Catching us asleep

SK directed us all to a link, 6 Brainwashing Techniques They’re Using On You Right Now on another blog last week. These are the six techniques listed:

  • #6. Chanting Slogans.
  • #5. Slipping Bullshit Into Your Subconscious
  • #4. Controlling What You Watch and Read
  • #3. Keeping You In Line With Shame
  • #2. Black and White Choices
  • #1. “Us vs. Them”

There’s enough there for all of us, so I won’t offer that these techniques work on some of us better than others. #4, for example, translates into “I read only sources I trust.” #5 is about the power of suggestion, or implanting ideas in our minds via back door channels.

We’re all manipulated by media in one form or another. It is when we reach a point of hubris (the state of being of the typical American journalist) that we are most vulnerable.

The author of the piece, David Wong, likely feels that he’s above the battle because he is able to spot these manipulations. He’s not. He’s been taken down via #5, though he’d be the last to know that. He should have listed the following:

  • #7. “Maybe they get to you, but not to me.”

Order restored in laws of physics, apparently

635536205744663791-AP-Los-Angeles-Apartment-Fire.1As I write there is a massive fire near downtown Los Angeles slowly being contained by fire fighters. la-apartment-fire-downtown-los-angeles-20141208
Looking at images, it appears that the laws of physics regarding structural steel, temporarily suspended on September 10, 2001, have been reinstated. The beams that supported the structure, despite intense heat, have not melted, twisted, contorted or collapsed. Other laws that were suspended back then, such as behavior of aircraft at low altitude and Newton’s Third Law (“for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”), might still be suspended by action of the state. I do not know. That’s above our pay grade.

_______________________________

john4Today, December 8, is the 34th anniversary of the death of John Lennon. That hit me hard. I’ll never forget sitting in our family room that night with my then-wife and mother-in-law as Howard Cosell said those words that cut like a knife … “dead … on … arrival.” I broke down in tears. My mother-in-law, ever observant of pop culture, was unsure why death of a mere musician would move me so.

Many questions still linger about the direction and source of the bullets that killed him, and also why that creepy kid Chapman was sitting there reading that book while it went down. As with the laws of physics, basic laws of investigatory diligence are suspended by fiat in certain instances, this but one of many.

The advent of the search engine

Years ago I was engaged in a boys club of sorts, an exclusive Yahoo email address wherein four or five people engaged in thoughtful discussions – I’ve lost track of all of them, and was overshadowed by some tall intellects anyway. My only remaining connection there is a link to the right to a blog called “Sohum Parlance,” where Erik Kirk still plods along.

Sometime in those discussions I discovered that by association of various phrases, I could easily explore any topic on a search engine, thereby giving me an advantage over the others. I quickly learned that they had the same advantage, so that even with Google at my side (there were several available and Google was not the most used), I was still outgunned.

Worse yet, they easily spotted anything I said that was the result of a casual search engine query. Days would go by as my visits to that address became less frequent – it was just too much work. Each session would take at least an hour, as the comments strings were long and involved. Importantly, I was exposed to people of high intellect who brought different world views to my attention, most importantly that of the high-minded right-winger. This was Jim Versluys of Houston, who exposed me to what I regarded as heartless analysis of US foreign policy stripped of any pretenses of democracy or humanity. In the face of such a powerful force, my soft-hearted liberalism shriveled.

For instance, the photos below are of the infamous “Turkey Shoot,” or “Highway of Death” after the first US attack on Iraq in 1991. General Schwarzkopf gave the Iraqis permission to withdraw from Kuwait, and once they did, US bombers cut off the head and tail of the convoy, and destroyed everything and slaughtered everyone in between.

Reporters commented that fighter pilots, able to fire on an easy target without fear of flak, often had erections when returning from sorties. They were told that such a physical manifestation was a result of their deep “patriotism.” I wrote about the duplicity and barbarity of the event, and Jim laughed. It was simply standard practice in war, he said, to get the enemy to expose himself so you can destroy him.

