ahh, revolutionary love at a bar, well, not hit or miss, but pretty intense!
Che states in his essay, and “Socialism in Cuba” that “the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love.”
A revolutionary expresses his love by initially caring about the poverty and oppressive conditions that people endure without much hope for change within a political system. If one did not care or was ambivalent about the terrible conditions that the masses experience daily, then revolutionary activity would not ensue. The revolutionary has the responsibility to use the best means available to overthrow an oppressive regime. It receives the respect and support of the people by its continual effort to bring justice and equality within a political structure, and uses its knowledge of strategies and tactics to defeat the enemy. This may involve the use of guerilla warfare as occurred in Cuba, nonviolence as used by Gandhi in India or a variety of approaches as employed by Subcomandante Marcos in Mexico.
Essentially, revolutionary love needs to have a corresponding behavioral component. According to Che, there are additional components to revolutionary love. (sources)
So, in a small town pub, and alas meeting Kim and Kevin, brothers in their 68-ish years, and then Kevin from Guatemala, and then a woman from Puerto Rica and one ffrom Peru, and then a guy from Jalisco, and then a guy from Sandy, Oregon, three toours in Afghanistan.
So is goes with Paul, Father Confessor.
Yeah, read, Power and the Glory:
In the world of Graham Greene’s 1940 novel, The Power and the Glory, it’s a bad time to be a Catholic. The book’s hero is an unnamed priest on the run from Mexican authorities after a state governor has ordered the military to dismantle all vestiges of the religion. Churches are burned. Relics, medals, and crosses are banned. The price for disobedience is death. While many clerics give up their beliefs and accept their government pensions, the unnamed priest travels in secret, celebrating Mass and hearing confessions under the cover of night. Yet he’s also a gluttonous, stubborn, and angry man drowning in vices, and the religious ambition of his earlier years has been replaced with a constant desire to drink, hence Greene’s term for him: the “whiskey priest.” Tired of risking his life, the priest even prays to be caught.
A violent, raw novel about suffering, strained faith, and ultimate redemption, The Power and the Glory received literary acclaim—but not without catching the attention of Catholic censors, who called the book “sad” and denounced its “immoral” protagonist. Despite—or even because of—this vexed history, Greene’s novel is the perfect book to read during the season of Lent, which began Wednesday. Stereotypically a time for modern Christians to abstain from Facebook or chocolate or alcohol, Lent is the most dramatic time of the liturgical year—40 days of prayer, fasting, and cleaning one’s spiritual house, in hopes that honesty might lead to penance and good deeds. One vision of Lent emphasizes transcendence over struggle: the American Catholic writer Thomas Merton called it “not a season of punishment so much as one of healing.” But Greene’s dark novel and its deeply flawed protagonist offer a richer way to think of faith and self-reflection—one that average Christians might find more accessible and realistic than romantic narratives about belief. (sources)
It’s fucking weird that I can end up in a bar-restaurant, and I don’t do that much these days, and the floodgates of confession come my way.
What is it about me, the journalist, the gatherer, the listener, the collector, the person who asks and listens, and alas, I have connections to almost everything I hear from people I have never met in my life before.
Two brothers, Kim and Kevin, just back from Florida, for the ending of the old man’s life, 92 years old, an old Navy guy who asl got into orchids, by the hundreds. They were there for his last two months, and the five acres of land, and the house, and the guy put down the old dog before the sons showed up, and he was on chemo, got sent to the ER, and he insisted, that is, yelled, after 14 days, “I want to fucking go home and die.”
One brother worked sandblasking nuclear subs and Warthogs and all sorts of military jets. The other brother is a yacht travelers, taking yachts, or delivering them, to various locales.
He’s working on whale watching in Depot Bay, and he is a guy who has been around the world, on boats, and he is a crusty guy, and looks like Hemingway, and he is here, in Newport, still working the boat scene, and his brother Kim is visiting, and there we have it — two hours of these guys telling me their stories.
Americans are full of the world, especially these folks, and alas, the ones who were not Americanos — Peru, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, Mexico — they are here, on some walkabout or lost soul search for something. In a bar, drinking at the bar, and it is a restaurant too, well, that is the fabric of this sort of father confessor shit.
The news that President Biden will begin a military withdrawal that will conclude on September 11th came as no surprise. When he released his interim national security guidance last month, you tore through it, highlighting passages and making margin notes. Look, you told your squadron commanders and chief master sergeants during a professional development session: For the first time since 9/11, there’s no mention of combating violent extremism across the globe. “Afghanistan” twice versus “Russia” five times and “China” fifteen. A signal that perhaps the Forever War was ending, that after years of consensus across the national security establishment that the military needed to re-focus on preparing to fight rival nations, the moment had arrived.
This guy I met was from Sandy, Oregon, and he was quick to point out around him that he wasn’t from Portland, as if that would have been a badge of disgrace or something. He was on the coast, in the bar, drinking, out here from his home base doing some tree work for the company he works for. He is a tree man, an arborist, maybe. He came to me to tell me his brief perspective:
“I was a fucking kid in Afghanistan. Eighteen when I signed up and then, bam, three tours, three hellish tours, and then, age twenty-six, I got out, and fuck I was not prepared for the culture, the people, the society,” he said, showing me fist and hand tatooes that display his combat loyalty to the military.
“I knew, shit, man, I had been in this regimented society, and not ready for all the levels of class and crazy distinctions and pecking orders in civilian life, and then here I was, out at 26, and I am still a kid, really, and the stuff I did and saw, no kid is prepared for that, and what the fuck, all of that perspective? It has been a crazy transition.”
I told the fellow that I had worked with homeless veterans, and that all my female clients had been raped by fellow uniformed soldiers.
““That’s the fucking shit, man. Can you believe it? I know that all females I knew in the military were sexually assaulted. All of them. And, where is the publicity, the stories? Nobody knows, or at least there’s no talk about that on Veterans Day. Imagine that fucking mess for women, the head trip, the fucking abandonement by fellow soldiers? Nothing on that on Fox or CNN.”
Yep, the pain, the sinking into a bottle or shooting up with hypodermic. For me, all my clients of the female persuasion — homeless, fucked up on some self-medicating drug — raped:
Nearly one in four U.S. servicewomen reports being sexually assaulted in the military. Why has it been so difficult to change the culture?
[Photo: Kellie-Lynn Shuble in front of her storage locker in Coraopolis, Pa., in July. She was harassed and assaulted throughout her time in the Army.Credit…Danna Singer for The New York Times]
[Photo: The Marine Corps deemed Shmorgoner unfit for service because of her PTSD in May. She now works as a horse trainer at Hidden Brook Stables in Maryland.Credit…Danna Singer for The New York Times]
Yeah, fuck the uniformed services, that system of Merchants of Death. Fuck this country. Fuck the people who skirt over it, or go to a pub and eatery to end their day with booze, on-tap ale and munchy carbs.
The brick oven pizza doesn’t cut it when so many Americans are suffering, dying inside, full of the demonic poison of military, empire, exceptionalism, capitalism, dog eat dog competition, and blind patriotism which is really nothing more than obedience to the master, like pathetic dogs in a Palenque ready to attack one another dog.
Mexico:
Fuck these mother fuckers. Fuck the military industrial complex. Fuck Biden. Fuck the Raytheons. Fuck Army-Navy-Air Force-Marines-Coast Guard-National Guard-Uniformed Public Health-Border Patrol-ATF-ICE-FBI-Homeland Security-Secret Service-All of the Uniformed Mother Fucking Fascists.
So, here we are, now, in a bar, at the bar, that is, and because this white guy, me, is so out there, so yakking it up in Spanish with those native speakers, so willing to make acquaintances with people, so Hemmingway and Neruda and Melville and Robert Bly and William Stafford like, I am the sponge, the father confessor.
Ahh, the problem is Americans are dead in the spirit category. And children. And clueless how their side of the team is screwing them equally bad as the other side.
I’ve been in this position for, what, 50 years, since age 16, earlier, and old and young folk, but mostly old when I was young, talked to me about their lives, and this is in Sonoita, or El Paso, Tucson, Bisbee, Seattle, Newport, Spokane, Vietnam, all throughout Europe, Mexico, the islands, everywhere, and they were in various forms or stages of life. Interesting, hard working, gamblers, ranchers, ex-military, well-off folk, struggling folk, waitresses, laborers, this and that, and so many wanted me to bear witness..
I am that sponge, that listening post, that person who listens to strippers in Tucson and Chihuahua, and then listens to murdering sons of bitches in Guatemala, ex-CIA.
You want to know how many COLLEGE students confessed, how many MILITARY confessed, when I was their teacher? I have been in a million situations, where people open up … sort of like the floodgates crashing through, man.
I’ve had cool people like Robert Bly and Winona LaDuke and James Crumley and so many others tell me about their lives. David Suzuki telling me about his family’s internment in Canada, and the pain of that still in his bones as an old man. The power of stranger confessionss, I got that early in my pimple faced life:
I researched why we don’t talk to strangers and what happens when we do for my book, The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World. This effort put me in the company of anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, archeologists, urban designers, activists, philosophers, and theologians, plus hundreds of random strangers I talked to wherever I went.
Strangers, what a word:
For more than 8,000 years, humans have lived in cities – a form of social organization characterised by a superabundance of strangers. But only recently have psychologists begun studying what happens when we talk to all these faceless strangers we’re surrounded by every day.
Learn, engage, risk, and talk: Talking to strangers can also make us wiser, more worldly, and more empathetic, says Harvard University professor and MacArthur “genius grant” recipient, Danielle Allen. When she was teaching at the University of Chicago, Allen was repeatedly warned by colleagues to stay away from the poorer side of town. She believes that this “fear of strangers was actually eroding a lot of [her peers’] intellectual and social capacities”. (sources)
Give it a try: BE engaged, interested, open, questioning, listening, holding strong conversations, open ended interviewing, and just being present, and motivational in the discourse. That’s all for tonight, 11 PM PST!
… Carter, Clinton, W-Bush, Ray-Gun, Obama, Trump, Biden . . . but that’s low hanging political rotting fruit, but then a Chomsky saying what about us unvaxxed folk?
“Sube a nacer conmigo, hermano” / “Rise to be born with me, brother.” — Pablo Neruda
So, those first two books of The Divine Comedy, Inferno and Purgatory, by Dante follow his journeys from hell to purgatory. In Inferno, Dante meets the poet Virgil who guides him through the rings of hell. Once the two reach the bottom of hell, Virgil continues to guide Dante through the next realm in Purgatory.
Throughout this epic adventure, Dante also presents ideas concerning the afterlife. These ideas range from simple descriptions of the two realms to more remarkable ideas of who exactly goes where after death and why. Dante also paints a picture of how sinners will be punished in hell and oppositely, the process of how sinners are redeemed in purgatory.
Like hell, purgatory also has a structure in which each level focuses on a different sin. Unlike hell, sinners in purgatory work their way up through the seven terraces of purgatory in order to finally reach heaven. To advance to a new terrace, sinners must first work off the sins from the previous terraces.
In each terrace, sinners face a unique punishment that they must endure until God is satisfied. Of this process, Dante writes,
“God demands we pay the debt.
Don’t dwell upon the form of punishment
but on what follows; think that at the worst
it cannot last beyond the day of doom” (10.108-111).
Then, there are those using that other thing, Bible, contrary to Dante’s notion of sinners redeeming themselves, sees it as impossible.
Ephesians 2:8-9 states,
“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast.”
This is all fun and games, no? Then, really, which lines will “they” cross which will convince you they (you know who I am talking about) are not worthy of respect, honor, valorizing, power, holding sway over us, the poor, weak, misbegotten? The Salt of the Earth:
Jimmy Carter?
On July 19, 1979, the Sandinista uprising culminated in their gaining full power in Nicaragua. The Sandinistas first move as new political leaders was to declare a state of emergency and expropriate land and businesses owned by the old dynastic family and friends, nationalize banks, mines, and transit systems, abolish old courts, denounce churches, and nullify the constitution, laws, and elections. A socialist state was born in Nicaragua. President Carter immediately sent $99 million in aid to the FSLN in an attempt to keep the new regime pro-U.S.. Simultaneously, however, Cuban officials were advising the FSLN on foreign and domestic policy and the FSLN sought an alliance with the Soviet bloc which they reached by March 1980 signing economic, cultural, technological, and scientific agreements with the USSR. Deliveries of Soviet weapons from Cuba began almost immediately after the signing of these agreements. (source)
Once it became clear to Washington that the FSLN would not moderate its policies, President Carter authorized the CIA to support resistance forces in Nicaragua including propaganda efforts, but not including armed action. The Sandinistas supported expanding socialism abroad, including sending weapons to leftist rebels in El Salvador beginning in 1980 and continuing for the next ten years. Some argue that this international support from Nicaragua was also in effort to insure that the Soviets would fully support and protect Nicaragua in case of a U.S. attack or intervention. Sandinista support for the Salvadoran rebels had a profound impact on U.S.-Nicaragua relations throughout the 80’s
Ray-Gun?
On December 1, 1981, Reagan signed an order that allowed the CIA to support the Contras with arms, equipment, and money. This order was implemented in conjunction with an overall strengthening of U.S. presence in Central America and the belief that covert activities are the most effective way to put pressure on a regime. This shift of foreign policy away from the Carter administration’s non-intervention culminated in June 1982 with the Reagan Doctrine which called for supporting democratization everywhere. It was at this point that the goal of the covert operations in Nicaragua shifted away from one of simply interdicting arms to one of supporting a change in government. Iran-Contra historian Theodore Draper, among others, argued, that this was the real goal all the long.
To help popularize the foreign policy changes of the Reagan administration certain propaganda and media initiatives were implemented to sway public and congressional opinion. In January of 1983, National Security Decisions Directive was signed, entitled Management of Public Diplomacy Relative to National Security, institutionalizing public diplomacy. In effect, it was a special planning group within the NSC to coordinate public diplomacy campaigns.[6] This group was America’s first peacetime propaganda ministry. Every administration tries to influence public opinion, but not until Reagan was it so institutionalized. Another use of white propaganda, which Richard Miller described as “actually putting out [the] truth, straight information, not deception,” was the State Department’s Group of Latin American Public Diplomacy (S/LPD).[7] This group, in actuality, reported directly to the NSC despite being housed within the State Department. Both committees utilized a variety of media propaganda and control efforts. A fourteen page memorandum dated March 20, 1985 from North to National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane explained over 80 publicity stunts to influence public and congressional opinion before upcoming Contra aid votes.[8] The public diplomacy officials also leaked select pieces of information that they wanted made public to journalists who favored Reagan. Strategic leaking and declassification of documents allowed the Executive Branch to manage the public perceptions of the American efforts in South America.
Yeah, elected president, Daniel Ortega, and this is Carter’s legacy, then Reagan’s?
My buddy, Toothless in Wisconsin (read my series on his life and my life intersecting with him here on Substack and part one over at Dissident Voice, he’s toothless because he was attacked by an inmate in a country jail in Wisconsin, who kicked his face for 92 seconds, straight. Then, six years in prison (four other years total in and out of jails) with Mengele Dental Hell, i.e. no dental care, that pretty much took his chompers out.
It’s a badge of honor, survival, etc. Now, is Kelly redeamable? He was in trouble because of booze, that old time religion in USA, and in Wisconsin, in the town her grew up in, 53 bars and drinking holes, and 43 churches. In a town of 9,000.
Look, he has traveled many pathways, many heights, and he has fallen and picked himself up and read books galore and has thought out a life now that is part monk, part estranged from family (on their part), part surviving the death of a woman he called friend and mate for over 40 years, and he is still on paper, man, age 65, still on paper, out of the hell mentality of DAs, cops, and judges.
Ahh, redemption, a la Neruda:
Canto general is, as intended, a monument of Western and specifically American literature. As a chronicle of a captive and abused people scheduled for redemption, it recalls the Hebrew Bible; as a historical vision of originary calamity and ultimate deliverance, it brings to mind Paradise Lost; and as a democratic catalogue of New World humanity, it follows Whitman, whom Neruda explicitly invokes. Canto general also looks forward, to Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, where the backwaters of the New World are also the center of creation, or to Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy, another factual chronicle of conquest and rebellion across the span of Latin American history related with prophetic indignation. Che Guevara carried a copy of Canto general with him in the Sierra Maestra.
For all that, Canto general is often more great than good. Neruda’s gift is lyrical, not narrative, and his ostensible epic, on inspection, is so many lyrics in historically chronological order. Neruda sometimes writes least about what is most important (the best of the 15 sections, “The Heights of Macchu Picchu,” is also among the shortest), and vice versa. And, unsurprisingly, Neruda’s weakest lines are often his most polemical, propagandistic, the poet seeming to say what he should feel or think instead of what he does. None of this much qualifies the glories of the thing. Part III of “Macchu Picchu” concludes, about everyone:
“they all faltered on awaiting their brief daily death:
/ and the bitter brokenness of each day was
/ like a black cup they drank from trembling.”
My translation may improve on some others, but the rills of plangent vowels are lost.
“Sube a nacer conmigo, hermano” is probably the most famous line of the poem: “Rise to be born with me, brother.” History presents a choice, Neruda says, between dying alone each day or being born at last with our brethren. If the notion is embarrassing today, this does not seem entirely to our credit. (sources)
So, also, talking with my friend who is going through hell with a domestic violence case against her husband, now going on 8 months of his incarceration in county jail, and delay after delay in the state’s case against him.
Can she see this far ahead now, after four-plus years, and now, almost a year more, of this fellow deceiving her, denigrating her, attempting to murder her soul and spirit and literally her body?
That’s a large arena from which she has to contend with the demons he put into her life, a la C-PTSD.
Forgiving?
On Feb. 3, 1998, as a bloodthirsty mob of Texans bayed outside a prison in Huntsville, Texas, Gov. George W. Bush defied the appeals of religious conservatives and ordered the execution of Karla Faye Tucker, a convicted ax murderer who found God on death row.
Leigh Anne Gideon is a former reporter for the Huntsville Item. Huntsville is where Texas has its death house, and since 1924 all the state’s executions have taken place there. Gideon has witnessed some of them, sometimes along with members of the condemned man’s family. “You’ll never hear another sound like a mother wailing whenever she’s watching her son being executed,” she says. “There’s no other sound like it. It is just this horrendous wail.”
Contrast that sound bite, taken from a remarkable National Public Radio documentary called “Witness to an Execution,” with what George W. Bush said in the second presidential debate. The subject had turned to the lynching of James Byrd, a black man who had been dragged to death, and Al Gore had made reference to the alleged need for a hate crimes law. Bush hit him back:
“The three men who murdered James Byrd, guess what’s going to happen to them? They’re going to be put to death. A jury found them guilty, and it’s going to be hard to punish them any worse after they get put to death. And it’s the right cause, so it’s the right decision.”
Bush smiled.
For Bush, that was hardly an uncharacteristic moment. Earlier in the campaign, he mocked Karla Faye Tucker, the pickax murderer who had become a born-again Christian and had pleaded for her life. “Please don’t kill me,” he mimicked her in an interview with Tucker Carlson of Talk magazine. Bush said he was misrepresented. (sources)
I remember Bush, in the back pockets of chemicals industry, vetoed a bill that doctors, nurses, humans, all over the USA, wanted to pass that would have gotten poison manufacturers to poison control markers in their products which would help ERs and EMTs and doctors counteracting poisonings. You know, a little bit of money spent to have markers in 13 or 14 of the most common poisons humans use. W Bush said he did not want to unnecessarily burdern private for-profit companies with more costs to do business.
No redemption for me, all the POTUS scum, but here, specifics. Dead people in ERs because of the time to attempt to test stomach material to see what the antidote might be, but then, these other grander more extensive death warrants these George W Bush’s mete out.
