The Broken AmeriKan

This author could very well be correct; I have found the banter around here to be some of the most inane, worthless bile. I sit there and wonder how it is that this (whatever it is) is what the conversation is?

"Are Americans Too Broken for the Truth to ‘Set Us Free’?

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States? Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further? What forces have created a demoralized, passive, disCouraged U.S. population? Can anything be done to turn this around?

YES. It is called the “abuse syndrome.” How do abusive pimps, spouses, bosses, corporations, and governments stay in control? They shove lies, emotional and physical abuses, and injustices in their victims’ faces, and when victims are afraid to exit from these relationships, they get weaker; and so the abuser then makes their victims eat even more lies, abuses, and injustices, resulting in victims even weaker as they remain in these relationships.
Does the truth of their abuse set people free when they are deep in these abuse syndromes?

NO. For victims of the abuse syndrome, the truth of their passive submission to humiliating oppression is more than embarrassing — it can feel shameful; and there is nothing more painful than shame. And when one already feels beaten down and demoralized, the likely response to the pain of shame is not constructive action but more attempts to shut down or divert oneself from this pain. It is not likely that the truth of one’s humiliating oppression is going to energize one to constructive actions.

In the United States, 47 million people are without health insurance and many millions more are underinsured or a job layoff away from losing their coverage. But despite the current sellout by their elected officials to the insurance industry, there is no outpouring of millions of U.S. citizens on the streets of Washington D.C. protesting this betrayal.

Polls show that the majority of Americans oppose U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the taxpayer bailout of the financial industry, yet only a handful of U.S. citizens have protested any of this.

Remember the 2000 U.S. presidential election? That’s the one in which Al Gore received 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush. That’s also the one that the Florida Supreme Court’s order for a recount of the disputed Florida vote was over-ruled by the U.S. Supreme Court in a politicized 5-4 decision, of which dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens remarked: “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.” Yet, even all this provoked few demonstrators.

When people become broken, they cannot act on truths of injustice. Furthermore, when people have become broken, more truths about how they have been victimized can lead to shame about how they have allowed it. And shame, like fear, is one more psychological way we become even more broken.

U.S. citizens do not actively protest obvious injustices for the same reasons that people cannot leave their abusive spouses. They feel helpless to effect change. The more we don’t act, the weaker we get. And ultimately to deal with the painful humiliation over inaction in the face of an oppressor, we move to shutdown and escape strategies such as depression, substance abuse, and other diversions, which further keep us from acting. This is the vicious cycle of all abuse syndromes.

Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?

Maybe.

Shortly before the 2000 U.S. presidential election, millions of Americans saw a clip of George W. Bush joking to a wealthy group of people, “What a crowd tonight: the haves and the haves more. Some people call you the elite; I call you my base.” Yet, even with these kind of inflammatory remarks, the tens of millions of U.S. citizens who had come to despise Bush and his arrogance remained passive in the face of the 2000 non-democratic presidential elections.

Perhaps the “political genius” of the Bush-Cheney regime was fully realizing that Americans were so broken that they could get away with damn near anything. And the more people did nothing about the boot slamming on their faces, the weaker people became.

What forces have created a demoralized, passive, discouraged U.S. population?

The U.S. government-corporate partnership has used its share of guns and terror to break Native Americans, labor union organizers, and other dissidents and activists. But today, most U.S. citizens are broken by financial fears. There is potential legal debt if we speak out against a powerful authority, and all kinds of other debt if we do not comply on the job. Young people are broken by college-loan debts and fear of having no health insurance.

The U.S. population is increasingly broken by the social isolation created by corporate-governmental policies. A 2006 American Sociological Review study (“Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades”) reported that 25 percent of Americans did not have a single confidant in 2004 (10 percent of Americans lacked a single confidant in 1985). Sociologist Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone (2000) describes how social connectedness is disappearing in virtually every aspect of U.S. life. For example, there has been a significant decrease in face-to-face contact with neighbors and friends due to suburbanization, commuting, electronic entertainment, time and money pressures and other variables created by governmental-corporate policies. And union activities and other formal or informal ways that people give each other the support necessary to resist oppression have also decreased.

Schools and Universities: Do most schools teach young people to be action-oriented—or to be passive? Do most schools teach young people that they can affect their surroundings—or not to bother? Do schools provide examples of democratic institutions – or examples of authoritarian ones?

A long list of school critics from Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, John Holt, Paul Goodman, Jonathan Kozol, Alfie Kohn, Ivan Illich, and John Taylor Gatto have pointed out that a school is nothing less than a miniature society: what young people experience in schools is the chief means of creating our future society. Schools are routinely places where kids — through fear — learn to comply to authorities for whom they often have no respect, and to regurgitate material they often find meaningless. These are great ways of breaking someone.

Today, U.S. colleges and universities have increasingly become places where young people are merely acquiring degree credentials — badges of compliance for corporate employers — in exchange for learning to accept bureaucratic domination and enslaving debt.

Mental Health Institutions: Aldous Huxley predicted, “And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude.” Today, increasing numbers of people in the U.S. who do not comply with authority are being diagnosed with mental illnesses and medicated with psychiatric drugs that make them less pained about their boredom, resentments, and other negative emotions, thus rendering them more compliant and manageable.

Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) is an increasingly popular diagnosis for children and teenagers. The official symptoms of ODD include, “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules,” and “often argues with adults.” An even more common reaction to oppressive authorities than the overt defiance of ODD is some type of passive defiance — for example, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Studies show that virtually all children diagnosed with ADHD will pay attention to activities that they actually enjoy or that they have chosen. In other words, when ADHD-labeled kids are having a good time and in control, the “disease” goes away.

When human beings feel too terrified and broken to actively protest, they may stage a “passive-aggressive revolution” by simply getting depressed, staying drunk, and not doing anything – this is one reason why the Soviet Empire crumbled. However, the diseasing/medicalizing of rebellion and drug “treatments” have weakened the power of even this passive-aggressive revolution.

Television: In his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), Jerry Mander (after reviewing totalitarian critics such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Ellul, and Ivan Illich) compiled a list of the “Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy.”
Television, Mander claimed, helps create all eight conditions for breaking a population.

Television: (1) occupies people so that they don’t know themselves—and what a human being is; (2) separates people from one another; (3) creates sensory deprivation; (4) occupies the mind and fills the brain with prearranged experience and thought; (5) encourages drug use to dampen dissatisfaction (while TV itself produces a drug-like effect, this was compounded in 1997 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration relaxing the rules of prescription-drug advertising); (6) centralizes knowledge and information; (7) eliminates or “museumize” other cultures to eliminate comparisons; and (8) redefines happiness and the meaning of life.

Commercialism of Damn Near Everything: While spirituality, music, and cinema can be revolutionary forces, the gross commercialization of all of these has deadened their capacity to energize rebellion. So now, damn near everything – not just organized religion — has become “opiates of the masses.”

The primary societal role of U.S. citizens is no longer that of “citizen” but that of “consumer.” While citizens know that buying and selling within community strengthens that community and that this strengthens democracy, consumers care only about the best deal. While citizens understand that dependency on an impersonal creditor is a kind of slavery, consumers get excited with credit cards that offer a temporarily low APR.

Consumerism breaks people by devaluing human connectedness, socializing self-absorption, obliterating self-reliance, alienating people from normal human emotional reactions, and by selling the idea that purchased products — not themselves and their community — are their salvation.

Can anything be done to turn this around?

When people get caught up in humiliating abuse syndromes, more truths about their oppressive humiliations don’t set them free. What sets them free is morale.

What gives people morale? Encouragement. Small victories. Models of courageous behaviors. And anything that helps them break out of the vicious cycle of pain, shut down, immobilization, shame over immobilization, more pain, and more shut down.

The last people I would turn to for help in remobilizing a demoralized population are mental health professionals—at least those who have not rebelled against their professional socialization. Much of the craft of relighting the pilot light requires talents that mental health professionals simply are not selected for nor are they trained in. Specifically, the talents required are a fearlessness around image, spontaneity, and definitely anti-authoritarianism. But these are not the traits that medical schools or graduate schools select for or encourage.

