Golden Oxen's First Amendment Forum
General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: Golden Oxen on April 21, 2014, 08:46:09 am
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Credit goes to Surly for posting a link to this marvelous article on his Doomstead Diner Daily column this morning.
After reading it twice and being enamored by it's scope decided to post it in it's entirety on our History thread. An absolute must read!
Great find Surly.
The Dark Places of the Future - Ecosophia
Over most of the last decade now, I’ve watched celebrations of the New Year become more and more muted, and I think it’s far more likely than not that this trend will continue when 2018 gets hauled off to the glue factory a little less than a week from now. No doubt plenty of people will be glad to see it go, but any enthusiasm engendered by that departure will be mixed with, if not swamped by, uncomfortable thoughts about what 2019 will bring in its place.
Those worries are by no means pointless. Despite the claims still retailed by the increasingly ragged chorus of believers in perpetual progress, industrial civilization is no longer progressing. Rather, it’s slipping bit by bit down the trajectory I’ve titled the Long Descent—the process, averaging one to three centuries in length, by which every previous human civilization has ended in a dark age. That’s not something that can be stopped or reversed; it unfolds from conflicts hardwired into the basic ecological and economic structures of civilization; several familiar milestones are already past, others are coming into sight on the road ahead, and one implication of that reality is that the rest of your life, dear reader, will be spent in a civilization in decline.
That doesn’t mean we face a future of unrelieved gloom. Decline is a chaotic process; losses in one place or decade are routinely balanced by partial recoveries in a different place or a different decade, and it’s also quite common for conditions to improve significantly for the poor and the working classes while they decline drastically for those who are used to living higher on the hog—the rich, yes, but also the middle and upper middle classes, which flourish mightily on the extreme complexity of a civilization at zenith and then end up twisting in the wind as economic and social simplification render their skills unnecessary.
Social historians have been pointing out for years that as Rome fell, those of the working poor who were able to stay out of the way when barbarian armies came through saw significant improvement in their standards of living, while the senatorial and equestrian classes found themselves plunged into poverty. The same process is arguably under way now, as real estate prices and other vehicles for the wealth of the well-to-do plunge in value while employment booms at the bottom of the job pyramid. There are plenty of factors feeding into that dramatic shift; the Trump administration’s tariff and immigration policies have given a hefty push to changes already being driven by the twilight of US global hegemony and the insidious decline in net energy from fossil fuels.
Will it continue in something like a linear fashion? Almost certainly not—but I suspect that one way or another, things are going to move that way just a little more often than not over the years and decades and centuries to come. In the decades immediately ahead, for example, those young people who let themselves be talked into seeking a university education are far more often than not going to end up much less economically comfortable than those who ignore the conventional wisdom and go for trade schools and apprenticeships instead; those who focus on trying to get rich by speculation are going to do worse than those who focus on trying to make a living by producing goods and services themselves, and so on.
That is to say, many of the comfortable assumptions on which our chattering classes base their notions of the future passed their pull dates quite some time ago, and are beginning to smell decidedly overripe. With that in mind, it’s time to revisit a venerable tradition on my blogs, review my predictions from a year ago, and offer predictions about the year about to begin.
You can find last year’s predictions here. For some reason I didn’t do as I’ve habitually done in past years, and finish up the post with a paragraph summarizing my predictions. Thus I’ll take them one at a time.
“My first prediction for the new year, therefore, is that one of the biggest stories of the year will be an event that nobody has predicted.” That was a direct hit. The black swan in question? North Korea’s dramatic reversal of decades of military confrontation, and the opening up of prospects for an enduring peace in that end of east Asia. Nobody, but nobody, predicted that. It’s a huge shift, not least because Russian railway engineers are now busy making plans to extend the Trans-Siberian Railroad south through the Korean peninsula to South Korea’s booming ports, opening up the Pacific basin to year-round trade with Russia and its central Asian allies.
“The Democratic dream of a sweeping midterm victory that will leave Trump paralyzed in 2019 and 2020 will almost certainly go whistling down the wind.” The Democrats did better than I expected, but not well enough to matter. While they took the House, Trump tightened his control on the Senate, giving him much more leeway in appointing cabinet officials and Federal judges, and impeachment doesn’t mean a thing unless 2/3 of the Senate votes to convict, so he’s safe for the next two years. (Claims by Democrats to the contrary show an astonishing ignorance of the basic principles of US constitutional law.) His dismissal of Attorney General Sessions and his sharp U-turn on the Syrian war aren’t the acts of a president without options—quite the contrary, he’s clearly been emboldened by the change in the Senate.
“The US is trying to carry out that most difficult of military operations, a staged retreat through hostile territory… expect the US to bluster and threaten in an attempt to win breathing room for its retreat from empire.” There’s been plenty of that over the last year, with saber rattling and occasional petulant bursts of missiles aimed at nations too poorly defended to shoot back. The troop withdrawals took longer to start than I expected, but they’re under way, so that one was another hit.
“Expect the rise and fall of speculative bubbles to be a constant feature of the business pages all year.” Check. That one really was shooting fish in a barrel.
“Meanwhile, outside the narrowing circle of the official economy, the United States is rapidly becoming a Third World nation in which off-book employment and subsistence economics are becoming increasingly the norm. I don’t expect any significant change in that picture this year, just a continuation of vapid cheerleading from the media and increasingly grim conditions in the real world.” That one I missed completely. My assumption was that it would take a couple of years of sensible tariffs and enforcement of the immigration laws to cause a significant upturn in the working class end of the job market, and I was quite wrong. The expansion of working class jobs is still geographically patchy and fragile, but it’s significant, and if it continues, a great many imbalances in our economic life may be able to right themselves.
“We’re going to see more big storms, more big floods, more big fires, and the streets of Miami Beach and a hundred other low-lying coastal communities will fill a little deeper with salt water every time they get a high tide and an onshore wind, but nothing’s going to be done about it.” That was another easy call, and of course it was quite correct.
There were a few other stray predictions in there, but those were the important ones. By and large, despite one partial miss and one major miss, I think I did fairly well.
So what can we expect over the twelve months that will begin shortly? One thing, I think, we can be sure of. You know the great changes that so many people are hoping for—political, economic, cultural, ecological, spiritual, and so on? They’re not going to happen in 2019.
A year from now, we’re not going to look back on 2019 as the year when Trump was driven from office and everything became either wonderful or horrible, depending on your political prejudices. It won’t have been the year that the economy rolled over and died, or the year when either the political correctness of the Left or the patriotic correctness of the Right finally swept all before it. It won’t have been the year when we finally started to solve the problem of climate change, nor will it have been the year when Gaia put on her hobnailed boots and gave our species the stomping we arguably deserve. As for the leap to a new level of consciousness that’s been pulling a no-show since long before December 21, 2012 became just another day—well, let’s just say that if you hold your breath waiting for that, you’re going to turn very blue indeed.
As 2019 winds up a year from now, furthermore, the dollar and the Euro will still have value, there will still be products on the shelves of your local grocery, gasoline-powered automobiles will still be lurching wastefully down the streets, airliners will still be rumbling even more wastefully through the skies, and more Americans will be concerned with the outcome of the upcoming Super Bowl game than with the subjects this blog discusses. I can say that with perfect confidence, and not just because I’ve been right every other time I’ve predicted it.
The thing that people most often miss when they climb aboard the bandwagon of pop-culture futurology is the pace of historic change. One of the really serious downsides of the way that history is taught in today’s schools, especially but not only in the United States, is that the bite-sized overviews of entire eras that get passed on to students make history seem a lot faster than it is, and the habit of imposing judgments in hindsight hides the sheer obscurity of historical change. Were I to have the task of designing a history curriculum for schoolchildren, I’d take the number of weeks in a school year, subtract one at the beginning and one at the end, and select one year in history to study in each of the others—and not the big important years, either.
This week, let’s say, the year we’re studying is 1763; since this is an American history class, we’re going to immerse ourselves in what people were talking about, what they were reading, what they thought was important, what daily life was like for them, in the American colonies that year. The students would learn to recite a lesson from a hornbook, lunch on hasty pudding and succotash, take in articles extracted from the newspapers of the day, and in a couple of dozen other ways get a sense of what life was actually like in the colonies just over a decade before the Revolution broke out—and it would waste the entire experience to highlight everything that led to the Revolution, or to whatever other big issue we in 2019 consider important.
In 1763 people weren’t bracing themselves for the Revolution—the thought of rebelling against King George was on no one’s mind yet. Other issues, most of them completely forgotten today, occupied the minds of the colonists just then, and the thought that they were living in the run-up to one of the few really world-shaking eras of social change in modern history would not have occurred to them at all. That’s an awareness worth cultivating. One of the core points of the study of history is to help us realize that the past really is a foreign country, and it exists in its own right, not just as a prelude to here and now.
In exactly the same way, if a school somewhere in North America in the year 2234 happens to use the kind of curriculum I’ve just sketched out, and 2018 is one of the years that’s chosen for a week’s intensive study, the teacher will have to make sure to present 2018 as it was, without slanting the presentation so that it highlights the issues that would shake North America and the world in the great convulsions of the mid-2020s. We don’t know what those issues are yet, and so the hypothetical students in 2234 would listen instead to the political posturings of utterly forgotten figures named Trump and Pelosi, giggle at the quaintness of programs on a simulated television screen, try to figure out why people liked fast-food hamburgers, and try to get as close as they could to our experience of 2018—an experience that includes, as a central feature, the fact that the world doesn’t change as fast as we like to think it does, and we don’t actually know which way it’s going.
So the first thing we know about 2019 is that it’s going to look a lot like 2018. It’s possible to draw some straightforward conclusions from that. The ecological news from 2019, for example, is going to be consistently bad. We can expect more big storms, more big fires, more big floods. The economic burden from weather-related disasters is going to keep ratcheting up, and Federal disaster relief funds and insurance payouts are going to cover less of it. Whatever areas take the brunt of the coming year’s climate disasters can count on the same mix of short-term obsessive attention from the media, followed by long-term neglect and partial abandonment, that’s become standard in the wake of climate disasters in the US for more than a decade.
If the area where you live draws the short straw, and you happen to be among the survivors, you’ll get to see some eye-opening sights. If you don’t, don’t expect the media to cover it at all. Meanwhile the Left will continue to insist in ringing tones that someone else, somewhere else, ought to stop burning carbon so they can keep living their current lifestyles, and the Right will keep on scrunching its eyes shut, plugging its ears with its fingers, and insisting that climate change will go away if they just disbelieve in it hard enough. That is to say, nothing will be done.
