“There isn’t a duopoly—only a corporate party and that’s it.” (-Nina Turner)
“Chomsky says: in his long life, he has never seen censorship in the West like that which has been imposed in the name of the war in Ukraine. Again, regardless of your views on this war, nobody should favor a closed system of propaganda.” (-Glenn Greenwald)
“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.” (-James Baldwin)
“It’s 2022 and people still believe this nonsense about NATO being a defensive organizations and America giving a damn about Freedom, Democracy and Human Rights.” (-Black In The Empire)
“And I hear punks talk of anarchy I hear hobo’s on the railroad, I hear mutterings on the chaingang cause those are the men who built the roads, and if you put it all together, you didn’t even once relent you cast a long shadow and that is your testament…” (-Joe Strummer)
“You may vote and debate freely on any issue which does not affect the functioning of the empire. When it comes to how money, weapons and resources move around the world, however, you suddenly find that your votes don’t matter and your position has no mainstream representation. They’ll let you argue until you’re blue in the face over whether or not you can have an abortion or whether minorities should have civil rights; they’ll even let you vote on it. But things like military expansionism and neoliberal globalization and deregulation are off limits.
The empire relies on false political dichotomies like Democrats vs Republicans to keep everyone fighting over issues which don’t affect the functioning of the empire so the machine can trudge onward uninterrupted by the local riff raff. That is the entire job of those parties.
The mainstream media exist to keep everyone spellbound by those false dichotomies on the level of discourse and debate. They manufacture culture wars which split the populace in half over an issue which doesn’t affect the empire, then continually feed into that debate.
The Bernie/AOC/TYT “populist left” and the Trump/Tucker Carlson “populist right” factions are there to lure parts of the population who get a little too curious about the raw mechanisms of empire back into the political false dichotomy so they stop asking unauthorized questions.
The entire political/media class exists for this purpose: not to help people, not to fight for civil rights, not to create a well-informed populace so that democracy can function, but to keep the grubby little mitts of the unwashed masses far away from the true levers of power. That’s their whole entire function.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“The national Democratic Party is not a party — it’s a fundraising email.” (-David Sirota)
“The CIA called China the biggest threat to the US in 2021. Today, the FBI claimed China is a “threat” to the US economy. Last time I checked, the CIA and FBI, not China, has overthrown more than 50 foreign governments and terrorized domestic social movements for generations.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“The U.S. Supreme Court has now eviscerated the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to tackle the climate crisis.
But instead of seizing this moment to radically reform the court and advance an aggressive climate action agenda, too many Democrats — and their enablers in the corporate media — are acting as if the court’s rolling judicial coup is inevitable and unstoppable.
I joined The Intercept to help shine a spotlight on injustices others take for granted and thereby expand the horizons of political possibility. And that’s why I’m so proud of how — as others have studiously avoided challenging the Supreme Court’s legitimacy — The Intercept’s journalism exposes how corporate greed and right-wing extremism have conspired to enable these outrageous power grabs.
As a reader of The Intercept, I know you refuse to accept an ever-worsening status quo. ” (-Naomi Klein)
“While elements of the corrupt latte-left in the U.S. & Western Europe collaborate with the rulers to undermine Cuba, The Black Alliance for Peace will never abandon the people of Cuba and their project.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
John McCain is posthumously awarded a Medal of Honor after spending the twilight of his life blessing the Nazis and jihadists serving as imperial foot soldiers. His hallowed words still echo today: “I hate the go*ks. I will hate them as long as I live.” https://consortiumnews.com/2018/08/27/the-other-side-of-john-mccain/… (-Max Blumenthal)
RIP … Nazareth founding Guitarist Manny Charlton
It’s no secret I love old Nazareth and sorry to hear their founding member passed at EIGHTY. Time keeps FLYING by. Everytime I see a photo of Ole Diamond Dave lookin’ even longer in the tooth than me and my longtime rollin’ buddies, I’m shocked, cause in my mind, ya know, we’re still wild and free and young and vital and totally capable of rockin’ this town inside out. Black leather sons a bitches never say die. Roth leaked another song that he probably recorded with John 5 and Brett Tuggle (RIP) called “Pointing At The Moon”, it’s real good in my humble opinion. I like Dave’s mellow stuff. My friend’s three legged dog Angus died. (RIP) Very sad days, indeed, everything is just zoomin’ by like fifties home movies projected on some wall. I’m overwhelmed by it all. The beautiful, sacred, holy, and gorgeous stuff keeps disappearing, while every day, more food warehouses are mysteriously burning down and kkkops kill people because they can.
RULING CLASS
These Private Jet Riding Sun Valley Hunger Games Oligarchs aint having all these secret meetings to talk about making the world a better or healthier or more prosperous and egalitarian place for us serfs, I can assure you of that. In spite of all their greenwash, pinkwash, woke and scientific diversity marketing, these evil robber baron shitheels are like science fiction villains, but totally for real and with access to unprecedented technology and surveillance tools, now they wanna start pushing for cashless society and yes, those chips they been talkin’ about forever. Don’t believe me, research World Economic Forum Agenda, yourself. Klaus Schwab Creeps are infiltrating every government. They finally took down their Georgia Guidestones after some forty odd years, the United Nations is said to have translated the surveillance tech dystopian manifesto into countless archaic languages as it is a ritualistic tradition of the secretive occult elites to warn their gullible victims ahead of time. Mainstream headlines said things like, “some conspiracy theorists believe the monument to be satanic”. People programmed at Shitlib U or Big 5 mockingbird propaganda do tend to blindly and obediently trust these authoritarian overlords who they believe are woke and scientific philanthropists and some even look forward to seeing more of their NWO Klaus Schwab rollouts. Not everyone is in favor of a one world government, social ratings, robot armies, special privileges for stormtroopers, mass depopulation, wars with Russia-China-Iran, permanenet lockdowns in the Global South, bigger and bigger monopolies like Vanguard and Blackrock gobbling up every institution and buying every resource, owning nothing, or any of that other shit the eager cult lords are so giddy about in their sinister WEF speeches you can see online. FREE THOUGHT PROJECT opines: “It’s a chilling reminder that in the American police state, ‘we the people’ are at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to ‘serve and protect.”