Mental health professionals’ focus on symptoms and feelings often create patients who take themselves and their moods far too seriously. In contrast, people talented in the craft of maintaining morale resist this kind of self-absorption. For example, in the Question & Answer session that followed a Noam Chomsky talk (reported in Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, 2002), a somewhat demoralized man in the audience asked Chomsky if he too ever went through a phase of hopelessness. Chomsky responded, “Yeah, every evening . . .
If you want to feel hopeless, there are a lot of things you could feel hopeless about. If you want to sort of work out objectively what’s the chance that the human species will survive for another century, probably not very high. But I mean, what’s the point? . . . First of all, those predictions don’t mean anything—they’re more just a reflection of your mood or your personality than anything else. And if you act on that assumption, then you’re guaranteeing that’ll happen. If you act on the assumption that things can change, well, maybe they will. Okay, the only rational choice, given those alternatives, is to forget pessimism.”

A major component of the craft of maintaining morale is not taking the advertised reality too seriously. In the early 1960s, when the overwhelming majority in the U.S. supported military intervention in Vietnam, Chomsky was one of the few U.S. citizens actively opposing it. Looking back at this era, Chomsky reflected, “When I got involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, it seemed to me impossible that we would ever have any effect. . . . So looking back, I think my evaluation of the ‘hope’ was much too pessimistic: it was based on a complete misunderstanding. I was sort of believing what I read.”

An elitist assumption is that people don’t change because they are either ignorant of their problems or ignorant of solutions. Elitist “helpers” think they have done something useful by informing overweight people that they are obese and that they must reduce their caloric intake and increase exercise. An elitist who has never been broken by his or her circumstances does not know that people who have become demoralized do not need analyses and pontifications. Rather the immobilized need a shot of morale.

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The Video All Global-Warmers Must Watch

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"Free" Country Criminalizing Thought?

"Will Congress Criminalize Anti-Semitism and Israeli Criticism? - by Stephen Lendman

In the current climate, perhaps given:

-- America's police state laws;

-- no due process or judicial fairness for any state target;

-- mass illegal surveillance;

-- targeting dissent; and

-- the power of the Israeli Lobby over Congress, the media, academia, the clergy, and most anyone confronting them.

During Israel's war on Gaza, only 5 of 535 congressional members dissented on pro-Israeli resolutions.

On January 8, 2009, the Senate unanimously passed S 10: "A resolution recognizing the right of Israel to defend itself against attacks from Gaza and reaffirming the United States' strong support for Israel in its battle with Hamas, and supporting the Israeli-Palestinian (no peace) peace process."

On January 9, the House, by a 390 - 5 vote, passed HR 34 "Recognizing Israel's right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza, reaffirming the United States' strong support for Israel, and supporting the Israeli-Palestinian (no peace) peace process." More on this below.

Then on October 28, Obama signed the expanded 2009 Hate Crimes Prevention Act, some call a stealth war on free expression and civil liberties. More on this as well.

Also consider events in Canada, initiated by a body called the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism (CPCCA), a voluntary association of 22 MPs investigating anti-semitism because, it says:

Its "extent and severity is widely regarded as at its worst level since the end of the Second World War," despite contrary evidence and much to show how Israel twists opposition to Zionism and its international law violations to be an attack on Jews.

On October 29, in fact, Reuters reported that:

"Anti-Semitic attitudes in the United States are at a historic low, with 12 percent of Americans prejudiced toward Jews, an Anti-Defamation League (ADL) survey found" based on polling done from September 26 - October 4 with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8%.

ADL said the level of anti-Semitism matched 1998's as the lowest in the poll's 45-year history. Yet in his 2003 book, "Never Again? The Threat Of The New Anti-Semitism," national director, Abraham Foxman, said he's:

"convinced we currently face as great a threat to the safety of the Jewish people as the one we faced in the 1930s - if not a greater one," contradicted by Cato Institute research fellow Leon Hadar (writing in the January 2004 Chronicles) that public opinion polls "indicate anti-Semitism (both its racial and religious versions) has been in steep decline in most of Western Europe...."

Yet various Canadian Jewish organizations, including Hillel, B'nai Brith, and the Canadian Jewish Congress cite rising anti-Semitic incidents. On March 31, 2009, for example, B'Nai Brith Canada claimed Canadian anti-Semitic incidents rose 8.9% in 2008 over 2007, with "more than (a) four-fold increase in incidents over the past decade."

The result gets bodies like CPCCA to exploit it, with disturbing implications of where this may lead, including calling opposition to Zionism and Israeli crimes anti-Semitism, and criminalizing them at a time the global BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement is gaining traction in the wake of Operation Cast Lead and 42 years of military occupation.

CPCCA's web site (cpcca.ca) says:

"In February 2009, parliamentarians from around the world gathered in London for the inaugural conference of the Inter-Parliamentary Committee for Combatting Antisemitism." Over 125 legislators attended from nearly 40 countries, after which "The London Declaration for Combating Antisemitism call(ed) on all governments to face the problem...."

CPCCA is a Canadian body, formed in March 2009 by 22 parliamentarians from all parties in the House of Commons. An inquiry was begun on June 2 calling for written submissions followed by public hearings (excluding anti-Israeli groups) running from November 2 - December 8. When concluded, the Steering Committee will produce a report for the government, anticipating a response "no later than the fall of 2010."

Its web site asks: "What is the new anti-semitism," saying:

"Anti-semitism is an age-old phenomenon, yet it is always re-invented and manifested in different ways. For example, while accusations of blood libel are still being made against the Jewish people, instead they are being directed against the State of Israel, such that anti-Zionism is being used as a cover for anti-semitism."

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME)

Founded in 2002, CJPME (cjpme.org) promotes "justice, peace, prosperity and security for all peoples of the Middle East," and believes "all positions should respect international law....violence is not a solution, (and) all parties in a conflict must be held to the same standard."

On August 31, 2009, it issued a "Written Submission to (CPCCA) Concerning Anti-Semitism in Canada," saying:

-- it opposes anti-Semitism;

-- Israeli criticism must not be linked to it; and

-- because of how it's vilified, CJPME fears it will result in:

-- "a terrifying attack on civil liberties (and free expression) in Canada, and

-- a total silencing of debate on Israel out of fear of legal action."

Yet both outcomes would violate "fundamental protections enumerated in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms," so efforts must be made to prevent them.

Israel is a secular state, not a proxy for Judaism or Jews. Many Jews globally, including Israelis, are extremely critical of government policies with regard to Occupied Palestine and its own Arab citizens. According to Ryerson University's Social Justice and Democracy Professor Judy Rebick:

-- equating Israeli criticism with anti-Semitism "is based on a claim that the State of Israel is the single outcome of the history of the Jewish people, the final end of generations of diasporic existence. It attempts to make the Zionist project of a Jewish nation the only legitimate project for all Jews," when, in fact, many Jews publicly oppose Zionism and Israeli policies. Doing so isn't anti-Judaic, anti-Israeli, or anti-Semitic because they, like Martin Luther King, believe that:

"True peace is not the absence of violence, but the presence of justice," an element entirely absent in how Israelis treat Palestinians and their own Arab citizens.

Asking why Israel is heavily criticized, CJPME cites the following:

-- its continued defiling of "the international consensus for respect for human and humanitarian rights - as reflected in international law....;"

-- its maintenance of "one of the longest military occupations in modern history" over Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan, and Shebba Farms area of Lebanon;

-- its repeated violations of international law and UN resolutions; and

-- its imposition of "elements resembling those of South African Apartheid."

As a result, it's unsurprising that anti-Semitism accusations are made to stifle Israeli criticism as a way to diffuse and perhaps criminalize them. The possibility worries CJPME enough to say they can't be used "to infringe on fundamental freedoms enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms comprising Part I of the March 29, 1982 Constitution Act. CJPME formally petitioned to participate in CPCCA's inquiry that so far excludes Israeli critics.

"America's Last Taboo"

It was distinguished Palestinian American activist/scholar Edward Said's title for his New Left Review November-December 2000 article citing the "near-total triumph for Zionism in the United States." Then and now, Israel is cast as victim in a dangerous neighborhood acting only in self-defense against "rock-throwing barbarians (comprising) what is essentially an invasive force. (It's the) Palestinians who are encroaching on Israeli territory, not the other way around."

The message is so ingrained that the media repeat it ad nauseam, and Said more than once said that the entire US Senate can be marshaled in a matter of hours to support Israel on virtually anything - even a wanton attack as malicious as Operation Cast Lead and numerous previous ones for many decades.

Exhibits A and B: S 10 and HR 34 with near-identical language saying:

-- "Hamas was founded with the stated goal of destroying the State of Israel."

Fact Check

Hamas was founded in 1987 during the first Intifada to resist repression and occupation through negotiation and international consensus, not war or terrorism as falsely portrayed. Yet as international law allows, it strongly defends itself when attacked.