In the same way, the great divide between Left and Right will continue to form a chasm across the heart of American society, across which not even the simplest message can be communicated without distortion. The mainstream Left will continue to demand the policies of free trade and open borders that, not coincidentally, provide the privileged among them with ultracheap consumer goods and inexpensive nannies. The insurgent populist Right will continue to demand the policies of trade barriers and strictly enforced immigration laws that, also not coincidentally, are driving the current boom in US manufacturing, with its attendant profits for the rich and jobs for the flyover-state working classes.
In a functioning democracy, the two sides would hammer out some kind of compromise that allows them both to get the things they most want. Unfortunately, we don’t happen to have a functioning democracy right now. Both sides act as though the only acceptable outcome is that they get everything they want and the other side gets nothing, and try to wrap the realities of naked self-interest in the unconvincing garb of moral posturing. Until both sides grow up a little and shed the toddler-habit of throwing tantrums when they don’t get what they want, politics in the US will remain hopelessly dysfunctional.
Another thing that will continue in 2019 is the ongoing decline in US global hegemony. As the US dollar loses its status as the world’s reserve currency, and more and more nations arrange to handle mutual trade in their own currencies, the arrangements that have allowed the US to print money at will to cover its soaring debts will become increasingly problematic. I don’t expect the US to be forced to choose between default and hyperinflation next year, or any time in the next few years; that’s coming, but we have a way to go before it comes knocking on the door. At the same time, I expect issues surrounding the US national debt to heat up in 2019, and the US and global economy will be in for some rough sledding for that reason among others.
Trump’s decision to bring US troops home from Syria and begin a serious drawdown from Afghanistan was as overdue as it was necessary. As US hegemony slips away, one of the essential tasks of American statecraft involves walking back unsustainable commitments around the world, leaving Eurasia and Africa to manage their own affairs, and establishing more sustainable relationships with the nations in the US “near abroad.” An end to US military adventurism in the Middle East and improved relations with Mexico are crucial steps along that path, and it’s to the Trump administration’s credit that several movements toward both these goals have been taken in 2018, but much more needs to be done. Whether that will happen in 2019 is impossible to say at this point. The sooner it happens, the less traumatic the transition to a post-imperial America will be.
The economy? A very mixed bag. As I write this, stock markets worldwide have had a very bad month or so, real estate prices in a great many overpriced markets have hit the skids, and a range of other measures that show how much excess cash has piled up in the speculative end of the economy are looking decidedly thin and weak just now. To borrow a bit of jargon, economic shifts are usually overdetermined—that means they have more causes driving them than are actually necessary to get the effect—but one neglected factor that I think is feeding into the current slumps is a rebalancing of wealth back to the productive sectors of the US economy.
For decades now, soaring stock prices and equally rosy valuations for other speculative assets have happened in tandem with serious economic distress for the majority of Americans. That was anything but accidental: a galaxy of government policies, free-trade agreements and the tacit acceptance of unlimited illegal immigration among them, forced down working-class wages in the US to near-starvation levels while channeling increased profits to the investing classes. Now that a number of those policies have been reversed, wealth is beginning to flow back into the productive economy, and the speculative economy is losing air as a result.
I expect to hear from a great many pundits, and plenty of people with investments as well, that this means a new Great Depression, if not the end of the world. Popular though that claim will no doubt be, my best guess is that it’s quite wrong. Just as the stock market soared to unimaginable levels while millions of working class Americans struggled to get by, stock market prices and other asset values can lurch and stumble back down to something like their historic range, while millions of working class Americans cash their paychecks every Friday afternoon and wonder what all the fuss is about. I’m not certain this is going to happen—the investment classes have a lot of clout, and will doubtless try everything they can think of to shove the pain off onto somebody else—but at this point I think it’s far and away the most likely outcome.
Will unexpected events grab a share of the headlines in 2019? No doubt some will. The future has plenty of dark places where not even the outlines of events to come can be seen. Those of my readers who want to insist that those dark places contain whatever drastic reversal of current trends they most want to hope for, though, are going to face the same disappointment this year that they’ve faced year after weary year in the past.The world doesn’t change as fast as we like to think it does, and we don’t actually know which way it’s going: keep those things in mind, and you’re a good deal less likely to be blindsided by the year ahead.
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-dark-places-of-the-future/
http://www.doomsteaddiner.net/forum/index.php/topic,9960.msg168554/topicseen.html#msg168554
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G.O.!
Thanks for the reply.
I am afraid you are right in your observations about DD, and TAE as well. It is a shame.
You are also right that my psa attachment to my posts was a bit over the top and it acted as a red flag. Got it.
You are also right that Ashvin is the most intelligent participant over there by a wide margin.
So, you seem to be RIGHT about everything. :)
I did not get any of your messages because I cannot access the personal messaging area of DD. My account seems to be fixed that way.
Anyway, we're in contact and I get what you are saying.
Yes, at some point I'm going to do my own (web) thing and I will publicize it so you can stop by if you like. Main probable starting point: men's health, a subject about which I know a fair amount and think I can offer something useful.
You're a good man, G.O.
Cheers!
Alan
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Hi Alan,
I sent you messages to contact me here. Sorry, I thought you could see messages from members but not send them.
It wasn't just you I was defending, but the whole idea of Free Speech. Let me apologize to you for the bigots and buffoons who labeled you a troll and got rid of you, they did the same to me before, so I know how you feel.
There was no excuse for their behavior, and I feel terrible about it. You did make a mistake in my opinion on leaving that banner on your postings, it was like waving a red flag in a bull pen, and it gave them an excuse to ban you. Other than that you conducted yourself properly in my view. You have to understand how they are like horses with blinkers on, they can only see in one direction as they are guided in their harnesses by the teem driver. A pitiful site. Ilargi at TAE is another dogmatic dolt that has been wrong for about ten years now, but it means nothing to him. Same drivel day after day and barks at dissenters. Of course in the class, brains, and sophistication department he is in another league altogether, but the inability to see the other side of the coin is there just the same.
Let me assure you that arguing, talking reason, or joking and building friendships with the hand picked cadre over there is a total waste of time. They were all selected for a reason, as I am sure you are currently aware.
Oh well, what can I say? I am sick of their bullying and threats and have stopped posting in total disgust for the past few days. Their hypocrisy is the most amazing thing I have ever witnessed in my life, Our view or No view allowed, as they lament about the same thing going on in the world that they practice there. Ashvin, the most brilliant and honorable person there by a very wide margin tried to explain it nicely to them as well, but you saw what happened there as well.
No big deal, don't let it upset you, it means nothing to them, they are totally without shame. Thanks for writing, it was a pleasure to hear from you. Keep in touch Alan and send me a link to your new website if you get it off the ground. Regards, GO
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HI, G.O.!
Alan2102 here, from DD.
Hey, I just wanted to say THANK YOU for the support you gave me at DD.
I really do appreciate it.
I would have sent you a message on DD, but they've fixed my account
so I cannot do that. So I looked you up... and here you were!
Thanks again, and God bless you.
Alan
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(http://www.thedailybell.com/images/library/peace2.jpg)
Ron Paul: Champion of God's Peace
Published by The Daily Bell - August 06 2015
Editorial by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. (http://www.thedailybell.com/images/library/LewRockwell2011.jpg)
Ronald Reagan used to be called the Teflon president, on the grounds that no matter what gaffe or scandal engulfed him, it never stuck: he didn’t suffer in the polls. If Reagan was the Teflon president, the military is America’s Teflon institution. Even people who oppose whatever the current war happens to be can be counted on to “support the troops” and to live by the comforting delusion that whatever aberrations may be evident today, the system itself is basically sound.
To add insult to injury, whenever the US government gears up for yet another military intervention, it’s people who pretend to favor “limited government,” and who pride themselves on not falling for government propaganda, who can be counted on to stand up and salute.
I had the rare honor of serving as Ron Paul’s congressional chief of staff, and observed him in many proud moments in those days, and in his presidential campaigns. But Ron’s new book Swords into Plowshares: A Life in Wartime and a Future of Peace and Prosperity, a plainspoken and relentless case against war that ranks alongside Smedley Butler’s classic War Is a Racket, is possibly the proudest Ron Paul moment of all.
It’s been calculated that over the past 5,000 years there have been 14,000 wars fought, resulting in three and a half billion deaths. In the United States, between 1798 and 2015 there have been 369 uses of military force abroad. We have been conditioned to accept this as normal, or at the very least unavoidable. We are told to stifle any moral qualms we may have about mass killing on the question-begging grounds that, after all, “it’s war.”
Ron, on this as on a wide array of other topics, isn’t prepared to accept the conventional platitudes, and a recurring theme in his book involves speculating on whether, in the same way the human race has advanced so extraordinarily from a technological point of view, we might be capable of a comparable moral advance as well.
There is much in this book for libertarians and indeed all opponents of war to enjoy – for starters, a refutation of the claim that war is “good for the economy,” a discussion of the dangers of “blowback” posed by foreign interventionism, and an overview of the War on Terror from a noninterventionist perspective. But there is a profoundly personal dimension to this book as well, as we follow Ron’s life from his childhood to the present and the evolution of his thought on war. I’ll leave readers to discover these gems for themselves.
Likewise, Ron relates some little-known stories of war. In one, it’s two weeks after D-Day, and Captain Jack Tueller decided to play his trumpet that evening. He was instructed not to do so: his commander explained that a German sniper had still not been captured from the day’s battle. Figuring the sniper was a frightened young man not unlike himself, he played the German song “Lili Marleen.” The sniper surrendered to the Americans the next day.
Before being sent off to prison, the sniper asked to meet the trumpet player. He said, through tears, “When I heard that number that you played I thought about my fiancée in Germany. I thought about my mother and dad and about my brothers and sisters, and I could not fire.”
“He stuck out his hand and I shook the hand of the enemy,” Tueller recalls. “He was no enemy. He was scared and lonely like me.”
Another story takes place just before Christmas 1943. Charlie Brown, a 21-year-old farm boy from West Virginia was on his first combat mission as a pilot when his B-17 was seriously damaged over Germany. With half his crew dead or wounded, he was struggling to get his plane back to England when a German fighter came within three feet of his right wingtip. But Franz Stigler, the German pilot, did not fire. Instead, he simply nodded, pointed, and flew off, allowing Brown to make his way back to England.
Some 46 years later, the two men met again. Brown finally got to ask Stigler why he had been pointing. Stigler replied that he was trying to tell Brown to fly to Sweden, which was closer. But since Brown knew only how to get back to England, that’s where he went.
The two men became close friends, even fishing buddies. Stigler said that saving Brown’s life was the only good thing that came out of the whole war for him.