The bill Bush vetoed (HR 976) would expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, by $35 billion over the next five years, to $60 billion. That would be enough, Democrats say, to provide health coverage to 10 million children whose families are low-income but not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid—about 4 million more than the program now covers.
Oh, remember Clinton and his affairs and his Arkansas mafia and his witch Hillary?
Man oh Man, no redemption there: This fellow shows redemption:
Shortly after becoming the U.N. Special Envoy to Haiti, former President Bill Clinton publicly apologized for forcing Haiti to drop tariffs on imported subsidized U.S. rice during his time in office. The policy wiped out Haitian rice farming, seriously damaged Haiti’s ability to be self-sufficient, and contributed to Haiti’s forced urbanization that likely increased the earthquake toll. Dr. Paul Farmer, who serves as Clinton’s deputy in Haiti, told Democracy Now! today: “I felt a sense of great relief just hearing him say that. I felt grateful for it as an American.”
Human stain, with no redemption at all in their futures: “We came, we saw, he died,” she joked when told of news reports of Qaddafi’s death by an aide in between formal interviews. “I’m sure it did” have something to do with her very own visit to Libya just days earlier, she continues.
Watch her, 12 seconds of hell!
Oh, it is a very very Dante’s Circles of Hell World in my book.
This is how they roll at Harvard, at Stanford, City of London, K-Street, J-Street, US Chamber of Commerce, Military Merchants of Death Industrial Complex:
The Nobodies Written By Eduardo Galeano
Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that one magical day good luck will suddenly rain down on them- will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day with their right foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms. The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way. Who don’t speak languages, but dialects. Who don’t have religions, but superstitions. Who don’t create art, but handicrafts. Who don’t have culture, but folklore. Who are not human beings, but human resources. Who do not have names, but numbers. Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police blotter of the local paper. The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them
+—+
That Lincoln?
Thirty-eight Native Americans were hanged on Dec. 26, 1862, as ordered by former President Abraham Lincoln, after the 1862 Dakota War, which was also known as the Sioux Uprising of 1862. The sentences of 265 others were commuted.
THE FACTS: A military commission sentenced 303 Sioux fighters to be executed after deadly fights white settlers and soldiers had with Indians angry about the loss of their homeland and lack of access to food. Harold Holzer, author of several books on Lincoln, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview this month that Lincoln reviewed “every one of these capital cases.”
According to reporting by The Associated Press, the original trials were a farce, some taking as little as five minutes. In addition, the Indians were denied counsel and did not understand what was being said.
After the review, Lincoln decided there was evidence that 39 Sioux were guilty of murder or rape during the uprising and ordered their execution. The remaining 264 sentences were commuted. In addition, one of those sentenced to be executed received a reprieve before the Dec. 26, 1862, hanging of 38 Sioux warriors.
Lincoln went against the advice of fellow Republicans in Minnesota who warned that showing mercy would “carry a large political cost” and that “lessons needed to be taught,” according to Holzer. (source)
Redemption?
Do I need to fill in the blank____________________________________________?
For those I believe do not get any redemption? Kissinger at 100?
How about history speaks about the United Snakes of Chaos-Lies-Deceit-Death-Terrorism?
A new book by David Michael Smith, Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023), estimated that the U.S. empire is responsible, or shares responsibility, for close to 300 million deaths.
Smith writes that “the almost inconceivable loss of life in these endless holocausts arguably makes this country [the United States] exceptional, though in a strikingly different way than its apologists intend.”
Exceptional in its violence and killing prowess, which is truly shameful. (source)
Yikes, yes, Oh-bomb-uh. But you know about his mother?
In 1965, the CIA backed a coup in Indonesia that resulted in the deaths of millions of alleged communists who were identified by lists provided to the Indonesian military by the CIA. One person suspected of helping to identify names for the blacklist was Ann Dunham, Barack Obama’s mother, who worked as an anthropologist in East Java, a communist stronghold.
[Photo: Ann Dunham in Indonesia in the early 1970s.]
Redemption my ass! Rogue State
William Blum talked about his book Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, published in 2000 by Common Courage Press. The book was cited by Osama bin Laden as one that Americans should read. The guest responded to telephone calls and electronic mail.
Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.5
Though not as easy to quantify, has also led the world in torture; not only the torture performed directly by Americans upon foreigners, but providing torture equipment, torture manuals, lists of people to be tortured, and in-person guidance by American instructors. (source)
Alas, just since 2014, Nuland and McCain and the other creeps pushing Ukraine into a Nazi-Hell Hole, all the people in Klanada, U$A, EU, U-Inbred-Kingdom, Five Myopic Eyes, EuroTrashLandia, Isra-Hell who support, cheer, fund, and overtly and covertly perpetrate the machinations of death, destruction and deceit, well, there you have it, no redemption given by yours truly. As if they give a shit!
The pig, Chomsky.
Noam Chomsky doubles down on his previous call for the state to segregate The Unvaccinated from society: “How can we get food to them? Well, that’s actually their problem.”
… you don’t just have to go to the Environmental Working Group to see how damaging the stuff the “scientists” put into food, air, water, soil, babies!
I want to remember Rachel Carson’s spirit. I want it to be both fierce and compassionate at once. I want to carry a sense of indignation inside to shatter the complacency that has seeped into our society. Call it a sacred rage, a rage that is grounded in the knowledge that all life is intertwined. I want to know the grace of wild things that sustains hope.
A team of pro-fluoride researchers led by California’s dental director intentionally omitted data from a study seeking to undermine the forthcoming National Toxicology Program (NTP) report linking fluoride exposure to neurodevelopmental damage in children, according to documents released last week.
The documents — obtained through a California public records search and posted in a press release by the Fluoride Action Network — show that the team, led by Dr. Jayanth V. Kumar, a dental surgeon, conducted a meta-analysis of the scientific literature on fluoride’s neurotoxicity and found a link between fluoride exposure and lowered IQ in children at low levels of exposure.
However, they omitted the data and wrote a paper concluding there was no evidence of a link.
Four rounds of peer review rejected Kumar’s manuscript as “poorly researched,” “internally inconsistent” and committing “unashamed exaggeration” before the journal Public Health finally published the study last month. (source)
If this is not monster-like, disgusting, perverse, then, you are lobotomized: So many popular baby food brands contain dangerous levels of mercury, lead, cadmium and arsenic, according to a new investigation by a House of Representatives oversight committee. Exposure to these toxic heavy metals can be harmful to babies, since they can slow growth and development, increase cancer risk and potentially lead to behavioral and learning issues.
Nutricia North America (formerly Scientific Hospital Supplies (SHS) North America) Nutricia North America. …
PBM Nutritionals. PBM Nutritionals, LLC. …
Prolacta Bioscience. Prolacta Bioscience.
On every level, they (sic) determine what we die from. Same side of the coin, Dems or Repubs:
Yesterday, The New York Times exposed the Trump administration for bullying governments into weakening international safeguards that protect mothers and newborn babies from the infant formula industry’s deadly marketing. Kudos to our allies like Baby Milk Action for shining a light on this story.
Ahh, sort of like Exoplanets, no, these Xenobiotics? Toxins that are foreign to the body such as drugs, pesticides, and carcinogens.
So, in Capitalism and in this buyer beware dog eat dog world, in this litigation nightmware for activists and individuals attempting to put feet to the fire those evil deeds in this chemical toxin industrial complex, we take one step forward (in our minds), while leaping a hundreds backwards.
Pure theater: But, yes, the film takes its basis from real events – with Nathaniel Rich’s New York Times article The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare serving as the source material for the script.
Oh, of course these highly-paid actors and film crews, all about a one-trick pony.
Think Monsanto: “Problem fixer Michael Clayton is brought in to clean up the mess after one of his law firm’s top litigators suffers a breakdown while representing a corrupt chemical corporation in a multi-billion dollar legal suit. Under pressure to appease the firm’s clients, Clayton finds himself torn between his desire to do the right thing and a pressing need to pay off spiralling personal debts.”
But just because these Holly-Dirt pimps and prostitutes get scripts going and act in these “social justice”-themed flicks, do not expect Capitalists in the biz to be anything but this — overpaid, money hoarding, dream hoarders that they are, too rich to shit properly.
Ahh, which rotten billionaire and rotten family do you want to see portrayed on TV?
Which robber barons do you want to read about?
New or old guilded age?
A couple of decades after the Civil War, the United States entered an era dubbed “The Gilded Age.” It was Samuel Clemens—Mark Twain—who gave us the term. In an 1873 novel, co-written with his friend Charles Dudley Warner, the duo satirized the economic excesses, personal greed and political corruption of the time. The novel’s title, “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today,” was an inspired choice of words.
In Twain’s telling, the era wasn’t a “golden” age—something pure and solid like a bar of gold—rather is was a “gilded” age. To “gild” is to cover something of lesser value with a coat of gold to make it look like what it is not. In Twain’s telling, the era was one in which such a superficial covering disguised a more base reality.
The Gilded Age was a time in which technological innovation drove wonderful new industrial products that improved individual lives, while at the same time creating great wealth and accompanying economic inequality. It was a period of market dominating companies and citizen and journalistic revolts against their control. It was also a period marked by claims of “fake news” and by the election of two presidents who failed to win the popular vote. (Hayes in 1876 and Harrison in 1888.) [source]
Gilding is covering up the crimes, and today, we have so many more criminals in this robber baron-gilded age mafia:
[Photo: Members of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the body charged with oversight of unfair or deceptive business practices.]
These people ARE the enemy, and always has been:
UPDATE, MAY 25, 2023: The Supreme Court (9 to 0) issued its ruling on Sackett v. EPA on May 25, 2023, stripping out key protections from the Clean Water Act, weakening the law, and narrowing its ability to defend the quality of the nation’s waterways. “This decision will cause incalculable harm. Communities across the country will pay the price,” says NRDC President & CEO Manish Bapna. “What’s important now is to repair the damage. The government must enforce the remaining provisions of law that protect the clean water we all rely on for drinking, swimming, fishing, irrigation and more. States should quickly strengthen their own laws. Congress needs to act to restore protections for all our waters.” (source)
It wouldn’t be hyperbole to call it the most important water-related U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) case to come along in a generation. Indeed, the outcome of Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the first case to be heard in the court’s 2022–2023 term, will determine the future efficacy of the Clean Water Act by deciding whether wetlands are—or aren’t—deserving of federal protection.
Given the close relationship between wetlands and the larger system of streams, rivers, and tributaries to which they belong, the court’s ruling is certain to have a profound impact on the health and quality of all of America’s waterways.
Headline after headline: The new Gilded Age: 2,750 people have more wealth than half the planet (2021)
versus
[Photo: Political cartoon from the Chicago Labor Newspaper in 1894 criticizing the Pullman Company]
Although middle-class philanthropists and technocratic politicians gave voice to policies that began to curtail inequality, they did not generate the conditions that made such policies either politically possible or effective. That took decades of widespread, sustained, and explicit anti-capitalist organizing from working people — in labor unions, youth groups, radical political parties, and coalitions of mass protest — from the 1870s through the 1940s. Cold War liberalism’s backlash against such radicalism was fierce and helped fuel the rise of the right.
Progressives and New Dealers also achieved their reforms by reaffirming the Gilded Age’s ideological and legal commitments to white supremacy, imperialism, and xenophobia. The mainstream labor movement marginalized radicals and underwrote imperial nationalism. Signature New Deal legislation — the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act — discriminated against women and African Americans by excluding domestic and agricultural workers, valorizing the white male family wage earner.
The “solutions” that ended Gilded Age inequality, in other words, became a crucial seedbed for our own era’s historically distinct expressions of inequality. (source)
From corner to corner, the capitalists and their academics and their law schools and business schools and all those marketing departments, all the psychological warfare practitioners, all of those prostitutes called Senators and Congressmen, all of them, from top to bottom, they are the reason flouride is in the water, brothers and sisters, and that “a little of poison is permitable” ethos is all about CAPITALISM. Oh, they know how to parse the rhetoric and deploy the barristers and legal eagles — “There is no solid proof this or that industrial concoction can cause cancer.” You know the trick.
Try as you may, Counterpunch writer: “What are our options? The most discussed are expanding the court to allow the appointment of several liberal justices, mandating term limits for justices, and impeaching justices. (Clarence Thomas, we’re coming for you first!) But none of those are likely in the foreseeable future. So, here’s the real bottom line on last week’s terrible, duplicitous, irresponsible, environment-destroying, climate-warming decision by the Supreme Court: It’s on us. We need to fight back. That means organize ourselves, our neighbors, and our communities to prevent local and state governments from paving what little paradise remains. It means protesting, boycotting, and otherwise blocking developers, by whatever means necessary, from destroying wetlands and the many species – including humans – that depend on them.” (Supreme Duplicity)
Hit that Silent Spring Institute for more on the cancerous capitalists:
Abstract
Consumer products are important sources of exposure to harmful chemicals. Product composition is often a mystery to users, however, due to gaps in the laws governing ingredient disclosure. A unique data set that the California Air Resources Board (CARB) uses to determine how volatile organic chemicals (VOCs) from consumer products affect smog formation holds a partial solution. By analyzing CARB data on VOCs in consumer products, we identified and quantified emissions of volatile chemicals regulated under the California Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act (“Prop 65”). We here highlight individual chemicals as well as consumer product categories that people are likely to be exposed to as individual consumers, in the workplace, and at the population level. Of the 33 Prop 65-listed chemicals that appear in the CARB emissions inventory, we classified 18 as “top tier priorities for elimination”. Among these, methylene chloride and N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone were most prevalent in products across all three population groups. Of 172 consumer product categories, 105 contained Prop 65-listed chemicals. Although these chemicals are known carcinogens and reproductive/developmental toxicants, they remain in widespread use. Manufacturers and regulators should prioritize product categories containing Prop 65-listed chemicals for reformulation or redesign to reduce human exposures and associated health risks. (source: More than 5,000 tons of toxic chemicals released from consumer products every year inside homes and workplaces)
We can’t leave this up to a non-profit or the US Chamber of Commerce or Industry Lobby Groups:
you rub elbows with the most cringe-worthy, elite-drenched, out-to-lunch over the top One Perecenters and their Little and Big Eichmanns, that some of that smear is bound to cause bacterial overgrowth
Oh, yeah, that Nightline: Greenfield, or Koppel, the Jewish Elites, alas, this is a REAL ECHO chamber:
Oh, that false balance, the Ted Koppel shit show, having on an expert in marine ecosystems describing coral bleaching and ocean acidification, tied to climate heating and CO2 pollution, and then the slick, coiffed expert in marketing and spin from Exxon, shooting holes in the scientist’s hard work, peer reviewed studies and his cadre of a thousand other scientists working on global heating.
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In the three months since Moran, Cynthia McFadden and Martin Bashir took the helm of a revamped “Nightline,” the ABC program — faster, far from frivolous but in some ways shallower — has enjoyed modest ratings success. Yet there has been considerable carping about the abandonment of the Ted Koppel tradition.
“Because of the tremendous shadow that Ted and the 25 years of that program still casts on the whole industry, establishing ourselves and who we are is still a challenge in the industry and with critics,” says Moran, a former White House correspondent. “The audience is getting it. . . . Because Ted and ‘Nightline’ were such an icon, any change disturbs people in our business.”
McFadden says the criticism “stings” because some of it is true.
“Sometimes we’ve deserved the knocks,” says McFadden, who also co-anchors “Primetime.” “We haven’t gotten the balance right every night. It’s very much a work in progress. . . . Sometimes we don’t give things quite enough time.” McFadden says it’s also fair to question “whether we’ve had on a few too many Hollywood types in the run-up to the Oscars.”
With its flashy Times Square studio, “Nightline” has evolved into a journalistic smorgasbord. The program isn’t serving up empty calories, but some stories seem to be of the reduced-fat variety. For all of its strengths, “Nightline” now seems difficult to distinguish from a dozen other newsmagazine or cable shows.
Still, the early returns are encouraging for ABC. For the week of Feb. 13, “Nightline” was up 3 percent in total viewers — to 3.7 million — over a year earlier, and 14 percent in the key 25-to-54 demographic. The program still trails Jay Leno and, most nights, David Letterman.
In reinventing “Nightline,” James Goldston, the British-born executive producer, also cites Koppel’s “long shadow. What one does following Ted was a complicated issue. . . . Was there an audience for the show without Ted?”
Asked if American audiences can sit still for half an hour on one subject, Goldston says that “people lead busy lives” and have no tolerance for news reports that are longer than necessary.
Oh, the good old days when I was still working for newspapers as journalist: A Red, for sure, I was, but I kept that to a low rumble most the time since calling oneself communist is/was akin to saying I was/am a mass murderer. Here, that freak show, Koppel, 1988: (source) . . . Kaplan, Koppel, Greenfield, Goldston Chomsky, well, you get the picture, for me, thirty -plus years ago.
Concision my ass. Circumcision!
JERUSALEM —
Newscaster Ted Koppel was relieved because the whole affair passed without physical violence.
Palestinian political scientist Saeb Erakat was frustrated because he thought he had been reduced to jousting with windmills.
And Ehud Olmert, a rightist member of the Israeli Knesset (Parliament), was delighted at what he saw as a public relations victory.
That’s how three key participants summed up their feelings after what “Nightline” producers described as an unprecedented “town hall” meeting between Israelis and Palestinians. The ABC news show was broadcast live from Jerusalem into American homes Tuesday night (early Wednesday here).
“If we had truly understood what we were trying to do here today, we would never have done it,” Koppel told a lopsided, mostly invited studio audience estimated at nearly 700 Jews and more than 100 Arabs.
All had risen well before dawn to travel to the Jerusalem Theater, pass through tight security checks and take their seats facing a backdrop designed to make the stage look as if it were just outside the walls of the capital’s historic Old City.
The “Nightline” crew had hoped to have at least 250 Palestinians in the audience and fewer Jews in order to more accurately mirror the population mix in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip territories that Israel has occupied since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
However, as a Palestinian journalist noted, “People were not happy with the idea, particularly after Abu Jihad was killed. That turned off a lot of people who were interested in coming.”
The journalist referred to the April 16 assassination of Khalil Wazir, the top military commander for Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, who was more commonly known by the nom de guerre Abu Jihad, or “Father of Holy War.” While the Israeli government refuses to comment on responsibility for the killing, sources here have confirmed that it was ordered by senior government ministers and carried out by a combined army, air force, navy, and Mossad intelligence agency force.
Oh, then, more Jews, Conan, and NPR, National Propaganda Radio, asking Koppel questions, ten years ago:
KOPPEL: Neal, I hate to do it, but you’ve set me up for this. No. I guess that I’m more of a pessimist than an optimist, and I’m sure we’ll get lots of good people calling in – I hope we do – who will explain to me how wrong I am and why I’m wrong. There’s not a great deal that does give me optimism right now.
I am not hugely optimistic about the nature of communication in this country. I think we have trivialized communication to the point that everything now is reduced to snippets of thought. We respond in nanoseconds to one another. Reflection, thought are increasingly becoming a thing of the past. So no, I don’t mean to be, you know, a total fool about this. I’m sure there are many wonderful things that are still going on.
And as an immigrant who came to this country at the age of 13 from England, I love the United States deeply. I wouldn’t live anywhere else in the world, for anything. But that’s precisely why I’m so pessimistic and why I’m so depressed by it. (source)
Duh, of course I am going to look at the Beltway, the East Coast, the movers and shakers, the insiders, the rulers of media, the guests on that media, the entire bread and circus aspect of it. I mean, really, a Jew asking another Jew about the Palestine “issue”?
This was lightly precipitated by the Grayzone trying to get stuff out of a weasel: The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) contacted The Grayzone to dispute our characterization of their organization as a CIA cutout. Listen to the highly revealing conversation that ensued with the NED’s communications director.