-- "Hamas has been designated by the Secretary of State as a Foreign Terrorist Organization."

Fact Check

True because any organization or group opposing imperial aggression and dominance is so designated.

-- "Hamas has refused to comply with the requirements of the Quartet (the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations) that Hamas recognize Israel's right to exist, renounce violence, and agree to accept previous agreements between Israel and the Palestinians."

Fact Check

Hamas repeatedly called for peace and an end of violence and expressed willingness to negotiate on the basis of "hudnah" or temporary truce. Its founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, said Hamas would end its liberating struggle "if the Zionists ended (their) occupation of Palestinian territories and stopped killing Palestinian women, children and innocent civilians." More recently, Hamas offered peace and Israeli recognition in return for a Palestinian state inside pre-1967 borders, its Occupied Territories.

-- "in June 2006, Hamas crossed into Israel, attacked Israeli forces and kidnapped Corporal Gilad Shalit, whom they continue to hold today."

Fact Check

On June 25, Palestinians, including Hamas, responded to repeated Israeli attacks by striking an Israeli military post near Kerem Shalom crossing, southeast of Rafah, killing two IDF soldiers, injuring several others, and capturing (not kidnapping) a third, corporal Shalit. Israel's long-planned Operation Summer Rain followed resulting in mass killings and destruction ahead of its horrendous July war on Lebanon, causing over 1,000 deaths and destruction comparable to Operation Cast Lead.

-- "Hamas has launched thousands of rockets and mortars since Israel dismantled settlements and withdrew from Gaza in 2005."

Fact Check

Many dozens, not thousands, of crude homemade rockets and mortars were used only in self-defense in response to repeated Israeli attacks with the most technologically advanced weapons, mostly from Washington, including F-16s, helicopter gunships, and powerful munitions, some clearly illegal.

House and Senate resolutions also cite, but don't substantiate, Iranian help; Hamas locating "elements of its terrorist infrastructure in civilian population centers, thus using innocent civilians as human shields," a practice Israel has used for decades; the threat "hundreds of thousands of Israelis" face from rocket attacks, giving them no alternative but to respond.

Dismissive about Gaza's two and a half year siege, the resolutions stress how "Israel has facilitated humanitarian aid to Gaza with over 500 trucks and numerous ambulances entering the Gaza Strip since December 26, 2008."

It also says "the ultimate goal of the United States is a sustainable resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that will allow for a viable and independent Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with the State of Israel...."

Fact Check

After Hamas' democratic January 2006 election, Israel, with Western support, collectively punished Gazans maliciously. It denied all outside aid, imposed an embargo and sanctions, and stepped up repression, repeated attacks, killings, targeted assassinations, and property destruction, followed by a medieval siege since June 2007 causing grave humanitarian harm by restricting essential to life foods, medicines, and medical equipment as well as electricity, fuel, construction materials, and virtually everything needed to function normally.

Israel facilitates misery, not humanitarian aid, peace or Palestinian self-determination it's spent decades to deny through violence, intimidation, naked aggression, confrontation over diplomacy and peaceful coexistence, and what scholar Joel Kovel calls "a machine for the manufacture of human rights abuses," facilitated by Washington's financial, military, and political support.

Ending "America's last taboo" is the way forward toward a viable, sustainable Middle East peace, possible only when 42 years of occupation end and Palestinians are again free - so far, what Israel and Washington won't allow or even consider.

The 2009 Hate Crimes Prevention Act

The Department of Justice FBI web site (fbi.gov) defines them as follows:

"A hate crime, also known as a bias crime, is a criminal offense committed against a person, property, or society that is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin."

On April 29, the House passed HR 1913: Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 "To provide Federal assistance to States, local jurisdictions, and Indian tribes to prosecute hate crimes, and for other purposes."

On April 28, S 909: Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act was introduced "to provide Federal assistance to States, local jurisdictions, and Indian tribes to prosecute hate crimes, and for other purposes."

On July 15, 2009, the measure was adopted as an amendment to S 1390, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010. On July 23, the full measure passed.

On October 8, the House passed HR 2647: National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 containing hate crimes prevention provisions.

On October 22, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act passed, then on October 28, it became law after president Obama signed it. A same day New York Times Jeff Zeleny article titled, "Obama Signs Hate Crimes Bill" said it:

"expands the definition of violent federal hate crimes to those committed because of a victim's (actual or perceived) sexual orientation (or identity). Under existing federal law, hate crimes are defined as those motivated by the victim's race, color, religion or national origin," even though, short of reading an offender's mind, there's no way to know if a crime was committed for other reasons besides "hate."

Further, the bill doesn't repeal the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, banning gays from the military if they admit their sexual orientation, or the Defense of Marriage Act, defining legal marriage to be between a man and a woman.

In addition, it doesn't address universal civil and human rights; patients' rights to effective health care; students' rights to a good education to the highest level; and everybody's right to the essentials of life, including safe food, water, and clean air; adequate shelter; full protection under the law; and democracy for everyone, not just the elite few.

Nonetheless, the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender advocacy group praised the bill as the "nation's first major piece of civil rights legislation" for LGBT. Others called it advancing civil rights, but critics expressed concerns.

The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a conservative legal alliance partnered with over 300 ministries and organizations, fears that pastors calling homosexuality a sin may be linked to a hate crime if a parishioner harms someone for their sexual orientation. ADF says it's seen:

"evidence of where 'hate crimes' legislation leads when it has been tried around the world: It paves the way for the criminalization of speech that is not deemed 'politically correct.' (These laws) fly in the face of the underlying purpose of the First Amendment, which was designed specifically to protect unpopular speech."

Others fear an attack on dissent against anyone expressing politically unpopular views at a time of disdain for human rights and eroding civil liberties putting everyone at risk.

The new law, however, prosecutes "crimes of violence," defined by section 16, title 18, US code as:

(a) "an offense that has an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against the person or property of another, or

(b) any other offense that is a felony and that, by its nature, involves a substantial risk that physical force against the person or property of another may be used in the course of committing the offense."

Whether new measures will follow bears watching given a severe economic crisis and the fragility of American democracy at a time it's transitioning toward a full-blown police state with noted trends watchers like Gerald Celente predicting the "greatest depression" unleashing violence, street crime, and mass civil unrest because "when people lose everything, and they have nothing else to lose, they lose it."

If so, government repression will follow with harsh police state measures because when powerful people fear losing what's taken them decades to achieve, they'll do anything to defend it, including criminalizing protected speech, dissent, and whatever threatens their privilege or important allies, none more valued than Israel.

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The Difference Between Iran and Israel

"Defending Iran and Condemning the West

Dog Poet Transmitting…….

....

So far as I know, Iran does not have a ghetto of torment which contains the original inhabitants of Iran behind razor wire fences and the Iranians do not use these captive unfortunates for target practice, nor do they routinely kill children for sport. I haven’t heard anything about the Iranians harvesting organs for profit nor have I seen Iran attack her neighbors on a regular basis with zero provocation. I have heard nothing about cluster bombs or banned weapons used on civilian populations either.

Iran’s tens of thousands of long time Jewish residents are very happy in Iran and despite great pressure on the part of Israel, they have no desire to migrate to that fascist, racist state. Iran’s recent elections were certainly more legitimate than any number of recent American elections and the very wide difference in votes between Ahmanedijad and his western backed opponent certainly cancels out any possible effect of any possible hanky panky.

Common sense and the application of anything close to normal intelligence upon the situation shows that the intention of the western neo-cons is nothing less than total subjugation of the Middle East at the behest of corporations seeking to profit from the plunder. These entities orchestrated the 9/11 attacks; that is now beyond dispute and they have used the pretext of this false flag to invade Afghanistan and Iraq with Iran being the main prize from the very gitgo. Of course, the long term intention is to impact on China and Russia in various ways that serve the interest of world hegemony.

I hardly know what to make of countries like America; the UK and Israel, along with their stable of willing whores, in countries of lesser influence, here and there, who have been subjugated to global, fascist enterprise by dint of behind the scenes currency exchanges and arm twisting. They deplore what they call torture and false imprisonment in Iran while they are flat out, in your face, guilty of these very acts on a much greater scale and far more conclusively proven. Millions have been maimed; killed, displaced and tortured by agents of the west, based on attacks carried out by agents of the west, against their own countries and then blamed on those who had no part in it. They have been torturing people for information that only they possess and they know this as they do this.