Turkey shootTL003576

I had to cede that argument, as there was no moral high ground, that is, the moral high ground was not something anyone cared about. It was simply an overlap of two worlds, mine of ethics and humanity, his of cold and cruel Machiavellian means to ends. He was impermeable to any soft reasoning, in fact laughed at it.

It was a good exchange, well worth the psychic pain such intellectual battering gave me. I saw the world from another viewpoint. It was cold and ugly, and I wanted no part of it, but I had to acknowledge its existence with or without my approval. It is there. It is how countries behave. It is how the military functions.

The Internet allowed me to know the gentlemen of that caliber, and to gain some self-awareness by doing combat with them. I didn’t win but I learned about how the other side thinks. It is good to know about them. I cannot be part of their world. It is too cold, but don’t get me wrong: It is not Sparta. These gentlemen appreciate the finer things of life, including art and humor. They are not thugs. They are simply men of the world.

I suppose it was inevitable that the Internet would degrade with such easy access. These past few days I’ve been engaged with Larry Kurtz and Big Swede, trying to pin them down, see what makes them tick. Where one time, long before it became the “Google” we know, I tried using a search engine to score some points with true intellectuals, I now see that The Google also operates as a flashlight for people who cannot read. Stripped of the search engine, neither Swede nor Kurtz have an ounce of native intelligence. They are also too typical of what the Internet as viewed through the blogs has become – a food fight among low brows and retards.

So many have left the blogging game, only a few left of maybe a score eight years ago. Those that stand have to put up with the likes of these two and Norma. I’m not issuing ultimatums or threatening to change anything, as my own desire to write drives me to carry on here. I am just offering some hard and cold analysis: Stupid people make blogging a chore. I am being careful here to avoid using names in the last paragraph so that the objects of scorn don’t know they are being talked about. What follows is a close to the opening paragraph that will assure us that the two in question do not see they are the object of hard and cold analysis.

I heard from Jim on occasion over the years, but lost track of him. No doubt he’s still kicking somewhere down in Houston, engaged in lively debate among people of his caliber intellect. I should Google him and see what he’s up to. But I cannot get drawn into debate with him, as he has a way of absorbing all of the light in a room into himself, as a black hole does. I need some light for myself. I cannot be in the same room with him, as I drown in his darkness.

Paris Match Interviews Bashar Al-Assad

Syrian President Assad
Syrian President Assad
One of the main features of American news is its ability to demonize any enemy of choice, making them into grotesque characters with blood dripping off their fingers. It helps if they object of the demonization has a mustache. It also helps if the object of demonization says a thing or two that can be wildly misinterpreted, such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s never-uttered desire to “wipe Israel off the map.” Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad has been most uncooperative in this regard. He’s a reasonable man who dresses in western attire and speaks in measured tone.

Consequently, I doubt that an interview with Paris Match, transcribed and reprinted in English here, will get much traction here in the land of the free. The interviewer, Régis Le Sommier, is hostile and confrontational, repeating every item of Western propaganda as if it were factual. Assad parries with him, never loses his cool, and strikes a tone of utter resignation to the preservation of the State of Syria in the face of Western-sponsored terror emanating mostly from France and Turkey.

Here are a few snippets:

Paris Match: Mr. President, three years into this war, and considering how things have turned out, do you regret that you haven’t managed things differently at the beginning, with the appearance of the first signs of the revolution in March 2011? Do you feel that you are responsible for what happened?
Bashar el Assad: Even in the first days of the events, there were martyrs from the army and the police; so, since the first days of this crisis we have been facing terrorism. It is true that there were demonstrations, but they were not large in number. In such a case, there is no choice but to defend your people against terrorists. There’s no other choice. We cannot say that we regret fighting terrorism since the early days of this crisis. However, this doesn’t mean that there weren’t mistakes made in practice. There are always mistakes. Let’s be honest: had Qatar not paid money to those terrorists at that time, and had Turkey not supported them logistically, and had not the West supported them politically, things would have been different. If we in Syria had problems and mistakes before the crisis, which is normal, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the events had internal causes.

