A glimpse into madness

  • Psychological projection: A theory in which humans defend themselves against unpleasant impulses by denying their existence in themselves, while attributing them to others.

In prosecuting his widening war in Ukraine, [Putin] has also resurrected the tyranny of the Big Lie, using state-controlled media to twist the truth so grotesquely that most Russians are in the dark — or profoundly misinformed — about events in their neighbor to the west. Most Russians get their news from state-controlled broadcast outlets, which have moved beyond mere propaganda into outlandish conspiracy theories and unhinged jingoism.

The above words are from a Washington Post editorial dated August 31st. Since it is the United States that is prosecuting a wider war in Ukraine by means of proxy, and it is the American public that is profoundly in the dark, kept so by its state-controlled news media, I conclude that the editors of the Post are either profoundly dishonest, or deranged.

Regarding the state of awareness in Russia, who is to say. We cannot do much about them. We can only affect our own leaders.

Reading the above piece, which I should note came to my attention via Moon of Alabama, I was reminded of a document written in 1950 and declassified in 1975 known as NSC-68. It should be required reading in all of our classrooms, for in it are contained the seeds of the “Cold War,” the expenditure of a trillion dollars on unnecessary military hardware and the loss of tens of millions of innocent lives. The document is written is readable prose and so is accessible to mere mortals. It tags the Soviet Union, the ” Kremlin,” as the source of all evil on the planet. It says that they want to overrun Western Europe, bury Great Britain, and ultimately rule the world.

The Soviet Union at that time was barely limping, recovering from the loss of twenty million citizens and destruction of two-thirds of its industrial base in the Second World War. Much of its military capability was horse-drawn. Its people were largely peasantry incapable of engaging in an industrial world. Having been attacked by Germany and Japan, Stalin was rightly distrustful of the other imperial powers, especially those calling themselves the “Free World.”

The Soviet Union posed no threat to the U.S. It was time for rapprochement and peace. But the newly founded U.S. National Security State, freshly infused with Paperclipped German SS and the American OSS, was ambitious. Peace was not an option.

Reading NSC-68, one is tempted to think that the Soviet Union in 1950 was a fully formed military power ready to strike. Why the paranoia? Why the urgency?

I can only imagine that our new creations, CIA and NSC, were intent on doing exactly what they were laying on the Soviets. The Department of War had been changed to “Defense,” and every evil had been projected on the Soviets. That meant, as Orwell advised around that time, that every evil imaginable was going to spring forth from a new Washington, intent on War and and not Defense. NSC-68 was the declaration of World War III, not against the Soviets, but against the world, done by the only superpower standing at that time.

As I read WaPo above, given that organ’s proximity to the seat of power, I have to assume that they, like the authors of NSC-68, are knowingly lying and projecting their own evil intent on others. While Moon of Alabama regards it as lunacy from a “Funny Paper,” I tend to take it more seriously. These are deranged psychopaths, as is our military leadership and Capitalism’s Invisible Army. There’s a sense of urgency in the words, meaning there is great danger now to the world. The source of that danger is Arlington, Langley, and Foggy Bottoms.

Below the fold here are a few choice paragraphs from NSC-68. I know a few who traffic here have or have or will read the whole thing. It is well worth the time. It helps to form a sense of the enemy, and the paranoia of those who run our funny farm.
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Fog of news

“From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”
(Andrew H. Card Jr., White House chief of staff, on why the Bush administration waited until September of 2002 to press for public support of its Iraq policy.

It takes some intelligence, depth and insight to see through the fog of American propaganda. It is, as CIA’s Frank Wisner, one of the men behind Operation Mockingbird, a “Mighty Wurlitzer” than can play any propaganda tune it wants. That tune resonates throughout the country, in every bar, social gathering, church service, and now, Facebook pages.
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The bubble

The best way to make communists is to put the Americans into a place where there were no Communists before. (Norodom [Prince] Sihanouk of Cambodia)

“Whoever has the Americans as allies does not need enemies” (Madame Nhu, wife of assassinated South Vietnamese leader.)

Americans often feel snubbed when they learn that they are not liked abroad. From a typical dis-informed viewpoint, we Yanks imagine we have been giving foreign aid and rebuilding places, sending food to places where they have earthquakes and tsunamis and are also busy liberating slaves. All we get in return in disrespect.

“So screw the world,” is the attitude that naturally follows.

Photos like this are not staged. No sireee ... not staged. No way.
Photos like this are not staged. No sireee … not staged. No way.
What Americans do not know, of course, is that we live in a huge disinformation enterprise known as the United States Mainstream Media (MSM). Even so, if it were only “news” given to us, its range would be limited. But it also extends to entertainment media. It repeats the message and helps us in the illusion that our foreign policy is all about do-goodiness. In movies and on TV, our terrorists (called “Special Forces,” Seals” and “Green Berets”) are big burly men with guns protecting children from thugs. They even hand out candy. Our military adventures are designed to “rescue” people and install democracy rather than merely keep the path clear for control of resources by America’s giant corporations. Getting hold of those resources usually involves removal of democratic governments and installation of thugs and terror regimes.