You won’t be surprised to learn that in addition to human-interest anecdotes like these, Ron spends time in Swords into Plowshares linking central banking and war, one of his perennial themes over the years. It isn’t for nothing that again and again, countries abandoned the gold standard when they went to war.
We rarely pause to consider what that tells us. If they needed to abandon the gold standard to go to war, that means the gold standard was a barrier against war. Of course, the ease with which governments could abandon the gold standard serves to remind us of the need to separate money and state altogether, and that the state cannot be trusted to maintain a sound money standard.
As always, Ron is at his fiery best when he unleashes on the neoconservatives, whose every overseas fiasco becomes a justification for still another fiasco six months later. He invites us to consider a typical remark by neoconservative Michael Ledeen: “Paradoxically, peace increases our peril, by making discipline less urgent, encouraging some of our worst instincts, and depriving us of some of our best leaders.”
Note that it is peace, according to Ledeen, and not war, that encourages our worst instincts. This was the view of Theodore Roosevelt, loved and admired by progressives and neoconservatives alike, who considered prolonged peace a deplorable state that made a people flabby and otiose.
Neocons complain when libertarians describe them as “pro-war” – why, they favor war only as a last resort, they assure us, and only because there are bad people in the world – but how else can we describe the views of Ledeen, who to my knowledge has never been publicly taken to task by any other neocon?
(Perhaps my favorite of Ron’s collection of ghoulish neocon quotations, though, if only for its obliviously Orwellian quality, is George W. Bush’s remark from June 2002: “I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace.”)
Meanwhile, the American people have been indoctrinated into a cult of the veteran, whom evangelicals blasphemously compare to Jesus Christ, and whereby everyone is expected to salute, applaud, and offer ostentatious thanks for the veteran’s “service.”
Here, by contrast, is Ron:
“Service” in our military to invade, occupy, and oppress countries in order to extend [the] US Empire must not be glorified as a “heroic” and sacred effort. My five years in the Air Force during the 1960s did not qualify me as any sort of hero. My primary thoughts now about that period of time are: “Why was I so complacent, and why did I so rarely seriously question the wisdom of the Vietnam War?”
Ron calls upon the peoples of the world to resist their governments’ calls to war and to refuse to take part in violent conflict. “If the authoritarians continue to abuse power in spite of constitutional and moral limits,” he writes, “the only recourse left is for the people to go on strike and refuse to sanction the wars and thefts. Deny the dictators your money and your bodies…. The more this is a worldwide movement, the better.”
This is why Ron is such a fan of the song “Universal Soldier,” which he asked singer Aimee Allen to perform at his dramatic Rally for the Republic in 2008. The man who enlists in the military and simply goes along with the prevailing current of opinion is the universal soldier. If he refused to “serve” and to fight, there could be no wars. Even Ron, a flight surgeon who never fired a shot, looks back on his time in the military and asks himself: why did I not resist? Why did I go along?
Needless to say, few among our political class – people who, generally speaking, have rather more to repent of than mild Ron Paul – reflect seriously on their moral choices, or rebuke themselves publicly.
When people read Swords into Plowshares generations from now – and they will – they will marvel that such a man actually served in the US Congress, and defied every campaign of war propaganda right on the House floor. But what’s great about Ron is not just his honesty, but also his constant intellectual growth – with the passage of time he has become an ever-more radical champion of freedom. His evolution is especially plain in this book, as you’ll discover for yourself.
One of the most important things Ron accomplished in public life was to show that it’s possible to oppose war without being a leftist. He likewise explained that a foreign policy of peace and nonintervention was a central, indispensable feature of the message of freedom, and not just an odd personality quirk of Ron Paul – as the many people who said “I like Ron Paul except his foreign policy” seem to have believed.
Bernie Sanders pretends to be antiwar, but as usual with socialists, a closer look shows he doesn’t really mean it. But even if he did, as a socialist he simply wants to point the guns at different targets – the undifferentiated aggregates like “the rich” to whom he urges his followers to direct their uncomprehending hate. Ron, on the other hand, is calling on us to put the guns down, and for peaceful interaction both between nations and among individuals.
It is a position most people had never heard of before 2008, since election campaigns are all about grabbing the machinery of state and pointing its guns at whatever group the eventual victor despises. But Ron captured the imaginations of millions of intelligent young people, whose brains hadn’t yet been deformed by an American political culture designed to deprive them of humane possibilities.
Ron turns 80 this month, and continues his life’s work of truth-telling. Wish Ron a happy birthday by joining us for a celebration in Lake Jackson on August 15, and by reading this extraordinary book.
This article contributed courtesy of LewRockwell.com.
Published by The Daily Bell - www.thedailybell.com - All Rights Reserved.
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Don’t Be Fooled by the Political Game: The Illusion of Freedom in America
Published by The Daily Bell - August 12 2015
Editorial by John Whitehead
Being a citizen in the American corporate state is much like playing against a stacked deck: you’re always going to lose.
The game is rigged, and “we the people” keep getting dealt the same losing hand. Even so, most stay in the game, against all odds, trusting that their luck will change.
The problem, of course, is that luck will not save us. As I make clear in my book, Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the people dealing the cards—the politicians, the corporations, the judges, the prosecutors, the police, the bureaucrats, the military, the media, etc.—have only one prevailing concern, and that is to maintain their power and control over the citizenry, while milking us of our money and possessions.
It really doesn’t matter what you call them—Republicans, Democrats, the 1%, the elite, the controllers, the masterminds, the shadow government, the police state, the surveillance state, the military industrial complex—so long as you understand that while they are dealing the cards, the deck will always be stacked in their favor.
Incredibly, no matter how many times we see this played out, Americans continue to naively buy into the idea that politics matter, as if there really were a difference between the Republicans and Democrats (there’s not).
As if Barack Obama proved to be any different from George W. Bush (he has not). As if Hillary Clinton’s values are any different from Donald Trump’s (with both of them, money talks). As if when we elect a president, we’re getting someone who truly represents “we the people” rather than the corporate state (in fact, in the oligarchy that is the American police state, an elite group of wealthy donors is calling the shots).
Politics is a game, a joke, a hustle, a con, a distraction, a spectacle, a sport, and for many devout Americans, a religion.
In other words, it’s a sophisticated ruse aimed at keeping us divided and fighting over two parties whose priorities are exactly the same. It’s no secret that both parties support endless war, engage in out-of-control spending, ignore the citizenry’s basic rights, have no respect for the rule of law, are bought and paid for by Big Business, care most about their own power, and have a long record of expanding government and shrinking liberty.
Most of all, both parties enjoy an intimate, incestuous history with each other and with the moneyed elite that rule this country. Don’t be fooled by the smear campaigns and name-calling. They’re just useful tactics of the psychology of hate that has been proven to engage voters and increase voter turnout while keeping us at each other’s throats.
Despite the jabs the candidates volley at each other for the benefit of the cameras, they’re a relatively chummy bunch away from the spotlight, presenting each other with awards (remember when Jeb Bush presented Hillary Clinton with a Liberty Medal for her service to the country), attending each other’s weddings (Bill and Hillary had front-row seats for Trump’s 2005 wedding), and embracing with genuine affection.
Trump’s various donations to the Clintons (he donated to Hillary’s Senate campaigns, as well as the Clinton Foundation) are not unusual. Remember, FOX News mogul Rupert Murdoch actually hosted a fundraiser for Hillary’s Senate reelection campaign back in 2006 and contributed to her presidential campaign two years later. In fact, FOX News has reportedly been one of Hillary’s biggest donors for the better part of two decades.
Are you starting to get the picture? It doesn’t matter who wins the White House, because they all work for the same boss: Corporate America. In fact, many corporations actually hedge their bets on who will win the White House by splitting their donations between Democratic and Republican candidates.
We’re in trouble, folks, and picking a new president won’t save us.
Just consider how insidious, incestuous and beholden to the corporate elite the various “parts” of the government mechanism have become.
Congress. Perhaps the most notorious offenders and most obvious culprits in the creation of the corporate-state, Congress has proven itself to be both inept and avaricious, oblivious champions of an authoritarian system that is systematically dismantling their constituents’ fundamental rights. Long before they’re elected, Congressmen are trained to dance to the tune of their wealthy benefactors, so much so that they spend two-thirds of their time in office raising money.
The President. With the 2016 presidential election shaping up to be the most expensive one in our nation’s history, with estimates as high as $10 billion, “the way is open for an **** of spending by well-heeled interest groups and super rich individuals on both political sides.” Yet even after the votes have been counted and favors tallied, the work of buying and selling access to the White House is far from over. Such access comes with a steep price tag.
The Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court—once the last refuge of justice, the one governmental body really capable of rolling back the slowly emerging tyranny enveloping America—has instead become the champion of the American police state, absolving government and corporate officials of their crimes while relentlessly punishing the average American for exercising his or her rights. Indeed, law professor Erwin Chemerinsky makes a compelling case that the Supreme Court, whose “justices have overwhelmingly come from positions of privilege,” almost unerringly throughout its history, sides with the wealthy, the privileged, and the powerful.
The Media. Of course, this triumvirate of total control would be completely ineffective without a propaganda machine provided by the world’s largest corporations. Besides shoving drivel down our throats at every possible moment, the so-called news agencies which are supposed to act as bulwarks against government propaganda have instead become the mouthpieces of the state. The pundits which pollute our airwaves are at best court jesters and at worst propagandists for the false reality created by the American government.
The American People. “We the people” now belong to a permanent underclass in America. It doesn’t matter what you call us—chattel, slaves, worker bees, drones, it’s all the same—what matters is that we are expected to march in lockstep with and submit to the will of the state in all matters, public and private. Through our complicity in matters large and small, we have allowed an out-of-control corporate-state apparatus to take over every element of American society.
Our failure to remain informed about what is taking place in our government, to know and exercise our rights, to vocally protest, to demand accountability on the part of our government representatives, and at a minimum to care about the plight of our fellow Americans has been our downfall.
Now we find ourselves once again caught up in the spectacle of another presidential election, and once again the majority of Americans are acting as if this election will make a difference and bring about change—as if the new boss will be any different from the old boss.
Published by The Daily Bell - www.thedailybell.com - All Rights Reserved.
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Why I'm a Libertarian. :'(
(http://www.thedailybell.com/images/library/domesticwaronUS.jpg)
Jade Helm, Terrorist Attacks, Surveillance and Other Fairy Tales for a Gullible Nation
“Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.” – Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly
Once upon a time, there was a nation of people who believed everything they were told by their government.
When terrorists attacked the country, and government officials claimed to have been caught by surprise, the people believed them. And when the government passed massive laws aimed at locking down the nation and opening the door to total government surveillance, the people believed it was done merely to keep them safe. The few who disagreed were labeled traitors.
