I am not a fan of public education, and I do not think that “history” should be taught in public schools. Kids ought to explore on their own what made this place. Textbooks, by structural necessity, must tell lies.

I am not a fan of charter schools either, as it is nothing more than an opportunity for rent seekers, like DeVry and University of Phoenix, only on a smaller scale.

What’s my proposal for education? I ain’t got one. I just know that what we got is producing mindless little non-thinking robots …

Hey – wait a minute! Right under my nose, kids and parents are acting up! I am so surprised and pleased. There’s always hope.

The US military operation in Fallujah, largely justified on the claim that Zarqawi’s militant forces had occupied the city, used white phosphorous, cluster bombs, and indiscriminate air strikes to pulverise 36,000 of Fallujah’s 50,000 homes, killing nearly a thousand civilians, terrorising 300,000 inhabitants to flee, and culminating in a disproportionate increase in birth defects, cancer and infant mortality due to the devastating environmental consequences of the war.

To this day, Fallujah has suffered from being largely cut-off from wider Iraq, its infrastructure largely unworkable with water and sewage systems still in disrepair, and its citizens subject to sectarian discrimination and persecution by Iraqi government backed Shi’a militia and police. “Thousands of bereaved and homeless Falluja families have a new reason to hate the US and its allies,” observed The Guardian in 2005. Thus, did the US occupation plant the seeds from which Zarqawi’s legacy would coalesce into the Frankenstein monster that calls itself “the Islamic State.”
(Nafeez Ahmed, How the West Created the Islamic State … With a Little Help From our Friends)

The link above (thanks to sk) is a good reference and will be quite shocking to neophytes to think that Obama speeches contain anything resembling truth, or even a scintilla of useful information.

Here’s a shorter article from Thierry Meyssan, Extension of the Gas War to the Levant, where the author performs useful shorthand to aid our understand of the dynamics of the region. Rather than refer to the fictional country of “Qatar,” he uses its brand name, “Exxon.” Similarly, Saudi Arabia is called “Aramco.”

I have been wanting to write about Fallujah for months, but have not gotten around to it. That city endured some of the worst war crimes of the new century. The sin: Contempt of the US military. When attacked in early 2004, they successfully resisted. Thereafter the U.S. pulled out all the stops, breaking out illegal weaponry, shutting down hospitals, cordoning off the city so that all the young men therein could be isolated and slaughtered. If you take time to read American sources on this battle, here’s a reader’s key: When they refer to “extremists,” they are talking about Iraqi citizens. Not Americans. Apparently the US military/intelligence complex does not have any of its own in its employe, least of all those officers who ordered use of illegal weapons and tactics. Under those quaint Geneva conventions, those are war crimes.

Anyway, this post is a ramble. I’ve got better things to do today than to lay out bait so Swede can glance at the title and jump down to the comments. Make of it what you will. One objective, which will not be achieved unless the reader follows links, is to grasp the size of the Western assault on the Middle East, spanning wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya and now back to Iraq. The conflict in Ukraine merely serves to sideline the Russians, who managed to thwart a U.S. bombing assault on Syria after last year’s false flag chemical attack. The policy is large, and barbaric: To destroy the region as it is and restructure it as a tribal region dominated by American and European bases. All of the elements of deceit are there, including the arming and backing of the region’s terrorists to give Western forces cause to attack those terrorists, classic agents provocateur, controlled opposition.

It’s complicated. But do not be deterred by that. Read, research, keep at it, and a better understanding will take hold not just of current activities in that part of the world, but of the history of the world, 1914 forward. I do not sit here with my corduroy jacket with arm patches – I struggle with all of this too. Our biggest disadvantage is lack of good information and honest reporting, followed closely with lack of understanding of long-term plans for the region by the imperialist powers.

Enjoy!

Zbigniew Brzezinski is one of those characters that operates openly in the shadows, a powerful man with easy access to other powerful people. Among his protegé are Madelyn Albright and Barack Obama. He speaks with a heavy accent, and because he never worries about electoral politics, sometimes publicly says what he thinks privately. It’s not a bad thing – I thoroughly enjoyed him on Morning Joe that morning when he told Scarborough that he was “stunningly superficial.” Joe thought not, saying he reads the New York Times.