Today, mindless legions of zombie shoppers descend upon the stores and malls of the falling empire for every kind of manufactured gifts for themselves and others, so that they can celebrate their imagined affection for each other in every way but the ways that might count for something. Meanwhile, their armies of occupation relentlessly plunder and pillage foreign nations because multi-national corporations, who run their governments, have decided they want what is buried in these lands and they don’t want to pay for it.

They brandish their nuclear might against nations without nuclear might and accuse them of seeking to possess nuclear weapons, which constant investigations prove they are not seeking, but that no sane person could blame them for if they did; given the threat they are forced to exist under. This rank hypocrisy stinks to the heavens. This is the real global warming, which is caused by the noxious methane of their relentless hypocrisy and the heat of their unbelievable greed, as well as their fiery hatred for any nation that will not willing lay its head beneath their hobnailed boots, as they march forward in pursuit of twisted psychopathic destinies, whose intent is to lay waste to the whole of the Earth.

Their corporations pour endless millions of gallons of toxic wastes into their water supplies, at home and abroad. They create bio-weapons with which they assault the world’s populations, as their pharmaceutical combines manufacture vaccines that are worse than the viruses they have engineered. They steal in broad daylight and laugh about it. As Lao Tzu said, “What kind of men are these, who never hunger, never thirst but eat and drink until they burst? There are other brigands but these are the worst of all the highway’s harms".

I don’t have the time or the space to list even a small part of their crimes and offenses but I can tell you without the slightest degree of uncertainty that I know who’s doing what and why....

***************

All of this is taking place because the illegal, Rothschild created country of Israel, has control of the world’s money supply and is using this to force compliance around the world. This is not a country at all. It is a criminal banking concern, operating under the camouflage of a sovereign nation, with the intention of controlling the world. The country was founded under the guise of a massive hoax that reveals the damning details of itself with the dawn of every new day. The truth is coming out....

Read the rest HERE

More:

"Obama (rhymes with Osama) is going to send some tens of thousands of new zombies into Afghanistan to protect Bush Senior’s opium crops and secure necessary transit lines and resources for that percentage of the world that uses far more than it needs to live at a higher standard than those they are stealing from. He’s also going to Copenhagen to shill for a major criminal enterprise, whose intention is yet another unbearable tax upon the backs of humanity, as well as to secure the financing to operate a world-wide, fascist governing body....

I realize that some numbers of us (and certainly the majority of people who read here) wish that we were living in another time but here we are.... Every day I look at the news, which I automatically identify as the particular lies and distortions of the moment. Then I know what it is that they want us to believe. I’ve got a pretty good idea of how we got into this mess. I’m a great deal less clear on how we are going to get out of it.

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Coming to Grips With the Empire

I have a hard time with it. Maybe this man can help.

"Savvy to a Fault: Coming to Terms With Imperial Power

by Chris Floyd
03 December 2009

"How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it." -- Henry David Thoreau

To me, this quote from Thoreau expresses the only rational, moral and humane stance that a citizen can take toward the vast and brutal machinery of the American imperial state in our time. The crimes of this state are monstrous, and mounting. But what is worse is that these crimes are not aberrations; they are the very essence of the system -- they are its goal, its product, its lifeblood.

And what is this crimeful essence? Matt Taibbi described it well in a recent article:

Our Western society quite openly embraces war as a means of solving problems, and for quite some time now has fashioned its entire social and economic structure around the preparation for war.

I believe this is an indisputable fact. Decades of historical evidence give it proof. The last three decades especially have seen the relentless acceleration of this systemic evolution. The quality of life for ordinary Americans, those outside the golden circle of the elite and their retainers, has decayed immeasurably – and measurably. Stagnant wages. Degraded infrastructure. A poisoned food chain. Whole communities -- with all their social, political, cultural and family networks -- gutted by the heedless flight of capital to cheap labor (and slave labor) markets abroad, and by the dissolution of an embodied economic life into the shadow-play of high finance, the ghostly manipulation of numbers that produces nothing of value except gargantuan profits for a very few. A bonfire of public amenities, making daily life harder, harsher, constricted, diminished. Ever-growing social and economic disparity, shrinking the circle of opportunity. Two million citizens behind bars, in prisons overflowing with non-violent drug cases – nightmarish institutions given over to gangs, neglect, punitive regimens and private profit.

Yet this long, grinding process of diminishment and degradation has been accompanied by a never-ending expansion of the war machine into a dominant position over almost every aspect of American life. Not even the ending of the Cold War slowed this excrescence; defense budgets grew, new enemies were found, there were new missions, new commands, new wars. The ruling elite of American society were – and are – obviously willing to let the welfare, prosperity, opportunities and liberties of the common people sink deeper and deeper into the mire, in order to finance a system structured around war, with all the attendant corruption, brutalization and accrual of authoritarian power that war brings.

This is the system we have. It’s right out in the open. There is a deep-rooted expectation – and not, alas, just among the elite -- that the world should jump to America’s tune, by force if necessary. And when, for whatever reason, some part of the world does not jump – or bump and grind – to the Potomac beat, then it becomes a “problem” that must be “solved,” by one means or another, with, of course, “all options on the table,” all the time. And whether these “problems” are approached with blunt, bullying talk or a degree of cajolery and pious rhetoric, the chosen stance is always backed up with the ever-present threat of military action, up to and including the last of those “options” that always decorate the table: utter annihilation.

This is not even questioned, must less debated or challenged. America’s right to intervene in the affairs other nations by violent force (along with a constant series of illegal covert activities) – and to impose an empire of military plantations across the length and breadth of the entire planet – is the basic assumption, the underlying principle, the fervently held faith shared by both national parties, and the entire elite Establishment. And if you want to have the necessary instruments to maintain such a state of hegemony, then you must indeed structure your society and economy around war.

Many nations – all vanished now – have done this. The Roman Empire was one. Nazi Germany was another. At great cost to the economic, social and political life of ordinary Germans, Adolf Hitler geared the state to produce the war machine necessary to assert the dominance in world affairs which he felt was Germany’s natural right. One of his chief aims was to procure enough “living space” and natural resources in Eastern Europe to compete with America’s growing economic might. The Holocaust of European Jews was, for all its horror, just a preliminary to the greater “ethnic cleansing” to come. As historian Adam Tooze reminds us in The Wages of Destruction, the Nazis had drawn up detailed plans for the extermination – by active mass murder and deliberate starvation – of up to 40 million East Europeans.

Today, we all recognize the inhuman madness behind this hegemonic ambition. We shake our heads and say, “Whatever evils we may be accused of, we have never and would never do such a thing.” Perhaps. But leaving aside for a moment the millions – millions – of African slaves and Native Americans who died in order to procure the living space and natural resources of North and South America for European peoples, it is clear that most Americans – the elite above all – can easily countenance the deaths of, say, more than one million innocent Iraqis, or upwards of three million Southeast Asians, without any disturbance in their sense of national righteousness, their bedrock belief that the United States has the natural right, even the duty, to assert its hegemony over world affairs.

The mass murder in Iraq, the horrible slaughter in Vietnam and Cambodia, the direct involvement in the massacre of hundreds of thousands of people in Indonesia, Latin America, and the Iran-Iraq War – to name just a few such operations carried out within the last generation – are regarded as actions which, however "mistaken" some might feel them to have been, were undertaken in good faith, to "preserve our way of life" from this or that imminent, overwhelming threat to our very national existence. [Which was, of course, the same reasoning Hitler used to justify his militarism: the urgent need to protect the German people from maniacal, irrational, bloodsworn enemies bent on their total destruction.]

And let us not forget that American war planners also drew up detailed plans involving the extermination of tens of millions of East Europeans in "first strike" nuclear attacks – plans which they often urged national leaders to put into practice. And even today, the constantly asserted vow to keep the nuclear option "on the table" at all times means that every single action or policy toward a "problem" nation carries with it the explicit threat to kill millions of people – to outdo the Holocaust in a matter of minutes.

Can one really look at such plans and attitudes, and at the towering, Everest-like mountain of corpses produced by American polices – just in the last generation – and say that there is not also a form of inhuman madness behind this hegemonic ambition as well? Is this really a system that one can be associated with honorably in any way? What should we think about a person who wants to lead such a system, who wants to take hold of the driving wheel of the war machine, to use it, to expand it, to accept all of its premises, to keep all of its horrific "options" forever on the table, to feed it and gorge it and coddle it and appease it at every turn, while millions of their own people sink further into degradation and diminishment?

