Putin to the rescue

The Obama administration is, for now, giving up on official “regime change” training ops in Syria and is unlikely to go for more intense fighting against the Islamic State. But that is only the official position. Unofficially, we can safely assume, the CIA and various shady Pentagon entities will continue their mischief in Syria and in Iraq.

But thanks to the Russians, it is now for all to see that the U.S. was never serious about fighting the Islamic State or about reigning in al-Qaeda and other Jihadis in Syria. While the U.S. has flown a total of 137 air attacks in Syria in some thirteen month[s] the Russians delivered 148 airstrikes within just one week.

(From Moon of Alabama.)

The intrigue surrounding Syria is complex, with the U.S. aiding and abetting the terrorist forces trying to unseat the regime and at the same time portraying that regime as the real terrorists. The propaganda and disinformation coming out of Washington prompted Joseph Goebbels to say “Guys, sometimes you gotta mix in a little truth!” Seeing all of the violence visited on that land by Western-backed forces, Josef Stalin was heard to mutter “My god, what horrible monsters these people are … these Americans.”

The Russians have attacked forcefully and effectively and set the terrorists and Washington back on their heels. They are acting as a civilizing force.

But it ain’t over. If there are two words to describe the current reign of terrorists and desk murderers that hold power in DC, they would be “fucking relentless.”

Colbert using television to uplift?

I was an admirer of Dave Letterman. The guy would send me into fits of laughter with his diabolical smiling antics – dropping watermelons off buildings, doing interviews that slowly sent people into a boil. He once flat-out told Bill O’Reilly he was full of it,  which he is and which needs to be said now and then but isn’t.

Ah well, moving forward. Stephen Colbert is finding his way. He works without a sidekick, which I like. But when I see the usual Hollywood stars waddle on out, I suspect his show is going to be Jimmy Fallon without the intellectual rigor.

But there’s hope! He has had politicians on, and challenged them in their boots, something not done even by professional “news” people. But that’s old Colbert Report shtick – Colbert does have a little more depth than the average TV personality. Not much more – like Jon Stewart, he’s a lightweight and doesn’t know it. (I could not sit through his long interview with the reptile John Kerry. It tested my limits.)

Last night I watched his show (on DVR to avoid commercials) on which he did a long bit on Whole Foods, laying some richly deserved ridicule on that phony enterprise. He said that Whole Foods has screwed up now and then, and has the decency to apologize … when caught, and will continue to do so … if caught. That’s ballsy, taking on a rich corporation. No doubt the network gave him a pass after checking the list of current sponsors, but still, it’s something.

But then there is this: He had Yo Yo Ma play while ballerina Misty Copeland danced, a performance that we watched twice. I only dabble in serious music and dance, but found this uplifting. Colbert said he wants to take his show in new directions … leading with style rather than playing to the LCD?

We will see where the network’s advertising department take him. If I turn it on in the future and see that he’s got George Clooney and  Taylor Swift on, I’ll know his influence was sidetracked by the need to please advertisers, and LCD won. Till then …

Enjoy! Sorry if you are forced to watch a fricking ad first. Those philistines know no propriety.

“

Don’t let the bastards wear you down

I closed out the post below with the following regarding the Roseburg, Oregon ‘incident:’

A lot of work, right? [To actually study the Roseburg incident in depth.] However, if you don’t have time, just wait. Others will do the legwork, and you can learn more from them. Then go and get the information. Don’t wait for it to fall into your lap via news sources, as that will not happen.

I should have added, however, that by the time you have your arms around Roseburg, another one will be along to take its place. These events take place at regular intervals, reminding me of Karl Rove’s (or Dick Cheney’s) words to the reporter Ron Suskind:

[Guys like you live] “in what we call the reality-based community,” defined as those who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

I think that all of these mass shootings are staged events, part of a strategy of tension to keep the American public in a state of fear so that we will continue to support wars abroad and the National Security State at home. It’s people control, thought control and inducement of mass psychosis. I am yet to see one of these events that doesn’t fall apart on closer examination, or at least have some aspects that are highly questionable. But they keep hammering us with them.