It’s that classic situation where a person cannot fathom his own stupidity because he does not possess the intellectual resources to see that he does not have intellectual resources he needs. Better said, stupid people do not know they are stupid. If they knew it, they would not be stupid. That’s the great conundrum of life.

I just mention this because Zbig gave an interview to Le Nouvel Observateur*, Paris, 15-21 January 1998, the meat of which follows:

Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs [“From the Shadows”], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

B: It isn’t quite that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

B: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn’t a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.

Translated from the French by Bill Blum

Let’s not be superficial here. Brzezinski words about Muslims are as true now as then. They are not a unified force any more than “Christians” or “Jews” or “Hindus” are, and present no threat to civilization. For foreign policy purposes, to control the domestic audience, the U.S. has incited hatred of Muslims as the center plank to justify its military aggression, 2001 forward.

In Afghanistan in the 1980’s, somewhere between 850,000 to 1.5 million people died, millions more left the place – those who could got the hell out. Left behind was a US-trained fighting force, the Mujahadeen, that would continue to be useful to this day operating under various names such as “Al Qaeda”, and perhaps now “ISIS” (though I do not reduce that Western-backed force to that one element).

Brzezinski has the typical veneer of the psychopath, glibly unaware of the suffering that he’s caused, indifferent to the tragedy of Afghanistan, seeing it only in geopolitical terms. He qualifies, as does Albright**, as a monster.

Even so, I delighted in his manhandling of Morning Joe. (By the way, sitting next to Morning Joe was Zbig’s daughter, Mika.)
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*Keep in mind that this interview, published in France, has never been republished or mentioned in U.S. state-controlled media.

**Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq, 60 Minutes, 5/12/1996, a famous interview where Albright is unable to grasp the concept of human suffering:

Stahl: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.

Alex Carey, an Australian observer who died in 1987, said that the greatest accomplishment of American propaganda was to convince Americans that there is no American propaganda. We are, of course, swimming in it. Most of it is benign – the false history and fake accomplishments, military flyovers and soldiers pretending to be defending us – it even serves a useful purpose, holding us together as a nation. Propaganda validates us, gives us a reason to feel good about ourselves.

Every country on earth swims in such nonsense. It’s far more intense in fascist states – only in Nazi Germany or the U.S. will you see flags the size of a football field. The more militarily aggressive countries go for big images and symbols.

Still, I’ve no problem with it. However, every now and the our controllers decide that they have to ramp up the game. Then we step up into agitation propaganda. That’s a different animal. While normal American propaganda merely keeps us misinformed and content in our ignorance, agitprop it is intense, psychologically destructive, and done with an immediate objective.

9/11 was the most intense agitprop I have ever seen, essentially a snuff film. It was a television show, and because of the power of television, people assumed everything they saw and heard was real. Even now, thirteen years later, when it is so easy to demonstrate how much of it was done using CGI, people cling to the belief that it was real.

If it is on TV, it is real.

Our agitprop people seem to have a fixation on aircraft and beheadings lately. Whether or not the Sotloff murder was real or simulated does not matter. The question you have to answer, and I mean this very seriously, is this: Who is behind ISIS? There’s a reason why they are shocking us now, traumatizing us with those horrible images. The Pentagon is going to start snuffing innocent people in Syria and Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of people will be murdered. Agitprop of the intensity we are seeing is intended to dull our senses and prepare us for what is to follow.

So I urge that you turn off your TV, burn your newspaper, turn the radio over to a music station, and do some investigation. Who is behind ISIS? Please, leave the bubble to do so.

I’ll wait.

With the shooting in Ferguson, Missouri and subsequent fallout, there is a lot of second guessing going on. For myself, I am quick to forgive individual failings, and look to institutional biases to explain gross injustice, as the Brown shooting appears to be.

In this case, I look at a white police force in a black community, and hatred between the police and the people they are charged to serve and protect. Blacks are not innocent victims, as they are just people. Nor are the police free of guilt, as their culture supports violence. So when there is a naked confrontation, the officer has a choice: Shoot, knowing that he’ll likely get off, or back down, not knowing what will happen. Seeing a large angry man coming at me, and having only the basics of training in handling weapons, I assume I too would have shot and then hoped that my brother police officers would have my back.