This is how unarmed Americans keep dying at the hands of militarized police.
Under the guise of qualified immunity, there have been no consequences for police who destroyed a private home by bombarding it with tear gas grenades during a SWAT team raid gone awry, or for the cop who mistakenly shot a 10-year-old boy after aiming for and missing the non-threatening family dog, or for the arresting officer who sicced a police dog on a suspect who had already surrendered.
Qualified immunity is how the police state stays in power.”
Big Tech Is Not Woke…. It’s Totalitarian (thefreethoughtproject.com)
Fashion Notes: Sun Valley ‘Billionaire Summer Camp’ Proves Money Can’t Buy You Style (breitbart.com)
REMEMBER WHEN SHITLIBS BLAMED RALPH NADER FOR REPUBLIKKAN SUPREME COURT SELECTION COUP?
Man, it’s one of those mornings when I’m missing all my good friends and family members who I used to call in surly, anxious, monotonous moods like this, who’ve already gone on to whatever comes after this dreadfully uncertain tyrannical bullshit. Been watching the old eighties videos on Vevo-everything from Animotion to New Edition. It takes me back. Of course, I still naturally wonder whatever became of my pals from detention school-Patti “Rolling Stones” Hamilin, “Damn N Shit” Marty, Gary, Alice, Kenny, who used to live across the street from Meat City and worked with me as a dishwasher at the Black Angus steak house where the crazy cheap owners recycled french fries and salads offa tables, White Mike, Farmer Jodie, and even Fat Diane, who liked Rick Springfield, but snitched on our whole classroom for math book cheating…We were onery kids from troubled backgrounds but gradually came together, which is what the working class of this society is gonna have to do if there is to be any hope of genuinely resisting the totalitarian Davos billionaires who’ve already bought the government, media, pharmaceutical industry, weapons manufacturing, farmland, food distribution infrastructure, and regulatory agencies. If you were somehow stubbornly blind enough to just dismiss and ignore the DNC leaks that got poor Seth Rich (RIP) killed, you probably do a fair share of elementary school back n forth namecalling when someone on social media suggests elections are rigged. According to tv obeyers, it is just outrageous when that “other” party’s supporters insist their preferred servant of the rich, pro police state, fascist old white man in a blue suit was somehow robbed of his rightful place on the faux-throne, but Hillary and Rachel harped on and on and on, all day long, for YEARS, that Putin’s troll armies and Facebook ads had supposedly flipped the election for Orange Man Bad. When Orange Man Bad’s supporters could similarly not believe longtime mediocrity, nothing will change, laughing stock Gropey Joe won, without even really bothering to campaign, that just OUTRAGES the shit-libs, there is just NO WAY to hack a USA USA All Amukkkan patriotic and woke election…EXCEPT of course, if that dastardly ORANGE MAN BAD was somehow in cahoots with that dirty, diabolical, super-duper villain, VLAD PUTIN! I dunno man, the blind partisan shit seems like an impossible to crack hypocritical hypnospell. I still think it’s like wrestling-the Heel Vs. The Face, and now, from backstage, here comes hard chargin’…Lyn Cheney (D) with a metal chair over the head, and now it’s….SCARY….QSHAMAN(!!!) entering the ring. Nancy Pelosi with a SARCASTIC CLAP and now…a TORN PIECE OF PAPER! (GASP!) AOC tweets, “ORANGE MAN BAD”, again…AND THE CROWD GOES WIIILLLLD! Ric Flair is even coming outta retirement. Bring back Jesse Ventura! You know the kangaroo court let those politicians who were complicit in covering up the crime of poisoning Flint’s water off? Was there ever any doubt? Rich people are never held accountable for white collar crimes in this country, it’s all about generating revenue by busting poor people for petty drug charges and shit. I remember the simple message of Occupy Wall Street being the One Percent were predators waging war on the rest of us and should be held accountable and that billionaire bankers and Wall Street servants were not to be trusted. College people were promptly dispatched to take control of the narrative. First, they lectured us endlessly on etiquette, then suggested we relocate away from the downtown business district where the law firms and banks we were supposed to be occupying were located, then, they said we can never inconvenience the gentrification landlords or “independent businesses” at Saturday Market. Then, they changed the topic to individual trauma stories and then it was all about pinkhat women’s marches objecting to bawdy Trump speech and getting Hillary elected. I’d ride my bicycle three miles into town mistakenly believing we were gonna feed the houseless community, and it would be one girl with a bullhorn talking about her personal trauma and how she should get free rent, babysitting, landscaping, reefer, wine, and a trip to the big city for wokeness. What? What? Huh? What? I was coming to help distribute grilled cheese and soup to poor people. Identity politricks was rolled out by college professors anytime there was danger of people uniting to help the poor, they collegeys pivoted the discussion to gender. Or gender privilege. I wasn’t there to be scolded, I came to assist the houseless community. What the fuck. You can not organize with the bourgeoises college people, they change the whole agenda, hijack your movement, protect their banking and lawyer and silver making farmer’s market landlord pals. It becomes a complaining divorcee gripe session winebox thing. Sheesh. Thankfully, a couple of very savvy and righton ladies stayed focused on the needs of the houseless community and organized a grass roots resistance the grifters and navel studies coattail riders were unable to derail. I saw first hand though, how university narrative managers are deployed to divide and control real people’s movements, as not to inconvenience the rich. They carve everybody up into separate factions, put us in boxes, try to tell us who we are, and label us as sub categories. The straightup exclude working class allies and actually tell blue collar white males to not speak. Like we’re the privileged landlord Dick Cheney oppressors. First the label and insult us, then they attempt to silence us, then they demand we vote for their corrupt do nothing Democrats again. No thanks. So the moral of that story, what I learned is you gotta work with other poor people, not fauxwoke identity politricks college campus safespace script memorizers. If you wanna make any successful moves against the entrenched powers that be. These booj hustlers are all about protecting their own power and Nimby property values. I try not to get involved with middle class landlords, college educated property owners, and people who self identify as holier than thou, enlightened high brows, or sacred cows. Once i finally located the advocated for the homeless community and not just the Me Show getmines, I was