This accusatory tone will appear throughout, with Le Sommier insisting that the Western-backed terrorist assault on Syria beginning shortly after the fall of Libya in 2011 is spontaneous and internal.

Paris Match: Many people say that the solution lies in your departure. Do you believe that your departure is the solution?
Bashar el Assad : The president of any state in the world takes office through constitutional measures and leaves office through constitutional measures as well. No President can be installed or deposed through chaos. The tangible evidence for this is the outcome of the French policy when they attacked Gaddafi. What was the result? Chaos ensued after Gaddafi’s departure. So, was his departure the solution? Have things improved, and has Libya become a democracy? The state is like a ship; and when there is a storm, the captain doesn’t run away and leave his ship to sink. If passengers on that ship decided to leave, the captain should be the last one to leave, not the first.

Western states are uniform in demanding regime change in Syria even as its government is entrenched and popular, more so in the wake of the terrorist attack. Assad has more support among his people, more of whom turn out to vote, than Barack Obama here in our fake democracy. No one calls for regime change here in the US. (I’d like to see it, but our comical switching back and forth between two bought parties doesn’t get it done.)

Paris Match: Let’s talk about ISIS. Some people say that the Syrian regime encouraged the rise of Islamic extremists in order to divide the opposition. How do you respond to that?
Bashar el Assad: In Syria we have a state, not a regime. Let’s agree on the terms first. Second, assuming that what you are saying is true, that we supported ISIS, this means that we have asked this organization to attack us, attack military airports, kill hundreds of soldiers, and occupy cities and villages. Where is the logic in that? What do we gain from it? Dividing and weakening the opposition, as you are saying? We do not need to undermine those elements of the opposition. The West itself is saying that it was a fake opposition. This is what Obama himself said. So, this supposition is wrong, but what is the truth? The truth is that ISIS was created in Iraq in 2006. It was the United States which occupied Iraq, not Syria. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was in American prisons, not in Syrian prisons. So, who created ISIS, Syria or the United States?

In American propaganda, any government we want overthrown, no matter how popular or democratic, becomes a “regime.” Any leader, no matter how he comes to power, becomes a “strongman” or “dictator.” I was glad to see Assad correct Le Sommier on that matter. As to the origin of ISIS, it takes some thought and reading to understand that a full-fledged fighting force, armed and well-financed, is not birthed as an adult. Cui bono? Certainly not Syria.

Paris Match: But U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry accuses you of violating the agreement because you used chlorine. Is that true?
Bashar el Assad : You can find chlorine in any house in Syria. Everyone has chlorine, and any group can use it. But we haven’t used it because we have traditional weapons which are more effective than chlorine, and we do not need to use it. We are fighting terrorists, and using traditional weapons without concealing that or being shy about it. So, we don’t need chlorine. These accusations do not surprise us; for when did the Americans say anything true about the crisis in Syria?

Indeed. When have the Americans said anything true about anything?

It is a powerful interview and won’t be widely disseminated here in the land of the free. It won’t be featured on Fox or NPR or NY Times, our entire spectrum, far right to less-far right. It won’t fall into the lap of the average American news consumer. All will be shielded. So I urge you to read the whole thing, make your own judgments. Takes about ten minutes.

Outliers 2

The posts below, Outliers, as expected, drew few reads and but one comment. Perhaps the biggest deterrent to anyone reading it is that it is long. But beyond that, there is a divide, and it is an interesting one to observe. Americans are kept under a bubble and fed shit, and have so learned to trust what they are fed that they regard anything outside it as aberrant. (“Conspiracy theory,” they are taught to think.) There is precious little freedom of thought in this country, and the most astounding thing is that this is so even as people are free to access any and all information from any and all sources … and don’t! They wait to have it dropped in their lap.

And then I realized because I have stepped out of traffic and read and read and tried to figure things out … that I am an outlier. I am not a radical in that I don’t have any solutions to our problems, and so have no proposals. There is no ‘ism’ that will fix us. I don’t support anarchists or syndicalists or libertarians or any of that nonsense, and certainly do not think that either of our two parties, the People’s Front of Judea or the Judean People’s Front, are any kind of solution.