My advice: Just ignore them. Don’t let the bastards wear you down.

The culture of fear

I put a residential rental unit on the market earlier this year, and in closing was told that I had to install $1,600 in radon mitigation equipment in the crawl space. I objected, as radon is not a problem for anyone other than coal miners who also smoke cigarettes. But I was told that one of the tenants in the building was afraid her child would get cancer if I did not act.

Shit, I thought. Fear works. It forces me to buy nonsense equipment that serves no purpose other than to line the pockets of greedy businessmen who got into EPA via the revolving door and created our bullshit radon regulations.

So too with all this gun nonsense. Bad things happen, but statistically speaking, we’re as safe as a swaddled baby in a crib. To go out and buy a gun is a personal choice, but for me not an option. I refuse to be part of the problem. And I refuse to let fear rule my life.

I know there was an incident in Roseburg, Oregon. I have not read about it, and won’t. I suggest to readers that if they are curious about that incident, to proceed as follows:

  • Verify by independent means that the victims were real people who really died that day.
  • Verify by independent means that the alleged shooter was a real person.
  • If it is determined that alleged shooter was real, do a deep background check on him, find out his acquaintances and friends, and associations. The object would be to see if he was manipulated by others to be where he was that day, and if he has been used by others, possibly sheepdipped and set up as a patsy.
  • Find out the number of shots fired, their source and direction, and caliber bullet to see if they came from one gun only.
  • Find out if there were any civilian, police or military training drills going on in that area at that time. (Such drills are the lever by which government resources are used – the drills can be “flipped live” to make fake events real.*)

A lot of work, right? However, if you don’t have time, just wait. Others will do the legwork, and you can learn more from them. Then go and get the information. Don’t wait for it to fall into your lap via news sources, as that will not happen.

In the meantime, stop being afraid.

*This is the method by which regular innocent people are recruited to participate in these incidents, unknowingly part of a larger script.

A clusterf*** of creeps, criminals, and corrupt politicians …

From the book Bloody Treason by Noel Twyman (1997), pp 633-634

… let us examine this incredible ménage of millionaires, industrialists, extremists, and corrupt politicians – bringing into the scene their various secret transgressions and liaisons. It is not a pretty picture. For example, Clare Boothe* Luce was at one time the mistress of Allen Dulles and another time bedded with the anti-Communist fanatic General Charles Willoughby. Meanwhile, Allen Dulles’s ex-mistress, Mary Bancroft, had an affair with Henry Luce, husband of Clare Boothe* Luce and owner of Life magazine. Then we have the rabid, racist billionaire H.L. Hunt with his three wives simultaneously; now adding in the crackpot General Edwin Walker, who turned out to be a closet homosexual, and J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson and lackey Roy Cohn all in the same category. Mix this with John F. Kennedy and his multiple adulterous affairs, including one with Marilyn Monroe, and Robert Kennedy and his affair with Marilyn Monroe; plus the mendacious, criminally minded Lyndon Johnson and his mistresses, and Johnson buying every election he ever won, and the Kennedy’s involvement with the Mafia in buying the 1960 presidential election. Added to this we have the partnership of the CIA with the Mafia to assassinate foreign leaders, the CIA’s involvement in Allen Dulles’s grotesque, ultra-secret mind-control programs to develop robot assassins, and the CIA and organized crime’s participation in illegal arms shipments and drug running, and we have a picture that is so outlandish and complex as to defy the imagination; and we are not even getting started with a long list of other dangerous secrets that can be enumerated. These people did not play by the prescribed rules. They made up their own rules as they went along. They all lived lives of deceit and betrayal. Out of is mise en scène exotique** emerged the decision to assassinate John J. Kennedy.