able to help serve the community who needed assistance. Immigrants with barriers from getting jobs, people who needed ID or SS cards to receive assistance, teens fleeing abuse, moms struggling after unexpected job losses, evictions, divorces, family deaths. There was a loud couple of assholes trying to make the Occupy Wall Street movement into a same ole same ole divisive red versus blue old paradigm, interrupting the discussion to make it about their own personal vanity trip and middle class entitlement, but what was even more shocking, were the city hall table sitters who saw nothing wrong with cops stealing houseless people’s tarps and tents, or kicking people awake, or arresting them for the crime of sleeping. These awful people put sharp rocks beneath underpasses, locked the public restrooms, hired thugs to hassle people in the parks and at the library, had uniformed rent a cops following parents around if their kid was loud in the library, they’d have two lady cops following them all the way home with their walkie talkies and nightstick intimidation tactics as they pushed a baby jogger in the rain. All the sports tailgate party fratboy Republikkkans wrote inhumane letters to the paper moaning about the presence of the unsightly poor in their rich and fancy white people paradise-one described houseless veterans shivering in the elements as “rapey hobos”, they’d always, always, almost all insist, get this: “I was once homeless but I…blah blah blah” with the Bill O Reilly bootstraps, victory story that always left out what they inherited or who they married. It was rough business watching both Kall Tha Kops Karens (D) and Redhat Hit ‘Em Harder Maga Copsuckers (R) unite to simultaneously rail against the poorest while instinctively protecting the class patrols and nasty, mean spirited, do nothing shitlibs of city hall and the real brazen, outright ugly city manager who worked for the hotel owners and Nike sports tourism billionaires.
PAY ATTENTION TO THE TAKEAWAY MEDIA MESSAGING
If you think Masked Singer, Drippy Hairdye, Drinky Drunky, Rudy Giuliani (certainly no loonier than First Fortunate Son Hunter Biden) was involved in some kinda dodgy rightwing deception and conspiratorial chicanery with all those Blue Lives Matter outta state Maga kkkops who marched on the Capital, (Qui Bono?) wait til you find out what kinda big conspiracy he helped cover up on 9/11! Shitlbs weren’t mad at Rudy when he Killed The Kool in NY. Strongarmed all the poor people outta their billionaires only V-I-P Zone. Shitlibs weren’t mad when Rudy’s stormtrooper gestapo “STORMED!” the unarmed houseless folks in Tompkins Square Park. Shitlibs weren’t mad when he helped ole Lucky Silverstein and Marvin Bush and Dick Cheney express mail the evidence to China after the Israeli art students hijinks and “pulled” Building #7 kerfuffle that resulted in Gropey Joe’s Patriot Act, TSA-NSA dismantling of the Constitution, Rumsfeld erasing the Geneva Conventions, and Bush-Cheney taking over the world, one regime change, proxy war at a time. Remember when General Wesley Clark spilled the beans on their Big Plans? They’re still at it, just maybe a little behind schedule. Copsucker shitlibs think that Cointelpro is a thing of the past, but why did so many protestors from Baltimore and Ferguson uprisings come to such seemy ends? Sandra Bland (RIP) was under surveillance when she was arrested and suicided and the Classy, Dashing drone prez aint say shit. He also said he was gonna let mercenaries abusing women elders water protectors at Standing Rock “play out”-remember? Him n Gropey Joe REWARDED the townie kkkops who arrested Harvard historian Walter Skip Gates in his Cambridge home with a cheerful, beerful visit to the WHITE house. Remember when Wikileaks Vault #7 data divulged how they killed Michael Hastings (RIP)?
Murkkkan politics are fake as fuck, and have been for a long time-maybe forever. Lion Of The Left, Gore Vidal (RIP) called us, the United States Of Amnesia, ’cause he knew nobody remembered yesterday, or ever paid any attention. Nobody thought it was weird at all that Warren Commission Ford replaced Nixon who was always fretting about “The Bay Of Pigs thing”, worried that the Dulles Brothers and company might turn on him, as well. Then, Redscare Ronnie the original Russiagate Rachel McCarthyist blacklist snitch was given the big chair, in spite of his dementia, he was surrounded with handlers and teleprompters and given mass media credit for ending the cold war with all his jellybean rewarded John Wayne script reading, until of course, a Bush cousin tried to assassinate him. Clinton’s cigar scandal seemed like a real big psy-op distraction, I remember seeing the movie “Primary Colors” that sorta opened my eyes to how a lot of campaign dirty tricks and fixers and operators like Roger Stone and James Carvelle hustle popular opinion to get their empty suits into office, at least before the rise of Bush/Cheney and their sordid Supremes and Diebold hackable voting boxes and Brooks Brother Rioters and hanging chad controversies and continuity of government privatizing of mercenary armies and NSA mass wiretap operations eviscerated the Bill Of Rights. Obama was trotted out to make Murkkkans “feel better” about Bush/Cheney policies, he promised Hope & Change with vaguely uplifting speeches delivered in gospel cadences, but just expanded all their worst policies, forking over big bailouts to rich execs, fracking up the water, allowing corporate gestapo to abuse the water protectors for big oil investors, knocking over more countries for Wall Street gangster profits, provided cover for BP ecocide in the Gulf, the governing conspirators of Flint, and bragged openly about his “Disposition Matrix” and helping Hillary topple Libya. Trump always seemed like a gullible stooge, an oaf, an easily handled egomaniac. Like you know how people always defended Obama, insisting maybe the need to know basis Deep State didn’t really let him in on what they were doing, by surrounding him with an entrouge of flattering admirers and media asskissers all pretending like he did something besides rebrand Dick Cheney policies, keeping him busy with phony peace prizes and golf and basketball and showbiz celebrity receptions? How much less do you think they told W, or Donald J? Or Gropey Joe, who can barely function and only campaigned from his wife’s side, in masks, from their basement? I remember when the backroom cigar chomping duopoly debate corporation would not let Ralph Nader participate, kkkops wouldn’t even let him enter the building-same thing happened with Dr. Jill Stein, they HANDCUFFED her to a chair for 8 hours for trying to attend a debate in this rigged, sham, stage managed, shell of a fake democracy. Where were all those pinkhats when Chertoff and Cheney installed actual groin fondling, porno screening, security theatrical, granny gropers in our airports? Where was the ResistanceTM? The Squad stands for nothing but Orange Man Bad. Empty tweets affect nothing. Performative protest theater.