So, this communications (sic) director of the National Endowment for Democracy is clueless, but clueless is a very good position to be in today, when stupidity and press flak crap make the grade in today’s flippant world. Note who this person is, Aun:
[EXPERTISE: BRANDING, CONTENT STRATEGY, PUBLIC RELATIONS, STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS AND MARKETING.]
Leslie Aun brought experience from both the corporate and nonprofit sectors to PRB, where she led all communications activities, including public relations, marketing communications, branding and advertising, editorial services, video and graphic design, and thought leadership from 2019 to 2022.
She began her career as a print and broadcast journalist with media outlets, including Federal Times, The Washington Business Journal, WTOP Radio, and WUSA Channel 9, before holding senior-level communication positions at such organizations as MCI Communications, Sodexo, Special Olympics International, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, and Venture Philanthropy Partners. As vice president of communications for the World Wildlife Fund, she led the team that won the Public Relations Society of America’s Silver Anvil Award of Excellence in the field of public relations for her work as managing director of Earth Hour, one of the largest and most successful public events for climate change in history, with more than one billion participants from around the world. Most recently, Aun headed up communications for Keolis North America, a global operator of public transit systems, and has consulted for NPR, Discovery Learning Alliance, and Snagajob.com.
A former adjunct faculty member and frequent lecturer at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies, Aun has served on the boards of numerous organizations, including Pennsylvania State University’s Sustainability Institute. A native of the Washington, D.C., area, she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in government from the University of Virginia’s College of Arts and Sciences.
Oh, come on, come on. Listen to her vapidity, her denials, her out of touch with the NED nothing burger. Is Max Blumenthal really surprised?
No surprise there, Blumenthal:
We also demanded to know whether NED had instituted guidelines which prevented it from funding anti-democratic and violent actors like the coup leaders and political arsonists we detailed. In one particularly revealing exchange on the topic, Blumenthal asked Aun, “How is it pro–democracy to support mobilizations that seek to remove elected leaders?”
“Isn’t that sort of what democracy is?” she fired back in a tacit admission that her organization views foreign meddling and support for violent putschists abroad as an intrinsically democratic act.
At a loss for answers, Aun resorted to a Red Scare-style insinuation: “I’m just curious, are you supporters of the Belarusian government, of [the] Ortega government, of the Chinese government?” she asked. “I mean, those are all governments that you are working, writing — you’re supportive of, like from an editorial perspective?”
After our call with Aun, we provided her with our questions in writing. Despite repeated promises over the phone and in follow-up emails to furnish the information we requested, the NED has not done so for over 50 days since we first engaged with Aun.
That is the simple background, but look at how WikiCIApedia starts Max’s entry: “Blumenthal is the editor of The Grayzone website, which is known for its apologetic coverage of authoritarian regimes such as the Chinese, Russian, Syrian, and Venezuelan governments, as well as denial of the Uyghur Genocide and other atrocities committed by these regimes.”
That is the Beltway, brother. Aun’s and Koppel’s and all those hasbara folk your family probably rubbed elbows with.
That Beltway, that Georgetown, that Virginia:
IN 2002, FORMER Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and his wife attended an elegant dinner party hosted by Barbara Walters. Other participants included Time editor Henry Grunwald, one-time ABC Chair Thomas Murphy, and Peter Jennings, then the anchor of ABC “World News Tonight.”
At one point in the evening, as New York magazine recounted, Jennings addressed Kissinger and asked him, “How does it feel to be a war criminal, Henry?”
Kissinger did not respond. However, Grunwald informed Jennings that this inquiry was “unsuitable.” Walters, who considered Kissinger “the most loyal friend,” later said, “I tried to change the subject, but it was a very uncomfortable moment. [Kissinger’s wife] Nancy reacted very strongly and hurt.”
First, the people at the top of American society absolutely love Henry Kissinger. He is their beloved compatriot, and they are anxious to protect his delicate feelings.
Second, Jennings sincerely believed that Kissinger was a war criminal and, unusually, was willing to say this in private. Yet he didn’t have the courage to say this in public, to his audience of tens of millions of Americans. Presumably he then would no longer be invited to these sorts of parties.
Third, Kissinger’s fancy, famous, rich pals will not exactly dispute that Kissinger is a monster. Rather, bringing it up is an embarrassing social faux pas, like, say, mentioning how everyone knows that your buddy is cheating on his wife, who is sitting next to you. Why would you want to spoil the mood just when we’re all feeling toasty from the Chambertin Grand Cru and having such a lovely time?
This is the cesspool, that DC:
The District of Columbia, or Washington, DC, is the seat of the United States federal government, the U.S. capitol, and home to 20 colleges and universities. While DC is considered only the 20th most populous city in the nation, hundreds of thousands of commuters flood in from both Virginia and Maryland for work each week to this world political capital. Headquartering 177 foreign embassies, DC hosts the Institute of World Politics, a graduate school of national security and international affairs.
The bulk of the city’s postsecondary institutions fall into two categories, public or private not-for-profit, and are distributed evenly amongst three types: research universities, master’s universities (like the aforementioned Institute of World Politics), or special-focus institutions. The oldest institution in Washington, DC, is Georgetown University, which was founded in 1789, and the same institution also claims the title of oldest Jesuit and Catholic university in the US. The largest public institution title goes to the University of the District of Columbia, while the largest by-enrollment is George Washington University. Four universities operate satellite programs in the capital, and those are Arizona State, Brown, New York, and Pepperdine. When it comes to special-focus institutions, Gallaudet University is one such and teaches classes in both English and American Sign Language (ASL).
With 25% of the city’s population employed by the government, it’s unsurprising that three of the universities in Washington, DC, are maintained by the US Government, including the National Intelligence University. To be close to the federal government, many organizations are headquartered in DC, including many law firms and lobbying firms; there are also six law schools accredited by the American Bar Association. DC is also known for medical research and is home to three medical schools, as well as research institutions, including the Washington Hospital Center
Oh, those college towns:
Los Angeles, California – 230
New York City, New York – 200+
Chicago, Illinois – 148
Boston, Massachusetts – 118
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – 115
To explain why The Grayzone has referred to the NED as a “CIA cutout,” Blumenthal pointed Aun to a declassified document showing Ronald Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey, proposing the creation of a US government-funded “National Endowment.” The National Endowment for Democracy was born just months after Casey circulated the document to cabinet level Reagan officials. A cutout, Blumenthal explained during the call, is “an organization spun out as an initiative of that entity and which performs the work or advances the agenda of that entity.”
False Balance occurs when one tries to treat two opposing positions as equally valid when they are simply not. If one position is supported by an abundance of evidence while another is entirely bereft of it, it is profoundly misguided to afford equal air‐time and coverage to both positions.
Equivocation is a mode of speech adopted when the speaker wishes to avoid a direct answer to a question but is unwilling to resort to telling a lie. The result is a mode of speech at least partly designed to obscure communication rather than achieve clarity. However, determining what is equivocation is complex, not least as it can show attributes close to that expected when making a nuanced argument that takes account of lack of information or current controversies about the issue. This suggests the equivocation is much a product of how a given speech is interpreted by the observer.
Concision as seen in media studies, concision is a form of broadcast media censorship by limiting debate and discussion of important topics on the rationale of time allotment.
And, then, just plain zero attention is another grand thing in today’s media:
In an article published by Medium on August 22, 2022, independent journalist Deborah L. Armstrong reported on the blacklisting of Roger Waters, co-founder of the iconic rock band Pink Floyd, by Ukrainian nationalists.
In early August, Rogers was featured on a 90-minute CNN special where he publicly criticized the US government’s role in the Russia-Ukrainian war. Waters explained that the war hinged on “the action and reaction of NATO pushing right up to the Russian border, which they promised they wouldn’t do when [Mikhail] Gorbachev negotiated the withdrawal of the USSR from the whole of Eastern Europe.” The musician went on to say that Russia had a right to Crimea because the people living on the peninsula were mostly Russian.
Shortly after making these statements, the musician was blacklisted by the Ukrainian government and criticized by its allies in US corporate media.
As Armstrong reported, the Kiev-based Myrotvorets website has labeled Waters an “Enemy of Ukraine.” The website claims Waters is spreading “anti-Ukrainian propaganda,” as well as collaborating in plans to legitimize Russia’s annexation of Crimea, which would challenge Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
Waters is not the only person listed on Myrotvorets. Currently, the database includes thousands of journalists, activists, and anyone else who is declared an “Enemy of Ukraine.” Additionally, those who are listed on the site have had their home addresses, personal phone numbers, and banking information leaked online. Some people featured on the list have been harassed, threatened, assaulted, or killed as a result of the doxing. Those who have been killed are identified with the word “liquidated” (ЛИКВИДИРОВАН in Ukrainian) over their profile photo on the Myrotvorets website.
Daria Dugina, a Russian journalist, was killed in a car bomb attack on August 20, 2022, not long after a red stamp appeared across her database profile. It is believed that she was targeted because her father, the philosopher Alexander Dugin, was believed to have been a strong influence on Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Russian government maintains that Dugina was murdered by a Ukrainian nationalist. Dugina is not the only person on the list to have been killed. In 2015, journalist Oles Buzina and a deputy in the Ukrainian parliament, Oleg Kalashnikov, were killed only days after their information was leaked on the Myrotvorets website.
In 2016 more than 4,500 journalists and media agents were stationed to report in the Donbass territory. Investigators claim that Myrotvorets employees hacked into the Ministry of State Security of the Donetsk People’s Republic’s database and stole the phone numbers, email addresses and home addresses of foreign journalists stationed in the Donbass territory. The Myrotvorets organization accused the journalists of “collaborating with terrorists” because they were reporting on the war from non-Ukrainian held territories.
As of October, 2022, no major US corporate news outlets have covered the story, but Armstrong’s piece was picked up by several independent sites, including Monthly Review Online, The Grayzone, and Covert Action Magazine.
So it goes, so it goes, Russia-Gate:
“Promoting Falsehoods and Marginalizing Truth-Tellers: WaPo’s Revelations About Russiagate Reporting Failures Typify Legacy Media Failures”
The Washington Post’s coverage of a January 2023 study arguing that the post-2016 coverage of Russia election meddling may have been overblown, reveals a corrosive trend in legacy news media where the personalities and outlets that perpetuate inaccurate or false news are rewarded, and the truth-tellers who expose legacy media lies are marginalized and ostracized.
The Washington Post cited a newly published academic study from the New York University Center for Social Media and Politics that concluded there was no evidence that the content suspected of being generated from Russia meaningfully impacted voters in the 2016 election. The authors wrote “we can’t find any relationship between being exposed to these tweets and people’s change in attitudes.” However, the Post was quick to point out that the study focused on Twitter and there was still the possibility that Russian content on other platforms such as Facebook (now Meta) could have tilted the election. However, there is no solid evidence to confirm such a claim and other previous studies by media scholars Emil Marmol and Lee Major, as well as Nolan Higdon of Project Censored, found Facebook’s reach was also minimal. They were not alone.
The study the Post referenced was hardly revelatory as even more researchers had drawn the same conclusion as early as 2016. Harvard University’s Yochai Benkler and his colleagues pointed out there was no empirical evidence that online content shifted electoral votes in 2016 and noted that cable news proved to be arguably far more influential. All of these studies found that the content from Russia was minimal in scope and influence when compared to the digital content disseminated by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s multi-million dollar presidential campaigns, which were further boosted by billions of dollars in free coverage from legacy media. Meanwhile, seasoned journalists such as Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Aaron Maté noted the flimsy sources and baseless claims so-called “mainstream” media were relying on to convince audiences that Russia tilted the election. Rather than analyze these arguments, corporate media outlets just shot at the messengers.
So, some flak for NED, some woman who has spent her career spinning and branding and mushing up and mashing down and furthering the propaganda and marketing ploys of various non-profits, she is just one in a million getting big bucks to do nothing, that is, to do a lot:
Ahh, we don’t know if Russia attacked Ukrainian arms depot because “we wouldn’t be allowed to report on that . . . “ That fucking media.
The entire mess goes back to Koppel and his variety show:
Caitlin Johnstone: “To be clear, when I say CFR is immensely influential, I mean it is immensely influential. Its membership spans throughout the major media institutions of the western world, and it once hosted a panel where a former State Department official who was also an editor of Time Magazine openly endorsed the practice of using propaganda on Americans to influence how they think.”
Another Jewish elite, from the East Coast: Stengel was born in New York City into a Jewish family, and raised in Westchester County. He attended Princeton University and played on the Princeton Tigers basketball team as part of the 1975 National Invitation Tournament. He graduated magna cum laude in 1977. After college, he won a Rhodes Scholarship and studied English and history at Christ Church, Oxford.
Ahh, Rhodes, Princeton, Westchester County. Hmm, those East Coast Blues!
Caitlin: “So to be perfectly clear I will not be supporting or cheerleading any candidate in this election. Not because I don’t think Australians have a right to involve themselves in US politics (we absolutely do), but because US presidential elections are a performance designed to trick Americans into thinking they have any meaningful control over the major decisions that will be made by their government. They’re the unplugged video game controller you give your baby brother so you can stop him from whining to play without actually letting him.”
Fucking hilarious:
The Americans; and Greenfield and Chomsky and all of them know how to fool a bunch of Goyim:
What a joke, expecting a media spinner — Aun — to have ANY knowledge of her own non-profit. Different languages, Max, that you and Aun speak. Same city, same backgrounds, but . . . .
And that is it, no, with the governor of the 51st state, *elensky?
Our new governor:
Those headlines which get ZERO airplay: “Ukrainian Regime Led by Media Darling Volodymyr Zelensky Kidnaps Student Dissidents, Bans Opposition Parties, Shuts Down Independent Media, Commits Egregious War Crimes and Imposes Regressive Labor Laws” By Dmitri Kovalevich
Again, if you need air sickness bags, here you go:
as we slide more toward Bedlam and Babylon, a Tower of AI-VR-AR Babel rises
Bedlam? (Modelled after a mental asylum . . . When it was rebuilt in 1676, London’s Bethlem Hospital was the most opulent mental asylum the world had ever seen – from the outside. Inside, it was another matter entirely.)
[Photo: The hospital may have looked like a palace, but treatment of patients was hardly ideal, as shown in this etching of William Norris in 1814 (Credit: Wellcome Library, London)]
Indeed we are in a controlled demolition, a programmed and set upon Tower of Babel rising, falling, rising, and falling and rising again :
And so there is so so much out there, from TikTok, to Netflix, to SmartPhones, and then beyond the unending media trolling creating these stories, these humans (sic) who joke about killing Russians, and money well spent:
“Lindsey Graham calls ‘Russians dying’ the ‘best money US has spent’ in a meeting with Zelensky: US senator Lindsey Graham dubbed ‘Russians dying’ as ‘the best money’ the US has spent during a meeting with Ukraine’s President Zelensky on Friday (26 May).
Footage from inside the room where it took place shows Graham joking with Zelensky that it’s ‘free or die’, as Ukraine requested more ‘long-range weapons’ to aid the ongoing invasion.
In a statement after the meeting, he said he expected the Ukrainian counter-offensive to ‘yield results’.”
Again, these are words of a murderer, two of them, and full-stop, my world is one where these murderers, and those pushing murder onto more crazy and empty headed people to commit, adopt and approve of this murder, should be, well, taken out.
For fuck’s sake, dudes and dudettes, do you approve of this unelected governor of an un-resolved 51st state, Ukraine, laughing it up about “free or die” in their remarks?
Come on, wimps, just bend a bit toward humanity, toward what you should do if you see men pounding a lady with a puny steak knife with taser high voltage wires?
Chromebooks reach their “death date” when they are no longer capable of receiving operating system updates. Replacing them straps district budgets and harms the environment.”
This dirty Capitalism, Chlamydia Capitalism, has built in assassin genes, shelf lives, preprogrammed obsolescence! Chromebooks, basic laptops programmed by Google that are primarily used for connecting to the Internet and running simple programs, have a notably shorter lifespan than other devices. Each is hardwired with a so-called “death date,” a predetermined date when they can no longer carry out operating system updates and consequently stop enabling students to navigate to secure websites even as the devices themselves still function.All of Google’s devices will expire in an average of four years, according to a recent report focused on the impacts of technology turnover by nonprofit advocacy organization CoPIRG.
Google and Samsung, and now, tech manufacturers like HP, Acer, Dell, and Lenovo offer their own versions of Chromebooks! “With a collection of about 78,000 Chromebooks for both students and staff, Denver Public Schools as invested more than $18.3 million in Chromebooks since 2021, about half using bond money and the rest from federal COVID relief funds, according to figures the district provided.”
All of this is pure Merchandizing Death, not just Graham and Zelensky Murder Incorporated Hit Squads and Assassin Drone Squadrons Killing Anyone of Russian “stench,” but also the death of people’s spirituality, spirit, soul, intellect, hope, through this killer stuff, Chromebooks. Hard-wired end of life Zoom School.
Snake oil and Charlatan Mojo?
It’s a no brainer why there is addiction, why the opioid crisis is a crisis. For fuck’s sake, this is lawyer, Californication Robert Kennedy Junio, blathering about a work camp style in fascist Italy, today?
Five years on the farm, and if you don’t do your chores and work for free and stay chained up when we say you stay chained up, then, watch out, brothers and sisters.
These all relate — Murdering Russians with USA Money, a Good Deal, Best Deal Behind Door Number Two; then, this criminal enterprise, this end of teaching/teachers/bricks and mortar for the Dirty Chromebook and WWW and insipid junk in these machines as well as a behavior experiment in compliance and acceptance of all things digital; and then this upsidedown world of RFK, Jr. (and I am 100 percent on record stating anyone going for the POTUS, anyone with a campaign, today, anyone getting press for POTUS aspiration, all of them are THE ENEMY).
But think about the stupidity of the lawyer Kennedy saying 100,000 opioid deaths a year is twice the number of those young boys dying in Vietnam over a 15 year period. What the fuck is that? Young boys? Hmm? US bombing, use of chemical weapons, napalm and phosphoric bombs as well as the ground operations of the US army caused the death of 3 million Vietnamese in the Vietnam war.
Work camps. Forced labor. Five years in a lock-down. Whew. RFK, Jr. touts this shit:
But the reality is, what causes addiction? Production? Working for criminals? War?
A well in My Lai
Mass murder of civilians by American soldiers in My Lai, Vietnam 1968
The city of Novi Sad for NATO bombing
Coalition F-15E aircraft during Operation Inherent Resolve
Afghanistan: Operation Enduring Freedom began on October 7, 2001
++—++
Ahh, so what is the root of Babel, or this Bedlam, of this Insane Doublespeak, Newsspeak, Equivocation, false balance, stacked deck, agnotolgy? Propaganda 101, and when we looked at these in my many dozens (hundred-plus) of classes I taught, well, now, what can we do NOW to get a Haeder Faculty Member Fired? There are more rhetorical devices and constructed ways to induce stupor or stupidity or blind ignorance or blind rage, but here, a short list for First Year Composition List.
PROPAGANDA TECHNIQUES TO RECOGNIZE:
1. NAME CALLING or STEREOTYPING: Giving a person or an idea a bad label by using an easy to remember pejorative name. This is used to make us reject and condemn a person or idea without examining what the label really means. Examples: “Republican”, “Tree-Hugger”, “Nazi”, “Environmentalist”, “Special-Interest Group”.
2. VIRTUE WORDS or GLITTERING GENERALITY: These words are used to dupe us into accepting and approving of things without examining the evidence carefully. Examples: “Natural”, “Democratic”, “Organic”, “Scientific”, “Ecological”, “Sustainable”.