When the government waged costly preemptive wars on foreign countries, insisting it was necessary to protect the nation, the citizens believed it. And when the government brought the weapons and tactics of war home to use against the populace, claiming it was just a way to recycle old equipment, the people believed that too. The few who disagreed were labeled unpatriotic.
When the government spied on its own citizens, claiming they were looking for terrorists hiding among them, the people believed it. And when the government began tracking the citizenry’s movements, monitoring their spending, snooping on their social media, and surveying their habits – supposedly in an effort to make their lives more efficient – the people believed that, too. The few who disagreed were labeled paranoid.
When the government let private companies take over the prison industry and agreed to keep the jails full, justifying it as a cost-saving measure, the people believed them. And when the government started arresting and jailing people for minor infractions, claiming the only way to keep communities safe was to be tough on crime, the people believed that, too. The few who disagreed were labeled soft on crime.
When the government hired crisis actors to take part in disaster drills, never alerting the public to which “disasters” were staged, the people genuinely believed they were under attack. And when the government insisted it needed greater powers to prevent such attacks from happening again, the people believed that, too. The few who disagreed were told to shut up or leave the country.
Finally, the government started carrying out covert military drills around the country, insisting they were necessary to train the troops for foreign combat, and most of the people believed them. The few who disagreed, warning that perhaps all was not what it seemed, were dismissed as conspiracy theorists and quacks.
By the time the government locked down the nation, using local police and the military to impose martial law, there was no one left in doubt of the government’s true motives – total control and domination – but there was also no one left to fight back.
Now, every fable has a moral, and the moral of this story is to beware of anyone who urges you to ignore your better instincts and trust the government.
In other words, if it looks like trouble and it smells like trouble, you can bet there’s trouble afoot.
For instance, while there is certainly no shortage of foul-smelling government activities taking place right now, the one giving off the greatest stench is Jade Helm 15. This covert, multi-agency, multi-state, eight-week military training exercise is set to take place from July 15 through Sept. 15 in states across the American Southwest.
According to official government sources, “Jade Helm: Mastering the Human Domain” is a planned military exercise that will test and practice unconventional warfare including, but not limited to, guerrilla warfare, subversion, sabotage, intelligence activities and unconventional assisted recovery. The training exercise will take place in seven different southwestern states: California, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Texas, Utah and Nevada.
U.S. Army Special Operations Command will primarily lead this interagency training program but the Navy Seals, Air Force Special Operations, Marine Special Operations Command, Marine Expeditionary Units, 82nd Airborne Division and other interagency partners will also be involved. Approximately 1,200 troops are expected to participate in these exercises.
The training is known as Realistic Military Training because it will be conducted outside of federal property. The exercises are going to be carried out on both public and private land, with the military reportedly asking permission of local authorities and landowners prior to land usage. The military map listing the locations that will host the exercise shows Texas, Utah and the southern part of California as “hostile territory.” According to U.S. officials, these three areas are marked as hostile to simulate environments where American troops are viewed as the enemy. The other areas on the map are marked as permissive, uncertain (leaning friendly), or uncertain (leaning hostile).
Military officials claim that the southwestern states were chosen because this exercise requires large areas of undeveloped land as well as access to towns and population hubs. These states purportedly also provide a climate and terrain that is similar to that of potential areas of combat for the United States, particularly Iraq, Iran and Syria.
Now, the mainstream media has happily regurgitated the government’s official explanation about Jade Helm. However, there is a growing concern among those who are not overly worried about being labeled conspiratorialists or paranoid that the government is using Jade Helm as a cover to institute martial law, bring about total population control, or carry out greater surveillance on the citizenry.
In the first camp are those who fear that Jade Helm will usher in martial law. These individuals believe that by designating the two traditionally conservative and Republican-dominated states, Utah and Texas, as hostile territory, while more Democratic states like Colorado and California are marked as friendly, the military plans to infiltrate the states with large numbers of gun owners and attempt to disarm them.
Adding fuel to the fire is the mysterious and sudden temporary closures of five Walmart stores in Texas, California, Oklahoma and Florida, two of which are located near Jade Helm training sites. Those in this camp contend that the military is planning to use the Walmart stores as processing facilities for Americans once martial law is enacted.
Pointing to the mission’s official title, “Jade Helm: Mastering the Human Domain,” there is a second camp that fears that the military exercises are merely a means to an end – namely total population control – by allowing the military to discern between friendly civilians and hostiles. This concern is reinforced by military documents stating that a major portion of Jade Helm training will be about blending in with civilians, understanding how to work with civilians, using these civilians to find enemy combatants and then neutralizing the target.
In this way, the United States military is effectively using psychological warfare to learn how people function and how to control them.
As a study written by military personnel states, mastering the human domain, also known as identity processes, means “use of enhanced capabilities to identify and classify the human domain; to determine whether they are adversarial, friendly, neutral, or unknown.” The study later states that identity processes can be used to “manage local populations during major combat, stability, and humanitarian assistance and/or disaster relief operations.”
While the military has promised that the work they are doing is aimed for use overseas, we have seen first-hand how quickly the military’s weapons and tactics used overseas are brought home to be used against the populace. In fact, some of the nation’s evolutionary psychologists, demographers, sociologists, historians and anthropologists have been working with the Department of Defense’s Minerva Initiative to master the human domain. This security research includes “Understanding the Origin, Characteristics, and Implications of Mass Political Movements” at the University of Washington and “Who Does Not Become a Terrorist and Why?” at the Naval Academy Post Graduate School. Both studies focus on Americans and the different movements and patterns that the government can track to ensure “safety and security.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is also working to infiltrate churches across the country to establish a Christian Emergency Network, carry out emergency training exercises to prevent and prepare for disasters (active shooter drills and natural disaster preparedness), and foster two-way information sharing, while at the same time instituting a media blackout of their activities. As the DHS continues to establish itself within churches, a growing number of churches are adopting facial recognition systems to survey their congregations, identify and track who attends their events, and target individuals for financial contributions or further monitoring. As the partnership between churches and the DHS grows, their facial recognition databases may be shared with the federal government, if that is not already happening.
Finally, there is the third camp, which fears that Jade Helm is merely the first of many exercises to be incorporated into regular American life so that the government can watch, study and better understand how to control the masses. Certainly, psychological control techniques could be used in the future to halt protests and ensure that the nation runs “smoothly.”
It remains to be seen whether Jade Helm 15 proves to be a thinly veiled military plot to take over the country (one lifted straight out of director John Frankenheimer’s 1964 political thriller "Seven Days in May"), turn the population into automatons and psychological experiments, or is merely a “routine” exercise for troops, albeit a blatantly intimidating flexing of the military’s muscles.
However, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the problem arises when you add Jade Helm to the list of other troubling developments that have taken place over the past 30 years or more: the expansion of the military-industrial complex and its influence in Washington DC, the rampant surveillance, the corporate-funded elections and revolving door between lobbyists and elected officials, the militarized police, the loss of our freedoms, the injustice of the courts, the privatized prisons, the school lockdowns, the roadside strip searches, the military drills on domestic soil, the fusion centers and the simultaneous fusing of every branch of law enforcement (federal, state and local), the stockpiling of ammunition by various government agencies, the active shooter drills that are indistinguishable from actual crises, the economy flirting with near collapse, the growing social unrest, the socio-psychological experiments being carried out by government agencies, etc.
Suddenly, the overall picture seems that much more sinister. Clearly, there’s a larger agenda at work here, and it’s one the American people had better clue into before it’s too late to do anything about it.
Call me paranoid, but I think we’d better take James Madison’s advice and “take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.”
This article contributed courtesy of John Whitehead and The Rutherford Institute.
http://www.thedailybell.com/editorials/36399/John-Whitehead-Jade-Helm-Terrorist-Attacks-Surveillance-and-Other-Fairy-Tales-for-a-Gullible-Nation/ (http://www.thedailybell.com/editorials/36399/John-Whitehead-Jade-Helm-Terrorist-Attacks-Surveillance-and-Other-Fairy-Tales-for-a-Gullible-Nation/)
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Utterly amazing synopsis of our situation. :-\
Chris Hedges (2014) "A Society of Captives"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O7IbmbPYy0
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(http://www.the-athenaeum.org/art/display_image.php?id=93535)
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There Is No Longer A Rule Of Law
This clown needs impeachment -- now.
This is not an option for the House. Any President who willfully and wantonly refuses to faithfully execute the laws of this nation must be impeached and removed from office. It is a duty of the Congress, not an option that Congress has.
Tonight you heard Obama appeal over a young girl who "came here" and is a great student. He quoted scripture (not that I believe he has ever actually read it.) We all know Presidents don't write their own speeches in the modern day, at least we do if we have a brain in our heads.
To declare that the law will not be enforced on a blanket basis for huge groups of people because the President disagrees with the Congress -- which has the absolute right to set immigration policy -- is a complete stick in the eye to any premise of The Rule of Law that you might believe remains.
I note that to refuse to decide is still a decision, and Congress is within its rights to do exactly that. Congress has no imperative to pass anything; it acts through absence of legislation more often than it legislates, in point of fact, and this is exactly what the founders intended -- and how all Constitutional Republics that are functional operate.
I find it particularly galling that Obama cited the "innocent" child who was "caught up" in the illegal acts of his or her parents. Not only does he propose to shield the "innocent child" he also proposes to shield the actual lawbreakers, the parents, themselves as well!
This is tantamount to endorsing the taking of hostages in the form of children to force the government to grant both of you amnesty. What you should get as an adult for doing this is prison time -- first for your lawless act, and then again for taking you child hostage and using him or her in this fashion. That latter act ought to be a felony, standing alone.
But tonight Obama instead celebrates it.
Well, tell that to the actual innocent people who have had their property stolen under "civil forfeiture" yet they're never charged. Double standard? It's worse than that -- it's just a complete absence of anything that could be called The Rule of Law at all -- it's not even vestigal in the United States any more.
So here you go folks -- if the Congress will not immediately impeach, and you know they won't, then they're going along with it. And that means that there is not just a lawless President in Washington DC there are 536 lawless individuals and their minions comprising the entirety of the executive and legislative branches that have decided that THERE IS NO MORE RULE OF LAW IN AMERICA.
We've seen literal hundreds of examples over the last few years and I've written about many.
My only remaining point of amazement is that this nation's citizens are willing to put up with it. :'( :'( :'(
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=229609
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(http://media.cagle.com/4/2014/10/30/155600_600.jpg) :D
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www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG5fDegi2ac#t=11
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>:( :'(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufn8cKUjxbk#t=91
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Nice to have you aboard. Thanks for your interest. Golden Oxen
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Thought I would drop this here, Celente all class.
