Criminal enterprises handing out candy

I’ve been around this block a few too many times. The war is on now, thousands of innocent people are being driven from their homes, and how many wounded or killed won’t be known for some time. It is well-known in the area what is going on. The further away one gets from Syria, the more clouded the issue will become. But by the time one gets to the USA, the issue will not be clouded at all. It will be a gigantic lie. Years from now we’ll learn that our American boys flying our American toys are bombing Syrian villages and towns, and reinforcing ISIS positions in the process. The whole thing is one big goddamned lie.

The war is on now to topple the democratically elected government of Syria. It is not a perfect government, but is far more representative of its people than our own. Americans haven’t a clue what their own government is doing. The United States military now is performing its terrorist function, and while supporting terrorists, is bombing and murdering innocent civilians. Soon they will hand out pictures of soldiers giving candy to children. The US military has an abundant supply of machines and bombs, stupid and deeply indoctrinated fighting men and women, and candy.

Photos like this are not staged. No sireee ... not staged. No way.
Photos like this are not staged. No sireee … not staged. No way.
Those pictures of candy and kids – honest, that shit works. Americans eat that candy up.

Anyone who takes time to review evidence scattered about the Post-War era will find, as I have, certain oddities. The enemies of the United States generally have broad popular support. The allies of the United States, say for instance the leader of “free China,” Chiang Kai-shek, or Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, or Augusto Pinochet in Chile or our most recent friend and ally, Petro Poroshenkoturn of the Ukraine, turn out to be terrorists and often enough drug runners and thieves to boot. We generally can label them “fascists,” but that label, like “Nazis”, has lost substance, and only means “bad.”

More to the point, the people the United States supports are well-connected to large financial interests like oil companies or mining concerns, or even companies selling such trifling items as soda pop. In Syria, it is natural gas production and distribution at stake, with ExxonMobil and Aramco wanting to displace the current route of gas to Europe from Tehran to Damascus with an alternative route that benefits their own coffers.

It’s that simple sometimes.

I read a little story some time back in a book written in 1970 by Fletcher Prouty called The Secret Team. Prouty was attempting to illustrate how corrupt agents within government manipulate honest and corrupt officials alike to their own ends. The events that he described eventually mushroomed into what became known as the Bay of Pigs, an invasion meant to sucker JFK into bombing the island. The driving force behind the invasion was pissed off businessmen and mafioso who had lost casinos, sugar plantations and mines. They regarded Cuba as their island paradise.

Most of the American-connected criminal element had left Cuba and taken up residence in Miami after the revolution. In Prouty’s example a few of them were in touch with some workers at a sugar refinery in Cuba. They hatched a plan to set off bombs in that refinery and destroy it. The CIA thought it was a good idea and supported the idea, supplying the bombs.

In case you’re wondering, that is a criminal act. The U.S. was not at war with Cuba. It was simply terrorizing the place.

On the night that the terrorist act was to be committed, Cuban military officials intercepted the boat and the bombs and arrested the agents and those at the factory who supported them. Cuban security was very good because of the neighborhood block reporting system. The Cuban government not only knew about the scheme, but allowed it to develop so that they could arrest the perpetrators and get them out of their hair.

There’s a lesson here that I believed as a youth and Swede, who has not read this far, still believes, and it is this:

Cuba is not free. We are.

Where journalism is still practiced

imageimageThe American journalism profession long ago ceased functioning as a news gathering operation, and instead became, as David Barsamian labeled them in his book, “Stenographers to Power.” It’s a tough way to live, undignified, so behind the veneer of “professionalism” journalists these days actually brag about their fealty, claiming it’s a requirement of the profession. They call it “objectivity,” better described as “see nothing, know nothing.” In practice they get a quote from both sides and move on, and learn nothing, tell nothing.*

It is interesting, however, to see how real journalists function, never trusting power, burrowing on their own, uncovering lies and reporting back to us on what powerful people are doing.

They are sports journalists. If Ray Rice was a senator instead of a Raven, he’s have gotten a free pass on his elevator activities. If Roger Goodell, Commissioner of the NFL, were the head of the Nataional Endowment for Democracy, a CIA front, for example, he’d have a free pass to do whatever it is he does in the shadows without fear of reporters snooping around.