3. DEIFICATION: This is when an idea is made to appear holy, sacred, or very special and therefore above all law. Any alternative or opposite points of view are thereby given the appearance of treason or blasphemy. Examples: “God-given right to…”, “Mother Earth”, “Gia”.
4. TRANSFER: Transfer is when a symbol that carries respect, authority, sanction, and prestige is used along with and idea or argument to make it look more acceptable. Examples: American Flag, University Seal, Medical Association Symbol (or something that looks like it). This method is also called GUILT- or VIRTUE-BY-ASSOCIATION.
5. TESTIMONIAL: When some respected celebrity (or alternatively someone generally hated) claims that an idea or product is good (or bad). This technique is used to convince us without examining the facts more carefully.
6. PLAIN FOLKS: This is a way that a speaker convinces an audience that an idea is good because they are the same ideas of the vast majority of people like yourself. Examples: “This is the will of the People”, “Most Americans…”. Another example would be when the speaker tells a story about a family or people that are “just like you” to reinforce the speaker’s point of view.
7. BAND WAGON: This common propaganda method is when the speaker tries to convince us to accept their point of view or else we will miss out on something really good. The Band-Wagon technique is often used in advertising. Examples: “This is the wave of the future”, “Be the first on your block”, “Act Now!”. You might ask yourself “What if I was the only one on my block because no one else was interested (duped)?”.
8. ARTIFICIAL DICHOTOMY: This is when someone tries to claim there are only two sides to an issue and that both sides must have equal presentation in order to be evaluated. This technique is used to dupe us into believing there is only one way to look at an issue, when in fact there may be many alternative viewpoints or “sides”. Like most propaganda techniques it simplifies reality and therefore distorts it, often to the advantage of the speaker. A classic example is the “intelligent design” versus “evolution” controversy.
9. HOT POTATO: This is an inflammatory (often untrue) statement or question used to throw an opponent off guard, or to embarrass them. Examples “Have you stopped beating your spouse”, “When will you pay the taxes you owe?” The fact that it may be utterly untrue is irrelevant, because it still brings controversy to the opponent.
10. STALLING or IGNORING THE QUESTION : This technique is used to play for more time or to avoid answering a pointed question. Examples: “More research is needed…”, “A fact-finding committee is working on this issue…” “I am calling for an investigation on this failure..” When asked about a tax increase possibility a senator replies: “I have always met the obligations I have to those I represent.”
11. LEAST-OF-EVILS is used to justify an otherwise unpleasant or unpopular point of view. Example: ‘”War is hell but appeasement leads to worse disasters”.
12. SCAPEGOAT: This often use with Guilt-by-association to deflect scrutiny away from the issues. It transfers blame to one person or group of people without investigating the complexities of the issue. Examples: “George W. Bush got us into Iraq”, “President Reagan caused the national debt”.
13. CAUSE AND EFFECT MISMATCH: This technique confuses the audience about what is really cause and effect. In fact the causes of most phenomena are complex, and it is misleading to say just one of the following: “Tuberculosis is caused by bacteria”, “Tuberculosis is caused by un-regulated capitalism that creates poor working conditions”, “Tuberculosis is caused by a lack of effective antibiotics”.
14. DISTORTION OF DATA or OUT OF CONTEXT or CARD STACKING or CHERRY PICKING: This technique is used to convince the audience by using selected information and not presenting the complete story. Examples: “A study was done that showed eating peanut butter causes liver cancer” (the fact that later the study was later shown to be flawed or funded by the peanut butter haters and therefore suspect, is not revealed). A variation would be “Raising the speed limit to 65 mph resulted in many fewer traffic fatalities”. Such statements need to be checked with how many people were driving before and after the change in speed limit. Fewer people may be driving after the speed limit change, even though the fatality rates (deaths per 100,000) may be higher, leading to the overall result of fewer fatalities.
15. WEAK INFERENCE (or False Cause): Weak inference is when a judgment is made with insufficient evidence, or that the conclusion does not necessarily follow from the evidence given. For example: Ducks and geese migrate south for the winter, therefore all waterfowl migrate south for the winter. Or, most rich folks vote republican, therefore most people who vote republican are rich.
16. FAULTY ANALOGY: This is when a comparison is carried to far. Example: “The economy is following the same path as right before the great depression, therefore we will experience a stock market crash soon!” SLIPPERY SLOPE would be an example of faulty analogy. Slippery slope makes the argument that a shift in one direction will continue to lead to extremes (ex. smoking pot will lead to heroine addiction). It is not necessarily so.
17. MISUSE OF STATISTICS: Some examples: Average results are reported, but not the amount of variation around the averages. A percent or fraction is presented, but not the sample size as in “9 out of 10 dentists recommend…”. Absolute and proportional quantities are mixed as in “3,400 more robberies occurred in our town last year, whereas other cities hand an increase of less than one percent”. Graphs are used that, by chopping off part of the scale or using unusual units or no scale, distort the appearance of the result. Results are reported with misleading precision. For example, representing 13 out of 19 students as 68.42105 percent.
18. FEAR: “Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.” — Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
19. ad hominem ATTACK (also called Deflection): You attack the messenger, instead of the argument or evidence that is presented.
20. tu quoque ATTACK: Pronounced too-kwo-kwee. This technique is when you respond to your opponent by accusing them of committing a logical fallacy or propaganda technique instead of addressing the claim of your opponent’s argument and evidence. Ex. “You too are using fear as a propaganda technique”
21. Preemptive Framing: “Frame an issue before other people get a chance to” (George Lakoff – On the Media Jan 2017) Ex. “The only reason the hacking of the poorly defended DNC (Democratic National Committee) is discussed, is that the loss by the Dems was so big that they were totally embarassed” -Donald Trump. When in fact the Dems did not lose big, nor was is their fault that they got hacked.
22. Diversion: When a major issue comes up that is embarrassing or threatening, so a diversion is created so attention is directed away from the issue.
++—++
Now, it is not to say we can’t parse our own propaganda, and the merits of critically looking at arguments, debates, and seeing how lawyers manage ethos, pathos, logos, and how we have the ability to dig deep into ideas and emotions and the collective as well as the individual perspectives and points of view and language and discourse and contexts to determine how and why and what people disagree on, those merits rank high.
Shit dog, I have studied this in graduate urban planning course, and have taught variations on a theme of the underlying principles: Systems Thinking for Social Change by David Peter Stroh. There is a lot of psycho-babble, a lot of systems language, much emphasis on change and consensus harmony. Certainly the Wikipedia definition makes more sense if applied correctly: Systems thinking is a way of making sense of the complexity of the world by looking at it in terms of wholes and relationships rather than by splitting it down into its parts. It has been used as a way of exploring and developing effective action in complex contexts, enabling systems change.
However, we all are framing things from our cultural biases, or our own critical significant emotional events generating some interesting strata, all those events in the womb leading up to the school, throughout life, carving into us. The brain of the human is very very malleable and mutatable. It’s been evolving to forget, to screen, to invent, and to amplify or deattenuate. And there are inbred peoples, that is, people who have a very thin margin of diversity in their familial lines, and that too has generated some interestingly cohesive and colluding mental states, emotional states and so-called consistently common IQs within family lines.
Well, we don’t want to get too weird, but, yes, we do inherit stature, ear lobes, eye color, hair, and, well, disposition and various emotional states. Are we the product of the sins of our fathers/mothers?
Who knows the direct and indirect ethos, pathos and logos of say being a Hillary and Bill offspring, or an offspring of Zuckerberg and Chan?
The dad of three shared sweet photos of the couple with the newborn, soaking up the first few moments with their baby girl.
“Welcome to the world, Aurelia Chan Zuckerberg! You’re such a little blessing,” he captioned the post.
Zuckerberg and Chan, who are Co-Founders and Co-CEOs at CZI [RE: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was founded in 2015 to help solve some of society’s toughest challenges — from eradicating disease and improving education, to addressing the needs of our local communities. Our mission is to build a more inclusive, just, and healthy future for everyone.] , are also parents to daughters August, 5, and Maxima “Max,” 7.
The Bezoses of the world have no need to be paid a salary. Bezos’ Amazon wages have long been set at the middle-class level of around $80,000 a year.
For years, there’s been something of a competition among elite founder-CEOs to go even lower. Steve Jobs took $1 in salary when he returned to Apple in the 1990s. Facebook’s Zuckerberg, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Google’s Larry Page have all done the same.
Yet this is not the self-effacing gesture it appears to be: Wages are taxed at a high rate. The top 25 wealthiest Americans reported $158 million in wages in 2018, according to the IRS data. That’s a mere 1.1% of what they listed on their tax forms as their total reported income. The rest mostly came from dividends and the sale of stock, bonds or other investments, which are taxed at lower rates than wages.
Now, who said this?
“Well, look, you can take — steal — all the money from the rich. I mean, multimillionaires, billionaires, us, and, that’s around 4,000 billionaires and a hefty 20 million multimillionaires. Take it all, and from Blackrock, from those Fortune 5000 companies. I guarantee, in five years, we will get all that money back from you. Go ahead, give me a stat: ‘One billion women around the world can’t access loans, markets, business training, or even open bank accounts. And when they can, other barriers stand in their way, such as gender-based violence and grueling household work. … This lack of opportunity perpetuates the cycle of poverty and hunger in their communities.’ Okay, then another stat — ‘ a majority of the world’s population (56%) continued to live a low-income existence, compared with just 13% that could be considered middle income by a global standard’ — so that’s what Seventy Percent of the World poor and low income. Hell, give the other 25 percent our wealth. That’s 95 percent of the world given all our wealth, and sure, land, holdings, what have you. I guarantee, that in five years WE will get all of that back. Hands down. All of it. And, with interest. All of it. Sure, the land and companies will be shit storms, all fucked up, broken down, useless, kaput. But just let the billionaires — the smart ones, the elite, the uber geniuses and quick on our feet ones — and their minions who are multimillionaires because we have given them a chance to work with and for us get tp work on fleecing you all. All that money, all of it, all back in our pockets. Hell, just one family, those drug dealers, the Sackler Family, take them for example. Hit them with 99 percent fines and taxes. What, forty members of that family. Here, more stats — ‘In 2016, the remaining 40 members of the Sackler family were worth $13 billion, which makes them the 19th richest family, according to Forbes. Since then, the figure has shifted due to litigation and settlement fines. As of September 2021, Bloomberg estimated that the Sackler family’s wealth had dropped to about $11 billion.
According to a CNBC report in March 2021, members of the Sackler family had written in letters to the U.S. House Oversight Committee that family members on the board had assets of only about $1.1 billion.
If the figure above ($11 billion) is accurate and the family pays out the $6 billion it agreed to as part of the recent settlement, it could drop the Sackler family’s net worth to $5 billion or less.’ —-
Do you get it? These forty, no matter how screwed up some of them are, including in-laws, etc., the Sacklers will amass a fortune in five years starting today, much more than what you all think you could have taken from them.
You’d be eating nettles and running around with leprosy and fornicating in the bushes and trying to start fire with rocks without us. Hahaha.”
Okay, that was poetic license, but I have heard it before — “Take my millions and millions away, and I bet in five years I or my offspring will get it all back from you. You’d be on a bender, like those Lottery Winners. Useless stuff. Yachts that end up sinking. Esates with no plumbing. Foreclosed on properties. You’d cocaine and prostitute yourself back into poverty. And I’d have it all back, from my investments in private prisons, booze, cigarettes, insurance, PayDay loans, Porn Hub, Walmart, health care, you name it, I’d be back fleecing you in no time.”
The world’s 85 richest individuals possess as much wealth as the 3.5 billion souls who compose the poorer half of the world’s population, or so it was announced in a report by Oxfam International. The assertion sounds implausible to me. I think the 85 richest individuals, who together are worth many hundreds of billions of dollars, must have far more wealth than the poorest half of our global population.
How could these two cohorts, the 85 richest and 3.5 billion poorest, have the same amount of wealth? The great majority of the 3.5 billion have no net wealth at all. Hundreds of millions of them have jobs that hardly pay enough to feed their families. Millions of them rely on supplements from private charity and public assistance when they can. Hundreds of millions are undernourished, suffer food insecurity, or go hungry each month, including many among the very poorest in the United States.
Most of the 3.5 billion earn an average of $2.50 a day. The poorest 40 percent of the world population accounts for just 5 percent of all global income. About 80 percent of all humanity live on less than $10 a day. And the poorest 50 percent maintain only 7.2 percent of the world’s private consumption. How exactly could they have accumulated an amount of surplus wealth comparable to the 85 filthy richest?
Hundreds of millions live in debt even in “affluent” countries like the United States. They face health care debts, credit card debts, college tuition debts, and so on. Many, probably most who own homes— and don’t live in shacks or under bridges or in old vans— are still straddled with mortgages. This means their net family wealth is negative, minus-zero. They have no propertied wealth; they live in debt.
Millions among the poorest 50 percent in the world may have cars but most of them also have car payments. They are driving in debt. In countries like Indonesia, for the millions without private vehicles, there are the overloaded, battered buses, poorly maintained vehicles that specialize in breakdowns and ravine plunges. Among the lowest rungs of the 50 percent are the many who pick through garbage dumps and send their kids off to work in grim, soul-destroying sweatshops.
The 85 richest in the world probably include the four members of the Walton family (owners of Wal-Mart, among the top ten superrich in the USA) who together are worth over $100 billion. Rich families like the DuPonts have controlling interests in giant corporations like General Motors, Coca-Cola, and United Brands. They own about forty manorial estates and private museums in Delaware alone and have set up 31 tax-exempt foundations. The superrich in America and in many other countries find ways, legal and illegal, to shelter much of their wealth in secret accounts. We don’t really know how very rich the very rich really are.
Regarding the poorest portion of the world population— whom I would call the valiant, struggling “better half”—what mass configuration of wealth could we possibly be talking about? The aggregate wealth possessed by the 85 super-richest individuals, and the aggregate wealth owned by the world’s 3.5 billion poorest, are of different dimensions and different natures. Can we really compare private jets, mansions, landed estates, super luxury vacation retreats, luxury apartments, luxury condos, and luxury cars, not to mention hundreds of billions of dollars in equities, bonds, commercial properties, art works, antiques, etc.— can we really compare all that enormous wealth against some millions of used cars, used furniture, and used television sets, many of which are ready to break down? Of what resale value if any, are such minor durable-use commodities? especially in communities of high unemployment, dismal health and housing conditions, no running water, no decent sanitation facilities, etc. We don’t really know how poor the very poor really are.
Millions of children who number in the lower 50 percent never see the inside of a school. Instead they labor in mills, mines and on farms, under conditions of peonage. Nearly a billion people are unable to read or write. The number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. So poverty is spreading even as wealth accumulates. It is not enough to bemoan this enormous inequality, we must also explain why it is happening.
But for now, let me repeat: the world’s richest 85 individuals do not have the same amount of accumulated wealth as the world’s poorest 50 percent. They have vastly more. The multitude on the lower rungs—even taken as a totality—have next to nothing.
forty hard years of lobotomizing, dumbdowning, infantilizing, and PSYOPS direct and covert operations by the Edward Bernays of the World have gotten us here:
Trillions for Ukraine. Christ, this is 2019, from The Nation, not exactly radical: “Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine/ Five years after the Maidan uprising, anti-Semitism and fascist-inflected ultranationalism are rampant.” By Lev Golinkin
Before the Russian invasion, CIA reports linked him to an oligarch so dirty and so mired in “significant corruption” that the State Department banned him from entering the U.S.
But now CIA propaganda portrays Zelensky as nobler than Winston Churchill and saintlier than Mother Theresa.
Will the Real Volodymyr Zelensky Please Stand Up
Sorry, but it does matter who controls the levers of power, the narrative, the engines of Press-Propaganda-Entertainment. As well as, politics, marketing, education?
Jews will attack Roger Waters, of Pink Floyd, and they will get countless thousands of lies published in countless broken media outfits immediately. Just Google-Gulag search: Roger Waters and Berlin Fascism. Hate, pure lies, and the hasbara and powerful Jewish hatred of thinking.
Israel’s foreign ministry later criticized Waters on social media, tweeting on May 24: “Good morning to everyone but Roger Waters who spent the evening in Berlin (Yes Berlin) desecrating the memory of Anne Frank and the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.”
I am sorry to say that the Jewish folk I have been reading about, listening to, and researching throughout my decades, even from day one of college onward are indeed a clear and present danger. They hate Russia, Russians, and anyone who might dare question the UkroNazi Proxy War with Russia, started, oh, hell, way before 2014.
Self-proclaimed Jewish criminal, Kolomoyskyi is the dirty banker and the dirty funder of Zelensky:
But, read this Jewish rag in Isra-Hell, Haaretz | World News/ “Ukraine Enlists Jewish Leaders to Lobby Israel for Arms”
Ukraine recently requested air defense systems and training from Israel, saying that Iran would use the deployment of its weapons systems in Europe to refine their capabilities. Still, Israel maintains that it would not send military assistance to Ukraine
A senior Ukrainian official close to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on world Jewry to push Jerusalem to arm his country with defensive weapons on Wednesday, only two days after Moscow warned Israel that supplying military equipment to Ukraine would “destroy the political relations between the two countries.”
Of course, I am disgusted by any racist group calling on “all Jews worldwide to continue the murder of Russians and Ukrainians in Donbass, and now, throughout Ukraine and into Russia.
This is merchant of death war mongering, and it has to stop, stop first by calling a Jewish Fascist a Jewish Fascist when you come in contact with him or her or them: Here, more lies, blatant valorizing of a corrupt and criminal man, Zelensky!
1. The most important Jewish leader in the world (source)
The past week has turned us all into experts on Ukraine, now at the center of every conversation. Did you know how big it is? (When you lay it over the U.S. map, it stretches from New York to Chicago.) Who knew that we were actually using the Russian city names and not the Ukrainian ones (it’s Kyiv, not Kiev; Lviv, not Lvov; and Kharkiv, not Kharkov). And their president—did you know that he is Jewish?
Volodymyr Zelensky is probably the most admired Jewish leader the world has to offer right now. Before entering politics in 2018, Zelensky was a popular comedian (and you can’t get any more Jewish than that); he does not often speak about his Jewish identity, but he has never tried to hide it. In a country like Ukraine, which is still struggling with a painful legacy of antisemitism, Zelensky’s Jewishness has always been present.
For Jews across the world, Zelensky is now a source of pride: a young, inexperienced leader who is putting his life at risk for his people by leading a nation of 40 million people in opposing a ruthless Russian aggressor.
In his inauguration speech, Zelensky famously told lawmakers not to hang his portrait on their walls. “I do not want my picture in your offices: The president is not an icon, an idol or a portrait. Hang your kids’ photos instead, and look at them each time you are making a decision.”
True to form, Zelensky maintained his unassuming, direct style when crisis hit. His video messages, posted several times a day, have been helping reassure the Ukrainian people. He spoke from his office and from the streets of Kyiv, even as Russian troops closed in on the capital, and when the fighting intensified, Zelensky candidly shared with all Ukrainians the fact that he has been marked by the Russians as “target number one” and that his family is “target number two.” But when the U.S. offered to evacuate him from Kyiv to somewhere safer, he responded: “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”
I’m writing this column on Sunday, as Russian forces, bogged down and weakened by courageous Ukrainians armed with AK-47s, Molotov cocktails, or sometimes just a large pole they picked up on the side of the street, still threaten the capital. Zelensky is leading the effort to save his nation, though most foreign intelligence services still think he’s fighting a losing battle.
So, this piece of shit Ukraine and Zelensky and the US and UK, with their Kill List, all brains have been thrown out the window, or the voice of reason is where?
