I suppose the objective is the bombing campaign to decapitate Syria and partition Iraq, delayed by the Russians last year after the false flag chemical attack in Syria did not work. Now that the Russians are sidelined in Ukraine, immobilized, the beheading videos, which are probably fake, are meant to scare the crap out of you and get you to support a new bombing campaign. God only knows how many innocent people Obama will behead with those bombs, but that part will not be broadcast.

I did not realize that ISIS was meant to be the new Al Qaeda, scaring the panties off Americans. Always behind the eight ball here.

• Psychological projection: A theory in which humans defend themselves against unpleasant impulses by denying their existence in themselves, while attributing them to others.

In prosecuting his widening war in Ukraine, [Putin] has also resurrected the tyranny of the Big Lie, using state-controlled media to twist the truth so grotesquely that most Russians are in the dark — or profoundly misinformed — about events in their neighbor to the west. Most Russians get their news from state-controlled broadcast outlets, which have moved beyond mere propaganda into outlandish conspiracy theories and unhinged jingoism.

The above words are from a Washington Post editorial dated August 31st. Since it is the United States that is prosecuting a wider war in Ukraine by means of proxy, and it is the American public that is profoundly in the dark, kept so by its state-controlled news media, I conclude that the editors of the Post are either profoundly dishonest, or deranged.

Regarding the state of awareness in Russia, who is to say. We cannot do much about them. We can only affect our own leaders.

Reading the above piece, which I should note came to my attention via Moon of Alabama, I was reminded of a document written in 1950 and declassified in 1975 known as NSC-68. It should be required reading in all of our classrooms, for in it are contained the seeds of the “Cold War,” the expenditure of a trillion dollars on unnecessary military hardware and the loss of tens of millions of innocent lives. The document is written is readable prose and so is accessible to mere mortals. It tags the Soviet Union, the ” Kremlin,” as the source of all evil on the planet. It says that they want to overrun Western Europe, bury Great Britain, and ultimately rule the world.

The Soviet Union at that time was barely limping, recovering from the loss of twenty million citizens and destruction of two-thirds of its industrial base in the Second World War. Much of its military capability was horse-drawn. Its people were largely peasantry incapable of engaging in an industrial world. Having been attacked by Germany and Japan, Stalin was rightly distrustful of the other imperial powers, especially those calling themselves the “Free World.”

The Soviet Union posed no threat to the U.S. It was time for rapprochement and peace. But the newly founded U.S. National Security State, freshly infused with Paperclipped German SS and the American OSS, was ambitious. Peace was not an option.

Reading NSC-68, one is tempted to think that the Soviet Union in 1950 was a fully formed military power ready to strike. Why the paranoia? Why the urgency?

I can only imagine that our new creations, CIA and NSC, were intent on doing exactly what they were laying on the Soviets. The Department of War had been changed to “Defense,” and every evil had been projected on the Soviets. That meant, as Orwell advised around that time, that every evil imaginable was going to spring forth from a new Washington, intent on War and and not Defense. NSC-68 was the declaration of World War III, not against the Soviets, but against the world, done by the only superpower standing at that time.

As I read WaPo above, given that organ’s proximity to the seat of power, I have to assume that they, like the authors of NSC-68, are knowingly lying and projecting their own evil intent on others. While Moon of Alabama regards it as lunacy from a “Funny Paper,” I tend to take it more seriously. These are deranged psychopaths, as is our military leadership and Capitalism’s Invisible Army. There’s a sense of urgency in the words, meaning there is great danger now to the world. The source of that danger is Arlington, Langley, and Foggy Bottoms.

Below the fold here are a few choice paragraphs from NSC-68. I know a few who traffic here have or have or will read the whole thing. It is well worth the time. It helps to form a sense of the enemy, and the paranoia of those who run our funny farm.
Continue reading “A glimpse into madness” →

The best way to make communists is to put the Americans into a place where there were no Communists before. (Norodom [Prince] Sihanouk of Cambodia)

“Whoever has the Americans as allies does not need enemies” (Madame Nhu, wife of assassinated South Vietnamese leader.)

Americans often feel snubbed when they learn that they are not liked abroad. From a typical dis-informed viewpoint, we Yanks imagine we have been giving foreign aid and rebuilding places, sending food to places where they have earthquakes and tsunamis and are also busy liberating slaves. All we get in return in disrespect.

“So screw the world,” is the attitude that naturally follows.

What Americans do not know, of course, is that we live in a huge disinformation enterprise known as the United States Mainstream Media (MSM). Even so, if it were only “news” given to us, its range would be limited. But it also extends to entertainment media. It repeats the message and helps us in the illusion that our foreign policy is all about do-goodiness. In movies and on TV, our terrorists (called “Special Forces,” Seals” and “Green Berets”) are big burly men with guns protecting children from thugs. They even hand out candy. Our military adventures are designed to “rescue” people and install democracy rather than merely keep the path clear for control of resources by America’s giant corporations. Getting hold of those resources usually involves removal of democratic governments and installation of thugs and terror regimes.