They changed their own debate rules like five times to try to keep anti-war notable Mike Gravel (RIP) out of the conversation. DNC argued in court they had no obligation to nominate the chosen candidate of the rank n file majority, they rigged two elections against Sanders, using every dirty trick in the book, superdelegates, rightwing billionaire Bloomberg switching parties and spending a billion to run against a tax the rich platform, Bezos and all the corporate lapdog media trashed Sanders night and day, they ran 22 corporate Dems against Bernie, people from the intelligence apparatus and Schwab school, Snake Liz Warren came out and blasted Bernie as a “sexist” even though he was running against Biden who got Clarence Thomas seated on the Supreme Court by attacking Anita Hill and can never seem to keep his hands of women and young people on countless videos, and the Me, Too pinkhats all decided to ignore Tara Reade, but it was Sanders(!!!) who had a populist rap that resonated with The People, never confused old “get off my lawn” Gropey Joe. When they all lined up and endorsed Biden, I knew the fix was in, they got the memo, did not wanna get Paul Wellstoned, so they all went along with the program. USA USA is like one of those old Hollywood cardboard sets, the Gunsmoke saloon that is just a wooden front, nothing behind the stage but spies and assassins. Snickering billionaires operating secret cults. Some overpaid hack media personalities who give middle class people false confidence that everything is running smoothly, and that the trains are running on time. This country operates a bunch of torture gulags, like Gitmo, which Classy, Dashing Obama casually broke his promise to close. Now they pig-media just blames it all on Trump and Putin, or Stein and Sarandon, and tries to whitewash image-rehab war criminals like W, Condoleeza, Hillary and McCain, and I think they’re grooming Lyn Cheney to maybe run for the presidency as a Democrat. Biden and Harris are both klutzy, bungling, boobs, goofs, incompetent, Mayo Pete is a lameduck spy weasel marketing creation. All the hysterical anti-protest Capital Hill media frenzy feels like another Clinton cigar psy-op to me. Distraction Theater. Boogeyman Scapegoating. So I aint got no horsey sauce in this ongoing rat race. I know I don’t get no real vote about how this sick society operates through it’s rich man trickery, secrecey, wars, extortion, torturing, spying, coups and mass media fabrications. I don’t believe in any of them, I think it’s all a big show and that we are really ruled by secretive oligarchs and evil billionaires from the shadows. They don’t really care HOW you identify, s’long as they can keep you feuding and blaming your neighbor and only ever punching down. Rather than fret about how “THE OTHER” party are “THE FASCISTS”, I suspect the best we can do is prepare for the worst and help our neighbors and uplift and educate and organize our own peers, rather than exchange media induced insults with them from a pre programmed script designed to keep us divided. Vanguard owns both Carlson and Maddow. They control both sides of the fake debate. talk about something else, turn the televisions off. Stop applauding One Percent Media Rule and Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg Techlord Censorship of all Dissident Voices.
-other-side-of-john-mccain/Julian Assange On DNC Emails And 2016 Election (Full Interview) | Meet The Press | NBC News – YouTube
Seth Rich Investigator Now Backtracking On Wikileaks Connection – YouTube
“I Have Never Seen The E-mails” Says Seth Rich Investigator – YouTube
‘Today, the US will spend more than $2,100,000,000 on war, then another $2,100,000,000 the next day, and the next day… While American workers struggle to cover basic needs like healthcare, there’s always money for war.’ (-Assal Rad)
“We built the largest and longest protest movement in our nation’s history, focused first and foremost on police violence. How did our government respond? By *increasing* police spending. And how did the cops respond? By killing more of us in 2021 than in the previous 8 years.” (-Awkword on Twitter)
The censorship continues. Facebook is shadowbanning us from almost half a million of our followers and have informed us our page is at risk of being deactivated. Help us fight back against corporate censorship by joining us on Telegram https://t.me/mintpress_news
“Even Amnesty International (which is blatantly biased in favor of Western governments) spoke out in 2015 against the US-backed Ukrainian coup regime’s authoritarian ban on the communist party, calling it a “flagrant violation of freedom of expression” (-Benjamin Norton)
” Alex Berenson and Daniel Kotzin were banned from Twitter for being right too soon. They said the same thing vaccine investor Bill Gates later conceded after increasing his fortune by $30 billion.” (-Max Blumenthal)
“Again, these are the same people who not only claim to be combatting disinformation but insist they are so reliably honest and have such superior wisdom they should be trusted to *censor the internet* in its name. Nobody spreads disinformation most casually and destructively.” (-Glenn Greenwald)
“Happy Birthday Julian! We won’t stop fighting for your release. May you go home to your family soon.”