We still have some journalists in our Empire of Lies. They work in sports.
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*This led to Krugman’s famous observation that if Republicans claimed the earth was flat, journalists would report “Shape of earth: Views Differ.”
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PS: It has been suggested to me not only in the comments below, but other people I read and listen to, that there are many good and curious people in the American news media who simply know to avoid career suicide. I believe that to be true and at the same time note that whether they are voluntarily shutting off their brains or just naturally incurious, the result is the same.

Does Missoula have a neighborhood watch program?

After some 3,000 Hmong had been flown across the Mekong Vang Pao and his CIA case officer, Jerry Daniels, a fifteen-year veteran of the secret war, flew out of Long Tieng and into Thailand – an ultimately, to Missoula, Montana, Daniels’ home town, where Vang Pao paid over a half million dollars for a cattle ranch, hog farm, and two large homes. By the end of the year, more than 30,000 Hmong refugees had fled across the Mekong into Thailand, the first wave of a mass exodus that would peak at 3,000 a month by 1979. “War is difficult, peace is hell,” concluded General Vang Pao. (Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, p331)

General Vang Pao
General Vang Pao
General Vang Pao (1929-2011) was a Laotian commander of the CIA’s army of Hmong villagers during the Indochina wars of the 1960’s and 70’s, the so-called “secret war.” It was no secret in the region, of course, and that word refers to the fact that it was never publicized in the American news media. Vang Pao was regarded as ruthless and tyrannical so that even our CIA boys, themselves murders and assassins, treated him with care and caution.

But he got the job done, and that is all CIA has ever cared about.

During his tenure, the Hmong villages in the mountains of Laos were decimated, with young men impressed and usually killed in combat. When the Pathet Lao, indigenous resistance fighters, and North Vietnamese had the strength of numbers to mount an offensive, CIA tried to convince Hmong villagers to move away from their homes and to encampments. But Vang Pao by that time had soured them on any connections with Americans and their agents. They refused to leave even as food supplies were cut off. (Under CIA guidance, most villages had ceased production of rice and were exclusively growing poppy. Their food was helicoptered in (and the opium out) via CIA’s proprietary transport company, Air America.) So the U.S. did what the U.S. does so well, began to carpet bomb the Plain of Jars to force people out.

Map_Plain_of_Jars_by_Asienreisender_700pxThat is but one small chapter in a larger conflict, one that the CIA actually won. The area was pacified, resistance slaughtered or silenced, the countryside devastated. There’s a myth out there that the U.S. lost in Vietnam and the rest of Indochina. Not true. They accomplished their objective, and by 1975 thought the area was brutalized and devastated enough that it could be left to slowly recover. CIA was moving on, next stop Afghanistan and the war of devastation on that country of the 1980’s, and where oddly enough, poppy fields flourished as well. (They still do, under protection of the U.S. military, in case you wonder what your boys are doing over there.)

Indochina would endure yet another 25 years of economic warfare, with sanctions not lifted until the 1990’s. Mission accomplished. The area is alive today, but will never again present a threat to U.S. power. They learned their lesson.

I read about stuff like this all the time, the real history of Indochina, along with that of Iraq and World War II, Latin America … and it is all so ugly. The leaders of our country are not at all like the citizen of this country. They are brutal monsters. All that I wrote above is just another small passage, another small part of the world devastated by exposure to democracy, American style. The only reason I write this is to detail the final chapters in the life of Vang Pao, cited at the opening above, where he moved to Missoula Montana, a wealthy man, and bought houses and cows and pigs, and lived a life he denied to his countrymen.

Playing football without helmets

I woke up this morning wanting to write about football or Star Wars trivia – anything to get away from the dreary humdrum repeated spectacle of American politics. Zbig’s words “stunningly superficial” repeat again and again in my head. As I used to say about my departed older brother, there are many ways to reason with him … none work.