Cannot get enough of Gerald Walter. Been listening to him for years on King World. A Class Act and original thinker.
Straight honest talk, no bull ****.
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Thought I would drop this here, Celente all class.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF2SGlkYyYY
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Americans For a Free Republic
Published on Jul 18, 2014
Democrats and Republicans are now a tyrannical monopoly with no differences between them. We are a one-party state. Our video explains how to correct this in 2016. The salvation of our country lies in the National Independent Party and its Four Pillars of Reform led by a nationally known free-market conservative.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv6JXE-vz4o
http://www.afr.org/
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Just going through a little reading, I mreally liked John Stossels Popular Nonsense. Thats CFS, with the figures to prove it too. Stopping working for free for experiece is madness IMO. Its one way anyone can get something on their resume to get a foot in the door in a business they want to get a break in. I dont have many really old fotos from my early single life, but one i have is taken with my grandfather the first time i went to work wearing a tie, and it was a volunteer placement but at really high level of specialization that even today looks good on resume and I can draw on the knowledge. I also then years later had final year students on placement to supervise myself, and they were every bit as enthusiastic and thankful as I was when I was their age. This will just make all those students struggling already with a load of debt and poor prospects even worse outlook. But then I hear about many stupid policies coming from the current american administration.
Yes Walter, am familiar with Popular Nonsense.
The best and most impressive things I learned in my youth were from people who worked for free or volunteers. That magical kind of person that wants to pass on to the young what they have learned in life and relish the that feeling of accomplishment and love and charity, of contribution.
Then of course there were the Nuns and Jesuits who gave up a life of material goods to teach and try and make a better world.
The current administration that wants to control everything and take away even our cherished freedom to work for free, to learn something and run around with lawyers and file law suits against folks who take people under their wing is most distressing. Their lust for control and interference and laws, laws, laws, endless loss of control and loss of freedom is unbearable.
It's everywhere and permeating everything, how much we should weigh, what we should eat, what we can read, what we can say, what kind of car we should drive, the list of the control freaks is endless. There was one on a forum yesterday advocating laws even for love and charity. They won't wise up until they or their children are slaves working in a rice paddy for a dictator some day. :-\
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Just going through a little reading, I mreally liked John Stossels Popular Nonsense. Thats CFS, with the figures to prove it too. Stopping working for free for experiece is madness IMO. Its one way anyone can get something on their resume to get a foot in the door in a business they want to get a break in. I dont have many really old fotos from my early single life, but one i have is taken with my grandfather the first time i went to work wearing a tie, and it was a volunteer placement but at really high level of specialization that even today looks good on resume and I can draw on the knowledge. I also then years later had final year students on placement to supervise myself, and they were every bit as enthusiastic and thankful as I was when I was their age. This will just make all those students struggling already with a load of debt and poor prospects even worse outlook. But then I hear about many stupid policies coming from the current american administration.
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Published on Jun 26, 2012
In 1969 undercover FBI agent Larry Grathwohl infiltrated the Weather Underground. Watch Hilder's films go to http://www.freeworldfilmworks.com/fwa... to learn more about the machinations of the NWO Gangsters. Bill Ayers said when he took over America he would send Patriots to re-education camps and murder those who would not accept the New World Order. He estimated he would have to murder 25 million American Patriots.
[/b
Really, folks.....
Did you know this?
Probably not.
Let me guess your response: "What difference does it make?" Karl Denninger
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=229151
www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBtANp4IKVk
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My three grandchildren from the next town, all boys age 4 through 11 brought me this present for Father's Day. Was I ever a proud grandfather when I received this gift. :D :D :D
(http://www.listingfactoryhost.com/users/elyphot/eBayAuctions/gold/images/ab94035be55e4e2ba9a367ba8_large.jpg)
A Gold Bar Piggy Bank. What I always wanted. ;D
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So glad you were able to continue with the very true opinions of an honest activist, GO. This is indeed an informative and worthwhile read and very educational for the novice which most of us on these blogs are. Do you happen to have an idea of what Robert's ideas might be for the turning around of this deplorable and desperate situation in regard to the steady collapsing of this sinking state? Anything beyond just departing from it for example? How about Chris Hedges rules for making a revolution?
Just my personal take from reading Robert's for years is the idea that he thinks we need to elect competent leaders. Due to the dumbing down of the populace and the welfare and food stamp state we have become, I consider that a very slim hope, but it is my view as well.
Wiith the military, the militarization of the police, NSA, MSM, chemical weapons etc., the idea of a revolution is a joke in my opinion.
Chris Hedge's knows what has happened to us for sure, but offers nothing viable for solutions in my view.
It was my pleasure to meet two people on DD, Peter and EL 'G who preached that physical resistance was now impossible, that they had all bases covered. Sadly I have come to accept their view.
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So glad you were able to continue with the very true opinions of an honest activist, GO. This is indeed an informative and worthwhile read and very educational for the novice which most of us on these blogs are. Do you happen to have an idea of what Robert's ideas might be for the turning around of this deplorable and desperate situation in regard to the steady collapsing of this sinking state? Anything beyond just departing from it for example? How about Chris Hedges rules for making a revolution?
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World War II: The Unknown War — Paul Craig Roberts
Posted By pcr3 On June 9, 2014 @ 8:54 pm In Articles & Columns
World War II: The Unknown War
Paul Craig Roberts
In my June 6 column, “The Lies Grow More Audacious,” I mentioned that Obama and the British prime minister, who Obama has as a lap dog, just as George Bush had Tony Blair as lap dog, had managed to celebrate the defeat of Nazi Germany at the 70th anniversary of the Normandy invasion without mentioning the Russians.
I pointed out the fact, well known to historians and educated people, that the Red Army
defeated Nazi Germany long before the US was able to get geared up to participate in the war. The Normandy invasion most certainly did not defeat Nazi Germany. What the Normandy invasion did was to prevent the Red Army from overrunning all of Europe.
As I have reported in a number of columns, many, if not most, Americans have beliefs that are not fact-based, but instead are emotion-based. So I knew that at least one person would go berserk, and he did. JD from Texas wrote to set me straight. No one but “our American boys” won that war. JD didn’t know that the Russians were even in the war.
JD had the option of consulting an encyclopedia or a history book or going online and consulting Wikipedia prior to making a fool of himself. But he chose instead to unload on me. JD epitomizes US foreign policy: rush into every fight that you know nothing about and start new ones hand over fist that someone else will win.
It occurred to me that World War II was so long ago that few are alive who remember it, and by now even these few probably remember the propaganda version that they have heard at every Memorial Day and July 4th occasion since 1945. Little wonder that neither Obama nor Cameron or their pitiful speech writers knew nothing about the war that they were commemorating.
Propaganda has always been with us. The difference is that in the 21st century Americans have nothing but propaganda. Nothing else at all. Just lies. Lies are the American experience. The actual world as it exists is foreign to most Americans.
In 1973 a British television documentary series was released that chronicled WW II. Of the 28 episodes, only 3 and a part of a 4th acknowledge Russian participation in the war. From the British standpoint, victory was an Anglo-American victory.
This did not sit well with the Soviet government. The Soviets offered their film archives to the West. In 1978 a 20 part series of 48 minutes per episode was released in an American documentary television series narrated by Burt Lancaster. The documentary was titled: “The Unknown War.”
Certainly, it was a war unknown to most Americans, raised as they are on propaganda.
The Unknown War was a revelation to Americans because it demonstrated beyond all doubt that Nazi Germany lost World War II on the Russian front. Of the 20 episodes, “The Allies,” that is, the Anglo-Americans and free French, feature only in number 17. One out of twenty is about the correct proportion of the West’s participation in the defeat of Nazi Germany.
If you google The Unknown War you will find an entry on Wikipedia. The series might still be available on YouTube. It was taken off the air when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, a folly repeated by dumbshit Washington. It was more important to Washington that Russia be demonized than any truths should be presented, so the truth revealed in The Unknown War was removed from US TV. Later the documentary reappeared on the History Chanel.
In my June 6 article, I said, following the consensus of historians, that Nazi Germany lost the war at Stalingrad. In this article: http://www.globalresearch.ca/70-years-ago-december-1941-turning-point-of-world-war-ii/28059 [1] historian Dr. Jacques R. Pauwels says that Germany lost the war 14 months earlier at the Battle of Moscow in December 1941. He makes a good case. Whether one agrees or not, the facts he presents are eye openers for the “exceptional, indispensable Americans” who believe nothing happens without them.
Normandy, June 1944, is 2.5 years after Germany lost the war in the Battle of Moscow. As historians have made clear, by June 1944 Germany had little left with which to fight. Whatever was left of the German military was on the Eastern Front.
At the 70th annual Normandy landing celebration in France, Obama informed his French vassal, President Hollande, that he, Obama, the ruler of the Exceptional Country, would not sit down to dinner with the Russian Putin. Americans are too good to eat dinner with Russians. So Hollande had to have two dinners. One for Obama, and then one for Putin. As food is still good in France thanks to the banning of GMOs, probably Holland didn’t mind. I myself would have enjoyed being at both dinners for the food alone.
Like all news that is important, the dinner for Putin, and its meaning, escaped the attention of the American presstitute media, the world’s greatest collection of ****. If memory serves, normally the Russians are left out of the Normandy commemoration celebrations. If the war was won in the West, what did the Russians have to do with it? Nothing, of course. “Our boys” did it all, just as JD informed me. Russians? What Russians?
But this time France invited Putin to the Normandy celebration, and Putin was not too proud to come. Putin spoke with European politicians in the off moments, and these politicians saw a real person, unlike Obama, a total fake.
The superiority of Russian diplomacy over Washington’s is clear to all. Putin’s position is: “we are here for you, we can work things out.” Washington’s position is: “do as we say or we will bomb you into the stone age.”
Russia is accommodating to its client states. Washington is not. Putin says that he is willing to work things out with the billionaire corrupt Oligarch imposed on Ukraine by Washington, but Washington has forced the Bulgarians to stop work on the South Stream Pipeline. This natural gas pipeline bypasses Ukraine by going under the Black Sea to Bulgaria. As Washington’s new puppet state in Ukraine has not paid its multi-billion dollar natural gas bill to Russia and threatens to disrupt the pipeline to Europe and to steal gas from it, Russia, despite Western sanctions, made preparations for a new pipeline route in order that Europeans do not suffer from winter cold and have their industries shut down and economies collapse from lack of energy.
Washington sees Putin’s commitment to Europe as a threat and has gone to work to prevent any Russian energy flows to Europe.
In contrast with Putin’s position, Washington’s position is: We don’t give a hoot what happens to our European puppets. Like the rest of humanity, European puppets don’t count and are dispensable, mere collateral damage, in the Indispensable Country’s war for world hegemony.