So screw ideology. I just operate on a different set of evidence-backed convictions.

If more people were to free their minds, we might have meaningful change. But I don’t see it ever happening. The forces of thought control as manifested by news and entertainment and schooling is far too powerful to overcome. We’ll just have to see where it takes us. We have not really suffered much, not as suffering goes on a world-wide scale anyway. Other countries have suffered deeply because of American insulation. Millions have died, millions more are homeless and trapped in poverty. But we have not suffered. So I guess there’s not much hope for change from within.

Outliers

Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers talks of the need to devote 10,000 hours to any activity to become really good at it. He’s talking, of course, about violinists and chess masters, people who stand out, but it struck me the other day, looking back over my life since 1988, that I have 10,000 hours of reading in the bank, or an average of an hour a day during that time. That does not count the hours spent writing on this blog these last eight years, a form of self-guided learning. That’s more time than I spent studying in college.

It does not begin to equate to the number of hours I spent in classrooms, however. Most of that classroom time was spent absorbing material that I would later have to recite back on a test before permanently forgetting it. How that qualifies as “education” – I haven’t a clue.

Looking back at my graduation from college, I am embarrassed at how little I learned. True, I passed the CPA exam, but on-the-job training is where that expertise comes from. I could have skipped most of college. Everything I know I learned since. There was very little learned in school that was truly useful later on.

My wife’s son runs a small business with quite a few employees. I asked him about the value of a college degree in his hiring practices. He didn’t think there was much value except for this: A person with a college degree can undertake a large project and see it through to the end. But honestly, there’s got to be better, cheaper ways of attaining that end than those thousands of hours wasted in classrooms. Can we not find a more visionary rite of passage into adult life?

It is our self-guided learning that matters most, because it is driven by interest. We tend to remember it. In my case, The lessons I had absorbed in sixteen years of classroom learning were those most Americans learn: Religious faith, false history, some numbers, some literature … drawing a blank here. What did I do all those years?

Let’s see: In college I studied …

  • statistics for three semesters. I cannot tell you a thing about it.
  • I studied marketing, but didn’t learn how it is really done, as no one will ever admit they deceive for a living.
  • I studied governmental accounting, and during that semester fell for a really hot girl. What I remember from that class: Betsy.
  • From my college history courses I remember some tidbits, like the type of landing craft used on D-Day, the first American victory in World War II at Al Alamein.
  • Dr. Aaron Small and Shorty Alterowitz, two professors at Eastern Montana College, left a positive lasting impression. They were really smart guys who seemed to like students – they brought some passion to the game.
  • A non-teacher came in and taught a course on insurance and investments, and his stuff stuck with me because it was counter-intuitive. He taught me the life insurance game, indeed a con game. That was a really useful information when I later encountered “experts.” That’s how I learned about snake oil.
  • Real estate – again, non-teachers taught the course, and they were all about closing deals, getting people to commit to borrowing large amounts of cash and thereby turning six percent over to them. The teacher, J. Cody Montalban, was a rich and eccentric character. He did not play it straight, and I really liked him. He died young.

That paragraph above, 233 words, is all that comes to mind as I think back on four years of post-secondary education. There’s more, but I’d have to work at it. Oh yeah: Randy Howard, accounting professor, was considered an excellent teacher because he laid out information in such an organized manner that you could remember it when tested. Mostly, though, here merely brought some humor to the dreary profession. He made a risqué joke one day about early withdrawals. I remember that.

Born in 1950, entered school in 1956, but it was not until 1988 that I started my own education, the self-guided type, following my real interests. It wasn’t an organized program of learning. I did not know the final objective. But I was interested. That year was the 25th anniversary of the death of JFK. I thought I might just solve that crime. I had done well in school, so thought I was able. So I asked the question.

Here’s what it has taken 10,000 hours and 25 years to understand: All of our glorified institutions, including our courts, law enforcement and news media, formed a circle around the criminals who committed the murder of JFK, and protected them. They are still doing so to this day. They do so in an instinctual manner, fulfilling their true function.

