We have nothing to fear but fear itself.

Oh for the day when a real leader asked Americans to be courageous, rather than the clowns and actors as we have now playing on fear. But times have changed. Post war, fascism merely moved to the other side of the Atlantic.

We have no enemies. No one wants to do anything to us ever except perhaps extract revenge. The amazing thing is that despite our historic provocation, and the ease with which a bomb can be planted on a bus or left in the queue waiting to be scanned at the airport, it has not happened. There is no defense against such attacks. They have not happened.
Continue reading “War on the home front precedes war abroad” →

I suppose security will be worse now at our airports, and the little Mussolini’s that work for the jobs program called TSA will be super-vigilant. The humorous part of that is if there really were non-American terrorists set to inflict harm on us, all they would have to do is blow us up while we wait in the queue to have our balls x-rayed.

This is a restatement of a point from the comments down below, without personal references. It has to do with what Ellul described as the destruction of the intellect due to agitation propaganda. Anyone my age or younger is a victim of it, for us older folks going all the way back to the 1950′s. In essence, the long-term effects of agitprop are for one part of the thought processing system to flourish, another to recede. In a state of constant fear, it is the amygdala that takes control and the whole of one’s existence is fear-response to fear. That is the primitive brain, the survival, fight/flight-survive-at all-costs-brain. It’s very hard to dislodge those thought processes, but I clearly remember in 1988 when I realized that Ruskies presented no threat to us, never had, and then breathing a huge sigh of relief, as decades of fear-mongering was suddenly lifted. And I was only lucky.

The cerebral cortex, where reasoning takes place, does not have much control in a fear-based environment, as we all know when faced with a crisis situation. I pretty much see the whole of the USA, post-9/11, as living in fear and not processing information properly, not that good information is even available. So while it appears when viewing the Democrats in action, or the Tea Party or listening to talk radio that humanity is a very stupid lot, we are only viewing fear at work. High intellectual capacity exists in almost all of us, but emotions override reasoning powers in an agitprop environment, which is unrelenting in our country.

They key to defeat of any system of propaganda, as always, is simply to be aware that it exists. Once that happens, it loses all power – even becomes the subject of wonderful humor, as in the old Soviet Union. Stop being afraid!

That won’t happen, of course. And the words above, if they strike too close to home, will be called “psychobabble.” But ask yourself what intellectual capabilities you exhibit when you think there is a burglar in the house.

After 9/11 there was a series of anthrax-laced letters delivered to various public officials, including the one at the right. Anyone attune to the methods of intimidation knows the meaning: STFU. Resident evil pinned the crime on Bruce Ivins, but we’ll never know who did it, as Ivins committed suicide. The fake investigation ended there. (Most likely, it was a staged suicide, but that will never be investigated either. Curious people die.)

Shades of those events, Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker received a letter laced with ricin, indicating that he might be curious about the Boston bombing. He’ll STFU.

American journalists, known to be housebroken, will scratch their heads at this odd coincidence, but it stops there.
__________
Update: It is indeed 9/11 all over again, with a ricin-tainted letter allegedly sent to Obama. (Whether that is a real event or fake, its implications are the same.) Something big is going down, the game is afoot, and I can only guess it is designed to ignite a Mideast War, with South Korea and Japan put on notice by the Korean provocations. I am only waiting, as are millions in Syria, Lebanon and Iran, for the other shoe to fall.

Not too long ago I read Nick Turse’s book, Kill Anything that Moves. I didn’t realize it, but hundreds, if not thousands of Vietnamese towns and hamlets have constructed monuments naming the dead in civilian massacres committed by young US soldiers, many of whose names are on the hundreds of monuments we have constructed to ourselves. The difference, of course, is that they were the victims.

The book is a recounting of a human tragedy that has happened too often on this planet – an imperial force ramps up its internal propaganda machine and then turns its killing forces loose on another country. The reasons, the real ones anyway, are never stated. It’s always due to some evil force, usually imaginary. The results are indescribable suffering and death.
Continue reading “Resident evil” →

The US ran war games on the Korean Peninsula during the entire month of March, and they were not defensive, but rather a practice of “pre-emptive” war. Part of the drill included flying stealth B52’s from Missouri to Korea. Those aircraft are capable of nuclear delivery.