All that is important to Washington is that Russia is damaged regardless of the damage done to the puppet regimes in Western and Eastern Europe, including the moronic Polish government, possibly the only government on earth more foolish than Obama’s.
Washington is trying to break off Europe’s economic relations with Russia. Washington is promising to supply Europe with US natural gas obtained by fracking. This promise is a lie, like everything else Washington says.
On May 20 the Los Angeles Times reported that “federal energy authorities have slashed by 96% the recoverable oil buried in California’s vast Monterey Shale deposits.” The Monterey Shale formation contains about two-thirds of the nation’s shale oil reserves, and only 4% are recoverable. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-oil-20140521-story.html [2]
William Engdahl has reported that at best the US has 20 years of natural gas from fracking, and that the price of the gas will be the despoiling of US surface and ground waters. Experts have pointed out that the infrastructure for transporting US natural gas to Europe does not exist and that it would take three years to build the infrastructure. What will Europe do for three years while it waits for US energy to replace the cut-off Russian energy? Will Europe still be there?
Washington’s European vassals should take note: Washington is prepared to destroy the economies of its vassals in order to score a one up on Russia.
How is it possible that by now Europe doesn’t understand how Washington thinks? Those bag full of money must be very large.
As I have reported several times, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security affairs told me years ago that Washington purchases European politicians with bags full of money. It remains to be seen if European “leaders” are willing to sacrifice their peoples and their own reputations in order to be complicit in the war that Washington is planning with Russia, a war that could mean the end of life on earth.
It is Europe’s call. If leaders emerge who tell Washington, “no dice,” the world is saved.
If instead European politicians want the money, the world is doomed.,
Europe would be the first to go.
www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/06/09/world-war-ii-unknown-war-paul-craig-roberts/
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JUNE 4, 2014
Popular Nonsense
John Stossel
6/4/2014 12:01:00 AM - John Stossel
"Young people are exploited!" "Income mobility is down!" "Poor people are locked into poverty!"
Those are samples of popular nonsense peddled today.
Leftist economist Thomas Piketty's book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" has been No. 1 on best-seller lists for weeks (with 400 pages of statistics, I assume "Capital" is bought more often than it is read). Piketty argues that investments grow faster than wages and so the rich get richer far faster than everyone else. He says we should impose a wealth tax and 80 percent taxes on rich people's incomes.
But Piketty's numbers mislead. It's true that today the rich are richer than ever. And the wealth gap between rich and poor has grown. Now the top 1 percent own more assets than the bottom 90 percent!
But focusing on this disparity ignores the fact that over time, the rich and poor are not the same people. Oprah Winfrey once was on welfare. Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton was a farmhand. When markets are free, poor people can move out of their income group. In America, income mobility, which matters more than income inequality, has not really diminished.
Economists at Harvard and Berkeley crunched the numbers on 40 million tax returns from 1971-2012 and discovered that mobility is pretty much what The Pew Charitable Trusts reported it was 30 years ago.
Today, 64 percent of the people born to the poorest fifth of society rise out of that quintile -- 11 percent rise all the way into the top quintile. Meanwhile, 8 percent born to the richest fifth fall all the way to the bottom fifth. Sometimes great wealth makes kids lazy and self-indulgent, and wrecks their lives
Also, the rich don't get rich at the expense of the poor (unless they steal or collude with government). The poor got richer, too. Yes, over the last 30 years, incomes of rich people grew by more than 200 percent, but according to the Congressional Budget Office, poor people gained 50 percent. That growth should matter more than the disparity. Piketty's data reveal times in our history when income inequality decreased: during world wars and depression. Do we want more of that?
It's right to worry about the plight of the poor, but not everything done in their name really helps them -- minimum wage laws, for example.
I've had hundreds of employees whom I paid nothing: student interns. Unpaid internships were allowed for years, because it was understood that interns learn by working. My interns learned a lot. Many went on to successful careers in journalism. One won a Pulitzer Prize. Many said they learned more working for me than at college (despite $50,000 tuition). They benefited and I benefited. Win-win.
So for years government ignored Labor Department rules that decreed unpaid internships legal only if an employer gets "no immediate advantage" from the intern.
Geez, who wants that? Of course I got an advantage from my interns. That's why I employed them!
Recently, President Barack Obama's Labor Department announced it would enforce the internship rules, and some interns sued their former employers, claiming internships were "unfair." Charlie Rose forked over a quarter of a million dollars. Word spread, so now unpaid internships are vanishing.
Some people say it's good that unpaid internships are gone, because they are unfair to poor people, who can't afford volunteer work. But getting rid of opportunities does nothing to help anyone. Employers lose and students lose.
Difficult as it can seem to make your own way in this world without a phony government promise that you'll be taken care of, or that every job will pay at least $15 an hour, success happens when markets are relatively free. Individual initiative creates new things, companies, job opportunities -- whole new ways of life -- that make the world better for all of us.
Government "help" ends up doing harm. Leave people free -- both as workers and employers -- to pursue opportunities they find worthwhile, and we will prosper in ways government planners could never imagine.
http://townhall.com/columnists/johnstossel/2014/06/04/popular-nonsense-n1847148/print
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On Point with Charlie McGrath- The Hate Train: Why Government Wants You to Hate Thy Neighbor
Charlie McGrath Presents Activist & Author William Grigg
Election season is upon on us and the hate train is full steam ahead. We discuss how politicians use the establishment media to keep the masses dumb downed and angry. William Grigg does a powerful, masterful job of showing how everything from race to religion has been weaponized in the battle for truth. We discuss who benefits from this hate pandering and how it has been implemented against the American people for decades to maintain the status quo and how it is leading America to its demise.
William Norman Grigg is a passionate activist & the author of several books including America’s Engineered Decline and Liberty in Eclipse: The Rise of the Homeland Security State. He was formerly a senior editor of The New American magazine, the official publication of the John Birch Society.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZXEwEbwk38#t=291
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Greenwald: NYT’s new editor ‘subservient to national security state’
(http://america.aljazeera.com/content/ajam/blogs/scrutineer/2014/5/16/greenwald-nyt-s-neweditorsubservienttonationalsecuritystate/_jcr_content/blog/mainpar/textimage/image.img.png)
Pulitzer Prize winner and Snowden go-between Glenn Greenwald said that incoming New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet has a “really disturbing history of practicing this form of journalism that is incredibly subservient to the American National security state.” Baquet, who is replacing the abruptly dismissed Jill Abramson, has been accused of playing a central role in spiking a story about illegal National Security Agency wiretaps when he worked at the Los Angeles Times in 2006.
By contrast, according to Greenwald, who was interviewed by HuffPost Live, Abramson was “probably the best advocate for an adversarial relationship between the government and the media.”
Baquet was implicated as a protector of the intelligence community in 2007 by NSA whistleblower Mark Klein. Klein had documentary and eye-witness evidence of “splitters” built into AT&T switching centersdesigned to copy domestic and international internet traffic, and forward it to the NSA. Klein initially took his story to an L.A. Times reporter, and was told it would be front-page material. After two months, however, Klein was told the story had been killed at the request of then-Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and then-NSA chief Gen. Michael Hayden.
The decision was made by the L.A. Times editor at the time, Dean Baquet.
When Klein told this part of his narrative on Nightline in 2007, Baquet confirmed he met with Negroponte and Hayden, but said it was his inability to comprehend the story inside Klein’s technical documents that moved him to pull the plug.
Klein then took his information to the New York Times, which published a detailed and fully understandable digest of the revelations in April 2006.
In the last year, the information leaked by Edward Snowden has confirmed what Klein and the New York Times reported. For her part,Abramson, in a January interview with Al Jazeera America, was asked if she viewed Snowden as a traitor or a hero. "I view him,” she said, “as I did Julian Assange and Wikileaks, as a very good source of extremely newsworthy information."
The New York Times has not been as closely associated with the Snowden revelations as have been, say, Greenwald and The Guardian, but the Times has not shied away from reporting the leaks, and, in its editorial pages, has embraced Snowden’s role in uncovering illegal government surveillance.
The contrast, is, it appears, striking. And it strikes Greenwald, who observed that if the past is anything to go by, the replacement of Abramson with Baquet “signals that the New York Times is going to continue to descend downward into this sort of journalism that is very neutered and far too close to the very political factions that it's supposed to exercise oversight over.”
. . . .
Any views expressed on The Scrutineer are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.
http://america.aljazeera.com/blogs/scrutineer/2014/5/16/greenwald-nyt-s-neweditorsubservienttonationalsecuritystate.html
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Fire tornado caught on camera as wildfires sweep across San Dieg
The earth changes are here.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sQqjQVwXBs
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Here is an inspiring story of dedication to a vision. Reaching a destination that has to be believed to be seen.
I enjoy a good story and a positive attitude Walter. With the obstacles facing most kids of today, student debt, high oil prices, shacks called houses sell for 300 and 400 thousand dollars, inflation, poor wages etc., this is just a pipe dream fairy tale story for the masses I am afraid.
We cannot all open a business on the internet and sell to one another, as in all matters of this nature only very few succeed, the rest waste valuable time.
There is much in the way of opportunity out there, but not for the masses of ordinary people.
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Here is an inspiring story of dedication to a vision. Reaching a destination that has to be believed to be seen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxVLKvSkRf0
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www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEATDhaZyVA&feature=youtube
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Lying Or Just Stupid?
There comes a point in the destiny of a failing nation when official lying is no longer distinct from official stupidity.
kunstler.com
As we have seen Jim, as we have seen. Still, the beneficiaries of Christmas presents the beholden believe in Santa Claus.
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(http://www.kunstler.com/images/JamesHowardKunstler_colorThumb_By_CharlieSamuels.jpg)
Lying Or Just Stupid?
It’s not always easy to define what exactly is wrong with America, but what ever it is, it’s huge.
— Roel Ilargi Meijer, The Automatic Earth.com
Nobody knows, from sea to shining sea, why we’re having all this trouble with our Republic.
— Tom McGuane, Ninety-Two in the Shade
Despite its Valley Girl origins, the simple term clueless turns out to be the most accurate descriptor for America’s degenerate zeitgeist. Nobody gets it — the “it” being a rather hefty bundle of issues ranging from our energy bind to the official mismanagement of money, the manipulation of markets, the crimes in banking, the blundering foreign misadventures, the revolving door corruption in governance, the abandonment of the rule-of-law, the ominous wind-down of the Happy Motoring fiasco and the related tragedy of obsolete suburbia, the contemptuous disregard for the futures of young people, the immersive Kardashian celebrity twerking sleaze, the downward spiral of the floundering classes into pizza and Pepsi induced obesity, methedrine psychosis, and tattooed savagery, and the thick patina of public relations dishonesty that coats all of it like some toxic bacterial overgrowth. The dwindling life of our nation, where anything goes and nothing matters.