Every institution in our land has both a stated function and a real function. The real function is usually so seedy that it is not discussed, even privately. For example, the FBI acts as political police, CIA as professional murderers. Both are charged with watching the population, ferreting out and undermining democratic movements, murdering the leaders if necessary. It’s not just that one murder that one day. Thousands of people have been killed in every way imaginable, from poison to heart attacks to cancer to downed planes to car wrecks to gunshots in an open plaza … god it’s disgusting. Murder, murder everywhere, Michael Hastings recently, for example. And just as with JFK, people know instinctively not to ask questions. Another cover-up.

If it were that one crime … but and it crosses all affairs of our glorious state. Everything about us is a lie.

Nothing changed on that day, 11/22/63. Had the crime been carried out as planned, had Lee Harvey Oswald been murdered by JD Tippet so that he never have uttered those four words “I’m just a patsy”, had not John Connally also been shot, we would not know as much as we do about that day. They bungled the job. The cleanup and coverup have been operations of brute force. Part of our patriotism now demands that we believe the impossible, the Magic Bullet, 2+2=5. Our leaders and institutions were left naked before us that day … for eyes that can see.

JFK does not matter. No matter his glorious intent, one way or another he would have been thwarted. He was just a man, and a deeply flawed one at that. But asking the question – who killed him – leads to other questions leads to answers and more questions, and finally, enlightenment.

Since I know that no others are going to take my journey, I’ll slip you the answer: The United States of America is a totalitarian state hidden behind the thinnest veil of democracy imaginable. In order to maintain the illusion of democracy, the bulk of the population has to be kept in a state of unenlightened patriotism, or deep indoctrination.

That’s what formal education does for us; that is its primary function. It keeps us willfully blind an unknowingly stupid. News and entertainment follow up in our post-education years to reinforce the blindness and stupidity. Teachers, journalists, cops, judges … all of them have to buy into the system and be as stupid and blind as the rest of us. Any who are enlightened are soon jettisoned. Or disgraced. Or murdered.

When I left college with a decent GPA and hours of study and classrooms behind me, the best words that described me were blind and stupid. Formal education had worked its magic on me.

Twenty-five years, 10,000 hours made me an outlier. I overcame my education; I learned things. I asked the question.

The power of (two or three) words

There are two (or more) ways of looking at the average political IQ of a typical American:

  • One, people are busy. They are working, paying bills, raising kids, watching football. They have very little time for politics. Consequently, when the political world injects itself into their world at two-year intervals, politicians have to carry short, pithy messages that are easy to grasp and remember.
  • Two, people are not intelligent. Taken as a whole, they are no more than a bewildered herd.

Whatever the truth might be, in our society there are no serious attempts to engage the public in debate, educate them in the schools, or do anything more than divert them and lie to them in media. The most important aspects of our political debates are supplied by the public relations industry in the form of two and three-word slogans.

There are many, and they are highly effective as they are crafted to yield an emotional punch. “Death panels” was used in the health care debate, and even as it was private insurers who were killing 50,000 people a year by denying sick people access to the health care system, those two words placed the government in that role, and carried the day. “Drill baby drill” reduced a debate about conservation, clean environment, and controlling access to the commons to an immediate imperative to allow the oil cartel a prize. “Support the troops” deflected legitimate anger about aggressive war and government lies by making our ignorant young men and women in the military the victims of dissidents.*

There’s another two-word phrase that has been equally devastating: “conspiracy theory.” I offer a description of its effect here in the form of pictures.

First, just an image of the amount of work that has been done by private researchers on matters such as JFK, RFK, MLK, JFK Jr., Wellstone, Florida 2000 Oklahoma City, Jonestown, First Gulf War, Iran Contra, Tonkin, 9/11, Boston, Sandy Hook, The Second Gulf War, Libya and now ISIS … you know, all of the lies of our times that our government tells us and our media refuses to investigate.
free-books-pile-007

Secondly, the impressive power of two words, “conspiracy theory” have in preventing normally intelligent people from even looking at the volumes of evidence uncovered by research over the decades:

"What you got there buddy, some kind of conspiracy theory?"
“What you got there buddy, some kind of conspiracy theory?”