This is how ZioAzovLensky rolls, and even the corrupt CIA-controlled Wikipedia has some facts here on the murderous Jews, Zelenksy’s mother ship, historical grounding, who called themselves Zionists, but I know very few Jews who are not ZIONISTS:
A successful paramilitary campaign was carried out by Zionist underground groups against British rule in Mandatory Palestine from 1944 to 1948. The tensions between the Zionist underground and the British mandatory authorities rose from 1938 and intensified with the publication of the White Paper of 1939. The Paper outlined new government policies to place further restrictions on Jewish immigration and land purchases, and declared the intention of giving independence to Palestine, with an Arab majority, within ten years. Though World War II brought relative calm, tensions again escalated into an armed struggle towards the end of the war, when it became clear that the Axis powers were close to defeat.
The Haganah, the largest of the Jewish underground militias, which was under the control of the officially recognised Jewish leadership of Palestine, remained cooperative with the British. But in 1944 the Irgun, an offshoot of the Haganah, launched a rebellion against British rule, thus joining Lehi, which had been active against the authorities throughout the war. Both were small, dissident militias of the right-wingRevisionist movement. They attacked police and government targets in response to British immigration restrictions. They intentionally avoided military targets, to ensure that they would not hamper the British war effort against their common enemy, Nazi Germany.
The armed conflict escalated during the final phase of World War II, when the Irgun declared a revolt in February 1944, ending the hiatus in operations it had begun in 1940. Starting from the assassination of Baron Moyne by Lehi in 1944, the Haganah actively opposed the Irgun and Lehi, in a period of inter-Jewish fighting known as the Hunting Season, effectively halting the insurrection. However, in autumn 1945, following the end of World War II in both Europe (April–May 1945) and Asia (September, 1945), when it became clear that the British would not permit significant Jewish immigration and had no intention of immediately establishing a Jewish state, the Haganah began a period of co-operation with the other two underground organisations. They jointly formed the Jewish Resistance Movement.
The Haganah refrained from direct confrontation with British forces, and concentrated its efforts on attacking British immigration control, while Irgun and Lehi attacked military and police targets.[6] The Resistance Movement dissolved amidst recriminations in July 1946, following the King David Hotel bombing. The Irgun and Lehi started acting independently, while the main underground militia, Haganah, continued acting mainly in supporting Jewish immigration. The Haganah again briefly worked to suppress Irgun and Lehi operations, due to the presence of a United Nations investigative committee in Palestine. After the UN Partition Plan resolution was passed on 29 November 1947, the civil war between Palestinian Jews and Arabs eclipsed the previous tensions of both with the British. However, British and Zionist forces continued to clash throughout the period of the civil war up to the termination of the British Mandate for Palestine and the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948.
Within the United Kingdom there were deep divisions over Palestine policy. Dozens of British soldiers, Jewish militants, and civilians died during the campaigns of insurgency. The conflict led to heightened antisemitism in the United Kingdom. In August 1947, after the hanging of two abducted British sergeants, there was widespread anti-Jewish rioting across the United Kingdom. The conflict caused tensions in the United Kingdom–United States relations.
Putin and Russians and those of us who actually want Russia to have a safe border, peace, and zero NATO interference, see Zelensky and his Jewish Lords — Kagans, Nuland, Blinken, Yellen, Sherman, Garland, and hundreds of others in the Biden White House and thousands of others in the Military Industrial Expanded Complex and millions more in the world of turning a dollar on death — as the ENEMY. Murderous, conniving, hateful, slick enemies numero uno. Violence and terror, that is right up Zelensky’s alley, and this war that UK and USA and Five Eyes and EU have unleashed will not end soon. Expect those weapons that USA taxpayer footed the bill for to bring down some commercial airlines in a neighborhood near-by soon.
We are a soiled Western Culture, and we have seeded the rest of the world with our feces — high tech, low tech, money, land theft, pollution, exploitation, consumerism, throw-away mentality, sanctions, blood lust, coups, supporting depots, money laundering and gold theft and assets removal. Loans from Hell, and alas, here we are, in a putrid world, two days before the big Monday Holiday, Memorial Day, and we straddle syphilitic monsters running the world and our own populous generally marked for death, marked as marks, by the billionaires, the fleecers and those Zionists and Israel-Firsters who have sold us down the Ukrainian toilet.
But leave it to the Paranoid Former Nazis and the disgusting ADL and AIPAC and Mossad loving Israelis to attack us all attacking them:
“The depiction of an unhinged fascist demagogue has been a feature of my shows since Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ in 1980,” Roger Waters said.
“I have spent my entire life speaking out against authoritarianism and oppression where I set it… My parents fought the Nazis in World War II, with my father paying the ultimate price,” he said.
“Regardless of the consequences of the attacks against me, I will continue to condemn injustice and all those who perpetrate it.”
Waters is a well-known pro-Palestinian activist who has been accused of holding anti-Jewish views. He has floated an inflatable pig emblazoned with the Star of David at his concerts. The singer denies the anti-Semitism accusations, saying he was protesting against Israeli policies, not Jewish people.
Ah, those old days, which now would be both considered hate speech and also ground down by the ugly media and the uglier mainstream fools in college, in towns, every where.
Yep, it is a piece of shit piece of cloth representing so so much death, murder, hate, and racism:
And, well, and, who writes the narrative of Ukraine, of Zelensky, of the Jewish Apartheid State supporting the Nazis under Zelensky?
Will one vapid bought and brainwashed media person get on with knowledge:
Here, over at Dissident Voice:
Journey to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Crimea
by Dan Kovalik and Rick Sterling / May 25th, 2023
At the end of April of this year, the two of us ventured together to Russia. We went with the purpose of fact-finding and also to make a point that we do not believe that Russia should be isolated from the world through sanctions and travel bans.
At this moment, Russia is more isolated from the West than it has ever been, quite possibly in history. As just one example, while V.I. Lenin was able to famously travel from Finland via train to St. Petersburg, even during the height of WWI, the train from Finland to Russia ceased operating after February 24 of 2022. And indeed, it was through Finland that we decided to travel to Russia, simply because there are now very limited ways to travel there. Thus, while for years, even during the Cold War, one could easily fly directly from the US to Russia on Aeroflot and other airlines, that is no longer possible due to sanctions. Now, one can only fly there through Serbia, Turkey or the UAE, but those flights are quite expensive.
And so, we ended up choosing to fly to Helsinki, Finland and have a Russian friend who has a non-Russian passport (Russians with only Russian passports cannot travel to Finland) drive from St. Petersburg to pick us up. This turned out to be more easily said than done as our friend’s car broke down at the Finnish/Russian border. And so, we took a very expensive, three-hour cab ride to the border, met up with our friend and crammed ourselves into the cab of a tow truck to drive the remaining three hours to St. Petersburg – a quite inauspicious beginning to our journey.
[Saint Petersburg streets are busy from early morning til late at night. This photo taken at 11:30pm]
St. Petersburg (Leningrad)
Our first several days were spent in St. Petersburg, formerly “Leningrad.” We stayed strategically at the Best Western in Uprising Square – so named by the new Bolshevik government in 1918 to commemorate the Great October Revolution of 1917. In the Square is located the Moscow train station which we used to great effect during our journey, as well as the Leningrad Hero-City Obelisk. The Obelisk commemorates Leningrad’s designation as one of 13 “hero cities” in the Soviet Union which distinguished themselves for their exceptional sacrifices in resisting the Nazis during WWII. Two other cities we visited on our trip (Moscow and Sevastopol, Crimea) are also honored with this designation, as is Kiev, Ukraine and of course Volgograd (formerly “Stalingrad”).
During our stay, the city of St. Petersburg sure seemed more like Leningrad, for it was beginning to be decked out in red flags with hammers and sickles and stars to commemorate both May Day and Victory Day over the Nazis on May 9. We were told by long-time residents that the ubiquitous display of such symbols of the USSR was something new (at least since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991), and was spurred on by Russia’s Special Military Operations beginning in February of 2022. It appears that the Russian people, and the Russian government as well, are looking to the legacy of the Soviet Union as a source of strength, pride and unity during this time of war – a war that they view, we believe quite rightly, was forced on them.
The newly released Russian Federation “concept” on foreign policy states quite explicitly that Russia’s current foreign policy is informed by the two main objectives and successes of the USSR – the defeat of Nazism and global decolonization. Certainly, on paper at least, this belies the claim of some Western leftists that Russia is motivated in its relations with other nations by imperialist concerns.
[Dan takes his turn playing guitar on St Petersburg street at 11 pm]
While in St. Petersburg, we visited the site of the terrorist attack which claimed the life of Russian journalist Vladlen Tatarsky and wounded over 30 others, at least 10 gravely. The attack involved the bombing of a cafe in the picturesque University district of St. Petersburg along the Neva – a soft target if there ever was one. The cafe remains closed, and three sets of memorials for Tatarsky are set up around it, consisting of flowers and photos. Of course, the Western press has tried to do everything it can to justify this vicious attack upon civilians, writing off Tatarsky as “pro-Kremlin” and “pro-war” (as if the Western press can’t be fairly characterized as “pro-war” and “pro-Pentagon”) and simply glossing over the numerous other civilians wounded in the assault as collateral damage.
[Rick and Dan at the site where Russian journalist was killed]
Moscow
As planned, we left St. Petersburg by train to Moscow after several days. We took the faster “Sapsan” (Falcon) train to Leningrad Station in Moscow (it is still called that). The train ride, reaching 120 mph, was smooth and comfortable. We sat across from two Russian women, one of whom was quite friendly. She told us of her son who lives in Boston and who, quite sadly for her, she hasn’t seen in years. She kept sliding over hard candy to share with us. And, when she saw Dan nervously biting his nails, she kindly handed him her nail filer for him to use. This type of sharing on the train is quite common in Russia as we would continue to discover on our journey.
[Rick with train compartment companions.]
Moscow too was being decorated for the May 9 Victory Day celebration. Red Square was sealed off from the public to prepare for the event, and the city was on high alert for possible terrorist attacks, one of which would come while we were in Russia with the drone attack upon the Kremlin itself. Despite the fears of attack, Muscovites were out on the streets day and night. Both Moscow and St. Petersburg were incredibly vibrant – much more so than our cities back home which are still feeling the effects of the lockdowns during the pandemic. Gorky Park was particularly lively with throngs of families with children enjoying the spring weather, swings and slides. Colorful tulips were in full bloom.
From appearances, Russia largely did not appear to be a country at war. However, everyone we talked to confided in us about their concerns for the war – for the loss of life on both sides, the fact that it was lasting much longer than people had expected, and the danger that the war could expand into a greater conflagration. Some Russians expressed their fear that nuclear weapons would end up being used before this was all over, though they believed that the US would be the first to launch them. At the same time, the Russians showed their usual stoicism in the face of such dangers, with one family with whom Dan had dinner stating almost matter-of-factly that “Russia has always had difficult times, and it will have them again.”
After several days in Moscow, and our hopes for visiting the Donbass falling through, we took the long, 27-hour train ride to Crimea – a region now fully in the crosshairs of the proxy war.
Arriving in Crimea
Ukrainian President Zelensky says he will “take back” Crimea. US leaders Victoria Nuland and Jake Sullivan say they support him. Indeed, Sullivan recently suggested Ukraine is free to use the F-16 fighter jets in attempting to “recapture” Crimea.” We traveled to Crimea to see the situation and learn details of how and why Crimea seceded from Ukraine in 2014.
A highlight of the train ride was passing over the new 12-mile long Kerch Strait bridge which connects mainland Russia to the Crimean peninsula. As our train approached the bridge, we could see that saboteurs had been active. There was a fuel tank on fire in the near distance. A couple passengers did not want us to photograph this, probably thinking it gives publicity to the enemy.
As we departed the train in Crimea at the beautiful station in the Capitol city, Simferopol, the loudspeakers on the platform greeted us with traditional Russian songs.
We then drove the roughly two hours to Yalta where we stayed while in Crimea. Along our drive, we saw the giant mosque which the Russian government is building along the highway in an area where Tatars, who generally practice the Islamic faith, protested to have land to live and worship. The Tatars had been persecuted during WWII as suspected collaborators and forcibly removed from Crimea to other Soviet Republics.
A number of Tatars have moved back to Crimea over the years and now make up about 12 percent of the population of Crimea. Meanwhile, about 65 percent of the Crimean population is ethnic Russian and about 15 percent is Ukrainian, though about 82 percent of the population overall speaks Russian on a daily basis.
As we were told while in Crimea, one of the first things President Putin did after Crimea returned to Russia in 2014 was to try to make good relations with the Tatar community by “rehabilitating” them from the claims of collaboration made by Stalin government, giving them the land they protested for, providing them with modest monetary reparations and building them the new Mosque.
Historical Background
All in all, we spent five days seeing the sights and meeting people in the capital Simferopol, Sevastopopol and Yalta. We were guided by translator and native Crimean Tanya. In the past, Tanya worked for US Aid for International Development (USAID), teaching Russian to US Peace Corps volunteers.
Crimea has a rich agricultural sector. It was severely hampered after Ukraine dammed the canal bringing fresh water from the Dnieper River. After Russian forces intervened, they removed the dam and agriculture is once again thriving. Crimean cities are busy with the streets and sidewalks full. In the parks, there are teens skate boarding and seniors playing chess.
The situation in Crimea is emblematic of the Ukraine crisis overall. In both Crimea and the Donbass (eastern Ukraine), the majority of people are ethnically Russian, their native language is Russian and they voted overwhelmingly for the elected but overthrown President Yanukovich.
From the 15th century Crimea was part of the Ottoman Empire. It became part of the Russian Empire in 1783 after the army of Catherine the Great defeated the Turks.
In 1921, Crimea became the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic as part of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic.
In 1954, Soviet Premier Khrushchev designated Crimea to be part of the Ukraine republic. This was done without consulting the Crimean people but it was not a major change since they were all part of one country, the Soviet Union. As we were told in Crimea, “Nobody could imagine the Soviet Union breaking up.”
As the Soviet Union was breaking up, Crimeans held a referendum in January of 1991. They voted overwhelmingly (94% in favor) to become the “Autonomous Republic of Crimea” and to separate from Ukraine. There was contention with Kiev and ultimately it was agreed that Crimea would be autonomous but within Ukraine. There was desire but not the urgency to secede from Ukraine at this point.
The desire to separate from Ukraine became more urgent in late 2013 and early 2014 as Crimeans watched with alarm as Russophobic ultra-nationalist and neo-nazi groups increasingly dominated violent protests in Kiev’s Maidan plaza. The book To Go One’s Own Way documents how the Crimean parliament and presidency issued statements, pleas and warnings about the threat to Ukrainian unity beginning in November 2013.
As we discuss in an upcoming article, the government of Ukraine reacted to the Crimean referendum to reunite with Russia quite punitively, and it continues to punish the Crimeans for their decision. At the same time, Russia has actively invested in the peninsula and made major improvements in the overall infrastructure there. In light of the foregoing, it is safe to say there are relatively few Crimeans who ever wish to return to Ukraine.
every waking and sleeping moment is run by the juice flow, cloud servers, electricity, diodes, capacitors, microchips, batteries, wires and EMFs a la 4, 5, 6 G, and forget about those satellites
[Photo: Ludd, drawn here in 1812, was the fictitious leader of numerous real protests. Granger Collection, New York.}
The question is, To be or not to be or not to be . . .
(from Hamlet, spoken by Hamlet)
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.
Rolling out Smart Phone City, our 51st state’s govenor, *elensky: Here, highlights from Lily Lynch’s recent blog: Ukraine’s ‘state in a smartphone’.
Notice the language — run like an IT company, Smart Phone city, exporting digitalization, you only need two seconds to become an entrepreneur’ and ‘30 minutes to found a limited liability company;
to ensure widespread adoption of the app, the government produced a miniseries with well-known Ukrainian film stars – creating what Fedorov calls ‘the Netflix of education’, particularly for those in rural areas and the elderly;
Diia eVorog (‘eEnemy’), civilians can use a chatbot to report the names of Russian collaborators, Russian troop movements, the location of enemy equipment and even Russian war crimes. Such reports are processed through support services at Diia; if deemed legitimate, they are submitted to the headquarters of the Ukrainian armed forces. At first glance, the interface looks like a video game;
that positions Ukraine as a technological powerhouse forged in war;
it was announced that by 2030, Ukraine intends to have become the first country to go entirely cashless and have a court system governed by AI;
As Zelensky noted at a recent Diia Summit, ‘A computer has no friends or godfathers, and doesn’t take bribes’;
Residents of Diia City will also benefit from a ‘flexible employment model’, including the introduction of precarious ‘gig contracts’, hitherto nonexistent in Ukraine;
Power announced that an additional $650,000 would be provided to ‘jumpstart’ the creation of Diia-ready infrastructure in other countries. On Tuesday, Power said these would include Colombia, Kosovo and Zambia;
When the Clinton State Department introduced the notion of ‘digital diplomacy’ – with one senior advisor telling NATO that ‘the Che Guevara of the 21st century is the Network’ – it already rang hollow;
It reflects the impoverishment of the Western liberal-democratic imagination, unable to deliver a convincing or desirable vision of the future, on- or offline;
IT is about freedom’, the narrator says. ‘All you need is a computer to invent a great variety of things.’
Lynch: “Wearing the Silicon Valley uniform of blue jeans, a T-shirt and a headset mic, strutting the stage like he was delivering an impassioned TED talk, Ukraine’s 31-year-old Digital Transformation Minister Mykhailo Fedorov explained the many features of the country’s pioneering mobile application. Thanks to Diia, he said, Ukraine would be run less like a country and more like an IT company, soon becoming ‘the most convenient state in the world’. USAID Administrator Samantha Power echoed this aspiration, noting that Ukraine – long known as the breadbasket of the world – was now ‘becoming famous for a new product . . . an open source, digital public good that it will give to other countries’. This would be achieved through the transatlantic partnership between the two nations. ‘The US has always exported democracy’, Fedorov said, ‘now it exports digitalization.’
When Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president in 2019, he promised to transform Ukraine into a ‘state in a smartphone’, making most public services available online. A digitalization agenda of this kind was virtually unprecedented, dwarfing ‘e-Estonia’ in both the speed of its rollout and the scale of its ambition. The programme’s crown jewel was Diia, launched in February 2020 with ample support from USAID. US funds reportedly amounted to $25 million for ‘the infrastructure underpinning Diia’ alone. Additional grants have come from the UK, Switzerland, the Eurasia Foundation, Visa and Google. The app is now used by some 19 million Ukrainians, about 46% of the country’s prewar population.”
+++——+++
The question is: Our we all part of this conspiracy? We use this fucking electronic computerized typewriter with millions of gigs of storage, and tied to the fiber optics, trolling the vast world wide net of information, so are we too the enemy? We communicate with cellular phones, so are we feeding the monster, the ghosts in machnines, the ghosts of the CIA and Mossad and MI6 who want us all handcuffed and monitored? We have our medical information Zoomed at home, and we bank on line, take Snap Shots of old fashioned checks to deposit, so are we responsible for our imprisonment?
We laugh at the Chromebook jokes our k12 students make. We love Hobbits in the next and next Lord of the Rigns, and drool over Cruise and his CGI pecs in Mission Impossible streamed on our tiny black mirror at bedtime while asking Alexa the best place to get Civet feces washed coffee. Are we the enemy?
We all pay for this gulag creation, from IRS chasing small potatoes like me, to the big bad killers of Julian Assange. We all have our nano-breaths fogging up our black mirrors that are now part of the ZioAzovNaziLensky’s wet dreams of tracking us ALL. First, try it in Estonia, Moldovia, Ukraine, then, the world!
Here’s a hell of a deal for USA taxpayer LLC, CIA: For $1 put in, $15 coming back.