Shouldn't someone who knowingly, willingly, eagerly bent all of their energies toward taking power in such a system instantly and irretrievably forfeit our regard and support? Should we really give such a "leader" the benefit of the doubt, cut him some slack, be ready to praise him when he or his government momentarily behaves in a normal, rational or legal manner? Should we grimly insist that he is the only choice we have, that his heart is probably in the right place, and that all we can do is try and cajole him into being "better"?

II.

In the light of these considerations, it is astonishing to see what has been the main reaction of many leading progressive writers to Barack Obama's murderous escalation of the imperial war in Afghanistan and the dirty war in Pakistan. While voicing their "disappointment" with the decision, they have reserved most of their scorn not for the man who has ordered this new tranche of mass death and inhuman suffering, but for those who have accused Obama of "betrayal."

No, that's not a joke. The new progressive line on the escalation seems to be this: "We knew all along he was going to do it, so what's the big deal?"

Read the rest HERE

Obama: Same Old Same Old

"Obama and the Same Old Bush Lies, for the Same Reasons

by: Peter Chamberlin

The war in Afghanistan is being escalated on false pretenses. There is zero chance to “win” the war with the “new” (which is the same old failed) strategy and everybody involved with it knows it. When Obama and McChrystal use the words “win” and “victory,” they are not using the same dictionary used by the rest of the human race. “Victory” to them, means that the greater undefined mission can continue, not come to an end.

Afghanistan, like Iraq, will never see the withdrawal of American/NATO forces; that’s why all the giant super-bases are needed in both countries. That also applies to the massive super-embassy being built in Islamabad. “Victory” is not winning, but is the point in the war when large numbers of troops fighting this war can be safely transferred to the next war. This is what we are seeing in the so-called withdrawal from Iraq and will probably see in the anticipated withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2011. There will never be a real American withdrawal from any of these countries, unless it is forced upon them by the people.

Just like Iraq, Afghanistan has been drawn-out until the start of the next war in Pakistan. This is done with the fraudulent war strategy of training replacement armies to fight the enemies which America’s superior forces could not defeat. Switching missions from an offensive war to a training mission merely gives the adversary time to reinforce. All the generals and strategists are aware of this; it is simply a part of the plan. The plan has nothing to do with defeating anyone, except maybe for eventually defeating the Russians. We might also fight for the sake of denying energy resources to our greater adversaries, the Chinese.

The “war on terror” is in reality, a war on mediocrity. We are waging this war in order to maintain our position as “Number One” boss of the world. Our leaders have determined that we cannot accept any other nation becoming our equal, meaning that they would have to share the power that they have accumulated unto themselves. The infamous document from the “neocon” Project for a New American Century, which clearly delineates this triumphal American ideology, is not an expression of a radical minority, but rather, a summation of the single American ideology which is common to both political parties. There are two neoconservative parties in America, masquerading as opposites.

The escalation in southern Afghanistan is embraced by both parties, as American and NATO forces move against local Taliban, hoping to push all the fighters into Balochistan, or back into South Waziristan. The entire war effort has consisted of herding the militants wherever central command planned to go next. This is the reason that many of the posts along the Durand Line were closed before Pakistan moved into S. Waziristan. Who ever heard of military planners opening the back door before coming in the front? How can one pincer by itself perform a pincer movement?

As long as the American people are willing to wage war without defined missions, our so-called leaders will be able to play these dangerous games. One would think that the ever loyal American veterans would grow tired of watching their comrades and their own children die for wars based on nothing but lies. The dishonor they bring upon all servicemen, by not speaking-up for their own, will haunt them until the day they die. Soldiers who are martyred in the liberation of countries are rightly honored, but who will honor those who have given their lives in wars fought to enslave mankind?

The American people were enlisted in this war under the pretense of fighting against a malignant evil, only to see this war hijacked in the service of other causes. The fight against terrorists has become a war against nuclear proliferation, a war for Israel’s security, a war for oil, a war for any reason they dream-up.

What has become of the moral sense of the people of the United States? Has life for us become so hard and uncertain that we will support any effort to merely keep things from getting worse, even if that means turning every country, especially our own, into a police state? We surrender our rights to choose our own destinies when we submit to the extortion that to do otherwise will make things get a lot worse. Isn’t this the same threat that Prince Bandar allegedly made to the British Crown over ending pay-offs–that failing to comply with his demands would mean that the terror against Britain would get a lot worse?

If we don’t support Obama and McChrystal’s surge, then what will happen? They tell us that if we don’t let them have their way, then the terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan will only grow worse. I say that is a total lie. If they do escalate the Special Forces and Predator strikes into Pakistan, launching a powerful counter-insurgency campaign, then I guarantee that everywhere will become like Peshawar is today. Peshawar is bombed daily, because the armies of militants were driven to the city’s doorstep.

Apparently these assholes haven’t figured-out the formula for this war yet—the more innocent people you kill, the more young men will volunteer to fight against the Americans to avenge them. The anti-American terrorism that makes the whole world suffer is not a spontaneous phenomenon; it is a reaction against what we have been doing in that part of the world for a lot longer than this current war has been raging. They fight because we kill their friends and relatives, simple as that.

America’s military leaders act as if they make policy for the politicians, instead of the other way around. They make their plans and tell us that we must stick to them; else our “American way of life” will perish from the face of this earth. Well, maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, after all. They don’t bother to own-up to the facts about our precious way of life, even though everything around us screams-out about the utter wrongness of our ways.

The continuing global economic collapse has been precipitated by American greed and profit-takers upsetting the balance of the international economic system. The low-level world war we see before us is a direct result of the many unnecessary low-level wars we have started, trying to preserve our inflated status. One day soon, the world will hold American leaders accountable for what they have done to the world in their greed. But in the end, it will be the American people, who will pay the price for the havoc that has been unleashed, in addition to the hundreds of millions globally who live in our chosen war zones. In the end, America as we know it will cease to exist within the global American empire, or in the catastrophic chaos that will result from failure of the empire. Either way, the America of our youth is no more.

It will only be through our own uprising and chaining these criminal psychopaths who run and ruin our Nation that the world will be spared what is barreling down the road at us. The war in Afghanistan is but an act of very desperate men.

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Israel's Puppet

"Obama is Israel’s puppet

by Paul Craig Roberts

It didn’t take the Israel Lobby very long to bring President Obama to heel regarding his prohibition against further illegal Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land.

Obama discovered that a mere American president is powerless when confronted by the Israel Lobby and that the United States simply is not allowed a Middle East policy separate from Israel’s.

Obama also found out that he cannot change anything else, either, if he ever intended to do so.

The military/security lobby has war and a domestic police state on its agenda, and a mere American president can’t do anything about it.

President Obama can order the Guantanamo torture chamber closed and kidnapping and rendition and torture to be halted, but no one carries out the order. -Essentially, Obama is irrelevant.

President Obama can promise that he is going to bring the troops home, and the military lobby says, “No, you are going to send them to Afghanistan, and in the meantime start a war in Pakistan and maneuver Iran into a position that will provide an excuse for a war there, too. Wars are too profitable for us to let you stop them.”

And the mere president has to say, “Yes, sir!”

Obama can promise health care to 50 million uninsured Americans, but he can’t override the veto of the war lobby and the insurance lobby.

The war lobby says its war profits are more important than health care and that the country can’t afford both the “war on terror” and “socialized medicine.”

The insurance lobby says health care has to be provided by private health insurance; otherwise, we can’t afford it.

The war and insurance lobbies rattled their campaign contribution pocketbooks and quickly convinced Congress and the White House that the real purpose of the health care bill is to save money by cutting Medicare and Medicaid benefits, thereby “getting entitlements under control.”

“Entitlements” is a right-wing word used to cast aspersion on the few things that the government did, in the distant past, for citizens. Social Security and Medicare, for example, are denigrated as “entitlements.” The right wing goes on endlessly about Social Security and Medicare as if they were welfare giveaways to shiftless people who refuse to look after themselves, whereas in actual fact citizens are vastly overcharged for the meager benefits with a 15.30% tax on their wages and salaries.

Indeed, for decades now the federal government has been funding its wars and military budgets with the surplus revenues collected by the Social Security tax on labor.

To claim, as the right wing does, that we can’t afford the only thing in the entire budget that has consistently produced a revenue surplus indicates that the real agenda is to drive the mere citizen into the ground.

The real entitlements are never mentioned. The “defense” budget is an entitlement for the military/security complex about which President Eisenhower warned us 50 years ago. A person has to be crazy to believe that the United States, “the world’s only superpower,” protected by oceans on its East and West and by Canada and Mexico on its North and South, needs a “defense” budget larger than the military spending of the rest of the world combined.