It’s simply failure to communicate. The rest of the world is very well-informed about who we are and what we do. American tourists are readily accepted (so long as we are not boorish and overbearing, like the guy our daughter told us about – wearing a cowboy hat, he stood up in a British pub and sang the Star Spangled Banner). But it is the typical American ignorance of the behavior of our CIA and special forces, our military, “our” corporations’ that creates a gulf between us and people abroad. They don’t like “us” for good reason, and we don’t know about it because we never see that face of “us.” We only see what we are meant to see, and so live in what is often referred to abroad as the American bubble.

It’s merely ignorance, easily remedied by expanded knowledge.

(If that is what really happened)

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

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

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

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

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

If that is what happened.

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

Reading American news: This one is easy to unravel

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

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

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

Putting lipstick on a pig

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

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

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

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

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

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

I call that putting lipstick on a pig.

Aliens among us

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

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

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

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

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

Ergo, the world as we know it.

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

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

A deeper kind of dedication

Merton (1915-1968)
Merton (1915-1968)
When my older brother, Steve, spoke at my oldest brother Tom’s funeral, he said that Tom (9 years older than me) had introduced him to the work of Thomas Merton as an eighth grader. Tom was a poet and quiet intellectual, and he and I, even without the age difference, did not have much in common. Merton was just a name to me. I knew such a person existed, but had no interest in him. Religious thinkers have never had any appeal for me. It wasn’t until I read James Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, that I caught a better glimpse of Merton and wondered about my older brother, wishing perhaps that I had known him better.

Here’s the Merton money quote from the introduction to Unspeakable:

“I have little confidence in [John F.] Kennedy, I think he cannot fully measure up to the magnitude of his task, and lacks creative imagination and the deeper kind of sensitivity that is needed. Too much from the Time and Life mentality, than which I can imagine nothing further, in reality, from, say, Lincoln. What is needed is really not shrewdness or craft, but what politicians don’t have: depth, humanity and a certain totality of self-forgetfulness and compassion, not just for individuals but for man as a whole: a deeper kind of dedication. Maybe Kennedy will break through into that someday by miracle. But such people are before long marked out for assassination.”

This was written in January of 1962.

Yazidis were never under seige

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

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

Moon of Alabama dissects the lies, as follows:

Obama today:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Montana senate debacle an opportunity for real change

donkeyelephantThe “two”-party system is a nice containment vehicle, a way to at once allow people the illusion of participation in their governance while preventing it. It requires constant management. Any real leaders who break free of party leadership have to be quickly contained.

The Amanda Curtis affair in Montana is an interesting one, but not unusual. The sacrificial lamb is an old strategy. The idea is that progressives have no place to go in our system but the Democrat Party, whose money-backed leadership finds them repugnant. Once every two years, if there is a contested primary, there might be some outlet for progressive voices in campaign rhetoric. Usually the person giving voice is a false leader who quickly shuts down after the election and reverts to form.

However, there is in the wake of wreckage a chance to teach progressives a lesson, and that is where the sacrificial lamb strategy come into play. The Montana Democrat Party fucked up royally in foisting John Walsh on its members. It’s not that Walsh lacked any real qualification or even the ability to think properly, but rather that these features of his ho-hum persona were exposed. The party’s money backers are perfectly happy with such zombies in office. Now that Walsh and the party leadership have been exposed, they have to beat a strategic retreat. So they assume the mantle of sincerity about putting up a real person in the place of a robot.

democrats-vs-republicans-differences-sop-politics-nonsense-politics-1389740460The Montana Senate seat is lost. It’s time to make lemonade. So Montana Democrat Party leadership is seizing the opportunity to show its progressive wing that progressives cannot win elections.

That is not true. Progressives can win elections. But they have no access to the big money that regular right-wing Democrats enjoy, along with TV exposure, without which no candidate can win. If the party leadership would turn their marketing wing to supporting a progressive, they could make it happen. Seriously, dear reader, if those geniuses can keep Max Baucus in office for 24 years; if they can make a man like John Walsh seem like a real human being; if they can land Jon Tester’s sorry fat ass in office for six years with 48% of the vote … then trust me. They can back a progressive to victory. They choose not to do so.

So the thrust of the Curtis “nomination” (selection) is for 2018 and beyond, to make sure that progressive Democrats in Montana know their candidates cannot win, to keep them in line and supporting the normal cloaked Republicans that the party likes.

As a Nader supporter I am well-schooled in these matters. Nader was not so much a threat to Al Gore as something else. Below the fold here, and linked here, is the 2000 Green Party platform that Nader ran on. Merely publicizing that platform was a reminder of what Democrats do not support. Nader exposed their bankruptcy, which is why the party leadership unleashed a venom on him never visited on Republicans.

The Illusion of Free Choice democrats republicansDemocrats, click the words “continue reading” below here to learn all about what your party is not. It will help you understand the massacre about to unfold in Montana. Perhaps then you will realize that you need an upheaval, that you need to change your heads, get rid of the low-life and lizards that currency run your party. It is time for some fresh air. The cold shower you will enjoy in November is not a defeat, but an opportunity to build a real grassroots party. If Curtis has chops, as she appears to, she might indeed have a vital role to fill in the leadership vacuum that will result.

(Can progressives win? In the coming week I am going to write about opinion surveys I have read about the general attitudes of most Americans. Our two parties are far, far to the right of the American public. You will be genuinely surprised, as my source is unimpeachable.)

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