It’s open, in the air, Wiki-CIA-Pedia: “In-Q-Tel (IQT), formerly Peleus and In-Q-It, is an American not-for-profit venture capital firm based in Arlington, Virginia. It invests in high-tech companies to keep the Central Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies, equipped with the latest in information technology in support of United Statesintelligence capability. The name “In-Q-Tel” is an intentional reference to Q, the fictional inventor who supplies technology to James Bond.
In-Q-Tel has stated that the average dollar invested by In-Q-Tel in 2016 attracts fifteen dollars from other investors.”
It is a fascist’s, oligarch’s, racist’s wet dream:
I just do not think most radicals and revolutionaries and anti-imperialists and those for Russia’s right to defense, peace, accords, treaties, independence, get it, get how overarching these madmen and madwomen are, with their armies of nerds, eggheads and academics and STEM gurus. Watch this shit storm:
These are the end times, for sure, for guys like me, using this shit storm computer, doing my snap-shot deposits, who pays for IRS interest fines on old unaccounted for 1099s which one of my Gig employers failed to send me. Deplorable, man, not me, not them, but those are the facts, ma’am, just the facts:
For ZioAzovUkrainians, this is reality: eVorog (‘eEnemy’), i.e. RUSSIANS (or anyone looking beyond the dirty tricks of Mossad and DARPA and Blackrock and Tel Aviv, London, Brussels, DC) are THE enemy, and will be blasted on a computer video game app that ties into the security-finance-survelliance state actors, including Google-JP Chase Morgan-BlackRock-Blackstone-Vanguard!!!
Then after the app IDs us, well, then, send in the cocaine cowboy clown’s assassin drones, or just old fashioned black-booted SS or IDF or SBU kicking in the door and targeting with the latest Israeli-made sniper weapon.
From Lynch:
When Russian forces destroyed numerous TV towers, Diia launched broadcasting services to ensure an uninterrupted stream of Ukrainian news sources. Ukrainians can also register destruction to property from Russian military strikes, which the government says will guide the country’s post-war reconstruction. Beyond the introduction of these useful wartime services, Diia has rolled out an array of ‘civil intelligence’ features. With Diia eVorog (‘eEnemy’), civilians can use a chatbot to report the names of Russian collaborators, Russian troop movements, the location of enemy equipment and even Russian war crimes. Such reports are processed through support services at Diia; if deemed legitimate, they are submitted to the headquarters of the Ukrainian armed forces. At first glance, the interface looks like a video game. Icons are illustrated as targets and army helmets. After users submit a report about the location of Russian troops, a muscle-flexing emoji pops up. When they submit documentation of war crimes, they click an icon of a drop of blood.
You have to take a short leap from Ukraine to the WEF, Fourth Industrial Revolutionaries, Transumanism Backers, and understand how the Power of AI to Control Us all is their goal, but we have to leap backward in order to look at why leadership is so disconnected, so transhumanist, so censorious, so Farenheit 451, so Brave New World, so Lord of the Flies, so 1984, so eugenics drenched. These people are in their own world, but their polarized colored glasses and Stem cell smoothies are killing us, even those of us who believe in full stop/time out/precautionary limits on their machinations, on their scientific disgust, on their world of more and smaller and quantumized this and nano-tech that, CRISPR-flogging us all into oblivion.
These people, the policymakers, CEOs, politicians, lobbyists, they live in their own smeared up bubble of hubris and hasbara. They are the Frankenstein masters.
And that propensity is particularly dangerous when leadership groups have become both selfish and short-termist. There really was once upon a time some people who went into government service for the service part, and not for the revolving door and networking. There was also a time, before the rise of global elites, where the powerful had ties to particular physical communities and some took interest in their betterment. In other words, while there were plenty of self-promoting and mediocre people at the helm, there were often enough in the room who were concerned about long-term risks to put a check on the worst behavior. (US Geopolitics: Believing Impossible Things)
There are no ethics, really, when the stage is set at places like CIA-DARPA-DoD-FinTech Stanford, or name the one of a thousand universities, even community colleges:
(Introductions by Professor Rob Reich, President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, and grad student Margaret Guo end at 13:52.) Twin revolutions at the start of the 21st century are shaking up the very idea of what it means to be human. Computer vision and image recognition are at the heart of the AI revolution. And CRISPR is a powerful new technique for genetic editing that allows humans to intervene in evolution. Jennifer Doudna and Fei-Fei Li, pioneering scientists in the fields of gene editing and artificial intelligence, respectively, discuss the ethics of scientific discovery. Russ Altman moderated the conversation.
[Stanford’s Fei-Fei Li and Jennifer Doudna of UC Berkeley will discuss the ethics of artificial intelligence and CRISPR technology. (Image credit: Getty Images)]
These high-tech, anything goes in science corrupt folks:
Since last fall, allegations of image manipulation in scientific papers for which Tessier-Lavigne is listed as an author have spurred questions about his decades-long scientific career. While members of Stanford’s Board of Trustees and several outside legal and scientific experts review the claims of scientific misconduct, Tessier-Lavigne has remained at the helm of one of the world’s premier research institutions.
His unusual position as president-under-investigation mirrors an unusual public-relations approach. Instead of staying silent, as many embattled leaders do during an investigation, Tessier-Lavigne has vocally defended his actions, criticized the student newspaper in harsh terms, and cast himself as a faculty member first and president second.
Some experts in higher ed and science have raised their eyebrows at the president’s tack. In embracing a defensive posture, critics say, he may have compromised his role as a community leader.
So, some egghead with the all that AI love and the other egghead with all the valorizing of CRISPR, they have zero weight in a discussion on the ethics of their Frankensteins, their creations, but in the world of controlled oppositions, controlled MSM, the media spinners in Academia who never scratch truth or rebelliousness, with of all of those secret private security bullet proof legions protecting bankers, millionaires, billionaires, the lot of them at Davos or Aspen, we will never get what we need — real debates with real revolutionaires, whether the beautiful people do or do not call us all Luddites.
Here, from the Stanford student newspaper, god love them:
Meanwhile, Tessier-Lavigne continues to evade questions. After a recent event with Colombian president Gustavo Petro, Tessier-Lavigne was approached by a Daily reporter about his research. To two questions, Tessier-Lavigne responded with silence: “Why did you publish Alzheimer’s research you knew wasn’t reproducible?” and “What was the decision-making process behind not retracting that paper?” To a third question, “What do you have to say to people who are wondering why there are so many allegations of research misconduct from your lab?” Tessier-Lavigne told the reporter, “very nice to see you and look forward to corresponding.” (source)
There are so many studies on this fact, how research is not reproducible. And, the solution to this? Yep, AI: Currently, researchers that have the most-cited or most popular studies in “high-impact” journals get rewarded — even though the methods may not be reproducible. In a recent piece in Issues in Science and Medicine, former Lown Institute VP Shannon Brownlee and National Institutes of Health researcher Bibiana Bielekova propose using machine learning algorithms to identify articles by their rigor, reproducibility, and societal impact, rather than their popularity or number of citations. This could incentivize better research methods while illuminating future research paths that are most likely to bear fruit.
Science as ideology. We think we follow science, but we are following blind ideology. Academic research has many problems. One is the replication crisis starting around 2005. In medical and biological sciences, 85 percent of research papers are not replicable/reproducible.
Did we overreact to “the virus” in 2020? Did we march out mRNA too quickly? Or, were those mRNA “things” way advanced in the pipeline? Well, it was in the plan. And if you put “it” (“Event 201” … or … “Moderna as already working on mRNA corona before 2019”) in a search box in Pharma-CIA-FinTech-DARPA Google, you will get pure deniability:
In October, 2019 Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who, together with his wife (now ex-wife), runs the richest and most powerful foundation in the world, co-organized a simulation exercise on a worldwide corona epidemic. Videos were posted documenting the exercise. Find them. Gates now denies such an exercise ever took place.
Why? On April 12, 2020, Bill Gates said in an interview to the BBC, “Now here we are. We didn’t simulate this, we didn’t practice, so both the health policies and economic policies, we find ourselves in uncharted territory.”
This is the same person who, just six months before the outbreak of the pandemic, organised a series of four role-playing simulations of a corona pandemic with very high-ranking participants. Event 201 was a simulation of a corona pandemic conducted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and Johns Hopkins University in October 2019.
Participants from the private and public sectors were presented with a scenario, not unlike the one that has unfolded in reality, and discussed what needed to be done. There are official videos of the four meetings and a best-of-video scenario presentation and discussion by the participants, who are members of a pandemic control council in the role play.
It is true that if a little less emphasis had been placed on opinion manipulation, more attention could have been paid to health and economic policy. One of the four meetings was entirely devoted to this. But health and economic policies did get discussed. Gates can hardly have forgotten that.
The video on control of public opinion is the most interesting one, as it helps to put in perspective the efforts in this regard, which we are currently experiencing. One participant tells us that Bill Gates is financing work on algorithms which comb through the information on social media platforms to make sure that people can trust the information that they find there.
And the Chinese participant, the head of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control muses about ways to counter rumours that the virus is man-made. Remember, this exercise took place in October 2019, before the current pandemic broke out. (source)
So are we “anti-science” and “anti-knowledge” and “anti-civilization” if we QUESTION from the bottom of our intellects? Luddites? Am I blind?
Am I a Luddite: According to the article by Richard Conniff:
As the Industrial Revolution began, workers naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”
The original Luddites lived in an era of “reassuringly clear-cut targets—machines one could still destroy with a sledgehammer,” Loyola’s Jones writes in his 2006 book Against Technology, making them easy to romanticize. By contrast, our technology is as nebulous as “the cloud,” that Web-based limbo where our digital thoughts increasingly go to spend eternity. It’s as liquid as the chemical contaminants our infants suck down with their mothers’ milk and as ubiquitous as the genetically modified crops in our gas tanks and on our dinner plates. Technology is everywhere, knows all our thoughts and, in the words of the technology utopian Kevin Kelly, is even “a divine phenomenon that is a reflection of God.” Who are we to resist?
“The original Luddites would answer that we are human. Getting past the myth and seeing their protest more clearly is a reminder that it’s possible to live well with technology—but only if we continually question the ways it shapes our lives. It’s about small things, like now and then cutting the cord, shutting down the smartphone and going out for a walk. But it needs to be about big things, too, like standing up against technologies that put money or convenience above other human values.” (source)
Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind. Not for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions, for Mechanism of one sort or other, do they hope and struggle. Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical character. — Thomas Carlyle (source)
…. and yet, the weathering of existence in Capitalism, the immune system hijacking of media-politics-propaganda-blase leadership, we all are inflammed!
I’ve been helping navigate the legal system my friend from another country, green card in hand, and a husband who attempted to suffocate her to death. The people in both camps — defense and prosecution — are interestingly together bedfellows, working the “system” hard, juggling which judge is this or that (pro- or con-), and using all the ugliness of a legal system that is stacked against, well, JUSTICE for one, JUSTICE for all.
Her case gets delayed, and delayed, and the accused is still in jail, awaiting a trial, and then new (sic) evidence pops up, and alas, more moves by defense team (at taxpayer’s expense) rallies to get the case delayed but hoping for the release of the accused from jail.
That hasn’t happened, but the entire mess, from last November’s 911 call, to all of it, from restraining orders, all the lawyer talk for divorce and prosecution, grand jury, sheriff’s deputies, the harassment of in-laws, all that, plus the waiting game, the hyper-vigilance, to going over from day one of life, all of her life, her parents’ role in her life, friends, situation, decisions, all the why’s why’s why’s, and then, finding herself, under the fear, the trauma, the suicidal ideation, all the yo-yo leave-stay-come back-leave-stay-come back of this psychological hell, all of that has weathered her tremendously. I see it.
Not so much vicarious trauma for her, but first-hand, and then repeated, and generational, and the trauma of this abuser and his own life trauma and Breaking Bad family line, the mean cuss father, and well, self-numbing, self-slobbering boozing.
Trauma, and then, just the prosecution and the defense of it all. Ahh, two agencies in Oregon, fighting for $$: OPDS and ODAA.
“The clients you represent through contracts with OPDS have been found indigent and unable to afford their own attorney or costs associated with defending themselves and their families against the accusations brought by the State,” Singer wrote in a Dec. 28 letter announcing the decision. “Neither the clients themselves nor OPDS is responsible for paying fees to learn what evidence the State has regarding its allegations.”
District attorneys have largely objected to the policy change.
Michael Wu, executive director of the Oregon District Attorneys Association, referenced a Nov. 30 letter to OPDS asking that they continue to pay for discovery until after the 2022 legislative session.
“Prosecutorial resources are already stretched by a historic backlog of cases resulting from widespread court closures across the duration of the pandemic,” the ODAA letter states. “We again request that you delay this action long enough for the issue to be addressed by the 2022 Legislature.”
Singer said he supports local prosecutors being properly funded, especially to defray the costs of providing constitutionally-mandated discovery.
“If they’re not being properly funded to defray these costs, I’ll sit at the table with them at the Legislature and support their request for funding. But they need to get that funding directly from the Legislature, not through the public defense system,” he said.
OPDS and ODAA are scheduled to discuss fees later this month.
It takes courage to help child and adult victims of sexual abuse, assist survivors of acts of terrorism and mass violence, fight fires that may have taken people’s lives, or respond to shootings and other crime scenes. It also takes commitment to do this work despite the personal, physical, emotional, and mental impact it can have. (source)
Again, everything in Capitalism is broken, and as Lloyd Ratheon Austin gets trillions more for his Mafia, we in the world of the 80 Percent are screwed, and that third-hand putrid economic and structural violence smoke filling our already screwed first-hand trauma burn in our lungs, well, think of death by a thousand vicarious traumas.
A recent study showed that Oregon needs roughly 1,300 more full-time attorneys – or roughly three times the number it currently has – to represent everyone charged with a crime who cannot afford a lawyer.
Oregon differs from other states in that it relies entirely on contracts with public defenders rather than keeping them on staff. The agency currently has about 100 firms on contract.
[…]
According to Oregon’s public defense agency, violating the constitutional right to legal counsel and a speedy trial has serious consequences, including wrongful convictions, threats to public safety, and an increase in the number of cases returning to trial years after a conviction.
Until July 2022, attorneys who contracted with the agency on an hourly rate made $105 per hour for murder cases. Since then, the agency bumped up the rate to $158 per hour for attorneys taking on cases of people in custody. Now, the agency will implement a tiered hourly rate, ranging from $125 to $200 depending upon the seriousness of the case, regardless of whether or not the person is in custody. (source)
Ahh, so all the charges, all the traffic stops, all the fines, the harassment of people for bad checks and bad lawns, and, yes, many accused are over-charged and innocent, ahh, just getting into the criminal justice system as a WITNESS or VICTIM will age you. However, in Domestic Violence cases, the reality is that once the cops are called, there is a very high chance of that woman being truly afraid of being, well, murdered. Say, what, you want data? Read the other pieces here:
The Oregon legislature approved release of the $100 million in special purpose appropriation funds which will be broken up like this:
$70.3 million for the Criminal Trial Division
$14.6 million for Nonroutine Expenses
$5 million for Court Mandated Expenses
$10.2 million for the Juvenile Division
Some lawmakers voted against releasing these funds because they thought it was too much money, but the vote ultimately passed.
“It’s a mess,” Senator Peter Courtney said. “When we deal with right to counsel…it’s not Republican or Democrat.” (sources)
+—+
And so it goes — trauma . . . second hand trauma . . . care giver trauma . . . trauma informed care . . . PTSD . . . C-PTSD . . . latency PTSD . . . collective PTSD . . . mass hysteria . . . mass … formation … psychosis: MASS FORMATION!
Psychosis is when people lose some contact with reality. Mass formation psychosis is when a large part of a society focuses its attention to a leader(s) or a series of events and their attention focuses on one small point or issue. Followers can be hypnotized and be led anywhere, regardless of data proving otherwise. A key aspect of the phenomena is that the people they identify as the leaders – the one’s that can solve the problem or issue alone – they will follow that leader(s) regardless of any new information or data. Furthermore, anybody who questions the leader’s narrative are attacked and disregarded.
There are four key components needed for an environment to experience a mass formation psychosis: lack of social bonds or decoupling of societal connections, lack of sense-making (things don’t make sense), free-floating anxiety, and free-floating psychological discontent. Free-floating anxiety is a general sense of uneasiness that is not tied to any particular object or specific situation.
So, vicarious trauma, and vicarious trauma training (which the victims assistance people in my county just went through), it is all part of a decaying society, from heavy caseloads, to vicious retrogrades who want all people dead, locked up, without safety nets, and it is there, within the care givers, stuck in their top down lives as workers, with these sychophants above, and the money money money and defunding and threats of budget cuts, and the caseloads out the roof, and the more and more people living Breaking Bad lives, truly, a society that has been scoured of intelligence, agency, community purpose, and, alas, has been put into a Netflix and Facebook Isolation Screen Scrolling Black Mirror Chamber, what can we expect then, this TRAUMA TRAUMA TRAUMA?
GAD, man, General Anxiety Disorder? What the fuck is that?
Vicarious Trauma: “It takes courage to help child and adult victims of sexual abuse, assist survivors of acts of terrorism and mass violence, fight fires that may have taken people’s lives, or respond to shootings and other crime scenes. It also takes commitment to do this work despite the personal, physical, emotional, and mental impact it can have.”
It gets multilayered:
Vicarious trauma was first identified in 1980s as the “cost of caring” (Figley, 1982). It is sometimes referred to as “compassion fatigue” (Perlman & Saakvitne, 1995). Symptoms can parallel those of PTSD – re-experiencing, numbness, avoidance, and persistent arousal (Figley, 1996).
Professionals working with survivors of trauma (e.g. sexual assault) report changes to how they see the world – for example, that the world is not just or safe (Salston & Figley, 2003). Professionals with previous trauma histories show significantly higher secondary trauma symptoms than those with no trauma histories (Folette, Polusny, & Milbeck, 1994).
Definition of Vicarious Trauma
▪ The emotional residue of exposure to traumatic stories and experiences of others through work; witnessing fear, pain, and terror that others have experienced; a pre-occupation with horrific stories told to the professional (American Counseling Association, 2016)
▪ Sometimes referred to as “secondary traumatization, secondary stress disorder, or insidious trauma” (ACA, 2016)
▪ Included in the DSM-5 as part of the cluster of “trauma and stressor-related disorders”
▪ Vicarious Trauma is not the same as “burnout”
Definition of Compassion Fatigue
▪ Beyond empathy, it is also known as secondary traumatic stress (STS), a condition characterized by a gradual lessening of compassion over time.
▪ Can happen quite quickly (as opposed to vicarious trauma or burnout) and is responsive to evidence-based treatment interventions
Definition of Controlled Empathy
▪ Constant monitoring of emotions so as to not react to stories and testimony, absorbing the information without showing emotion
▪ Requires vigorous neurological activity
• Autonomic empathy – involves both sides of the brain, reacting to stories with appropriate emotion, allows brain to react, release tension
• Controlled empathy – taking control of the empathic response and taxing the right hemisphere of the brain
Definition of Burnout
▪ Long term stress reaction and process that occurs among professionals who work with people in some capacity (Freudenberger, 1974; Maslach, 1982; Maslach and Schaufeli, 1993)
▪ Can be brought about by workplace conflict, overload of responsibilities, perception of inequality and inadequate rewards, and consistent exposure to traumatic materials (Chamberlain and Miller, 2008)
▪ Emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment
▪ Feelings of being emotionally overextended, depleted or self-doubt
▪ Increasing disillusionment (Edelwich and Brodsky, 1980)
▪ End result – depersonalization and apathy (source)
So, we are all products of trauma, and many traumas, indeed. The collective trauma, and vicarious trauma, man oh man, just watching the news, or watching the lips moving on a Trump or Biden or Harris or Pence. Our fucking history, and the instantaneous cruel work of pigs of NaziLandia and Racism and Misogyny!