For the black community, it is hard to watch one of their own gunned down, but more so knowing that it can be done with impunity; that the only justice will likely come from mob violence. They come from a culture that has endured untold indignity. This was best expressed in a Wayans Brothers movie I saw where, trying to get police to respond to a crime the only thing the black guy could think to do was to call 911 and say “White girl in trouble!” Numerous police cars responded instantly.

Being black in a society dominated by whites is hard to endure, which is why they have developed their own means of communicating. This is reflected especially in their music. They can dog whistle one another while we whites assume it’s just a tribal beat. But it is a bubbling cauldron, and it only takes one flagrant abuse of white power for the community to erupt. When that happens, the cops drop the public service masks and go on the offensive. Pictures of cops brandishing weapons at innocent civilians are disgusting, but the rage is mutual.
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I didn’t sit down to write all of that. I was only curious about the fact that the Officer Daren Wilson, the man who shot Michael Brown, emptied his weapon. I was reminded of a shooting in Billings, Montana where the assailant’s weapon was a motor vehicle. There too the officer emptied his weapon into the driver. He was immediately suspended pending investigation, and a spokesperson at that time said that officers were trained to empty weapons in potentially fatal confrontations.

Why, I thought? The answer is obvious, but not if we are TV drama viewers. There, when people get shot they immediately drop, and are dead unless they have more than an extra role in the presentation. I put up the picture of Reagan above because, contrary to the official story, he has already been shot and does not know it. People do not drop when they are shot, and usually don’t even realize it for a period of time. The head shot is the best way to disable a victim, but cops are not that well trained in firearms. Anyway, who can say where to shoot when an officer is in panic mode? A large man presents a good target, and the torso is the best sure hit, the head a little more iffy. But it takes quite a few shots to disable an assailant, more so a large man.

If that is what happened.

So officers are trained to empty their weapons, create as many wounds as possible so that the victim will bleed out and lose consciousness as soon as possible. One shot will not do. In the meantime even if already hit, he is still a threat. The officer is in survival mode, and training allows him, even instructs him, to shoot, shoot shoot until out of bullets.

State Department admits that there might be “dozens” of Americans fighting in Syria and Iraq, and that they are “disaffected,” possibly posing a ” threat to national security” when they return home. This is in response to an American turning up dead fighting for “ISIS” in Syria.

As American news goes, this one is easy to unravel. “Dozens” means hundreds, and as fighting intensifies, more of them will be killed, captured or otherwise exposed. They are not expatriates, they are not fighting for the other side. Their histories are wiped clean, they seem to randomly up and leave and go fight in strange lands. They are American agents, provocateurs, part of ISIS and under US control, and subject to the following dictum, taken from a popular TV show back in the sixties:

If killed or captured, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your activity.

…the same individuals were to be presented as allies yesterday and must be as enemies today, even if they are still on orders from Washington.

It is difficult have an understanding of international terrorism as sponsored by the United States, and at the same time watch the U.S. state-controlled media twist that same information into a fairy tale. ISIS is nothing more than a terrorist organization, and when it was doing Washington’s work in Libya and Syria, was presented as a pro-democratic force.

Defeated in Syria, armed to the teeth by the U.S., Turkey, France and Saudi Arabia (acting as a conduit for Ukrainian weapons), ISIS is now presented as a scourge that is forcing Washington’s hand, perhaps triggering another intervention in Iraq.

What changed? Words changed. That’s all. Al Qaeda, Syrian Emergency Task Force, Al-Nosra, Northern Storm Brigade … ISIS. All Washington employees, all the time. Sometimes a friend, sometimes an enemy, always on the payroll. Terrorists, saboteurs, beheaders, eaters of intestines, human scourge … these are our guys. They are drenched in American weapons and money.

I have long regarded John McCain as a terrorist. Sent on a mission to bomb a light bulb factory in north Vietnam, he was shot down, could have been left to drown but was instead rescued and imprisoned for five years. He was tortured, and broke. He’s not a sane man now, but I had no idea that he is, as Thierry Meyssan claims, an agent behind so much illegal U.S. activity these last decades, from the ouster of president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti, the attempt to overthrow President Mwai Kibaki in Kenya, the attempted overthrow of president Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and most recently, the ousting of the constitutional president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. These are all democratically elected governments, and the U.S. attacked them, probably for that reason.