The military budget is nothing but an entitlement for the military/security complex. To hide this fact, the entitlement is disguised as protection against “enemies” and passed through the Pentagon.

I say cut out the middleman and simply allocate a percentage of the federal budget to the military/security complex. This way we won’t have to concoct reasons for invading other countries and go to war in order for the military/security complex to get its entitlement. It would be a lot cheaper just to give them the money outright, and it would save a lot of lives and grief at home and abroad.

The US invasion of Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with American national interests. It had to do with armaments profits and with eliminating an obstacle to Israeli territorial expansion. The cost of the war, aside from the $3 trillion, was over 4,000 dead Americans, over 30,000 wounded and maimed Americans, tens of thousands of broken American marriages and lost careers, one million dead Iraqis, 4 million displaced Iraqis, and a destroyed country.

All of this was done for the profits of the military/security complex and to make paranoid Israel, armed with 200 nuclear weapons, feel “secure.”

My proposal would make the military/security complex even wealthier as the companies would get the money without having to produce the weapons. Instead, all the money could go for multi-million dollar bonuses and dividend payouts to shareholders. No one, at home or abroad, would have to be killed, and the taxpayer would be better off.

No American national interest is served by the war in Afghanistan. As the former UK Ambassador Craig Murray disclosed, the purpose of the war is to protect Unocal’s interest in the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline. The cost of the war is many times greater than Unocal’s investment in the pipeline. The obvious solution is to buy out Unocal and give the pipeline to the Afghans as partial compensation for the destruction we have inflicted on that country and its population, and bring the troops home.

The reason my sensible solutions cannot be effected is that the lobbies think that their entitlements would not survive if they were made obvious. They think that if the American people knew that the wars were being fought to enrich the armaments and oil industries, the people would put a halt to the wars.

In actual fact, the American people have no say about what “their” government does. Polls of the public show that half or more of the American people do not support the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan and do not support President Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan. Yet, the occupations and wars continue. According to General Stanley McChrystal, the additional 40,000 troops he asked for are enough to stalemate the war, that is, to keep it going forever, the ideal situation for the armaments lobby.

The people want health care, but the government does not listen.

The people want jobs, but Wall Street wants higher priced stocks and forces American firms to offshore the jobs to countries where labor is cheaper.

The American people have no effect on anything. They can affect nothing. They have become irrelevant like Obama. And they will remain irrelevant as long as organized interest groups can purchase the US government.

The inability of the American democracy to produce any results that the voters want is a demonstrated fact. The total unresponsiveness of government to the people is conservatism’s contribution to American democracy. Some years ago, there was an effort to put government back into the hands of the people by constraining the ability of organized interest groups to pour enormous amounts of money into political campaigns and, thus, obligate the elected official to those whose money elected him. Conservatives said that any restraints would be a violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.

The same “protectors” of “free speech” had no objection to the Israel Lobby’s passage of the “hate crime” bill, which has criminalized criticism of Israel’s genocidal treatment of the Palestinians and continuing theft of their lands.

In less than one year, President Obama has betrayed all of his supporters and broken all of his promises. He is the total captive of the oligarchy of the ruling interest groups.

Unless he is saved by an orchestrated 9/11-type event, Obama is a one-term president.

Indeed, the collapsing economy will doom him regardless of a “terrorist event.”

The Republicans are grooming Palin. Our first female president, following our first black president, will complete the transition to an American police state by arresting critics and protesters of Washington’s immoral foreign and domestic policies, and she will complete the destruction of America’s reputation abroad.

Russia’s Putin has already compared the US to Nazi Germany, and the Chinese premier has likened the US to an irresponsible, profligate debtor.

Increasingly the rest of the world sees the US as the sole source of all of its problems. Germany has lost the chief of its armed forces and its defense minister, because the US convinced or pressured, by hook or crook, the German government to violate its constitution and to send troops to fight for Unocal’s interest in Afghanistan. The Germans had pretended that their troops were not really fighting, but were engaged in a “peace-keeping operation.” This more or less worked until the Germans called in an air strike that murdered 100 women and children lined up for a fuel allotment.

The British are investigating their leading criminal, former Prime Minister Tony Blair, and his deception of his own cabinet in order to do Bush’s bidding and provide some cover for Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq. The UK investigators have been denied the ability to bring criminal charges, but the issue of war based entirely on orchestrated deception and lies is getting a hearing. It will reverberate throughout the world, and the world will note that there is no corresponding investigation in the US, the country that originated the False War.

Meanwhile, the US investment banks, which have wrecked the financial stability of many governments, including that of the US, continue to control, as they have done since the Clinton administration, US economic and financial policy. The world has suffered terribly from the Wall Street gangsters, and now looks upon America with a critical eye.

The United States no longer commands the respect it enjoyed under President Ronald Reagan or President George Herbert Walker Bush. World polls show that the US and its puppet master are regarded as the two greatest threats to peace. Washington and Israel outrank on the most dangerous list the crazy regime in North Korea.

The world is beginning to see America as a country that needs to go away. When the dollar is overinflated by a Washington unable to pay its bills, will the world be motivated by greed and try to save us in order to save its investments, or will it say, thank God, good riddance?

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Our Lie-Based Reality

"Our Lie-Based Reality

by: Peter Chamberlin

Our government cannot function without the trust of the people. Without unshakeable faith that the people will allow the government to proceed, the governing coalitions of politicians will not dare to implement their own plans. Fear of popular reprisals (which could diminish their power) restrains even the most devious politicians from acting. Even Hitler himself would not have dared to proceed with his vile plans, if he hadn’t believed that the people would let him get away with it. When government plans are so repulsive that no sane person would support them, then it becomes necessary to construct a false version of reality to spoon-feed the people, in order to gain the requisite trust, and with it, the people’s consent.

This is our current situation in America and throughout the Americanized world.

Government could not function, commerce could not go forward, human interaction would become even more restraineed, if the false “official version” of reality suddenly collapsed. For then, all we would have left is the cold hard reality that our government has necessarily kept from us.

If the official versions of events were blown away, we could clearly see the obvious truths and the absurdity of the lies that concealed them.

Perhaps then, for a brief second, we would laugh at the apparent contradictions in the “magic bullet” official explanation of the single, undamaged bullet, which allegedly killed President Kennedy and wounded Gov. John Connally, a feat which required the bullet to change course in midair.

Somehow, I find it hard to believe that anyone would laugh if we all suddenly admitted to ourselves and to each other the obvious absurdity in claims that kerosene fires reduced concrete and steel into talcum powder in two one-hundred story skyscrapers, which collapsed at freefall speed.

Laughing over the absurdity of the official lies that have been used to justify killing a million or more innocent souls would be a macabre sacrilege, an affront to both God and man. Yet, isn’t that what many of us have been doing all along, as we celebrated our retribution against the official scapegoats, while others revelled in the brutality of our military’s executioners, high-fiving their teammates over missions accomplished?

But none of this is happening; no absurd lies are being exposed. No air is being cleared. For politicians, who are afraid to put-on their pants in the morning, without first testing the political wind, there isn’t the slightest hint of the piles of fetid, rotting flesh that our troops are accumulating in invaded foreign lands, in their missions of “liberation.” They have received no indications that We the People will not continue to allow them to “liberate” our world into a quite real state of slavery.

Operating under the absurd delusion that American and NATO troops (who are destroying multiple nations) are there to “defend America,” throngs of people gather for patriotic parades, heaping piles of honors upon those highly-trained young men who kill for false visions of “God and country.” If only these men who hold honor and service to mankind in such high esteem (even though they are bathed in the blood of innocence) could see beyond the carefully constructed false reality for just a moment, then their own consciences (if they still had them) would probably convince them of their own personal guilt and immorality. If the devil that blinds their eyes could be restrained for but a moment, then perhaps God would come rushing back in.

But that is not happening. As a result, we stand ready to up the ante in Afghanistan, as the American people watch their TV sets and ignore the fact that Obama is about to make our criminal assault on the Pashtun people a whole lot worse. Because Obama’s behavioral specialists have taken America’s temperature and pronounced us willing participants in allowing the escalation of the slaughter, he will hold the banner of righteous retribution over his head, like some black knight in shining armor, leading the charge to slay the great beast called “al Qaida.”

Obama and McChrystal will lead us into Pakistan in hot pursuit of an apparition, chasing the great bloody “Islamist” beast which has so obligingly preceeded us into this prized territory. Wasn’t that convenient, that these evil militants created the conditions for us, which would make it possible to go where we have always wanted to be, Western Pakistan?