There are many ways to approach Americans about lies, propaganda, the futility of party politics, the utter corruption of our society and the warmongering machine that is raining hell on the rest of the world. None work. Americans are unreachable, secure in their ignorance, and happy to be diddled and bamboozled time and again by the owners of this place. This time it is ISIS. Before it was to prevent a massacre in Libya (when they were really causing one). Before that it was those fake WMD’s, also used to justify a massacre. There was the whole of 9/11 … it’s a hugely successful franchise.

It’s so frustrating. These plays always work! It’s like the American public has no defense, can’t stop the pass, can’t stop the running game, is even clueless about how the game is played. Americans are playing football without their helmets. No wonder they always lose.

  • Did you see that? Do you believe it? A game winning touchdown called back because timeout was called!!!!!
  • A whole supposed invasion of Ukraine by Russia a big lie with zero evidence in support!!!
  • That pass knocked down in the closing seconds as the Broncos held on to beat the Chiefs!!! Close call!!!
  • The whole of ISIS easily seen to be an American-financed terrorist force being used to justify more American aggression!!!
  • The Bills are 2-0!!! That’s so good for that city, so that the owner might not pull the rug and do a midnight move to Toronto!!!
  • Airliner disappears in mid-flight over the Pacific? Just disappears? Bullshit!!!
  • Democrats and Republicans so painfully obviously using the same play book!!!
  • Too many interceptions in that Vikings game. Maybe the Pats are spying on their practice sessions. Another SpyGate!!!

So by chance, at Facebook of all places, I came across an interview with Noam Chomsky, put up at Alternet and probably in a book I have on my shelf as well. The words are tightly reasoned and illuminating, and gave me great comfort. I know only a couple of people will bother to read it, least of all Swede, who will comment anyway. But these words landed on me like a soothing warm shower after a long hike.

QUESTION: You’ve written about the way that professional ideologists and the mandarins obfuscate reality. And you have spoken — in some places you call it a “Cartesian common sense” — of the commonsense capacities of people. Indeed, you place a significant emphasis on this common sense when you reveal the ideological aspects of arguments, especially in contemporary social science. What do you mean by common sense? What does it mean in a society like ours? For example, you’ve written that within a highly competitive, fragmented society, it’s very difficult for people to become aware of what their interests are. If you are not able to participate in the political system in meaningful ways, if you are reduced to the role of a passive spectator, then what kind of knowledge do you have? How can common sense emerge in this context?

CHOMSKY: Well, let me give an example. When I’m driving, I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I’m listening to is a discussion of sports. These are telephone conversations. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it’s plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding. On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, it’s at a level of superficiality that’s beyond belief.

In part, this reaction may be due to my own areas of interest, but I think it’s quite accurate, basically. And I think that this concentration on such topics as sports makes a certain degree of sense. The way the system is set up, there is virtually nothing people can do anyway, without a degree of organization that’s far beyond anything that exists now, to influence the real world. They might as well live in a fantasy world, and that’s in fact what they do. I’m sure they are using their common sense and intellectual skills, but in an area which has no meaning and probably thrives because it has no meaning, as a displacement from the serious problems which one cannot influence and affect because the power happens to lie elsewhere.

Now it seems to me that the same intellectual skill and capacity for understanding and for accumulating evidence and gaining information and thinking through problems could be used — would be used — under different systems of governance which involve popular participation in important decision-making, in areas that really matter to human life.

There are questions that are hard. There are areas where you need specialized knowledge. I’m not suggesting a kind of anti-intellectualism. But the point is that many things can be understood quite well without a very far-reaching, specialized knowledge. And in fact even a specialized knowledge in these areas is not beyond the reach of people who happen to be interested.

(My emPHASis)

Golden apples

A wonderful gal, married to my cousin, sent me the above YouTube. She’s a reader and ponderer and has traveled the waters of doubt and deceit, as have I, so I took time to watch it. (There’s a lot of disinformation and deliberate deceit in the YouTube world, just like every other nook of American media. Nothing is untended in our garden of lies.)

The first words to come to my mind after watching it were “golden apple.” Let me explain. Dan Rather was a mostly useless apparatchik in American news, but in 2004, late in his career and perhaps believing his own press clippings, he got brave. Presented with the ” “Killian documents”, he went forward with a report detailing George. W. Bush’s AWOL status during his military service in the National Guard.