(- Chris Hedges)
“If we want more than the 2 parties killing our future thru climate collapse, escalating war & crushing inequality – we have to fight for it by voting 3rd party.” (-Dr. Jill Stein)
“Some states are passing laws saying people can’t sleep or “camp” on state property. This is a wonderful idea – If we make it illegal to be homeless then that will mean unfettered capitalism works great!” (-Lee Camp)
“Democracies” are states which the US has managed to overthrow or install a client regime. “Authoritarian regimes” are countries where the US has not yet been successful in doing so.” (-Alan MacLeod)
MAINSTREAM MONOPOLY PROPAGANDA MEDIA WILL NOT ALLOW CHOMSKY, HEDGES, McGOVERN, ROWLEY, McKINNEY, OR COL. ANN WRIGHT ON THE AIRWAVES
Mass Media: A History – Activist Post
Why Were The Georgia Guidestones Destroyed? – Activist Post
‘Let Me See Your…’ BOOM! Cop Kills Father Before He Could Even Comply (thefreethoughtproject.com)
“Japan’s right-wing former PM Shinzo Abe was part of a fascist cult called Nippon Kaigi which seeks to restore the Japanese empire (denying its genocidal crimes in China & Korea), undo the pacifist constitution and end women’s equality and human rights laws” (-Benjamin Norton)
“When many shortages were reported in the old USSR, communism – the system – got blamed. Now that we suffer many shortages, everything other than the system – capitalism – gets blamed. Dont be fooled.” (-Richard D. Wolff)
“It trips me out that Americans are willing to pay taxes to send people to prison but not to send people to college or have health care.” (-Brokeass Stuart)
“These Mercedes Benz princes do not represent any Arabs. They are simply selfish and stooges for America. The people, from Morocco to Bahrain, do not support any of this.” (-Richard Medhurst)
“This appears as madness but it is actually policy so we should not not be surprised. The U.S. openly declared its’ commitment to “full spectrum domination” & a military-first strategy in their public documents. Building an effective Anti-war movement is only way to to stop them.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Find someone who loves you as much as the Washington Post loves demanding we bomb Iran.” (-Alan R. MacLeod)
“First the US nuked Japanese civilians, killing 200,000 in order to prevent Japan from going socialist and becoming an ally of the Soviet Union Then the US rehabilitated fascist war criminals and gangsters, turning Japan into a one-party right-wing regime, which it still is today.” (-Benjamin Norton)
About – Rich Ferguson (rich-ferguson.com)
And those Hollywood nights | Reviews (i94bar.com)
“Beyond Finland & Sweden formally joining NATO, it’s the military posture that’s the real story. There’s 260,000 more combat-ready troops that are going to be brought up to Russia’s borders, increasing the likelihood of war.” – BT Editor Ben Becker WATCH https://youtu.be/tdEquEff1P0
“WAR ON HISTORY: DISMANTLING of memorial to Soviet soldiers who LIBERATED Klaipeda, Lithuania begins in the city. The site remembering those who sacrificed their lives against NAZI Germany will be taken DOWN.
We must face the fact that WWIII has begun, and the EU must face the fact that the US, while against Russia, is not on the EU’s side.” (-Dan Kovalik)
The Other Side of John McCain – Consortium News
“Democrats Remove Green Party from NC Ballot Dirty UnDemocratic tactics like posing as Green Party telling people not to vote Green cos it would hurt Dems! Going to people’s homes to ask to remove signatures from Green ballot petition” http://blackagendareport.com/democrats-remove-green-party-north-carolina-ballot…
@blkagendareport (-Baba Yoga)
John Trudell – “Rockin’ The Res” official music video from AKA Grafitti Man – YouTube
“One of the hardest things to do in rocknroll is walk it like you talk it.” (-Billy Bragg)
“With a government that doesn’t give a damn about them and has passed on the cost of the ruling class war in Ukraine on to the working class, why don’t people in the U.S. rebel?” (-Ajamu Baraka)
RISE
It’s way too hot to be in the garage where the old record player is, a big heat emergency, accompanied by sudden desert thunderstorms that always floods all my rickety old domiciles. I got buckets placed out there in the ancient sun warped wooden garage now, but ya know, it just depends on how heavy the rains are and how long they last. Anyways, I’m jonesin’ to go out, there cause I got real lucky at the usually sucky second hand store the resell plunderers access before us peasants get a chance, the two tourist trap boutiques in town obviously got an inside line, cause no old school boom boxes or records or tapes or cd’s ever make it to the floor. Used to be a steady influx of cowboy shit which I always like-from hats and chaps to bolo ties, cufflinks, boots, to ya know spurs and button down Western shirts and shit, but these greedhead boutique owners struck a deal with the non profits donation store managers, so they buy up everything with potential resell value and then, charge fifty times whatever they paid for it. Hardly seems fair to us low wage scavengers, but about every three or four months, something slips by the eagle eyes of all the ripoff artists and today, I hit the jackpot with a Nick Gilder 45, 3 Shuan Cassidy 45’s, a book about Tombstone and the gunfight at the Okay Corral, a Tina Turner dvd and two Ike and Tina records I can not wait to play next time it’s cool enough to go out there and me and my old lady are able to steal some very rare private time together, when we can work on making music together, and enjoying some crackly old records. I’m pretty lit about finding some desirable stuff I like and can almost afford for a change because it does not happen too often out here in the wind beaten, scorching hot, rain faded, streets flooded, mosquito ridden, no man’s land. That was a bigass haul for me. Everything is a motherfuckin ripoff nowadays, we had to pay over $4 for a disposable motherfucking lighter to light sparklers on the Fourth Of July. They were always Ninety Nine cents before these big monopoly Vanguard/Blackrock power grabs and price gouges under cover of Covid/War On Russia. Biden’s billionaire buddies are having the time of their fuckin’ lives, just mercilessly gouging us impossibly propagandized slaves to death. “Blame Putin”, they say ten thousand times a day. And for me, personally, even the “Blame Trump” bullshit has gotten stale. Beyond stale. Just bullshit excuses at some point. Nobody wakes up THAT early. The rich are all in it together, but use the bullshit media to keep the slaves all divided, arguing about petty madeup shit so we never unite against the common oppressors.