[My personal footnotes]

* Not to mention that the “Boothe” in her name is a changed spelling of the original name, Booth – she was a relative of John Wilkes Booth, as is Theresa Cara Booth, aka Cherie Blair, wife of the former British Prime Minister.
**translation from French: exotic staging

The illusion of choice

The spectacle of nearly twenty Republican presidential candidates is a recent phenomenon, and a curiosity. They are nearly uniform in their views, so much so that they would be at home in the Politburo or Cuba’s National Assembly of People’s Power. There is no diversion from the doctrinaire code of Americanism – we love our wars and want lower taxes, hate immigrants and want to end abortion (for others).

How does it come about? These men and woman are, by and large, low quality. Having schooled themselves in American Economics 101 (lower taxes, cut government non-military spending), they imagine themselves clever. Their views are never tested in the heat of real debate, and so they never move forward in their thinking.

What’s up? All I can figure is that the bar of entry to politics, on the Republican side at least, is set so low that any damned fool can cross it. As long as they mouth proper groupthink platitudes, the media has no basis for derision or dismissal. All are credible in our low-thought environment.

Among all those candidates, one has already been selected as our next president. I do not know who it is.

On the Democratic side, the field is much narrower. In debates on that side, while support of military and its many wars is a given, the breadth of issues is wider, and candidates, all on a leash, are given latitude to talk and sound somewhat progressive**. Debates will be an immersion into wedge politics.

Among those candidates, one has already been selected as the second place finisher in November of 2016.

Between the loonies of the right and the fake liberals of the left, we have the illusion of choice. That is the only reason we have politics – if voters realized they have no voice in the management of our country, they might get uppity. They might even form a real political movement for change.
_________________
*Al Gore has hinted at entering the race. Would it not be hilarious if he did, won the nomination, and had the election stolen from him by Jeb Bush?
** Where is my head at! This is known as “platitude latitude.”

On second thought

In the post below I suggested to readers that they read Chomsky’s 1967 essay The Responsibility if Intellectuals. I realized, of course, that no one would read a 13,000 word essay, as it smacks of a homework assignment. We are not a reading culture. So I will capsulize the essay:

“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.”

If you know of any American intellectuals who are actually doing this here in our Empire of Lies, please alert your local authorities. The consequences of speaking truth in this land are severe, usually loss of job, sometimes jail, often enough death.

Wild wings

I was looking for the origins of the phrase “wild men in the wings.”

I was pondering the significance of an event ranked way down low on the list of atrocities committed by the United States in the postwar era, the deliberate bombing of a trauma hospital in Kunduz in northern Afghanistan.

The phrase sounds Shakespearean, but the Google can only point me at sports teams and chicken recipes and bars …  oh, one other item, a 1967 essay by Noam Chomsky called “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.”  It was published in the New York Review of Books prior to his being banned from that haven for liberal intellectuals … this taxes my sense of irony. I must stop!

Deep in the essay Chomsky quotes McGeorge Bundy, a liberal intellectual and Camelot guy who was an important mover behind the US invasion of Vietnam. That is where the words “wild men in the wings” appears. (If the phrase has another origin, please let me know in the comment section.)

The Responsibility of Intellectuals is one of the most important essays ever written by Chomsky. I strongly urge that readers capable of prolonged concentration give a look. Chomsky addresses the question asked throughout human history – why do intellectuals align themselves with power and against ideals like simple justice and humanity? His prose is accessible and easily understood, though the essay is long.

The Eastern seaboard and California coast and every major city in the United States are bursting with liberal and right-wing intellectuals justifying the fascist course this country has taken since 1945. No atrocity is so significant that it cannot be trivialized. Motives are never questioned. Barbarity, slaughters, genocides are pedestrian affairs ascribed to high ideals.

“Wild men in the wings” refers to military men who run with a policy and turn it into slaughter and mayhem. But they could not succeed without backing from the intellectual class. Who, then, are more dangerous?
__________________
PS: For the benefit of those who do not read the essay, which is deed a homework assignment, I will slip you the answer: “IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.” If you know of any American intellectuals who are actually doing that, please alert your local authorities.