It’s simply failure to communicate. The rest of the world is very well-informed about who we are and what we do. American tourists are readily accepted (so long as we are not boorish and overbearing, like the guy our daughter told us about – wearing a cowboy hat, he stood up in a British pub and sang the Star Spangled Banner). But it is the typical American ignorance of the behavior of our CIA and special forces, our military, “our” corporations’ that creates a gulf between us and people abroad. They don’t like “us” for good reason, and we don’t know about it because we never see that face of “us.” We only see what we are meant to see, and so live in what is often referred to abroad as the American bubble.

It’s merely ignorance, easily remedied by expanded knowledge.

When my older brother, Steve, spoke at my oldest brother Tom’s funeral, he said that Tom (9 years older than me) had introduced him to the work of Thomas Merton as an eighth grader. Tom was a poet and quiet intellectual, and he and I, even without the age difference, did not have much in common. Merton was just a name to me. I knew such a person existed, but had no interest in him. Religious thinkers have never had any appeal for me. It wasn’t until I read James Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, that I caught a better glimpse of Merton and wondered about my older brother, wishing perhaps that I had known him better.

Here’s the Merton money quote from the introduction to Unspeakable:

“I have little confidence in [John F.] Kennedy, I think he cannot fully measure up to the magnitude of his task, and lacks creative imagination and the deeper kind of sensitivity that is needed. Too much from the Time and Life mentality, than which I can imagine nothing further, in reality, from, say, Lincoln. What is needed is really not shrewdness or craft, but what politicians don’t have: depth, humanity and a certain totality of self-forgetfulness and compassion, not just for individuals but for man as a whole: a deeper kind of dedication. Maybe Kennedy will break through into that someday by miracle. But such people are before long marked out for assassination.”

This was written in January of 1962.

I recently took a test which is supposed to give me a reasonable approximation of my “true IQ.” It only takes a few minutes. The result is my own business, and I invite the reader to find out an approximation with the understanding that the very fact that you are reading this blog, Piece of Mind, means that you are above average. The test is here.

Why do such tests exist? As a freshman in high school I was placed in a small section of the class at Billings Central Catholic High School, Billings, Montana, knows as the “honors” section. I did not last long. My family’s home life was not conducive to studying, and overwhelmed by distractions, the school officials decided I belonged with the regular kids. Once nice thing about that was the addition of two new class periods to my schedule, study hall and PE. Apparently the brightest kids needed neither.

Continue reading “Get your free IQ score here!” →

The following passage originally appeared in a 1969 book of essays and such, under the heading American Labor and United States Foreign Policy, and cites Thomas Braden. More about Braden in a second, but if you are like me, when you saw that book title you thought “Wow! There’s a book I’ll never read.” Indeed, I never did. I picked up this passage from The Politics of Heroin, by Alfred McCoy.

In the cited book, Ronald Radosh cites Braden, a CIA agent, as follows:

On the desk in front of me as I write these lines is a creased and faded yellow paper, It bears the following inscription in pencil:

“Received from Warren G. Haskins, $15,000 (signed) Norris A. Grambo.”

I went in search of this paper on the day the newspapers disclosed the “scandal” of the Central Intelligence Agency’s connection with America students and labor leaders. It was a wistful search, and when it ended I found myself feeling sad.

For I was Warren G. Haskins, Norris A. Grambo was Irving Brown, of the American Federation of Labor. The $15,000 was from the vaults of the CIA, and the yellow paper is the last memento I possess of a vast and secret operation…

It was my idea to give $15,000 to Irving Brown. He needed it to pay off his strong-arm squads in the Mediterranean Ports, so that American supplies could be uploaded against the opposition of Communist dock workers.

Historians who rely on declassified documents will be hard-pressed to understand what Braden is talking about, but it has to do with breaking a dock workers’ strike in Marseille, France in the post-war years. Quite a few things were going on. The Corsican mob, with CIA assistance, was strong-arming communist workers* out of the unions, while Lucky Luciano, then living in Italy, was using laboratories in Marseilles to process heroin for shipment to the United States (the “French Connection”). The CIA assisted the Corsicans and Luciano in moving product stateside. The U.S. was also running arms shipments through Marseilles to assist the French in their battle to retain their colony in Vietnam.

In the meantime, CIA was busy infiltrating American labor unions and student organizations, trying to separate them from leftist influence. And, in a separate operation aptly known as “Mockingbird,” CIA was busy infiltrating its people into American media. CIA Director William Colby would later say that the idea was to “Own everyone of any significance in the major media.” No doubt they succeeded, as our American news media is a tame rabbit even as it is portrayed in movie and TV fare as a stalking tiger.