So yesterday, after many, many days of very high stress and escalating desert high nineties heat, I was able to squeeze in a few covert hours of well deserved R & R, watching some Roku Tv ap station called VEVO that plays all the old 80’s MTV videos-Pat Benatar, Berlin, Hall & Oates, Cyndi Lauper, Jodi Watley, the Police, the Motels, John Cougar, Cameo, Duran Duran, Prince, Madness. It was good to slip back there into the long gone past, even just for a little while, and dream. Poor people have been telling middle class people, for a long time, that this ever expanding police state and military industrial surveillance complex is not democratic or woke, that faux-woke politeness culture and creepy Disneyfied identity politricks aint woke, but these middle class people are still so comfortably privileged and consumerist cloistered in their homes with their secondary rental investment properties and never ending streams of Amazon boxes on their purple front porch with the prayer flags and Buddha statues, they are unable to hear anything, except how, of course, More Big Pharma Is Always Good, Anything That Feels Ikky Is Fake News Or Russian Disinformation, Big Tech Censorship and NSA Surveillance Is Good, Big Proxy Regime Change Wars Are Good, and We Just Need More Imperialist KKKops In Khaki Pants-Suits. There is no genuine communicating with people who never leave their houses, that watch television everyday, the mainstream celebrities become their imaginary friends and they will fight you to protect their imaginary friend’s honor. “Don’t say that about KAMALA! She…WEARS A KHAKI PANTS-SUIT! ….FOR FREEDOM!”
I saw how Johnny Carson and David Letterman and Vanna White and Betty White provided continuity and familiarity to my relatives whose spouses had died. You can NOT reach the middle class tv people, they do not wanna know that things are crummy for the poor, outside their luxury, high fenced, hot tubbed, country clubbed, gated communities or skyrises with doormen and shit. They don’t wanna know, they don’t care. They really do seem to think that all their non stop relentless stand in lines obedience and sucking up to power and ignoring real injustices is gonna protect them, or get them some special privilege status in the Great Reset. Grovelers, worshippers of authority. Don’t waste your time involving yourself with these corporate media monopoly programmed Just-Us Got-Mines. They care even less about you and me than their millionaire celebrity class idols do. You can not organize any genuine resistance with these know it all time wasters who just repeat tv slogans like robots all day, I say it’s best to just avoid them entirely, you can not help them, educate them, or collaborate effectively with them, because they just wanna gorge on your energy and steal the monetary value-they do not believe in real collaboration, or equality, or possess any communal or egalitarian vales, you will be unable to ever, ever, ever change their minds, raise their consciousness , or push them left, because they have lifelong investments in their personal identity, the hometeam sports uniform and family of origin tribal myths, they believe in their heart of hearts that the Tv does not lie, Obama kept it classy, and Bill Gates is a Super Savior Scientist For Science From The Future Like Jeff Bezos & Richard Branson & Elon Musk!!! SUPER SMART SPACEMAN WHO WANT TO RESCUE US! FOR PHILANTHOPY! I love Cait Johnstone from Australia-she is a modern day equivalent of like Edward Abbey or Bill Hicks or Mark Twain or Lenny Bruce. She is a real talented writer and her powerful words are beautiful fountains of fiery truth, a dazzling light in the dark-like fireworks, like THE CLASH! A real power to the people, salt of the earth, truth telling social commentator. This one made me laugh: “Very surprised that we weren’t rescued from internet censorship by the man who is a crappy car salesman and also a billionaire and also a womanizer and also an emerald mine heir and also a malignant narcissist, but don’t worry guys he’s still definitely going to save the world.” That’s what I’m saying about the blue no matter who college people, they really have been so conditioned to totally worship all millionaires and billionaires uncritically, they can’t see the trees for the forest, they just echo the commercials. I would feel more sympathy for them if they weren’t so stubbornly self obsessed. Me, me, me, my, my, my. Never a legitimate “us”, unless they’re talking ’bout their family member who has the most money. Can’t wait to inherit some vacation house in Malibu or Ibiza or Dubai or whatever. To the haves on the hill punk is just one more empty commodity they try to own the most shares in. They put up a poster saying we earn more than you. Only thing that ever trickled down from the rulers at the top was greed and powertrip freakery.