Not too long after airing, the Killian documents were revealed by a blogger to have been typed on an instrument that was not available in 1972. They were forgeries.

The entire Rather/Killian episode was an intelligence covert op, and it ended Rather’s career. More importantly, the Killian documents were a golden apple, or planted evidence. The exposure was well-planned, the blogger* either manipulated or actually in on it. The overall effect: All reporters knew from that day forward never to mess with Bush’s service records.

There’s a lot of that in our news, reports from supposedly “independent” sources that make stories seem credible. The key to its effectiveness is that we have to stumble on such evidence by our own efforts. It cannot be handed to us. This makes skepticism about regular news a minefield. Even as we know the mainstream is lying to us, intelligence agencies also go to great lengths to give us false leads and evidence, just to keep us confused.

The “Pentagon Papers” are, in my view, a golden apple. That’s another story. To a far higher level of deceit, Edward Snowden is performing the golden apple function. He appears to be rogue and speaking out of school. He is telling secrets and yet … not telling us anything new, and telling us exactly nothing about the most important events of our times. What is his function? As with the Pentagon Papers, it is the “limited hangout,” telling small truths as a way to conceal large ones. He keeps our eyes off the ball.

I first encountered the term “golden apple” via Jim Garrison, the district attorney in New Orleans who investigated the JFK assassination. As I look back on his work, I realize what a smart man he was.** His image should be on our postage stamps and dollar bills. He was an honest man! He took on the entire intelligence establishment and the U.S. media to boot. He wondered toward the end of his life if it had all been worth it. Would be not have been better off just letting that dog sleep? He was so abused during his life, and yet he did get one small reward – in the movie of 23 years ago, JFK, Oliver Stone cast him in the role of Earl Warren.

Anyway, back to the video: I know that subliminal suggestion is part of advertising. We’ve all heard that they used to splice movie pre-rolls with the words “Drink Coke.” How effective was (or is) it? I don’t know. That’s proprietary information, buried deep in the bowels of ad agencies. I do know this: Advertisers spend billions of dollars making their products. They do it because advertising works. Really well. The beating heart of every ad agency is the behavioral psychology team. They craft the message, and the rest of the agency is on board to embed that message in those three things they have found effective in selling products: Humor, sex, and fear.

So was our government sending us a subliminal message all those years when TV stations used to sign off playing the national anthem off every night? Here it is as revealed by this YouTube:

TRUST THE US GOVERNMENT
GOD IS REAL GOD IS WATCHING
BELIEVE IN GOVERNMENT GOD
REBELLION WILL NOT BE TOLERATED
OBEY CONSUME OBEY CONSUME

I suppose so. It’s possible. It could also be planted evidence designed to make people who fall for it look stupid when we find out it was a hoax. That would make it a Killian scam.

It wasn’t but a few hours after the CIA was created, put together of remnants of the American OSS and Nazi SS, that the agency went rogue. By the time Bill Casey came on board in 1981, they had managed to infiltrate American media, placing moles and disinformation agents at every critical junction. At his first staff meeting after he took over, Casey was quoted as saying

“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”

Mission accomplished, I suppose. But is the video above real, or a golden apple? I don’t know. If real, it is clumsy. They are better at persuasion than that. Way better.
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*Having a lowly blogger do the big reveal was classic CIA sting. It adds credibility.
** RFK, as I understand, sent a private courier to Garrison during the investigation saying that he was watching closely but could not speak publicly, and would reopen the JFK investigation after he became president. Garrison thought that was foolish, that Bobby needed to go loud, as keeping secrets endangered his life. He said that once you are public with information, they can no longer kill you to silence you. (They might kill you anyway just as a STFU example, but what are you gonna do?) Bobby did not listen. However, and this is what I call the Kennedy Curse, that whole family has to shut up about everything, as they all know that if they say anything in public they might run into a large pond or a tree or their small aircraft might disappear into the ocean. So I look at RFK’s 11 children all doing good work and staying silent, and admire them deeply.