Imagine the lifestyles and fortunes and perversions of the rich and famous constantly bombarding youth, and chipping away at the middle class wanting more hoarding.
Imagine the devaluing of human life that the perverse at the top, in the EU or Israel or USA, UK, you name the society, imagine that constant hatred of the weak, infirm, poor, misbegotten, old, disabled, bad Zip Code useless breather and eater and worker, imagine that collective and deep-veined trauma, pulling us apart one stroke and diabetes case at a time?
Some wisdom in trauma, according to Mate: It’s 90 minutes!
Yet, oh yet, Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers:
“If you get gored by a rhino, you’re going to have a stress response,” Robert Sapolsky said. “There’s no amount of meditation you can do that’s going to prevent that. It doesn’t matter what your self-esteem is like.
“But if you think about mortality and global warming, if you think about how you’re going to pay the bills, if you think about how you got rejected back when (and) you’re always going to fail … if you get mired in the real stress of human psychological turmoil, we differ enormously as to how readily we can keep things in perspective.”
Dennis Anderson, a mental health counselor in Spokane, used Sapolsky’s “Zebras” book instead of a traditional textbook in a class about stress and coping he taught for EWU’s psychology department.
By explaining to therapy patients what’s happening to them on a physiological level – whether it’s a result of anxiety or marital or financial problems – he can help provide a reason to change, he said, especially considering the long-term health effects of stress.
Sometimes people don’t realize long-term stress persists in the “background” of daily life, Anderson said. Meanwhile, those glucocorticoids are pounding away.
“They think of stress as you get fired from your job, or you get in a car wreck – you get in these big things that happen to us,” he said. “But all these little micro-stressors – you’re living paycheck to paycheck, you’re working in an environment that is a hostile environment – it recedes into the background. It becomes, ‘Oh, that’s what normal is.’ ” (source)
Yet oh yet, I see daily the families, the individuals in a township, the big time news, or the state news, or the global news, how destructive these people are in dog-eat-dog world of “I’ve got mine, good luck getting yours” mentality. The endless eugenics of Capitalism, of war as a method of depopulation, of sanctions and stopping medicines to people, to humans. It was all worth it, this Jewish war monger, right?
So, Sapolsky was in Spokane, on my radio show, and at Eastern Washington University, talking to the crowd. And so was this monster, with a huge speaker’s fee of $75,000 for a puny school to dish out?
People ask me how I can rant and rail and deploy polemics and look at the underbelly of life and systems and civilization ALL the time? Come on, it is part and parcel some of our existences. Do I soak in and absorb and inhale all that supposed vicarious trauma? Or, do I relish the people who are there pushing and prodding and pulling and digging and emoting and expressing what the underpining of our decaying society is about?
Do I need emotional air sickness bags when I explore the darker realm, the entire Fortune 5,000 realm, the realm of geniuses who do and make and ask what and how, but never WHY? Sure, air sickness bag is for temporary stomach trauma.
You betcha, seeing Gates or Thiel or Nuland or Zelensky or the 400 top showboaters in DC, or anyone on Wall Street, or, well, you understand all the who’s in the world that produce vomitus.
The endorsement of Kissinger by Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and, eventually, by Clinton, has normalized him, making his views a central part of American statecraft by casting him as a fount of establishment gospel—a gospel that preaches the value of American humanity and accepts as necessity the casual destruction of other people and places. Normalization of this sort, also perpetuated by figures in the media, policy experts, and academics, is dangerous. It transforms the deplorable into the acceptable. Donald Trump is now trying to make such a shift; there is no guarantee that he will fail. Kissinger offers a lesson in how to succeed, by never disavowing and never apologizing, and by relentlessly persuading others of the legitimacy of his diplomacy. (Author and refugee: Viet Thanh Nguyen in The Atlantic 16 Nov 2016)
Is it all vicarious, and am I seeing my body break down at 66 because of all the exposure to the toxins of Capitalism Hasbara/Propaganda/Media/Miseducation? Who the hell knows, and stress is stress, and sure, I am always on the run, fight or fight or fight, and never freeze or flight. But that is just me, and a few million others I know are out there.
Does this shake me to the core? This killer is 100 years cold today!
Oh, come on. If you have been a human your whole life — age 13 or 60 — you know what is real and what is foul.
Go on the dark side and read a hero, Doug Valentine:
The book in essence recounts Valentine’s journey of discovery—as if in a Joseph Conrad novel—about the dark side of the U.S. empire.
Valentine’s political awakening occurred at the age of fourteen on the day JFK was assassinated when he told his father excitedly that they had caught the culprit. Douglas Valentine, Sr., responded in a rather kindly voice: “The guy they got didn’t do it, Doug. You can count on that.”
[…]
Valentine tells a story about how the OSS recruited a Kiowa Indian and Japanese Nisei with connection to the leader of the Black Dragon Society, a paramilitary ultra-nationalist group, for a suicide mission into Nagasaki which was obliterated by the atomic bomb on August 9, 1945, along with 400 allied prisoners of war.
Valentine sees the mission as a parable for how U.S. intelligence agencies manipulate minority groups and use right-wing criminals—who are discarded or killed with little thought after their utility has run out.
This modus operandi fits a long trend in U.S. history going back to the Indian Wars and slavery, an inescapable part of the country’s DNA.
Valentine writes that the United States, like all of North and South America, is “brimming with hungry ghosts invisible to its militant Christian nationalists—the millions of indigenous people who were slaughtered and African-Americans who were enslaved and lynched.”
There are also the ghosts of millions of Southeast Asian peoples whom the same militant Christian nationalists believed were “better dead than red,” along with the millions of victims of the drug trade that the CIA oversaw through the Cold War. (sources)
Read him. You WILL not get VICARIOUS trauma by being informed. Really!
“The gazelle and the lion are enemies only in the minds of the Takers. The lion that comes across a herd of gazelles doesn’t massacre them, as an enemy would. It kills one, not to satisfy its hatred of gazelles but to satisfy its hunger, and once it has made its kill the gazelles are perfectly content to go on grazing with the lion right in their midst.”
“We’re not destroying the world because we’re clumsy. We’re destroying the world because we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it.”
“Once you learn to discern the voice of Mother Culture humming in the background, telling her story over and over again to the people of your culture, you’ll never stop being conscious of it. Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you’ll be tempted to say to the people around you, ‘how can you listen to this stuff and not recognize it for what it is?’”
Australians, err, Brits, err, Europeans, err, Canadians, err, Americanos, all cut from the same heads on spikes cloth — Tasering Old People to Dreaming!
[Oliver Cromwell’s head was placed on a spike and erected in the 17th century. A drawing from the late 18th century.]
These are the forefathers/mothers of this shit hole Anglo Saxon World:
Looks like one of my aunts in Surrey:
Clare Nowland, 95, has died in hospital one week after she was allegedly tasered by a police officer at a New South Wales nursing home.
NSW Police confirmed the 95-year-old’s death in a statement on Wednesday night.
“The tasering is such an extremely brutal act at her age at 95 and with her body size, she fractured her skull and had a large brain bleed,” he said on Monday.
“The community is also reeling, messages are pouring in through my social media channels… there’s an enormous outpour.
“A newspaper in Brazil covered this story, there is care for all over the planet pouring into our little town.”
Cooma priest Mark Croker also visited Ms Nowland in hospital on Sunday to deliver mass, the Daily Telegraph reported.
“She looks peaceful, she’s not conscious but she certainly looks comfortable… They say the last of your senses to go is your hearing, so we know she can hear us,” he told the publication.
“The thing with Clare is the dementia hadn’t completely taken hold, you could still have a conversation with her… she might get a bit confused, but that’s an age thing.” (source)
There are millions of people tortured, splayed, spiked, evicerated and gutted.
Here are some peace activists:
So, the old lady dies, and I am sure it is big news in Aussie-Land, for sure.
But the WWIII is being pushed by a Germany of Old, and other Nazi-Drenched countries:
Russia is preparing a superstrike
The chairman of the presidium of the All-Russian organization “Officers of Russia”, Major General Sergei Lipovoy, in a conversation with Tsargrad, assessed the rumors about the creation of an elite special forces unit “Storm” by Russia to strike at important and complex targets and battles with F-16s.
This is no longer news. Our Aerospace Forces have been working on this for a long time, and we are taking measures adequate to the current situation. If NATO has now put forward a serious armored group against us and is creating an air fist, then we must respond accordingly. Therefore, a decision was made to create such a grouping that could successfully work both against the air component and against the ground. On the territory of Ukraine there are a large number of armored vehicles of various types – we will have to dispose of them,
Lipova stated.
He called it a rhetorical question how long it would take for this disposal. According to the assumptions of the major general, much less than for the training of Ukrainian pilots to use the F-16. At the same time, Russia has all the necessary resources.
“We, unlike NATO, unlike Ukraine, have everything necessary for this,” summed up the source of the “First Russian”. (source)
It makes sense that a Taser is used on an old lady, with a puny steak knife, with big hulks of cops ready to probably break a neck artery.
Then, it goes to the next and the next level, until we have the Putrid Pigs of Capital pushing for a strike on Russia. Now, why is it that Nazi-fied Germany and Nazi-fied Poland and then all the other NATO numb nuts not legit targets for a country that is being attacked by these said countries?
How to spin the murder of an old lady, no? How will that spin by the racists and thugs of Anglo Australia? Before that, let’s remind ourselves of the dirty Zelenksy: From Prof Michel Chossudovsky!
Absolutely stunning,
An Astute Intelligence Op.
A Russian Jew transformed into a Nazi?
See the video below.
***
Zelensky is Jewish. He supports the Nazi Azov Battalion, the two Nazi parties, which have committed countless atrocities against the Jewish community in Ukraine.
He belongs to a Russian-Jewish family. He was brought up as a native Russian speaker, who until recently was not fluent in Ukrainian.
And now this Jewish-Russian proxy president wants to “ban everything Russian”, including the Russian language, the Russian media, the teaching of Russian in the schools.
He has been instructed by Washington to lead Kiev’s Neo-Nazi government, which is portrayed by the U.S. mainstream media including the NYT as a democracy.
Zelensky also plans to ban Russian composers including Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Borodin, Glinka, Rimsky-Korsakov, and many more.
Meanwhile, the Kiev neo-Nazi regime (supported by US-NATO) has endorsed the writings of Stepan Bandera as well as Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Zelensky has also betrayed his family. Many of his relatives were the victims of the Nazi holocaust.
In a twisted irony, days before he assumed office, “he …laid flowers on the grave of his grandfather, Semyon Ivanovich Zelensky, who fought in the Soviet Union’s Red Army during World War II”.
It was May 9 — Victory Day in Ukraine — and a day of “thanksgiving,” he wrote in a Facebook post.
“[Semyon] went through the whole war and remain[s] forever in my memory one of those heroes who defended Ukraine from the Nazis,” he wrote. “Thanks for the fact that the inhuman ideology of Nazism is forever a thing of the past.
Thanks to those who fought against Nazism — and won.” (quoted in Washington Post, emphasis added)
High Treason.
My Grandfather: “one of those heroes who defended Ukraine from the Nazis”.
What a liar and a criminal,
Sponsored by America and Europe, Zelensky is promoting Nazism in Ukraine.
That Australia, which is part and parcel the project of Conquest, Spain, Germany, UK, USA, Canada, Portugal:
Some of the other remains held in the boxes at Mitchell (which I’m not permitted, out of deference to the dead, to open) belong to Indigenous Australians who died in colonial institutions – jails, hospitals and asylums – and, scarcely cold, were “anatomised” (a benign euphemism for butchery). Thousands more, who might have died naturally and remained buried, were exhumed en masse.
The collection of bodies at Mitchell is central to a shameful, bleak, little-known narrative that begins at colonisation and reverberates through Australia’s unsettled national sovereignty. It extends discomfortingly into the 20th century, and resonates today as an element of ongoing trauma in Aboriginal communities.
It is also a story about those who created an extensive body-parts market in Australia and in leading institutions around the world. Until the mid-20th century, Australia’s Aboriginal people were seen as something of a missing link to the prehistoric; as late as 1945, Arnhem Land people were likened to Neanderthals, their bodies studied just like the other fauna that officialdom considered them to be. The renowned amateur anthropologist Charles Mountford promoted a 1945 lecture tour about Aboriginal people in Arnhem Land under the title Australia’s Stone Age Men, drawing on a stereotype that had defined the work of Darwinists and phrenologists for 150 years. Phrenology, best described as a pseudo or even voodoo science “of the mind”, had created its own prolific market for the body parts – especially heads – of Australian and other indigenous people since the late 18th century. Long after phrenology was widely discredited, Aboriginal skulls were still sought and displayed with the same benign sentiment that one might attach to animal remains. Mountford’s expedition removed hundreds of skeletons from sacred sites in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. Many made their way to the Smithsonian in Washington DC and were only returned, after considerable resistance, in 2010. (“The bone collectors: a brutal chapter in Australia’s past/ The remains of hundreds of Aboriginal people, dug up from sacred ground and once displayed in museums all over the world, are now stored in a Canberra warehouse. When will they be given a national resting place?”)
[Photo: A picture of OnYong, the last full-blood man of the Ngambri people of the Limestone Plains. He died at the end of a rival’s spear. Settlers dug him up and fashioned a sugar bowl from his skull. By TY Balcombe, circa 1850, Mitchell Library.]
Now now, this old lady will be buried, maybe, not just a potter’s grave or museum box, we hope.
[Photo: rnhem Land in the Northern Territories, where Aboriginal skeletons were removed from sacred sites. Photograph: Richard I’Anson/Getty Images/Lonely Planet Images]
Ahh, which Utopia is it for? Full movie link on Vimeo: LINK.
Tasers. Amazing the infantilization of this sort of weapon: The Taser was first developed in the mid-1970s by American inventor Jack Cover. Taser is an acronym for Tom A. Swift Electric Rifle (the Tom Swift books about an inventor of amazing gadgets were a childhood favorite of Cover) and is a brand name for the device, which is manufactured by Taser International.
They are deadly, combined with the pigs/cops other techniques:
Reuters now has documented a total of at least 1,081 U.S. deaths following use of Tasers, almost all since the weapons began coming into widespread use in the early 2000s. In many of those cases, the Taser, which fires a pair of barbed darts that deliver a paralyzing electrical charge, was combined with other force, such as hand strikes or restraint holds. (source)
So, the Brits sent the convicted (most not murderers but first time offenders) to New South Wales: New South Wales, a state in southeast Australia, was founded by the British as a penal colony in 1788. Over the next 80 years, more than 160,000 convicts were transported to Australia from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, in lieu of being given the death penalty.
Oh, those convicts: “It should be observed that Australia’s richest man – ever – was ex-convict Samuel Terry, the ‘Botany Bay Rothschild’. Tapping in to the urban consumer culture by importing goods and running pubs were both highly successful ways of accumulating wealth and Terry and his wife Rosetta Pracey successfully exploited both strategies. When Thomas Bigge came to town in 1820 he heard that Terry held 1,450 head of cattle, 3,800 sheep, 19,000 acres of NSW, and that he supplied more mortgages than the Bank of New South Wales (of which he was one of the largest shareholders). At his death in 1838 he was worth 3.39% of the colony’s gross domestic product, the equivalent today of over $24 billion (Rubenstein, 2004).
Terry was not alone in forging a fortune, but it was certainly easier for a convict to make good in the early years of NSW than in the later phases.” (source)
Ahh, the society based on theft, murder, torture, rape: The Cult of Forgetfulness. DOes that ring true of so much history today? I wrote about that in today’s AM substack, and there is the Agnotolgy.
Like many settler colonies with evolving frontiers, there has been a continuous undercurrent of sexual violence in Australian history. From the first establishment of European settlements in Australia, forced sexual relations perpetrated by white settlers have remained relatively unspoken about in recollections of the Australian frontier experience, regardless of the victim’s race.
The term ‘the Great Australian Silence’ was first coined in a 1968 lecture delivered by anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner. Stanner utilised the term to address the manner in which certain critical areas of Indigenous and non-Indigenous history, including invasion, dispossession and massacres, had generally been ignored by Australian historians as part of a long-term structural trend, otherwise known as the ‘cult of forgetfulness’. (source)
Yurlayurlanya. Now, go to Wikipedia, and it’s hundreds of names and tribes: This list of Australian Aboriginal group names includes names and collective designations which have been applied, either currently or in the past, to groups of Aboriginal Australians. The list does not include Torres Strait Islander peoples, who are ethnically, culturally and linguistically distinct from Australian Aboriginal peoples, although also an Indigenous Australian people.
Typically, Aboriginal Australian mobs are differentiated by language groups. Most Aboriginal people could name a number of groups of which they are members, each group being defined in terms of different criteria and often with much overlap.[citation needed] Many of the names listed below are properly understood as language or dialect names; some are simply the word meaning man or person in the associated language; some are endonyms (the name as used by the people themselves) and some exonyms (names used by one group for another, and not by that group itself), while others are demonyms (terms for people from specific geographical areas).
Over the last three decades a rich seam of Indigenous life-writing has emerged in Australia, much of which (since it is an essentially female phenomenon) is devoted to Aboriginal women’s recollections of working as housemaids in white people’s homes. During the same period Aboriginal domestic service during the first half of the twentieth century has become the focus of extensive investigation by a new generation of Australian historiographers. The relationship settler Australians had with their Aboriginal servants was, both sets of textual evidence attest, for the most part, controlling, sadistic and deeply rooted in feelings of racial superiority. It bore, in other words, more than a passing resemblance to that which flourished under regimes of formal enslavement in other parts of the world. (source)
Clare Nowland. Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith:
Heads on Spikes. F-16’s. Oh, Australia, the vassal.
Read all about the vassal state: USA, Australia Militarizing PNG: Softly swallowing sovereignty, rendering a vassal state; An independent geopolitical perspective by Dominic Navue Sengi
For the last few weeks, I’ve seen a film bring together Aboriginal people all over Australia. The buzz around Utopia – a documentary by John Pilger – has been unprecedented. Some 4000 people attended the open-air premiere in Redfern last month – both indigenous and non-indigenous Australians – and yet little appeared in the media about an event that the people of Redfern say was a ”first”. This silence has since been broken by a couple of commentators whose aggression seemed a cover for their hostility to the truth about Aboriginal people.
When I watched Utopia for the first time, I was moved to tears. Three times. This film has reminded me that the great advantages I enjoy today – as a footballer and Australian of the Year – are a direct result of the struggles and sacrifices of the Aboriginal people who came before me.
Utopia honours these people, so I think the very least I can do is honour Utopia and the people who appeared in it and made it.
It takes courage to tell the truth, no matter how unpopular those truths may be. But it also takes courage to face up to our past.
Ahh, the language of hate, covered over, dissected by Aboriginal Poetry:
Understand Old One
What if you came back now To our new world, the city roaring There on the old peaceful camping place Of your red fires along the quiet water, How you would wonder At towering stone gunyas high in air Immense, incredible; Planes in the sky over, swarms of cars Like things frantic in flight.
– Oodgeroo Noonucal
Maybe Clare will forever be remembered if we burn photos of her:
I shared with Leane an observation by Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha poet Ali Cobby Eckermann from his essay in Fire Front, a First Nations collection edited by Alison Whittaker. At an Aboriginal Writers Retreat in 2009, some of the best poems he heard were thrown into a campfire. “The campfire is a vessel that holds many of our stories,” he writes.
“That’s right,” Leane replied. “They were put into the air—released to the air. They’re still in the air, not dissipating. First Nation literature goes into the campfire and into the air and into the song and into the water.”