A word about Bernie

Just to set the record straight, a word or two about Bernie Sanders:

He was a weekly guest on the Thom Hartmann show on radio for years, and I listened to him every time I got a chance. I believed then that he was the real deal, a genuine progressive. I ascribed his ascent to Senate as a peculiarity of his home state, Vermont, thinking it could only happen there.

Later I learned he was Jewish and never criticized Israel. But then, no one elected to high office in our country ever voices criticism of Israel, as the punishment is immediate and severe. So that is forgivable.

Later I would learn that Jews tend to be Democrats, and for good reason – during the early postwar period, they were not allowed in the country clubs and skyscraper dining rooms of the Northeast, nor the Republican Party. They were not welcomed as screen writers, authors or any other position of prominence either, and only slowly gained a foothold. (William Gaines and Harvey Kurtzman, who founded Mad Magazine, were Jews who could not make their way into the ad agencies, magazines or TV networks. So they made their own magazine, one that I loved as a kid.)

So don’t ever say that I have any disrespect for Sanders as a Jew. His cultural tradition is rich and glorious, full of humor and suffering. The Jewish culture is a great addition to the American scene. I will never forget that it was young Jews from the Northeast who headed south in the fifties and sixties to help out the fledgling civil rights movement. They were the first whites to take a stand. Silly me – plenty of whites have been involved in civil rights – it was fundamentalist Christians who spurred on abolition in the last century.

When Bernie set out to run for president, I scoffed. When he began to gain traction, I looked for a reason, as the establishment, while having no problem with Jews, hates progressives.

He might knowingly be diddling progressives as a stalking horse. But I find it so difficult to believe that the man who mouthed all those platitudes and was so well versed on the Hartmann show all those years is a phony.

He could be, however. Leadership of the opposition is critical in American politics, with some of our most prominent liberals and progressives actually masked Republicans. Think … Jerry Brown, Jon Tester, John Hickenlooper, Steve Bullock, John Kerry, Barack Obama…

Bernie Sanders? I do not know. I don’t know the man’s heart. I refuse, however, to go all in.

General Reinhard Gehlen

Henry Ford, a Nazi supporter, said that history is bunk, and indeed it is. But a trip down the aisles of Barnes and Noble shows that most works of history are written to reinforce the official stories of our wars and other mechanizations.

Allen Dulles
Allen Dulles

Two well-known names are Allen and John Foster Dulles. They worked for Sullivan Cromwell, highly influential Wall Street law firm, and were drafted into public service by Dwight Eisenhower in his first term. John Foster headed State, and Allen CIA.

They are not the names I am highlighting, but Allen Dulles was instrumental in the rescue of one highly placed Nazi, enlisting him as an American intelligence asset. It was part of a much larger operations called “Paperclip” wherein thousands of ex-Nazis were brought in to help with rocket science, mind control experiments, and intelligence. His name ought to be a household word, but is not. He is General Reinhard Gehlen.

Don-Knotts-1024x892Reinhard GehlenA picture of Gehlan reminds me of Deputy Barney Fife without the humanity. He was a scrawny man, 130 pounds, who possessed a large amount of arrogance and a nasty temper. Gehlen was given control of $200 million to spy on the Soviets. He ran about 4,000 agents in Europe on behalf of the US, as our own intelligence operations were fledgling. When he retired in 1968, Allen Dulles gave him a Swiss chalet, reinforcing my belief that old Nazis never die, but rather retire in luxury. The US shepherded many of them to exile in South American, Argentina a prime destination.

Carl Oglesby wrote about Gehlen in his book The Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies from Dallas to Watergate. He claimed that Gehlen’s role was primarily to protect Odessa, and relocate tens of thousands of ex Nazis throughout Europe, and South and North America. He did this at the expense of US taxpayers.

Gehlen died in 1979. His legacy lives on in CIA, State, throughout Latin American and Europe, but he is never mentioned. How many people of curious mind, once they learned of this man, would go on to read and wonder about the origins of the CIA, the JFK execution, and all that has followed.

Ergo, there’s no mention of Gehlen in our history books.