It’s not just the individual cluelessness of ordinary people leading lives too frantic for a moment’s reflection about anything, but the appalling institutional cluelessness of enterprises where you’d think combined intellects might tend toward a more faithful view of reality. But these days all we get is a low-order of wishful and clownish group-think, such as this item from today’s New York Times discussing a proposed reversal of Gazprom pipelines along the Ukraine / Slovakian frontier as the solution to the Kiev government’s fuel problem:
Nearly all the gas Washington and Brussels would like to get moving into Ukraine from Europe originally came from Russia, which pumps gas westward across Ukraine, into Slovakia and then on to customers in Germany and elsewhere. Once the gas is sold, however, Gazprom ceases to be its owner and loses its power to set the terms of its sale.
Get that? To avoid depending on Russian gas, they’re going to buy Russian gas from sources other than Russia. What New York Times editor can read this story without spraying her video display with coffee? What genius in John Kerry’s “Haircut-in-Search-of-a-Brain” State Department dreamed up this dodge? Who would think that you could improve a Chinese fire drill by tacking on a Polish blanket trick (i.e. trying to make your blanket longer by cutting a foot from the top and sewing it onto the bottom).
The only conclusion the casual observer can come to is, to put it mildly, these institutions have gone completely meshugga. Since I follow the behavior of these organizations, I know that this is not an isolated example. For the State Department, the entire gambit in Ukraine has been a chain of obvious bungles and miscalculations, starting with our sponsored overthrow of the original elected Kiev government, and the absurd presumption that Russia had no legitimate interest in that region’s stability to the strategy of shoot-yourself-in-the-foot financial sanctions. The New York Times (once America’s “Newspaper of Record”), is now a completely unreliable conduit for un-parsed White House backgrounder propaganda and raw State Department spin, with an overlay of editorial PMS brain fog.
Another humdinger on a somewhat different issue caught my attention the other day in the formerly eminent, now degenerate journal Foreign Affairs (May / June 2014): The United States of Gas, by Robert Hefner III . This idiotic article in the current issue hits on all the usual wishful thinking delusions du jour concerning this country’s energy prospects, namely: due to fracking in shale deposits we’ve entered an energy-and-manufacturing renaissance, we’re soon-to-be the premier energy exporter to the world, and US “consumers” (i.e. citizens) can be assured of driving to WalMart forever — in other words, all economic problems solved. These idiots (editors and fact-checkers included) must get all their information straight out of the Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) PR handouts. CERA, of course, is the official public relations shop of the oil and gas industry.
It’s one thing that this article is patently misleading. What’s worse is the complete absence of any understanding of the fundamental dynamic between the high cost of unconventional oil and gas and its effect on capital formation. In other words, the capital investment for continued future drilling will simply not exist. What a surprise that will be to the people who run this land.
There comes a point in the destiny of a failing nation when official lying is no longer distinct from official stupidity. We’ve crossed that boundary in the USA. It pays to remember that societies get what they deserve, not what they expect.
kunstler.com
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Would just like to point out on the forum that I came across a remarkable series of short audio interviews by Antal E. Fekete. They are simply remarkable in my opinion and I have started posting them in the Gold research section of the site. It is my hope that anyone with an interest in Gold will take the time to acquaint themselves with this remarkable scholar.
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Welcome Karpatok, It is a pleasure to have you as a member. Thanks for your interest.
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OH That Poor Poor Surly. Now he will have to bear the Cross alone. Oh my.
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Poster Bot Blogger, a favorite of mine at Doomstead Diner put up this remarkable video. So impressive was this kindly gent's message that I felt compelled to post it here as well. If anyone of our dual members would post a thank you to Bot from me for this wonderful find, it would be most appreciated. GO
Nothing prevents you from doing so yourself, especially since you are obviously reading the forum every dat.
Of course I read the forum daily Surly, I spent two years there and have a lot of interest in the people and their ideas there.
As mentioned previously, it is impossible for me to subject myself to having my posts scrutinized by others before being allowed to post. It is merely a personal choice, I feel demeaned and insulted by that policy being directed at me.
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Poster Bot Blogger, a favorite of mine at Doomstead Diner put up this remarkable video. So impressive was this kindly gent's message that I felt compelled to post it here as well. If anyone of our dual members would post a thank you to Bot from me for this wonderful find, it would be most appreciated. GO
Nothing prevents you from doing so yourself, especially since you are obviously reading the forum every dat.
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Poster Bot Blogger, a favorite of mine at Doomstead Diner put up this remarkable video. So impressive was this kindly gent's message that I felt compelled to post it here as well. If anyone of our dual members would post a thank you to Bot from me for this wonderful find, it would be most appreciated. GO
http://vimeo.com/88171992
http://www.doomsteaddiner.net/forum/index.php?topic=2713.msg48250#msg48250
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Found this today and thought of you:
Thanks Surly, Always a pleasure to have you drop in and say hello.
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Glad you found a solution Surly. The workings and methods of doing something on a computer are mystifying to me, but my kids breeze through it without even thinking how it's done. Like walking or breathing. :D
That's why they call them "digital natives."
Did it again. It's certainly a workaround. Function works OK w/Safari on the DD forum, but not on any derivative forums, including yours or AG's. I am not a computer whiz by any stretch, but I work on both platforms enough to do some basic troubleshooting, and have taught myself a little, mostly through trial and error. But I sure can't sort this one out.
Anyhow, hope you are well.
Found this today and thought of you:
(http://www.newyorker.com/images/2014/05/05/w620v320/140505_daily-cartoon-tuesday_w620v320.jpg)
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Glad you found a solution Surly. The workings and methods of doing something on a computer are mystifying to me, but my kids breeze through it without even thinking how it's done. Like walking or breathing. :D
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GO, Joe P,
I have pretty much concluded that the problem must be in my browser. Joe, I am using Safari. If you have any wisdom to share, light me up[. I have diddled with my preferences but still can't get the quote function to work; but it works fine on DD.
Troubling-- but I hope it's the worst thing that happens to me.
Pardon me but I could not help but overhear your quandary. If I may, you may wish to go about it as follows:
DO NOT simply click "quote" and wait for a reply box with the quote inside. Rather, click "reply" and wait for an empty reply box.
Having come this far, then scroll down and your box will disappear off the top of your screen. Fear not friend for it can be brought back down.
Scroll down until you see the post you want to quote.
Having rounded on your prey, it is then just a matter of highlighting the desired discourse and only then click "quote".
You will be pleasantly surprised to scroll up and find the quote appearing prepacked in the reply box.
With Compliments, WJ
Why, I did the very thing that you suggest, and that does indeed work.
Thanks.
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GO, Joe P,
I have pretty much concluded that the problem must be in my browser. Joe, I am using Safari. If you have any wisdom to share, light me up[. I have diddled with my preferences but still can't get the quote function to work; but it works fine on DD.
Troubling-- but I hope it's the worst thing that happens to me.
I can tell you what works for me on my very mature IPad with Safari. I click "Quote". After doing this, a red bar that is titled "Quick Reply" with a plus sign (+) to the left appears at the bottom of my screen. I click on the (+)...sometimes twice. Then a frame opens with the complete quote in it. I can then add my comment below the quote in this frame and post the complete reply. ;D
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GO, Joe P,
I have pretty much concluded that the problem must be in my browser. Joe, I am using Safari. If you have any wisdom to share, light me up[. I have diddled with my preferences but still can't get the quote function to work; but it works fine on DD.
Troubling-- but I hope it's the worst thing that happens to me.
Pardon me but I could not help but overhear your quandary. If I may, you may wish to go about it as follows:
DO NOT simply click "quote" and wait for a reply box with the quote inside. Rather, click "reply" and wait for an empty reply box.
Having come this far, then scroll down and your box will disappear off the top of your screen. Fear not friend for it can be brought back down.
Scroll down until you see the post you want to quote.
Having rounded on your prey, it is then just a matter of highlighting the desired discourse and only then click "quote".
You will be pleasantly surprised to scroll up and find the quote appearing prepacked in the reply box.
With Compliments, WJ
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I use Firefox Surly, Safari is on my I pad mini and I never really did get the hang of it yet.
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GO, Joe P,
I have pretty much concluded that the problem must be in my browser. Joe, I am using Safari. If you have any wisdom to share, light me up[. I have diddled with my preferences but still can't get the quote function to work; but it works fine on DD.
Troubling-- but I hope it's the worst thing that happens to me.
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Admired blogger James Howard Kunstler, and another of his Brilliant perspectives. (http://www.kunstler.com/images/JamesHowardKunstler_colorThumb_By_CharlieSamuels.jpg)
The wonder is that more Americans are not ticked off about the state of our country than whatever is happening ten thousand miles away. For instance, how come the US Department of Justice is not as avid to prosecute the pervasive racketeering in the US economy as the State Department is for provoking unnecessary wars in foreign lands on the other side of the planet, over matters that have little bearing on life here? This racketeering, by the way, amounts to a war against American citizens.
I’m speaking especially of the US military racket, the banking and finance rackets, the health care racket and the college loan racket, all of which have evolved insidiously and elegantly to swindle the public in order to support a claque of American oligarchs. In other civilized lands, health care and college are considered the highest priority public goods (i.e. responsibilities of government), and national resources are applied to support them under the theory that bankrupting people for an appendectomy or a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering is not in the public interest. In our land, that would be considered “socialism.” Instead, we “socialize” the costs of supporting Too Big To Fail banks — so their employees can drive Beemers to their Hamptons summer house parties — and a military machine that goes around the world wrecking one country after another to support a parasitical class of contractors, lobbyists, and bought-off politicians in their northern Virginia McMansions.
Hence, the laughable conceit pinging through the news media lately that some dynastic grifter like Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton will slide into the White House in 2016 as easily as a watermelon seed popped into a shot glass. I don’t think it’s going to work out that way. The US political system needs to be turned upside down and inside out, and I expect that it will be. Either it happens within the bounds of electoral politics, or you’ll see it playing out in the streets and the windswept plains.
Just a glance around the USA these days ought to nauseate the casual observer. We have an infrastructure for everyday life that is failing in every way imaginable. Are you disturbed by the asteroid belts of vacant strip malls outside your town? Or the empty store fronts along your Main Streets? What do you suppose these places will be like in ten years when the mirage of shale oil dissolves in a mist of disappointment and political grievance? How are Americans going to feel, do you suppose, when gasoline just isn’t there at a price they can pay, and they are marooned in delaminating strand-board-and-vinyl houses 23 miles away from anything? Does the sheer immersive ugliness of the human imprint on the American landscape not give you the shivers?