The entire operation is a massive provocation, and North Korea, which has no way of knowing the intent of US war planners, did what any rational actor would do – it responded in kind. They ramped up rhetoric, went into high defense posture, and explained what they were capable of doing at this point – dropping a bomb on Tokyo.

In the US state-controlled media, this is “provocation” by those crazy nuts in the DPRK. We’re rational, they’re not. I’ve looked through the first three pages of Bing search results on the B52 incident, and found that it was reported by two American sources – US News, and Yahoo. In each it was described as a warning in the wake of North Korea’s provocations.
Continue reading “Bush III” →

The film “Collateral Murder” (at end of this post) put Wikileaks on the map and Bradley Manning behind bars. He had, after all, committed the supreme crime againt a national security state: exposing the crimes of the national security state.

Ethan McCord was patrolling the streets of Baghdad as the events depicted in the film transpired. He was interviewed at RT (yes, we must go to Russian media to learn of American news). He was five blocks away that day, July 12, 2007.

“One guy’s head was off, the top of his head was completely off and his brains were on the ground and the smell, the smell still haunts me every day. …

A four-year old girl had been struck by bullets and had a wound to the stomach. He remembers her “looking at me and the blood around her eyes made her eyes so ghostly. He grabbed the girl and ran her into a nearby building. There he picked the glass out of her eyes so she could blink and handed her off to a medic. Then he discovered another child. Looking at the film clip he says

“That’s me right there. That is a little boy that I originally thought was dead. I couldn’t stop myself from crying.”

Continue reading “PTSD” →

My son, who is in the teaching profession, has reminded me that most teachers care about kids, know how to teach, and don’t need advice from outsiders like me. I agree. This is not about them. It is about public policy, or more specifically, the testing regime.

I never took the SAT, though it probably existed. Instead, I took the “ACT” (I think). These were general tests given perhaps yearly. I don’t recall being grilled on anything more than basic abilities in math, science, reasoning and language. I received the results in a percentile form, and have never been told what my “IQ” is. Such testing was important to identify strong students as part of the culling process, as these would be our future technicians, scientists, and blah blah blahs. It was a system that relied on testing, but not a testing regime. I have struggled with the idea, as do teachers including Polish Wolf, who wrote this piece about a testing scandal in Atlanta. NCLB had created perverse incentives, people have responded accordingly, and now we must punish them.
Continue reading “The testing regime” →

“The greatest enemy of the truth is not the lie – deliberate, contrived, and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, pervasive, and unrealistic.” (John F. Kennedy)

Driving home yesterday we listened for a while to NPR, not expecting much and not disappointed. During the Vietnam war protesters had managed to use various local radio outlets to spread their message, and the result was widespread dissemination of information that the government did not want. NPR, which went on the air in 1971, is not without an accomplishment here and there, such as exposing Archer Daniels Midlands corruption in the mid-1990’s. (ADM promptly began funding NPR, so that never happened again.) But the effective result of NPR and its 900 stations is to suck up bandwidth. Those pirate community stations are almost all gone now, blanded out of existence. NPR has replaced them with news indistinguishable from any other major outlet, and cultural programming. I listen to some of it, but have long given up on NPR as a meaningful alternative to government-managed news as presented to us by the other major outlets.

We listened to Talk of the Nation Yesterday as the host interviewed Washington Post editor Jackson Diehl. (Transcript here.) He appears to have all of the credentials of an ‘Op”, or government intelligence employee placed at a critical junction as a news filter in the private news media*. He’s a Yalie, and pro-military aggression and war all the way, including an advocate of the attack and invasion of Iraq in 2003. News, after all, is too important to be left in independent hands. If Diehl is not an op, he’s very dumb.
Continue reading “Another dung beetle on the feedlot of power” →

A Cypriot news source has accused Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades of wiring €21 million of his own funds to London prior to announcing the Eurobank-sponsored haircut that would affect his fellow countrymen’s holdings. He has promised that he would authorize an investigation of himself by a committee that will be organized tomorrow. There is no word on the reliability this committee, as any government that investigates its own activities must be held to extremely high standards of transparency and accountability.

I found no coverage of this story in American news.