Who knew? Such a man, rightly imprisoned in Vietnam, is behind international terrorism. He is presented as a hero here in the Empire of Lies. That’s why I said at the outset here that it is difficult to watch U.S. state-controlled media twist all of this around, lying about everything everywhere all the time and taking a man like McCain, a deranged terrorist, and making him seem something better than that.

I call that putting lipstick on a pig.

My last 26 years have been a quest to understand our world, and to a small degree I think I have succeeded. There are two key features of our existence that cast a dark shadow over every human affair.

Psychopaths: It’s as if the planet was seeded with two species, regular humans, and psychopaths. Whether they are two or five or ten percent of the population, they live among us posing as regular humans. They have enormous advantage, as they understand us (while we are only beginning to get a grip on them). They imitate us. They appear to have a breeding advantage as they can bring tremendous sexual energy to the mating game. Even as they live among us, appear to be part of us, they are really just stalking us. They have no great ideas, do not dedicate their lives to any cause other than gaming, accumulating wealth. They rarely excel in professions, and so rely on recruitment of regular people to run their organizations, build their weapons, man their armies.

You’ve met them. They have befriended you, taken advantage of you. You helped them on their tests in school as they just can’t knuckle down. They have engaged you in a love affair and then walked out on you. They have tried to empty your bank account, and undermined you at work. Their biggest thrill in life is the trap, to set it up, capture some one, snap it shut. They do not have much else going on, so that gaming is very important to them. They are disproportionately represented in the prison population, but more importantly, in the corporate world. The higher up one travels in an organization, the more common is the psychopath. They have infested Washington and every state capital.

Power: Regular people do not crave power. We don’t seek to rule others, take no special advantage in being in a position where we control the lives of others.

Psychopaths do. Consequently, by default, power cedes to psychopaths.

Ergo, the world as we know it.

I read, and I do not remember where, that it is very rare that two psychopaths marry. That made me change my perception of the Clinton’s. Bill is a brilliant man, can project empathy and charm and brings tremendous sexual energy to his game. Hillary appears cold and calculating, even menacing. Are they that rare couple, or is it one and not the other? I do not know. I only know with Hillary that the hair on my neck stands on end when I see her on TV. I had that same reaction years ago to George H.W. Bush. These are not nice people.

We all instinctively know when we are in the presence of a predator. We only need to refine that sensibility, and pay attention to it. We are learning more about psychopaths, talking openly about it. There’s even a TV series dedicated to them now. It’s called True Blood.

I wrote here about the plight of the Yazidis that it had all the earmarks of American agitprop (How to spot lies … use brain). It used the archetype of women being abused by really bad, bad men, a common theme throughout our history. For that reason I suspected that there were no Yazidis in trouble, and that other game was afoot.

It also did not hurt that I knew the “bad men” doing the supposed abuses, ISIS, were people the US is arming and supporting. But that is not unusual either, as the US often backs the terrorists that it later sends in the military to thwart. I heard someone refer to this as “The Hegelian Dialectic,” but am not well-schooled in such fancy talk.

Moon of Alabama dissects the lies, as follows:

Obama today:

“We broke the ISIL siege of Mount Sinjar,” Obama said.

“We do not expect there to be an additional operation to evacuate people off the mountain, and it’s unlikely we’ll need to continue humanitarian air drops on the mountain,” Obama continued.

This “broke the siege” statement is a lie. There never was a “siege” on the Sinjar mountain range. The Yazidi who had fled there were quickly welcomed and evacuated to Syria by the Kurdish PKK and YPG forces. There are now some 15,000 of Yazidis in the Kurdish part of Syria. Some thousand refugees may still be in the mountains but the nomadic shepherds who live there will likely help them along.

The PKK was already there doing the job three days before the first U.S. action took place. …

The only reason Obama sent troops and jets to the area was to protect the city of Erbil with its CIA station, the international airport and the local headquarters of various “western” oil companies.

When dealing with Western media sources, one learns to look for such deceit. Worse yet, one learns to expect it.

Ahem, people: Plagiarism is a sign of a weak intellect and a lack of personal integrity. These are the qualifications for high office in the Democratic Party, I realize, but please, Democrats, don’t sit here and tell us that plagiarism is not a big deal.

It’s a big deal. Period.