Saker writes about the conspiracy theory thought control meme here. He too is frustrated at how incredibly effective the tactic is. He asks What is wrong with you guys?! Has basic logic just become extinct?!

No, it has not. But propaganda techniques are so highly refined that its agents merely have to invoke two words to shut minds off. That is amazing psychological control of the masses.
______________
*Another one has surfaced recently, “Nyet neutrality,” removing the notion of “freedom” from people who want an open Internet, and ceding it to the communications cartel.

The journalist from DC Comics

Amanpour
Amanpour
American journalists are very bad at their job, generally, but don’t know it because they are sheltered from feedback. They give each other awards, and if they are really, really sycophantic, government officials take a liking to them and start heaping praise on them, and before you know it you’ve got yourself a Medal of Freedom recipient Tom Brokaw. Or, a Christiane Amanpour.

Man of steelAmanpour recently had two guests on – Mikhail Kasyanov, a fierce critic of Vladimir Putin (ergo his ease of access to American television audiences), and Anissa Naouai, of RT. Naouai was not proper in her approach to the interview, that is, did not approach Amanpour on bended knee. Rather, she was highly critical of her, CNN in general, and the whole idea that American news is independent of the government while Russian news is state-sponsored.

So Amanpour did what all good American journalists do – censored those parts of the interview critical of her and CNN. Read the whole thing here.

Superhuman journalist Lane
Superhuman journalist Lane
That reminded me of the movie Man of Steel, the Superman franchise reboot. In that movie (which also rebooted the 9/11 franchise) the part of the intrepid reporter Lois Lane is played by Amy Adams. She is confrontational to power, refuses to be quarantined, and demands answers from military officials. She is feisty.

Anyway, the whole thing about a guy from another planet coming here, being able to fly and having superhuman strength … that part was OK. I buy that. The part about the confrontational and feisty journalist – man, that was a reach. In this country it is far more likely that a dude in a red cape flies across the landscape than a journalist confronts power.

Elections: “A form of public self-worship”

The paradox of education is precisely this — that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. (James Baldwin)

Dangerous psychopath?
Dangerous psychopath?
The above quote came to me via Joseph McBride, and reminded me of something George Carlin use to say in his act. He, like me and McBride, was a product of Catholic schools, but Carlin’s education was progressive. He was not taught to be a Catholic. The assumption was that he would come around on his own by his own internal light as he grew in ability.

…somehow we got lucky, y’know. Got into a school where the pastor was kinda into John Dewey and progressive education and he talked the parish…talked the diocese, rather, into experimenting in our parish with progressive education and whipping the religion on us anyway and see what would happen with the two of them there. And [it] worked out kinda nice; there was a lot of classroom freedom. There was no…for instance, there were no grades or marks, … no report cards to sweat out or any of that. There were no uniforms. …there was no sexual segregation; boy and girls together. And the desks weren’t all nailed down in a row, y’know. There were movable desks and you had new friends every month. It was nice; like I say, a lot of classroom freedom…in fact there was so much freedom that by eighth grade, many of us had lost the faith. ‘Cause they made questioners out of us and … they really didn’t have any answers …

george-carlin-84

While the world is crawling with ex-Catholics like Carlin, McBride and myself, Catholic education these days does not mess around. They go for the mind, take ownership, and leave no doubt that Catholic is the righteous path.

I am reading McBride’s Into the Nightmare. It is about his growing up and coming of age after the Kennedy assassination. He and I have much in common, being about the same age, taking the same publications in our homes as youths, twelve years of Catholic schooling, and having the assassination as the lever by which were launched into the grown-up world.

JFK was just a man who tripped over real power. I seriously doubt he could have changed very much, as the office of president, while powerful, is not the center of power in this land. But the assassination is a focal point. If we examine it closely, we can come to grips with that power, educate ourselves, and free our minds of the deep indoctrination that is American education. It is a lever by which we learn to view the world with unfiltered eyes. It can help us grow up.