Stupid pretty faces

I was half-heartedly watching a TV drama called Ray Donovan the other night. It is one of those productions for pay channels that draws rave reviews, most likely because it has swearing and nudity and is not interspersed with mind-numbing and psychologically subversive advertising. Consequently it seems more coherent than regular TV fare. The acting and casting are more skilled. One of the main characters is Mickey Donovan, played by Jon Voight, otherwise known as Angelina Jolie’s dad. I’ve not been able to locate him in the casting available on websites, but Mickey has a certifiably crazy friend, with erratic mannerisms and a goofy unshaven appearance. (I am guessing here that this is “Bunchy Donovan”, a family member who suffers from depression and addiction. I have not paid enough attention to be sure.)

As I was watching the other night, I noticed that Bunchy was talking about 9/11, and realized that I was witnessing some of the only permitted discussion of that event on television. And of course, the show’s writers and producers had it come from the mouth of a crazy person. But why?

This naturally leads to discussion of how much of our thought control regime is intentional, how much accidental, how much self-induced, and how much merely instinctive. In this particular episode, there was no reason to discuss the 9/11 event in terms of plot. The character was merely riffing. The writers could have been trying to demonstrate the character’s instability, and so chose skepticism about 9/11 as evidence. Or, in a more sinister manner, the show’s writers could have been trying to warn us that only crazy people doubt the official truth of 9/11.

If the latter, the show’s writers certainly have no skin in the game. They were hired because of their skill at their craft, and it’s highly unlikely that natural selection would yield people who are botkih skilled writers and who want to warn the U.S. public not to doubt its government. So I suspect that the lines were interjected in the drama from outside sources.

Who? From where? I have no clue. This I know, however: There are only a half-dozen companies that own all of our media, and there is no variety among them. They all spout the same lies as news, they all use stupid pretty faces on the screen to seriously tell us what serious events are happening in the world. Right now, for instance, all American media outlets, news and entertainment, are telling us that the Russians have invaded Ukraine and the Vladimir Putin is an evil man. That appears to be a lie. Sources closer to the action over there say otherwise, that there’s no evidence of any such troop presence of invasion, and Putin is highly regarded all over the planet outside our bubble.

Whether true or false, in a free media environment, there would be perhaps one skeptical voice saying “Wait, where’s the evidence?” There is not. All speak with one voice.

That speaks of heavy-handed control. I am not in the least surprised. Television is a powerful tool in the hands of the state, as it lulls viewers into a state of somnambulism and high suggestibility. No way does that tool escape control, no way are Americans allowed to see anything but approved opinions via that medium.

Those of us who have seen the evidence around 9/11, and I am boldly speaking for all of us skeptical ones, are deeply troubled by the nature of the event. Yes, there were real deaths and real explosions, and buildings really did evaporate before our eyes. But most of it was made-for-TV. There were no planes, but by the time we were told that one such phantom plane had hit the Pentagon, the idea was so firmly planted in our minds that we did not even have to see it. We never have seen it. We are also told that the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania (the “Let’s Roll” fable) went into an abandoned coal mine, and sunk into the ground leaving behind no airplane parts. That’s utterly absurd, and yet that is the power of suggestion coupled with the hypnotic effect of TV. People don’t doubt it.

They would doubt it, easily so, if one credible doubting voice were ever allowed to speak on TV. But there are gates and walls around it. Any who say anything contrary to official truth are disciplined, or, as Charley Sheen learned, out of work.

Andrea Mitchell knew right on that day that Osama was the perp. She's really good.
Andrea Mitchell knew right on that day that Osama was the perp. She’s really good.
What is so troubling is threefold, one that it speaks of immense power of mind control to get away with such ludicrous fables as the official 9/11 one; and two, that there were many people involved in planning the event beforehand. Three is most upsetting – that they know our minds so well. They know how to do mass suggestion, and make it stick. I am not speaking of the pretty stupid people who read their scripts before TV cameras, as they are most likely clueless. I am talking about corporate executives, well-connected reporters like Andrea Mitchell (wife of Alan Greenspan), and government, military and intelligence officials at all levels.