This brings us back to the greatest contradictions in the official story of the “war on terror” (despite repeated denials and charges of “ludicrous” and “absurdity”), the militants, who are invariably described as “Islamists,” always create the conditions that will justify American intervention, wherever energy interests crop-up. Claims that we are at war with “militant Islam” justify sending US forces wherever the militants appear, and they always appear in areas where American oil companies are already focused. Isn’t that convenient? ”Islamists” in Central Asia are the vanguard of American expeditionary forces, probing deeply into energy-rich territories of the former Soviet Union. No matter what western media reports may say to the contrary, rest assured that Russian investigators are aware of all this as they investigate this week’s bombing of the Nevsky Express.

Pakistan, the great prize in the current phase of the Imperial war project, is being pryed open like ripened fruit, to facilitate advancing American forces. The great irony here, is that this is being done for America by Pakistanis. The “Islamists” who are turning the Central Asian states into the next battlegrounds have all received their basic training in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Now these black crows have returned home to roost, as they ply their evil trade in the North West Frontier Province and FATA. Safely entrenched there, despite recent pseudo-offensives allegedly launched against them by the Army, the militants perform a carefully choreographed dance with their former trainers, the ISI and the Army. Their dance creates the illusion of tribal war, projecting the image of the Army as the great defenders of the “Land of the Pure,” validating further Army escalations, which, in themselves, will justify the next phase of the American occupation.

Following the pattern that was set in the very beginning by Pres. Carter and Mr. Brzezinski, a bunch of “stirred-up Muslims” have justified every American intervention in Afghanistan, just as they are now validating steps into Pakistan and into Central Asia. It is a time-tested ploy that has worked on the American people every time it has ever been played. It has been so easy to sell an un-Christian assault against all those scary dark-skinned Muslims to such a bigoted, frightened racist nation as the United States. This is the primary reason that we have been given a black president, to dispute the charge that this is a racist war. How could it be a racist war, if it is being led by a black man? The cleverness of our captors is only exceeded by their audacity.

They, like their mentor Hitler, understand fully the meaning of the “big lie” concept–make your lies so big and outrageous that they are beyond the ability of the common man to question them.

Hesitation by Obama as he tried to play the “Islamist” card once again, tells us that rising popular displeasure with this war is undermining confidence within the ruling class that the people will accept much more of this. Hence, before the new escalation was announced, it was revealed that an “exit strategy” was also being sought. This act of misdirection restored the leaders’ confidence that the people would take the bait and swallow this latest escalation whole, hook, line and sinker.

With this renewed confidence in the people continuing to act like sheep being led to the slaughter, Obama is announcing the new exit strategy/escalation before an obedient, if not down-right adoring audience, today at West Point. The only thing that will prevent the unfolding of this premeditated act of mass-murder is a sudden revelation for our secret leaders that the old official lies aren’t going to cut it anymore, that We the Sheeple won’t play along with the usual bullshit anymore.

The only thing that will save our rotten souls, is if we all get really mad at ourselves for allowing this travesty of international justice to continue, and convince our overlords that our minds have been changed. First, we must get mad, then, we must convince them just how angry we really are.

We the People are mad as hell and we are not going to take it anymore!

Watch: VIDEO

Related:

"The sudden interest of the subservient mainstream media in this old bit of news is a weak attempt to discredit ongoing investigations into nefarious CIA mind-control and other dangerous practices. They want to make investigators into “conspiracy nuts” for pursuing this angle with garbage “news” like this. It tells me that some of us must be getting close to the truth." -- There Are No Sunglasses

All I Needed to See

I didn't watch the speech and I don't watch television news so I didn't really know what he actually said; however, I don't really need to know what else he said after seeing this:

"It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak....

I don't even like reading him; forget listening or watching a speech.

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Yeah, that TV is staying off.

Climategate Story....Not Going Away

"Climategate Story....Not Going Away

Dear Main Stream Media,

We know you are doing your best to cover this up. It is understandable, but very immoral. Instead of focusing on one of the biggest scientific scandals ever, and identifying the real scoundrels involved, you have given in to both corporate and governmental pressure. A lot of big companies pay you a great deal of money to advertise their products and they really want to continue the lies about the existence of global warming that they have helped perpetuate. Governments have their own shady agendas.

What you must understand is that WE THE PEOPLE are not letting this go! We will get the word out and we will make sure the truth is told, even if you stopped doing that long ago.

Sincerely,
Truth Seeking Citizens of the World

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"CLIMATEGATE - Climate Conspiracy

Broadly speaking, this scandal will alter the burden of proof. From this point on, proponents of global warming theory will receive no benefit of the doubt. Wanton extrapolations, reliance on models in which data can be endlessly readjusted to fit the thesis, and attempts to stigmatize critics as scientifically illiterate will have to stop. Ad hominem attacks on critics suggesting that they are in the hire of “big oil” or other interests will be seen for the shabby evasions they always were. Let’s hope that the result of this scandal is a restoration of principled inquiry to an important public policy debate.

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"More on Climategate

In my previous post on Climategate I blithely said that nothing in the climate science email dump surprised me much. Having waded more deeply over the weekend I take that back.

The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is surprising even to me. The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering....

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"The definition of “Climate deniers” has changed, thanks to ClimateGate

Just a few months ago, the term “Climate Deniers” meant someone who denied that Global Warming was an absolute, unquestionable fact.

If you asked why some areas are colder, or why the movie “The Day After Tomorrow” depicted massive cold fronts, or why Al Gore says that air conditioning is a killer threat while running around town in an air conditioned limo, then you were a knuckle-dragging climate denier.

If you didn’t fall on your face and instantly believe anything the left said about the climate, you were a climate denier.

If you questioned the “hockey-stick” graph, which has been abandoned for a long time by most climatologists, you were a climate denier. "

If you wondered why the founder of The Weather Channel says the Global Warming movement is a hoax, you were a climate denier.

If you wondered why the planet has been cooling since 1998, you were a climate denier.

If you wondered why over 31,000 scientists (over 9,000 of them having PhD’s) have signed a petition rejecting global warming, then you were a climate denier.

After the revelation of private emails from the Hadley CRU at East Anglia over a week ago, the term climate deniers now has taken on an entirely new meaning. As you can see from the massive amount of information on the ClimateDepot website, as well as the online, searchable database of the emails and documents (which have been authenticated by officials at the East Anglia University), the whole Global Warming movement has been based on an elaborate fraud. Data was manipulated to create the impression that the world was warming (when it was really cooling for the past 11 years) and it was all the fault of the modern western lifestyle.

The new definition of a “Climate Denier” is one who denies that the ClimateGate fraud is real, or that the emails and documents are real, or, worst of all, says it doesn’t matter and that their plans to reduce the lifestyles of the populace and institute cap and trade and other heavy taxes will continue....

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"CLIMATEGATE - A REALLY inconvenient truth!

In 1991 720 oil wells were set alight in Iraq.

This must have thrown a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere.

If the global warming fable were true then the global temperature should have risen.

It didn't.

It actually dropped quite drastically at the end of the year.

Climate Change is Natural News

"ClimateGate scandal demonstrates intellectual protectionism of modern scientists

by Mike Adams

NaturalNews
Nov 30th, 2009

The inconvenient release of private email conversations among climate change scientists has been a boon for climate change skeptics. What emerges from the leaked emails is a depiction of a group of scientists who practice “intellectual protectionism” — meaning they know they’re right and they’ll do anything to protect their beliefs, even if it means hiding or manipulating data.

Sound familiar? Scientists in the pharmaceutical industry have been practicing this for decades. If you think the ClimateGate emails are revealing, just imagine what kind of similar emails are flying around between Big Pharma scientists who routinely manipulate study data and commit scientific fraud in the name of medicine. Time and time again, we see revelations of manipulated clinical trials where data was intentionally distorted in order to make a dangerous, useless drug appear to be safe and effective.

What ClimateGate scientists and Big Pharma scientists have in common is that they have both abandoned the core principles of good science in their quest to be right. Rather than asking questions of nature and humbly listening to the answers provided by the data, these scientists have staked out a position and decided to defend that position at all costs — even if it requires hiding or distorting data!

That approach is entirely unscientific, of course. In my mind, it now puts much of the recent global warming science in the same category as Big Pharma’s research: Pure quackery.