Look at the pathetic and disgusting appearance of our cities, which for the most part present themselves as demolition derby arenas or war zones — except the strongholds of the red-white-and-blue oligarchs: Washington, San Francisco, and especially New York, Financialization Central.
What happens at the “magic moment” when Facebook stops being a narcissistic virtual playground for “selfies” and becomes a bulletin board for political revolution? Think that can’t happen here? And what if that revolution is a kind that doesn’t appeal to you — say, a revolution of race hatred, or fascist zealotry, or Marxist gangsterism of the type that took Russia hostage for 70 years?
All this is happening, incidentally, because the supposed best minds in our nation are paying no attention whatsoever to the most important story of our lifetime: the winding down of the techno-industrial global economy. It doesn’t really matter anymore why they don’t get it. Hubris. Greed. Distraction. Denial. All that matters is that they can’t be depended on and when that happens authority loses legitimacy. And when it comes to that, all bets are off.
The disintegration of Ukraine would be best understood by Americans as a mirror of ourselves and our sclerotic republic, poised to sink into poverty and disorder. Everything we do and say rings hollow now. What used to be called The Establishment has run out of ways to even pretend to save itself. We have no idea what’s next, but it’s not going to be more of what’s been.
http://kunstler.com >:( :'(
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(http://i0.wp.com/armstrongeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Russia-China.jpg)
Russia and China are becoming closer thanks to Obama and his insane policies behind the NSA that have left America trying to find friends in a dark hour. The sanctions being imposed on Russia have sent China into its camp. The USA is finding it increasingly more difficult to be the bully in the school-yard. No former administration has ever acted with such arrogance and blind stupidity than the Obama Administration. The net result is to empower Russia and to inspire a new dynamic-duo of Russia-China against the USA. China supported Russia, when Western countries launched an anti-Russian campaign. With both of their economies turning down, this is by no means the proper time to impose sanctions. All this policy is doing is re-enforcing Putin and placing him in the position where he must become more aggressive or seem weak in the shadow of Obama.
In keeping with the idea that the West/America plotted the fall of the Soviet Union as a covert plot rather than the economic collapse of Communism, feeds directly into the idea that the majority of people see whatever happens to them as a victim of someone else rather than the consequences of their own stupidity. Putin’s statements that the fall of the Soviet Union was the greatest tragedy of the 20th Century is gaining momentum in Russia.
(http://i2.wp.com/armstrongeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Gorbachev-Mikhail.jpeg)
There is now talk of Mikhail Gorbachev being put on trial. Gorbachev was the last president of the USSR and the proposition to bring him to trial for the collapse of the Soviet Union is being bantered about. This is part of the propaganda machine to enrage the people to justify the invasion of at least Eastern Europe. Putting Gorbachev on trial will be an indictment of the West and further the conspiracy theory that it was a plot and not economics.
The Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev delivered a well received speech in the Duma in Russia demonstrating the rise in power and determination of the New Russia. He stated regarding trade how the West suppressed Russia. ”For 17 years, we were actually kept in the hallway, where we argued that we deserved the right to enter the world trading community, that we meet its standards. Now we have a full right to demand other WTO member countries should observe the regulations with respect to Russian goods.”
The treatment of Russia by the Obama Administration has been appalling to say the least even before Crimea. The policies that are in place and the thinking is so outdated built around an ego of self-centered aggrandizement, it is hard to see how this cannot lead to any place other than armed conflict. I stated upfront, give the East Ukraine back to Russia on a timetable and allow free elections there that should have been monitored. The people should have decided this issue, not politicians. That should have been the serious solution just as East Germany was given back to the West. Failing to reach such a negotiated settlement allowing for real free elections has led to this confrontation with no escape. Both sides now have their backs against the wall and neither will back down fearing this will be a sign of political weakness.
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/04/26/world-war-iii-on-the-horizon/
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Nothing troubles me lately as much as major items being forgotten or major revelations being ignored after a few days go by, and the sheeple get back to their ball game or the Hollywood idols they fawn over.
Snowden is forgotten, two senseless wars have been forgotten, Obama's broken promises forgotten, The 2008 crash forgotten.
How easy it for for TPTB to control us and the politicians to lie to us.
If we get caught, just wait a few days and the sheeple will forget and move on to the next game. Two to three days usually works just fine, a week at most if it is big slip up. :-[
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A question unrelated to the thread, GO:
Does your "quote" function work for you as it does for the DD Forum? I find that it does not work for me, and am wondering if it might not be some browser setting on my part. Unless you are experiencing the same thing.
I had the same problem for awhile with my MS desktop but it works now. I think I still have the problem on my iPad/Safari...but I can open "Quick Reply" to get the quote and that seems to work OK.
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Seems OK Surly, I utilized in this reply to you. Will try another test next posting
Testing Quote function. Appears OK Surly.
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A question unrelated to the thread, GO:
Does your "quote" function work for you as it does for the DD Forum? I find that it does not work for me, and am wondering if it might not be some browser setting on my part. Unless you are experiencing the same thing.
Seems OK Surly, I utilized in this reply to you. Will try another test next posting
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A question unrelated to the thread, GO:
Does your "quote" function work for you as it does for the DD Forum? I find that it does not work for me, and am wondering if it might not be some browser setting on my part. Unless you are experiencing the same thing.
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Welcome jdwheeler42, It is a pleasure to have you aboard. Thanks for your interest.
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This might have been inevitable, for both legal and commercial reasons. But that doesn't mean we have to like it."
Good morning Surly, a sad situation indeed. They inundate us with unwanted advertising, help NASA all they can in their disgusting illegal spying, and now take over the net with their same old weapon, MONEY.
It is difficult not to become a fatalist with the goings on. Once we lose our freedom to speak, and converse with one another, it will be all over.
Doomsday will have arrived. :-\
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Posted this on the Diner forum.
Much in the same way that you can own all the guns you want but they don't do you much good without ammunition, you can have all the fora and websites you want, but they won't do you much good without bandwidth.
(https://scontent-a-dfw.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc3/t1.0-9/10264619_741662329209829_79872000196355513_n.jpg)
NYT reports ISPs such as Comcast and TimeWarner will now be able to determine and negotiate diverging prices for different services and levels of service. So greater bandwidth -- speed and capacity -- could go to the Disneys and Netflixes, those prepared to pay the premium. Meanwhile home and non-commercial service could be throttled.
"The rules could radically reshape how Internet content is delivered to consumers. For example, if a gaming company cannot afford the fast track to players, customers could lose interest and its product could fail.
The rules are also likely to eventually raise prices as the likes of Disney and Netflix pass on to customers whatever they pay for the speedier lanes, which are the digital equivalent of an uncongested car pool lane on a busy freeway.
Consumer groups immediately attacked the proposal, saying that not only would costs rise, but that big, rich companies with the money to pay large fees to Internet service providers would be favored over small start-ups with innovative business models — stifling the birth of the next Facebook or Twitter."
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/technology/fcc-new-net-neutrality-rules.html?smid=tw-bna&_r=0
http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/23szhc/fcc_in_net_neutrality_turnaround_plans_to_allow/
"So Google and Microsoft and Netflix and other large, well-capitalized incumbents will pay for speedy service. Smaller companies that can't—or that ISPs just aren't interested in dealing with—will get whatever plodding service is left for everyone else. ISPs won't be allowed to deliberately slow down traffic from specific sites, but that's about all that's left of net neutrality. Once you've approved the notion of two-tier service, it hardly matters whether you're speeding up some of the sites or slowing down others.
This might have been inevitable, for both legal and commercial reasons. But that doesn't mean we have to like it."
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/04/net-neutrality-finally-dies-ripe-old-age-of-45
Maybe it was inevitable...
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Looks really good, GO. Very impressed. I will be back when I have more time.
looking forward to visiting.
Wonderful Surly, thanks for visiting.
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Looks really good, GO. Very impressed. I will be back when I have more time.
looking forward to visiting.
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The teal adds a touch of class, great concept.
Thank's Walter, It is a pleasure having you aboard, welcome.
Yes Walter, Have always been impressed by the different moods and feelings a color can display. Amazing how people react differently to a color, or exactly the same.
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Looks good GO.
Haven't been able to embed a video on this version of SMF as of yet. If I figure out a way, I will let you know.
RE
Thanks RE, At your leisure.
I have come to understand and appreciate the work that goes into a forum, even a simple glorified blog such as mine. Surly was right, I think I have that Carpal Syndrome, or whatever they call it from going back and forth a million times figuring out how to do what.
Going to have to buy a new keyboard. :D
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The teal adds a touch of class, great concept.
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Looks good GO.
Haven't been able to embed a video on this version of SMF as of yet. If I figure out a way, I will let you know.
RE
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Hey GO,
You've done quite a job sprucing up this site. (http://www.runemasterstudios.com/graemlins/images/2thumbs.gif)
Haven't had time to check it all out yet - just got home from work and now I have to get ready to take my wife out for our anniversary celebration. But I'll take a closer look soon. Your site looks very nice.
Thanks JoeP, Happy to have you aboard. Give my regards to your wife as well, enjoy the evening.
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Hey GO,
You've done quite a job sprucing up this site. (http://www.runemasterstudios.com/graemlins/images/2thumbs.gif)
Haven't had time to check it all out yet - just got home from work and now I have to get ready to take my wife out for our anniversary celebration. But I'll take a closer look soon. Your site looks very nice.
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The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering with the right to peaceably assemble or prohibiting the petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances. It was adopted on December 15, 1791, as one of the ten amendments that constitute the Bill of Rights.
This Forum was set up with the intention of trying to live up to this right our founders wrote into Our Beloved United States Constitution.
Hopefully members will strive to make it a place of constructive ideas, critical thinking, and respect for the rights of others to voice their opinions. What can we learn on topics we all agree on? Differing views are the basis for learning and seeing the other side of a coin.
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Members, my computer skills are sorely lacking, so kindly bare with me as I feel my way around and try and get the forum functioning properly. Comments, suggestions, instructions as to how to make this place more comfortable to post in for you are appreciated. Thanks for your patience and understanding.
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Welcome Diners, and members Surly, JoeP, and Ralph Emerson. Thanks for joining, make yourself comfortable and feel free to discuss anything you wish here. Your interest and membership is most appreciated.
While my areas of main interest are in the area of Gold, Art, Coins and Stamps as well as Doom, Finance, and Political power and suppression, your views and ideas on various topics that interest you are of interest to me as well and no doubt to our other members . Glad to have you aboard, GO