RT: DrJillStein: RT
: 
The US government was completely bought for $14.4 Billion The 2 candidates who spend the most (meaning the 2 corporate shills) win the elections 100% of the time A large Princeton study found the US is an oligarchy,…
New Data: Billionaires Bought The US Government For $14 Billion – Lee Camp
Lee Camp: New Data Shows US Government Has Been Bought For $14 Billion (mintpressnews.com)
OH BABY WHAT A PLACE TO BE IN THE SERVICE OF THE BOURGEOISIE
Their only real concerns are protecting their delusions of being popular and shit like that, of owning the Most Stuff. Waiting for more inheritance to prove their moral superiority and virtue to all those lazy and unscientific, lesser thans, who aint so lucky-it;s all about the hoarding and lording over “the others”. Like starbellied sneetches. They consider themselves The Winners. But ALSO, always aggrieved and injured parties, who still do not have Enough Stuff. So hard to get help/nobody wants to work/those dirty ikky POORS are to blame!!! Hometown dude wrote to say he’d been insulted by successful local big fish in small pond retail businessman, for not being as mainstream popular as dude’s trendy hipster own cousin, the popular shtick guy, I reminded him of what he accomplished thirty years ago with primitive home recordings on pre digital equipment and his own whacky, zany humor and imagination. His quirky old cassette tape garage band influenced two or three decades worth of local music makers. I always liked original ground breaking, trail blazing innovator eccentrics more than just the usual come-lately, pudgy suburbans whose families finance their redundantly derivative, glorified cover band, hipster gimmick acts. It gets harder and harder to not just give up on people, and I suppose I already have mostly given up, certainly on the tv believing, wishful thinker status quo preserving, active rat racers. Surely, somewhere out there, there has got to be other remnants of rebel alliance, old punk or anarchist, or gypsy minded droput, kindred spirit resistors, but we seem to be fewer and farther in between. I met an old indigenous rights activist, radical organization veteran elder and was encouraged to see somebody espousing so many of the same ideologies as me, but alas, there aint no women in the desert, it’s just overwhelmingly old man populated, so he could not get past his horny oldman crush on my wife, his tongue was on the floor like some old wolf cartoon, he was stepping on it, just seemingly incapable of holding it together and being respectful enough to our family in order to have any kind of relationship with us-the oldsters just go too ga ga over females in these deadend ghost towns, to even remember there is anything happening, besides being struck dumb by some vah vah voom fantasy mirage. He was just an overgrown old teenager. Made me think of when I was eighteen and could not stop myself from flirting with someone’s girlfriend back then, even though I shoulda known and done much better by then. I guess in some ways, I am a graying teenager too. On a hot day like today, I wish I had somebody to talk to, somebody to rock with, I miss the old fashioned ya know, get down, productive ruckous. Like band practice, ya know? When did singing and drinking in the summertime become such a cancel culture criminal offense? Feels like the fake ass shitlib left was hijacked by like, the Moral Majority or P.M.R.C. anti rock conspiracy! But when it comes to the corruption of the DNC they always all look the other way! Like can you imagine if videos were leaked of Donald Trump Jr. smoking crack, how outraged the fake left would be? But Hunter Biden working for secret labs and oil companies in the Ukraine? Totally okey-dokeyed by every shitlib Karen. It’s a kooky world with the partisan blindness. They all work for the same megadonors, they just wear different colored ties, sometimes.
We got to build new coalitions among the working class, we have to unite with other poor people and not allow ourselves to be diverted or disrupted by squeaky wheel, me first, middle class Karens. My wife says nobody ever grows up and I see it-these smalltown guys back there in the forever competitive midwest are in their sixties now, and one is gloating he’s got more fame and fortune than some forgotten old weirdo basement punk. Even though his fortune and fame are second hand vicarious, being lived through his well financed family member’s paid for corny coverband’s pay to play high visibility. I just aint got the energy for that kinda nonsense no more. High school people still suck. They closed down the malls and the drive in and rollerskate rink, ya know all that’s left in the plantation states are jails, churches, crackhouses, bars and a hospital. Oh, man. So yeah I heard from some people who stayed in the soybean fields and tank factory places and they just got crazier and crazier, bored, churchified superstitious, delusional, adversarial, stalkeresque. Whip themselves into paranoid frenzies. Hunting for witches or commies in the corn. They are the best case scenarios, too. Most of ’em killed themselves, got hooked on crack, or went to jail. Saddening. I know folks who still think there are two very separate political parties in this country, that they are being represented and this is a democracy. It is probably not a coincidence they all got free college and own property.
Rise, like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you:
Ye are many—they are few!
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley
The video footage coming out of Sri Lanka right now has been the recurring nightmare of every ruler throughout history.
Thousands of protesters outraged by the deteriorating material conditions of the nation’s economic meltdown have stormed the presidential palace of Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, and I guarantee you the aerial footage as they poured into the building en masse has made every government leader and plutocrat a little uncomfortable today.
Video footage of Sri Lankan protesters taking over President’s office in Colombo
Buddi U Chandrasiri pic.twitter.com/FINwaaqUat
— NewsWire 
(@NewsWireLK) July 9, 2022
Just look at that. Look at all those people flooding in there. That is some truly awe-inspiring power. Imagine how terrifying it would be to find yourself on the receiving end of it.
Every ruler throughout history has spent time envisioning what would happen if a crowd that size decided to storm their base of operation. If their numbers became too great to suppress, or if your forces who would be doing the suppressing joined the ranks of the people instead, the best-case scenario for you is that you’d have already fled the building by that point, as Rajapaksa had the good sense to do shortly before the building was stormed. If enough angry people get their hands on you, it won’t matter if they’re armed with rockets or pistols or their own bare hands; you are in for a violent end.
If you’ve ever wondered why so much energy goes into keeping everyone propagandized in our society, this is why. If you’ve ever wondered why our rulers work so hard to keep us divided against each other, this is why. If you’ve ever wondered why we’re always being instructed to take our grievances to the voting booth even though we learn in election after election that it never changes the things that most desperately need to change, this is why.
Our entire civilization is structured around preventing scenes like the one we’re seeing in Sri Lanka today. Our education systems, our political systems, our media, our online information. Religions that have been around for thousands of years because the powerful endorsed and promulgated them are full of passages extolling the virtues of obedience, poverty, meekness, and rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. From the moment we are born our heads are filled with stories about why it’s good and right to consent to the status quo and why it would be wrong to take back what has been stolen from us by a predatory ruling class.
WATCH: Protesters storm presidential palace in Sri Lanka as economic crisis worsens pic.twitter.com/diIVaXx8Cd
— BNO News (@BNONews) July 9, 2022
This is why we’re always inundated with messaging about the importance of civility and politeness any time people realize that they can simply confront corrupt officials in restaurants or at their homes to push for what they want. The managers of the oligarchic empire which rules over us are terrified that we will one day notice that there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and that there’s really nothing they could do to stop us if we decided to replace them with a system which benefits ordinary people instead of an elite few.
Things are getting worse and worse because the systems that are in place are designed to exploit and oppress rather than to uplift and help thrive. Those systems will protect their own ability to continue to exploit and oppress until the people use their numbers to replace them with something healthy. The people will never use their numbers to replace abusive systems with something healthy as long as they are successfully propagandized away from doing so.