As Christopher Booker explains in The Telegraph, “The reason why even the Guardian’s George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated. What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/…)

Claiming to save the planet is no excuse for scientific fraud

Global warming may, indeed, be a real phenomenon. But trying to “prove” it by conspiring to manipulate the data in order to be right is absolutely the wrong way to go about studying the issue. In fact, these ClimateGate revelations have soundly discredited much of the global warming scientific community to the point where whatever these people say from now on simply cannot be trusted.

And that’s a shame because the question remains: What if the global warming scientists are really right? What if they’re right for all the wrong reasons, and they let their egos and their professional pride get in the way of conducting real science, thereby discrediting the very notion they were attempting to prove? That’s a possibility we would still do well to consider.

Yet, from their released emails, it’s quite clear these scientists were manipulating data to make the “science” fit their beliefs. They weren’t focused solely on the real facts; they were interested in forwarding their climate change theories using any means necessary — including scientific trickery.

What’s truly sad about all this — both in the climate change community and the pharmaceutical community — is that real science has seemingly been replaced by pseudoscientific quackery. I’ve known for a long time that you can’t trust scientists who work for pharmaceutical companies because they tend to distort their findings to support their employer. Now learning that a similar approach to junk science was apparently pursued by climate change scientists is more than a little disconcerting. It makes me wonder: Are there any honest scientists left anywhere?

The structure of scientific revolutions

It seems that in all realms of science, egos are more important than observational data. Whether you’re dealing with astronomy, oceanography, anthropology or biology, every scientist wants to be right, and most will do whatever it takes to defend their proclaimed theories and beliefs. This is why it remains so ridiculously difficult to penetrate the minds of modern doctors with facts about vitamin D and cancer, for example: These “scientific thinkers” have already decided what to believe, and they’ll defend those beliefs at all costs, even in the face of strong evidence that contradicts their beliefs.

What I’ve come to realize in all this is that many of today’s scientists aren’t scientific thinkers. They’re really just followers of their own private cult. Some “scientists” belong to the Cult of Pharmacology, and they believe pharmaceuticals are the answer to everything. Others belong to the Cult of Climatology, where scientific evidence is replaced with “faith” beliefs that are not allowed to be questioned. These micro-cults of scientific “truth” explain why science usually doesn’t advance until a whole generation of scientists either retires or expires.

It all brings us back to the amazing book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As this book explains, science almost never advances based entirely on new research, new ideas and new data. Instead, these new understandings collide with a wall of ego-driven resistance from the established scientific community. At times, such new ideas may linger for decades or even centuries before finally being seriously considered by the scientific community and then adopted as “truth.” The classic example of this is the “Earth is the center of the universe” belief that was eventually replaced with the current sun-centric solar system model — but not before many scientific thinkers were condemned (and even put to death) for their “preposterous” belief that the Earth was not the center of the universe.

In reality, modern science advances much like vomit — in sudden wretched heaves that are both painful and revealing. The modern scientist is far more interested in being right than in being humbly informed about the mysteries of nature, and this makes much of so-called science more of a laughing matter than anything to be taken seriously. There are, no doubt, many very good scientists operating today who truly take to heart the Scientific Method and who avoid entangling their egos in their work, but I’m coming to discover that the number of such scientists may be far smaller than I had hoped.

In my mind, all of this further discredits the very idea that science is a reliable pathway to knowledge. There are many ways to glean knowledge about the world around us, and science is only one of them. Other methods included meditation, “communing” with nature, spiritual study or even embarking on spirit journeys with the help of plant medicines. Western science has given us much in terms of practical discoveries in fields like electricity, chemistry and physics, but it has utterly failed to provide us with answers on the things that really count: What is the meaning of life? What is the nature of human consciousness? What is the human soul?

None of these questions, it seems, will ever be answered by an ego-driven, profit-focused scientific community that would rather be right than enlightened.

Three questions we need to be asking

In order to know what’s truly happening with human-caused climate change, we need to get accurate answers to the following three questions:

Question #1) Are CO2 emissions on the rise? And by how much? (The answer to this is clearly yes. This part isn’t being debated.)

Question #2) Will high CO2 levels in the atmosphere cause global warming? If so, what will be the climate effects at different CO2 levels? (This is the part being debated.)

Question #3) What can we do to prevent devastating climate change from occurring? (This is also being heavily debated.)

In my mind, there’s no question that what we dump into the air affects the climate in some way, but as I’m not a climate scientist, I must rely on others to determine what levels of carbon dioxide are correlated with observable climate effects (such as a change in atmospheric temperature or lack thereof). What I’ve learned from the ClimateGate scandal is that I really can’t trust these scientists to tell the truth about their findings, and that leaves me in a position of having more questions than ever before.

It won’t change my behavior, though. I’ll still engage in recycling. I’ll continue with my plans to install solar panels to power my house. I’ll keep planting trees and growing most of my own food locally. Regardless of who’s right about ClimateGate, we all have a responsibility to reduce our footprint on this planet, or we may someday discover some other environmental tsunami rising up to haunt us in ways we may have never imagined.

The ClimateGate scientists may have made complete fools of themselves, but I believe we must still practice ecologically-sound “green living” in our own way, each and every day, to the best of our abilities. In other words, don’t let the egos of a small group of scientists distract you from the very real need to protect the future of life on our planet. Reduce your own environmental footprint in ways that you can. Conserve and protect what we have on this planet, and we may yet have a planet left for our children a few generations down the line.

Remember: Just because these scientists manipulated the data doesn’t mean we all have free license to endlessly pollute the planet. If these scientists really were hiding data indicating global warming isn’t as bad as we thought, that would only be a blessing because it would mean we have more time than we thought to reduce the eco-footprint of human life on Earth (hopefully without invoking nefarious Big Brother population control measures…)

It will be fascinating to see how this story develops. We’ll continue to cover it here on NaturalNews.com.

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Where We Can Agree on Climate Change

"Climate: We Can ALL Agree On Two Things

Whatever you think about the leaked emails showing that "tricks" were used to "hide the decline" in the climate data, and the fact that the original source data showing historical climate information was destroyed, you should agree on two things.

The Carbon Footprint of War

First, as Harvey Wasserman notes, continuing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will more than wipe out any reduction in carbon from the government's proposed climate measures. Writing about the escalation in the Afghanistan war, Wasserman says:

The war would also come with a carbon burst. How will the massive emissions created by 100,000-plus soldiers in wartime be counted in the 17% reduction rubric? Will the HumVees be converted to hybrids? What is the carbon impact of Predator bombs that destroy Afghan families and villages?

The continuance of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars completely and thoroughly undermines the government's claims that there is a global warming emergency and that reducing carbon output through cap and trade is needed to save the planet.

I can't take anything the government says about carbon footprints seriously until the government ends the unnecessary wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For evidence that the Iraq war is unnecessary, see this. Read this for evidence that the U.S. could have taken Bin Laden out years ago and avoided a decades long war in Afghanistan. And for proof that the entire war on Muslim extremists is unnecessary for our national security, see this.

War is also very harmful to the economy. See this, this and this.

Carbon Trading

Second, the proposed solution to global warming - cap and trade - is a scam. Specifically:

• The economists who invented cap-and-trade say that it won't work for global warming

• Many environmentalists say that carbon trading won't effectively reduce carbon emissions

• Our bailout buddies over at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and the other Wall Street behemoths are buying heavily into carbon trading (see this, this, this, this, this and this). As University of Maryland professor economics professor and former Chief Economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission Peter Morici writes:

  Obama must ensure that the banks use the trillions of dollars in federal bailout assistance to renegotiate mortgages and make new loans to worthy homebuyers and businesses. Obama must make certain that banks do not continue to squander federal largess by padding executive bonuses, acquiring other banks and pursuing new high-return, high-risk lines of businesses in merger activity, carbon trading and complex derivatives. Industry leaders like Citigroup have announced plans to move in those directions. Many of these bankers enjoyed influence in and contributed generously to the Obama campaign. Now it remains to be seen if a President Obama can stand up to these same bankers and persuade or compel them to act responsibly.

  In other words, the same companies that made billions off of derivatives and other scams and are now getting bailed out on your dime are going to make billions from carbon trading.

Consensus

Everyone should read the leaked emails and rationally think through what they mean. But whatever one believes about climategate (the leaked emails showing that "tricks" were used to "hide the decline" in the climate data and the destruction of the original source data), we should all be able to agree that:

(1) We should end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; and

(2) We should not let the financial giants who caused the financial crisis to profit off of cap and trade schemes.

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