After an event of that magnitude follows a cover-up, and fear is endemic among those who know the event was a lie. These are quite a different group than those who had foreknowledge. These are frightened people who know to shut up. They are guilty of nothing more than accessory after-the-fact, and with good reason. They need jobs, and also like being alive.

The cover-up of the murder of JFK has been going on now for fifty years. There are still no media voices who doubt official truth. There’s never been a credible official investigation. Fear is so inculcated in our media that even if there were smart people incidentally having pretty faces giving us our news, they would know to shut up. This is a powerful regime of thought control, and escape is virtually impossible. Occasionally we see a movie like Wag the Dog or Invasion do the Body Snatchers that attempt to smuggle some truth our way, but on television, there is none of that. Ever. Occasionally, and this may never be seen again, a bold effort is made to give us the truth directly, as did Oliver Stone with his movie JFK. That was 23 years ago, and there’s been nothing like it since. Hollywood is completely submerged now, and is even an official outlet for lies and fables, as the award-winning and god-awful movie Argo demonstrates. (You get no links from me on that piece of crap.)

So when I see a minor and certifiably crazy character on a made-for-TV drama with high production values and budget doubting official truth, I know it is no accident. We are being sent a subliminal message: Only crazy people doubt our government. It’s just reinforcement. If the character were a normal person of intelligence and possessing some pattern recognition and problem solving skills, he would not be given those lines.

Uselessly overadvantaged

We have also noted how power structures successively dominate over human affairs had for aeons successfully imposed a “specialization” upon the intellectually bright and physically talented members of society as a reliable means of keeping them academically and professionally divided – ergo, “conquered,” powerless. The separate individuals’ special, expert glimpses of the separate, invisible reality increments became so infinitesimally fractionated and narrow that they gave no hint of the significant part their work played in the omni-integrating evolutionary front of total knowledge and it’s power-structure exploitability in contradistinction to its omni-advantaging potentials. Thus the few between become uselessly overadvantaged instead of the many becoming regeneratively ever more universally advantaged.
(Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path, p162)

My first reaction on reading the above was that Fuller did not need to write like that. The wording is dense and arcane, difficult to parse. The whole of the book Critical Path is difficult reading, and much of it goes right by me in a comfortable way – I am happy not to need to know what he is writing about.

But this passage stuck with me because it answers a question I have long wondered about – how our society manages to marginalize its best and brightest, leading them to useless careers doing specialized work that has no real purpose other than to cordon them off and render them into eunuchs.

I just completed a very complicated tax return for a client. I am one of those “gifted” souls who can do that sort of thing (I pause here: I am in a profession littered with people of remarkable talent in this field. I have sat in rooms with them and died a slow death of tedium and boredom. There seems to be no personality in these rooms, no humor or self-deprecation, no awareness that most of what we do just doesn’t matter.) As a young man with children I needed to make a living, and so became an accountant and then studied for the CPA exam, passing it on my first attempt. In a class of perhaps 100 or so candidates, I was the only one to do so.

Special, eh? At one point when I had an office in Billings, MT, I looked at a bank of six files and realized that three of them were devoted to history, current events, my real passion. I was not advancing in the professions as I was supposed to. I was distracted by real life.

Those rooms full of accountants, those seminars I sit through, are a waste of human energy. We do nothing more important than to protect wealthy people from overpaying their taxes. Slowly over time the IRS as roped us in and brought us around to work for it and against our client, by law. But even so, one step above all of that is pointlessness. So what? If my client for whom I just gave birth to the tax return ends up paying a thousand more than he should have, I have failed, he’ll never know it, and life goes on unaffected in total by my laborious pursuit.

As professions go, there are more demanding ones than accounting and taxation. Astrophysics is demanding, as is music, metallurgy, civil engineering, medicine. Each if these have yielded tremendous benefits to is, made our lives better and easier. I have no illusions about that.

Here’s another example of specialization: Dow, back in the sixties, bragged about “better living through chemistry.” Dow manufactured napalm, a mixture of gasoline and gels that burns human flesh. In its early versions, people exposed to napalm could jump in water and escape some of its effects, even survive. The Dow Boys fixed that however, and napalm advanced in its usefulness because it still burned humans up even when immersed in water.