CIA were busy boys in those days! The reason this passage struck me was that anyone who was sentient in 1982 might remember a TV show on CNN called “Crossfire,” and the opening words uttered five nights a week:

From the left, I’m Tom Braden.”

Yeah, that Thomas Braden, speaking from the left no less!. Braden was obviously Mockingbirded into his seat on that show. (He was also a newspaper columnist, and the inspiration for the TV show “Eight is Enough.”)

I call it full spectrum dominance. No matter your point of view in this country, if you get your news from the American media, you’re a right winger. If you’re “on the left,” like Braden, you’re just a righty of another color.
______________
*Due to McCarthy era propaganda, which went on through 1990, the reader’s assumption might be that the communist workers were part of the Internationale, and took orders from Moscow. Not true. It was merely an organizing force for labor.

There are things we are told which are plainly obviously lies, such as magic bullets and aircraft slicing through steel buildings like a knife through butter, all utterly impossible, defying logic and physics. Yet dogged doctrinaire supporters of power demand that we pretend to believe these things to be real and undeniably true. This is the source of our cognitive dissonance, power over our perceptions, to tell us that we see one thing that is actually something else. Those of us who do not see what power tells us to see are indeed the odd ones.

I wrote that, and it is bad form to quote myself. But it does, more or less, add yellow highlighter to the center of my existence. And I’ve been kicking it around for a couple of days here as I avoid writing on the blog. If I cannot get one true thing across, what is the point?

There are degrees of acceptance of the above. For me it is easy. I simply say that if something cannot be true, then it is not true. On the far side, the other end, people like James Conner, for instance, ridicule what is obviously true as a belief in impossible conspiracy, as if saying things that are obviously true is stupid! Most people fall somewhere in between, troubled, wanting to belong to the mainstream and so filing away their doubts in a dark place. That is the definition of cognitive dissonance.

What Conner does is a manifestation of denial, of aggressive stupidity, and yet I know he is not stupid. If the dissonance resides so uncomfortably in him that he feels a need to lash out, then he is perhaps on the verge of internal harmony. Perhaps he will come around. Perhaps his isolation right now is a time during which he is confronting his own internal contradictions.

Perhaps not. His writing lately offers no hint of any forward movement.

In the meantime, there is politics. We always have politics. It does us no good; it solves no problems. It merely keeps us busy. The political system is too corrupt for mere intermittent unfocused anxiety expressed as well-intended votes to have any impact on the power behind the candidates. Perhaps, if one can admit that certain physical feats are impossible, then a clean accounting of the soul will yield yet another hard and undeniable truth: We do not live in a democracy, a republic, a democratic republic, or anything even remotely representing that kind of place. There is only one way that public opinion matters in this country, and that is when it is unified against power.

Unless some entertainer suggests on TV that we should do that, I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

One of the most incomprehensible features of the Citizens United ruling by our Mullahs, our Supreme Court, was the secrecy provisions. That made no sense – even if they decreed that money should rule, even a modicum of democratic governance would indicate that we should at least know where the money comes from.

As always, it came as a revelation from someone else that made me slap my head … Of course! The secrecy provisions are in place because CU allows unfettered manipulation of political campaigns by organized crime.

We then need to understand what “organized crime” means. There’s an old meme at work that Castro kicked the mob off the island of Cuba in the early 1960’s, along with United Fruit, oil and gas and mining interests, etc. The assumption there is that there are legitimate imperialists, and there are mobsters. But take it one step further: The Mob, and not the CIA, killed JFK, say Hartmann and Waldron. That makes it more palatable.

But what if they are all one and the same? What if the mob operates under the same rules, and with the same exemptions from civil society as do Exxon, Citibank, and Chiquita Banana (once known as United Fruit).

Isn’t it then all an academic exercise? The Mob killed JFK! The CIA did! The military-industrial complex did. But I repeat myself. And the Mob/CIA/MIC obviously own some of our Mullahs, perhaps all of them. That would make them mere tools, or toys of tyrants.

This is just something I heard last week, wrote down and forgot. It’s from Gordon Duff:

Americans have been over a decade in Afghanistan, and no one has ever seen anything leave a poppy field and move out of the country to a heroin processing plant. In ten years.

The comment is sardonic, of course. The Taliban had the poppy crop under control before the Americans arrived, and since that invasion in 2001, new records are set on a regular basis. The US claims to be trying to stem the flow, but this is a lie. The US is there to protect the fields, as the drug money is an important part of covert operations for intelligence agencies. It ends up in Wall Street banks, London, you know, with the cocaine snorting set, as opposed to crack users, who often land in jail. War on drugs, you see.

Don’t kid yourself – the US is not involved in a war on drugs. Afghanistan, probably Mexico and Colombia too, are wars for drugs.

That’s your country, folks. That’s what the boys are fighting for.