As we finished our conversation, I pictured Eckermann’s verses going out into the universe, expanding and purifying the silence between our words. (source)
Let her live in another world, walkabout: Everywhen & Dreaming
According to most traditions, the human spirit cannot be destroyed, even after the body dies. Instead, it becomes one with elements of nature called the everywhen. Researchers have not managed to successfully translate the term Everywhen – or Dreaming. It roughly means that nature and ancestral spirits share a close connection. The Dreaming also exists beyond space or time.
This Dreaming is a wide-ranging way of life. Part of the human spirit remains behind close to where the person died. It may then turn into a dangerous but short-lived ghost. The other part of the soul is the immortal spirit that joins the Dreaming. (source)
if it’s good for business, bring it on, anything goes in Chlamydia-Syphilitic Capitalism
You get the old soft shoe routine: PT Barnum, Snake Oil salesmen, PayDay Loan Sharks, Treaty Breakers, Indian Women, Children, Elderly Killers.
It’s the business of servicing the pioneers. Don’t get too cozy with the idea that those pioneers were all god-fearing, law abiding, great examples of fairness and grit.
Don’t get all warm and fuzzy about the armies of thieves and insurance scammers and foul meat hucksters and robbers and robber barons coming through the land and picking at it like frenzied vultures on a deer.
Remember this human stain, oh, yes, purely steeped in the madness of money-marketing-plagiarism-smoke & mirrors and outright visual and audio murder by a thousand advertisements and a million seconds of his idea of fun, the circues:
Leslie Moonves can appreciate a Donald Trump candidacy.
Not that the CBS executive chairman and CEO might vote for the Republican presidential frontrunner, but he likes the ad money Trump and his competitors are bringing to the network.
“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” he said of the presidential race.
Moonves called the campaign for president a “circus” full of “bomb throwing,” and he hopes it continues.
“Most of the ads are not about issues. They’re sort of like the debates,” he said.
“Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now? … The money’s rolling in and this is fun,” he said.
“I’ve never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going,” said Moonves.
“Donald’s place in this election is a good thing,” he said Monday at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco. (source)
I look at his face, and definitely have much more respect for vultures.
Imagine, all that copy in the dirty New Yorker on this human stain: the huckster and his $120 million severance package. And these stains are in charge of “news”? Farthest from the truth.
Ahh, one of my buddies sent me a couple of news blurbs, one being:
“Surgeon General: ‘Growing Evidence’ Social Media Harms Kids’ Mental Health”
There is “growing evidence” that the use of social media by kids and adolescents could be detrimental to their mental health, according to the U.S. surgeon general. Dr. Vivek Murthy is sounding the alarm about the negative effects of social media on the mental health and well-being of young people, amid what he calls “a national youth mental health crisis.”
In a new advisory issued Tuesday, Murthy highlighted the “significant” public health challenge posed by the use of social media by U.S. youth — specifically those between the ages of 10 to 19, who “are undergoing a highly sensitive period of brain development.”
“Nearly every teenager in America uses social media, and yet, we do not have enough evidence to conclude that it is sufficiently safe for them, especially at such a vulnerable stage of brain, emotional, and social development,” Murthy said in a statement.
He urged policymakers and tech companies, as well as families of young people in the U.S., to take immediate action to “maximize the benefits and minimize the harms of social media platforms” and create “safer” and “healthier” environments for young users.
Fun stuff in Mister Rogers Neighborhood. Hmm, 10,000 bottles of chemicals on the wall, and, who the fuck knows what one chemical does to the fetus, to development, let alone two together in synergistic fun, let alone dozens working on the old (fetal) endocrine system?
And so, with the tap-tap-tap of TV, of everything on the boob tube from time immemorial, through to the violent sexual assaulter Les of CBS, all of them, with their, “if it bleeds, it leads” mentality, with their, “gotta get the money anyway possible,” and so we have a Surgeon General warning about social media?
Is that because the kids are on it so much, that there is pure vapidity in the black mirror scrolling? Or, is it because there is so much venom on it, so many ways to morph a young mind into thinking 2 is 3 and down is up? Is it the eye candy effect, and the marketing Edward Bernays effect, getting pregnant women to take a puff or a gulp? Here, a little of the Freudan power of billboards and magazine layouts:
You betcha Bernays and Les are cut from the same cloth. And servicing those mean, violent, Indian hating pioneers? You betcha there were legions of hucksters and thieves working their black arts.
They call this piece of human stain, the Original Influencer: Bernays the Barbarian!
Ahh, the Harvard historian and those Pilgrims Progress, in Smithsonian Magazine, written by a Rosenbaum, who I am sure would never ever see the savagery of Isra-Hell akin to the original people’s in Turtle Island being splayed:
“In truth, I didn’t think anyone sat around erasing it,” Bernard Bailyn tells me when I visit him in his spacious, document-stuffed study in Harvard’s Widener Library. He’s a wiry, remarkably fit-looking fellow, energetically jumping out of his chair to open up a file drawer and show me copies of one of his most-prized documentary finds: the handwritten British government survey records of America-bound colonists made in the 1770s, which lists the name, origin, occupation and age of the departing, one of the few islands of hard data about who the early Americans were.
“Nobody sat around erasing this history,” he says in an even tone, “but it’s forgotten.”
“Conveniently?” I ask.
“Yes,” he agrees. “Look at the ‘peaceful’ Pilgrims. Our William Bradford. He goes to see the Pequot War battlefield and he is appalled. He said, ‘The stink’ [of heaps of dead bodies] was too much.”
Bailyn is speaking of one of the early and bloodiest encounters, between our peaceful pumpkin pie-eating Pilgrims and the original inhabitants of the land they wanted to seize, the Pequots. But for Bailyn, the mercenary motive is less salient than the theological.
“The ferocity of that little war is just unbelievable,” Bailyn says. “The butchering that went on cannot be explained by trying to get hold of a piece of land. They were really struggling with this central issue for them, of the advent of the Antichrist.”
Suddenly, I felt a chill from the wintry New England air outside enter into the warmth of his study.
The Antichrist. The haunting figure presaging the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation plays an important part in Bailyn’s explanation of the European settlers’ descent into unrestrained savagery. The key passage on this question comes late in his new book when Bailyn makes explicit a connection I had not seen before: between the physical savagery the radical dissenting Protestant settlers of America wreaked on the original inhabitants, and the intellectual savagery of their polemical attacks on the church and state authorities they fled from in Europe—and the savagery of vicious insult and vile denunciation they wreaked upon each other as well.
“The savagery of the [theological] struggle, the bitterness of the main contenders and the deep stain it left on the region’s collective memory” were driven by “elemental fears peculiar to what was experienced as a barbarous environment—fears of what could happen to civilized people in an unimaginable wilderness…in which God’s children [as they thought of themselves] were fated to struggle with pitiless agents of Satan, pagan Antichrists swarming in the world around them. The two [kinds of struggle, physical and metaphysical] were one: threats from within [to the soul] merged with threats from without to form a heated atmosphere of apocalyptic danger.”
Ahh, Bailyn, a Jewish fellow, died in 2020 at 98. Rosenbaum, also Jewish, writes some pretty disgusting things about those of us who see the Zionist and Jewish Aparthied state as wrong wrong wrong:
But it’s not an impossibility. Try to imagine a world in which Israel no longer exists. After a heart-stopping moment you move on, thinking: If it hasn’t happened by now … And sure, the entire world has essentially turned on the Jewish state, driven by the false narratives of the hate-Israel types, and it’s clear there will be relatively few mourners internationally if it should happen. Things have become so turned around that hating the Jewish state has been a way for the world to absolve its guilt at allowing the slaughter of the Jews a few decades ago. Just like Hitler did, they will find a way to blame it on the Jews for bringing it on themselves. I guarantee it; the apologists for genocide have prepared the way by slandering the Jewish state for #GenocideinGaza while ignoring the explicit call for genocide in the Hamas charter. (source)
Ahh, so, thus far, I have been wading my toes into Jewish waters, for sure, with Les, Ron and Bernard being proud successful Jews witht he gift of gab and the platforms from which to articulate. The discussion (hateful) that Ron makes in that piece quoted form above is again retrograde and revisionist. Have at it. All song and dance and again, more elite and filtered fodder from a specific group of people in America who have found the golden calf.
But is it the social media that the surgeon general really knows about? Is it the movies, the history, the KKK side and the Elite side of this society where so many in the middle have been enslaved and abused and held hostage to the grand experimentation of Chlamydia Capitalists?
Remember, dear Surgeon General, “sleep and boredom and focus and reality are our enemies,” according to the monsters of social media, FU Book, Google, TikTok, YouTube, the lot of them, including the CBS ads and constant billion dollar giveaway to Trumps or Bidens or any of them.
Former Facebook president Sean Parker admitted thatsocial media apps are about “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology” and that they “understood this consciously and did it anyway”.
All of them, the lot of them, they never ASK why? Why go ahead with this shit, but WHY do we need this crap, WHY would you want to add to the already distracted society? WHY WHY WHY? Apes with nukes, man.
We are their experiments, in every sense of the word, and they never ask why — more satellites in space, more chemicals on the wall, more free beer on Memorial Day weekend, more more more, and geez, those new-fangled plastics and nanoparticles. All those CRISPR fun things. Oh, why oh why?
Only one other organization, the company Acceligen, has received FDA approval for a gene-edited animal. In 2020, FDA made a low-risk determination for products made from “Slick-Haired Cattle” that are gene-edited to have coats that increase the animals’ resilience to higher temperatures. Other companies have received FDA approval for genetically-modified animals, but for transgenic approaches, which involves a different technology that inserts DNA from outside species into the genome of an organism.
Gene-editing is an emerging technology that works only within a species’ DNA and can make changes that could come about naturally or through traditional breeding practices. Dr. Oatley hopes his work will improve public perception of gene-edited foods.
Google that: “WSU and gene edited pig meat” or any combination thereof, and you will find all positive, PR spinning, WSU-originated shining stories why the process is great for human kind.
Ahh, Surgeon General, anything about those influencers in the human tragedy of knowing too much and not enought questioning WHY?
Then, the crux of it all, really: dancing and sipping and eating and partying while tens of thousands get ground up in the meatgrinder of Ukraine, and then, shit dog, how many are dying from starvation, hunger, disease, structural violence, economic sanctions, a thousand cuts of weathering, the planned pandemic, all of that, fun stuff?
Facebook?
Facebook has a new hardware product called Portal, a video sharing device which has Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa built-in, and it is the first physical product released from Building 8.
“Whether you’re moving around the kitchen or chasing the kids through the living room, Portal’s Smart Camera adjusts to follow the action,” the website reads.
According to Facebook’s job listings, “Building 8’s goal at Facebook is to create and ship new, category-defining consumer hardware products that are social first. To do so at scale. And to power this with a breakthrough innovation engine modeled after DARPA. As a team of world-class experts, we drive innovation in the areas of augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence, connectivity, and more – and operate on aggressive, fixed timelines with extensive use of partnerships in universities, and small-large businesses.”
DARPA stands for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, whose mission is “to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security.” (source)
Sure, I voted for these Eichmann’s, NAZI-bred folk, doing what? You know about it, right, reader?
In mid-2003, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched an ambitious program aimed at recording essentially all of a person’s movements and conversations and everything they listened to, watched, read and bought.
The idea behind the LifeLog initiative was to create a permanent, searchable, electronic diary of entire lives. Not only would a lifelog immortalize users, in a sense, it would also contribute to a growing body of data that military researchers hoped would contribute to the development of artificial intelligence capable of thinking like a human being does. (source)
All of this precipitated by Judge Judy. I was listening to a friend who was sipping tea and listening to Judge Judy out-takes, and man oh man, we are in Judge Judy Land, are we not, with the Tribe of People from Zionism and Judaism giving us the stiff upper cut.
Any news fromthe Surgeon General about this form of sadism on TV, and I have been around a hundred plus Judge Judy types in education, journalism, literary arts, higher ed, union organizing, social work, even in the environmental field, and in urban and planning circles, as well as journalism.
Judith Sheindlin occupies a nearly divine perch in television. The 5-foot-2 family-court judge — known for her black robe, lace collar, and acid tongue — has been doling out tough-love legal verdicts since the Clinton administration, and the approach has paid off. She brought in a whopping $47 million a year for just 52 days a year of filming at CBS, and she has held onto the sort of cultural cachet that has eluded many of her contemporaries.
Following a public dispute with CBS — said to be over money and, improbably, Drew Barrymore’s talk show — “Judge Judy” wrapped in spring of this year. Amazon quickly stepped in, paying Sheindlin an estimated $25 million for 120 new episodes of “Judy Justice,” which the company hopes will serve as a cornerstone of its IMDb TV free streaming service. The deal was reportedly the largest-ever first-season order of a single show by a streamer. “Judy Justice” launched on Monday.
In a recent New York Times interview, Sheindlin said that while her robe would change color for the new show — from black to a deep maroon — she intended to keep the legacy of the original production going, including her hard-nosed, moralizing style. “I bring eyeballs because, at least for one hour a day, people see that someone is holding the line,” she said. “I’m unafraid to call out irresponsible, un-American behavior. If we settle for mediocrity, we get what we deserve.”
But some of Sheindlin’s former colleagues, dating back to the mid-aughts until the show wrapped, say she failed to hold the line against racism, sexual harassment, and abuse at her own show. An Insider investigation involving interviews with 16 former “Judge Judy” employees, as well as a review of thousands of pages of court records, has found that Sheindlin’s long-standing executive producer and director Randy Douthit has repeatedly been accused of sexually harassing employees, making inappropriate sexual comments to female staffers, offering preferential treatment to staffers he found attractive, and ordering junior producers to bring fewer Black litigants on the show.
The former employees who spoke to Insider described an unrelenting high-pressure environment behind the scenes at the show. They accused Douthit and his deputies — the supervising producer Victoria Jenest and the co-executive producer Amy Freisleben — of fostering a workplace culture in which staffers were pitted against one another, threats of termination were frequent, drinking during work hours was not unusual, cases were manipulated to artificially increase the drama, and a vicious contempt for litigants who appeared before Sheindlin was common.
Nah, WHY Judge Judy, WHY TV kills brain cells, and, nah, WHY elites with gigs at MSM rags, legacy media, even those in the Halls of Poison Ivy League schools like Harvard are being steered by some interestingly tribal know it alls?
Then, this stuff, a piece from a Russian, seeing all the fun and games in St. Petersburg, while men die on the battlefield and families are murdered in Donbass.
I sent this to a friend, Toothless in Wisconsin (read the Substack series) !
His comments?
Had a 40 minute discussion with a die hard 88 year old River Falls republican, about…. a lot. Nine- eleven to Hoover. Capitalism. Covid, and who really got the “stimulus”.
Unbowable, and unyielding. Won’t answer a difficult question. Been waiting for a late cab, for an hour. Gonna piss in the gutter, soon.
How appropriate in the days leading up to “memorial day”. When I spoke with the eighty-something USA republican, yesterday, and brought up Russian casualties in World War Two, and juxtaposed those numbers with American losses, the old fool had no answer, but to challenge my numbers. When I bring up invasions of Russian soil, he countered with 9-11. Then we went to false flags, and physics, and he was on his way directly. There are none so blind.
One with a mouth full of pearly whites can still be toothless. Takes guts to be an honorable defender of others.
Everything on MSM and everywhere, really, just broken, and I wonder how the surgeon general deals with his own dead-brain? Social media? Nah, elitism and tribal control of media, marketing, finance, AI, and social media, publishing, TV, and history books? Any do no harm there?
Later, Haeder . . . . Quoting:
Vladlen Chertinov, writer and journalist, former military commissar:
“On May 10, the Ukrainian side distributed two videos made from a drone. They depict the suicides of two Russian soldiers. On one, a fighter, who finds himself in a hopeless situation, blows himself up with a grenade, on the other, he shoots himself from a machine gun. What and who were these people thinking about before deciding to do something that strengthened their spirit? After all, they probably could have surrendered, but they chose death.
These shots now do not go out of my head when I see a peaceful life: cafes and restaurants crammed with visitors, crowds of fans going to Zenit, the smelt festival, posters inviting to concerts, and soon also Scarlet Sails. It feels like there are two Russias: one is dying at the front, and the other, as if nothing had happened, is enjoying life. The first dies for the second.
On May 13, I looked at the Internet poster and found out that in the remaining days of the month 62 musicals, 163 shows and 103 stand-ups will be held in St. Petersburg. It just doesn’t fit in my brain.
Most of all, stand-ups achieve – performances in the style of the Comedy Club, when several bullies, as a rule, of mobilization age, laugh on stage, and their humor, as a rule, is below the belt, and even with drug addict overtones. “Black stand-up”, “Stand-up top comedians”, “Petersburg stand-up”, “Adult stand-up”, “Premium stand-up”, “Fresh stand-up”, when there is not enough imagination, just “Another stand-up” will do – their name is legion. And the audience during these stand-ups, sitting at the tables, eats and drinks something. In general, some joke with a blunt end, others neigh and guzzle. And others die. There is tragedy, and here is comedy.
From the above, I personally have associations with the fall of the Roman Empire.
Approximately on the same days when both of our nameless soldiers committed suicide in battle, the fashion designer Valentin Yudashkin was buried. All the media have been talking about it. The singer Pugacheva came to Russia, who, together with her husband Galkin (recognized as a foreign agent in Russia), condemned the special operation, and in front of her at the funeral, the press secretary of the supreme commander in chief, leading this very special operation, bowed and kissed her hands. How can you put it all in your head? And … combine in one country.
Then it turns out that our soldiers fight and die for this too. So that Pugacheva and Sobchak, spitting on Russia during the war, could return to it with impunity whenever they want. They are fighting for the same Yudashkin, holder of the Order of Honor and Order of Merit for the Fatherland, who, according to some reports, has not filed tax returns since 2015 and owes the state millions of rubles. But the state did not delicately disturb Yudashkin, and the press secretary of the president, Dmitry Peskov, personally came to his funeral.
They are fighting for the head of the Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, who with impunity allowed the West to rob Russia of 300 billion dollars, and quietly withdraw the money of Western companies arrested in response from the country.
They are fighting for Sberbank, which after 2014 invested billions of dollars in Ukraine and indirectly financed the Armed Forces of Ukraine, while refusing to work in the Russian Crimea, and opened the first regional branch there only 14 months after the start of the SVO.
They are fighting for businessmen who drive up the price of bulletproof vests. For corruption in the defense industry, which continues even during the SVO, as recently announced by the head of the investigative committee, Bastrykin.
And this anti-list of those with whom our “Motherland begins” can be continued endlessly.
In my opinion, it is much more difficult for our soldiers today than for their grandfathers and great-grandfathers during the Great Patriotic War. Because they knew: behind them – the whole people, the whole huge country, “stand up for a mortal battle”, turned into a single military camp. On the world and death is red. And today they die in loneliness and obscurity.
It is already clear that in recent years our government has made many serious mistakes that cost the country and people dearly. And the fact that today the government is deliberately lulling the people into a peaceful life, in my opinion, is another big mistake. Another loss of precious time, comparable to the Minsk agreements and the freezing of the Russian Spring in 2014.”
+++——+++
Ahh, those Krauts and those Chosen People:
According to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Minsk agreement served to buy time to rearm Ukraine. “The 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give Ukraine time,” Merkel told the weekly Die Zeit. “It also used this time to become stronger, as you can see today.” (source)
WWJJD?
Bring it on, What Would Judge Judy Do? Runs shivers down my spine, and I have extra air sickness bags from Southwest Airlines, so all is well here tapping on my laptop.
Terminal Velocity: Man Lost of Tribe is a reader-su
Paul Haeder, Author 