Don Draper: Grew up in whorehouse
Don Draper: Grew up in whorehouse
If was often said over the years that Europeans were not surprised at how JFK was murdered, that such intrigue is common and accepted over there. Americans still cling to childish beliefs about leaders and countries and systems of government. I know I did, so that finally coming to realize that JFK was murdered by Americans, and that the whole of our collective institutional structures formed a circle around the murderers was deeply shocking. I had to throw out my education and beliefs and start over from scratch. I realized that I had grown up in a whore house. (This is, I suspect, the underlying message of the TV series Mad Men, as Don Draper comes to grips with his life and real identity. The TV series is smuggling some truth to to us.)

The Saker wrote a nice short piece on this country called “Hillary, Jeb, Rand – does it make a difference anyway?”

[I] see the USA as run by a tiny elite which is good at “pretend democracy” but which makes darn sure that the people vote the “correct” way. I consider the primaries, conventions, caucuses, and elections themselves as a mix between a farce, a form of entertainment, a re-legitimization of a system and a secular liturgical act (a form of public self-worship). There is no “democracy” in the US and there probably never was. However, if the regime does not change, the specific clans within the 1% do fight each other and struggle for control of the regime.

Second, there are different clans, interest groups, factions who fight *within* the top 1% and they can, and do, make use of the electoral process not as a means of popular expression, but as a way to impose their agenda and interests. I often speak of the “old Anglo guard” (best represented by the Bush clan before Dubya) and the “Neocons”, but there are many more interest group[s] (oil, banking, military, drug warriors, big pharma, etc.) who all participate in the internal struggle for power.

Thus, there is no real difference between the Republicrats and the Demoblicans, they are all part of the same elite, but there are differences between different political figures who are more, or less, aligned with any specific interest group. Thus Greenwald is correct when he identifies the various groups who would support a Hillary Presidency. This has nothing to do with democracy, the political parties or even her own views and everything to do with which interest groups she sold out to.

The Saker, as a legal alien educated elsewhere, came to this country with a fully formed cerebral cortex. Unlike products of our own education system, he is a grown-up. Later in his short essay he says that given a choice we might be better off “having a generally mentally sane Jeb Bush (and his staff) … than a clearly rabid Hillary (and her staff).” This feeds my own sensibilities, affirms my own judgment to a degree.

My impressions of people that we only know via media and print is flawed, of course. Over the years I have come to view George H.W. Bush as a dangerous psychopath, for example, and Ronald Reagan as a dunce and the mere vehicle by which (the unelectable) Bush was handed the presidency (on March 30,1981). George’s son George W. is a ninny. Richard Nixon was a complex and intelligent man who, like JFK, thought the power of the office of president could be exercised roughshod over the other factions within the 1% who have different objectives. He failed to grasp the nature of the makeup of our oligarchical structure. Fortunately for him, his removal from office was bloodless.

And yes, Hillary, like George H.W. Bush, scares the crap out of me. She’s unprincipled and ruthless, and smart only to the degree that she can see up to, but not around the bend. Having no emotions or concerns about human suffering, she might indeed think war with Russia is a smart move, for example.

Why do only the good ones get taken down? Where are those damned hidden gunmen when we really need them?

Something rotten in Holland

Four countries are charged with the investigation of the downing of Flight MH17, the flight that crashed in Eastern Ukraine on July 17 of this year. They are Netherlands, Belgium, Australia and Ukraine. Since Ukraine is a potential suspect in the matter, it has a bold faced conflict of interest and should not be part of the investigation. But it gets worse:

Part of the agreement between the four countries and the Dutch Public Prosecution Service, ensures that all these parties have the right to secrecy. This means that if any of the countries involved believe that some of the evidence may be damaging to them, they have the right to keep this secret.

This is unheard of. In fact, it is bizarre. It is a strong indication that something is going to be hidden. So ask yourself which of the four countries listed above would want to protect, say, Russian interests, and which would want to protect NATO/US interests.

[link]