Not too far from us here in Morrison is a Lockheed plant. They are an important part of Denver’s economy, with many high-paid specialists busy making weapons. That’s common throughout our country. The whole of Southern California and Silicon Valley, MIT, major Texas communities are nothing more than Pentagon dependencies. These are our best and brightest. We live in a rich country that has a crappy public education system, useless news and information, rotting infrastructure, highly inefficient transportation, a crappy medical delivery system, a crappy diet, mindless entertainment and a deeply indoctrinated citizenship.

And our best people, smartest and most useful, are specialized and know nothing of any useful pursuit to solve these, our most vexing problems. They are busy devising new ways to murder people.

That’s specialization. Fuller said it very well – he must have, as his passage caught my eye, made me think. Well done.

So deep in the stupid

I’ll be blunt here. The video above, which went viral over the 9/11 pornography festival, makes me wanna puke. In it American soldiers, who in reality knock off democratic governments and bomb, murder and maim innocent civilians, are portrayed as heroes. Ronald Reagan, a good actor and very stupid man, narrates.

Sit through it if you can. The German propaganda ministry used to put out films like this, and they too were very, very good at it. They knew how to rally the troops.

Then there was this, a comment from a friend’s Facebook post under this video, since taken down:

Incredibly Powerful. 911 is tomorrow. I have heard from a report from American intelligence that an imminent attack is coming. Pray to be rescued. Pray to be saved. Please pray that they can’t and won’t succeed.”

It is just one frightened and stupid person. But it gave me pause to know that so many millions of Americans, deep in the stupid, are under psychological control by use of such devices as this Nazi-like patriotic film and that goddamned intellectually debilitating fear this poor gal is expressing.

It makes me want to lose hope, but then I remember that it only takes a few. We certainly don’t have critical mass at this time, but there are many incredulous, skeptical and thoughtful people out there. Many read this blog. Not you Swede. Sit back down. I wasn’t talking about you.

Anyway, whew! Fricking 9/11 is over for another year, we’re done bemoaning our victimhood and pretending our soldiers are brave and smart. As you were folks. Back on your heads. Break’s over.

It’s a very big war going on now …

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)

Missing from photo: Candy for the children
Missing from photo: Candy for the children
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!

September 11: A day to remember

September 11 should not pass without remembrance of honorable people who died in an act of disgraceful cowardice. A building symbolic of democratic government had its dome blown to bits. A respected president died of (an apparent) suicide in the face of execution by thugs. Then followed concentration camps and inquisitions, and a fascist government installed – one of the minor criminals of the 20th century, Augusto Pinochet, came to power.

There have been many others, much more important criminals, such as Churchill, Stalin, el-BJ!, Henry Kissinger and Nixon, George H.W. Bush, his son, and of course, Cheney. Poroshenko is getting rave reviews but is a minor player, like Pinochet a mere puppet on the CIA string. Barack Obama: I don’t know if he has a criminal mind or just reads his lines and enjoys all the perks of being president. He has stood idly by, however, and so has a place reserved in the annals of war criminals, men who should face civilized justice followed by “up the long ladder and down the short rope*”

September 11, 1973 was the day the democratically elected government of Chile was overthrown in an US backed coup d’etat. It is a dark day in history. May we never forget Pinochet or the thousands of victims left in his wake. May we 41 years later vow that it never happens again.

Oh wait. The current puppet just announced he’s going to topple the democratically elected government of Syria. It’s 9/11! It’s on! Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, is a brave man, I hope. Our thugs, given a chance, will murder him in cold blood as they did Allende, as they did Qaddafi (to Hillary’s delight). It is sad and distressing that men of low caliber such as Obama are held in high esteem while men of real value go down.

But for every American crime, every aggressive war, new leaders rise up. One man sat by as the US attacked Serbia without just cause, his country too weak to stop the attack. Vladimir Putin has become the most important statesman on the world stage today. May Russia rise to become what the United States always said it was, but wasn’t, really.
______________
“Up the long ladder and down the short rope,
To hell with King Billy and God bless the Pope!
If that doesn’t do we’ll tear them in two
And send them to hell in their red, white and blue.”
Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem, closing down the bar.