This is why our political and media institutions act the way they act and why our systems are set up in the way that they are: to keep us from realizing how easy it would be to shrug off the old mechanisms of oppression like a heavy coat on a warm day and build something new that works for all of us.
Things will keep getting worse until we find a way to cut through the propaganda brain fog and rise like lions.(-Caitlyn Johnstone)
“Backslide”! Where has this commitment to human rights been? Yemen, Israel, the U.S. judicial system, Guantanamo, the U.S. healthcare system? Let’s ask Jayland Walker about U.S. human rights – oh sorry we can’t he has 60 bullets in him.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“So, uh, I guess the military poisoned a major Hawaiian water supply, lied about it, and then downplayed the harm. Now a whistleblower seems to have revealed a video of the leak to a local paper. Wow. Locals would be justified in booting the military off the island over this.” (-Edward Snowden)
Our Town – YouTube
MC5 celebrate their 50th anniversary in style supported by an extraordinary Michael Monroe – RAMzine
Useful Idiots | Matt Taibbi | Substack
Aaron Mate | Aaron Maté | Substack
Weapons Industry’s Investment in US Congress – Consortium News
“Business owners love to complain about the attitudes of the workers they exploit.” (-Gritty Is The Way)
UK Bill Threatens Journalists With Life in Prison – Consortium News
I know the word fascist/fascism is overused and often misused – but Abe’s political project and beliefs fit the bill, especially when we understand fascism to be a type of imperialism / authoritarianism that is built on specific goals of ethno-supremacy. Steve Bannon loved Shinzo Abe, called him ‘Trump before Trump’. Italian and German fascists also loved Abe and they romanticized Japan under his leadership. Why? Because Abe was a fascist – he was referred to as a “right wing populist” but his views, philosophies were fascist.” (-Sana Saeed)
“If you’re Black and you want to know what the Democrats really think about you, try to escape their Party, watch how some of them treat you and listen to what they call you All those fake smiles, caring and civility goes out the window and you’ll see that they think they own you. Biden saying “If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t Black” is how they really think” (-Black In The Empire)
“Maybe moving Joe Biden left will begin after the Democrats lose the House and Senate in 2022.” (-Compton Jay)
“The moral rot of a society could not be clearer when you see a society that shuns the working class & the poor Instead of investing in uplifting people out of poverty…the priority of capitalists is building a strong national security state.” (-Baba Yoga)
“How did this happen? The normalization of warmongering by neoliberals? There is almost no push-back, no counters to why economic competition must lead to war – nothing in the corporate press. Abe was a fascist from a family of war criminals.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
Biden to Nominate an Anti-Abortion Lawyer to Become a Federal Judge – Rolling Stone
“Water wars are already coming to America’s suburbs. In some places people have to pay to have water trucked in. This water is often stolen from other locations. As the droughts across the US worsen, these battles will increase & grow.” (-Lee Camp)
“Joe Biden reads from teleprompter “repeat the line” instead of repeating the line. “Say goodnight Gracie.” (Look up the reference if you’re young).” (-Margaret Kimberly Black Agenda Report)
“Elon Musk is a total fraud. This Twitter stunt, like most of what he does, was just for media attention. This failson oligarch only manages to stay afloat thanks to billions of dollars of US government subsidies and his own manufactured media scandals.” (-Benjamin Norton)
“Every time I hear her, I am reminded @AbbyMartin has things to say that will never be spoken on the corpo media nightlies. The very definition of a “dangerous voice.” (-Edward Snowden)
“PARDON SNOWDEN PARDON ASSANGE PARDON HALE” (-Abby Martin)
Embedded with Tim Robbins – In These Times
SHE DIDN’T LIKE ROCKNROLL
Man, this song’s like a really significant entire chapter of my long gone former life. They say opposites attract, but I’ll never know how, or why this one foxy broad got involved with me, or I got involved with her. I was a pink leather clad, defiant antisocial, outcast glamarchist street kid, into Slade, writing rebel songs, and having boozy singalongs. She was from the ultra mega in crowd, hypnotizingly beautiful to behold, but with introverted, landlordly sensibilities, a propertarian, into money, ownership society, conspicuous consumption, popularity, hierarchy, VIP parking, and from an entirely different class. I remember buying her a double Sam Cooke lp for Valentine’s Day and her really just not digging it, at all. Red flag. Turns out she didn’t really like me, deep down, either. Not really. I’m a pauper, a dishwasher, a minimum wage earning record store guy. A music ranter who won’t take checks to say the Foo Fighters or Kid Rock or Lil Nas X or Kanye are good. I thought she knew. Don’t get involved with rich girls who don’t like Sam Cooke. That’s my only advice.
You’re not “saving democracy” by blindly supporting a party that has rigged its own primaries, kicked the Green Party off ballots, & taken more money from Wall Street in 2020 than the corrupt Republican Party. You’re doing the machine’s bidding and enabling the corporate duopoly. (-Ryan Knight)
“And how do they fool you? Because they pick the leaders they want. And they put those people up there and portray them as being your leaders when, in fact, they’re leaders of nobody.” (– Fred Hampton)
“Whatever The Oppressed do to get The Oppressor off its back…Is Justified.”(-Malcom X)
“I am a revolutionary I am the people I’m not the pig.” (- Fred Hampton)
Aaron Maté is creating the news show “Pushback with Aaron Maté” | Patreon
Democrats Remove Green Party from North Carolina Ballot | Black Agenda Report
“TOO POLITICAL”…YA EVER HEAR SELF PROCLAIMED “PUNKS” SAY YOUR LYRICS ARE “TOO POLITICAL”?
I dunno when capitalist hierarchy culture convinced people that “punk” was all about acquiring a big collection of products, or “being popular” with the trendies or sports idiots, but man, I LEARNED stuff from The Clash, and even CRASS, growing up. I dunno how the global one world government transhumanist Davos billionaires captured the universities and regulatory agencies, but most of the media was consolidated under their umbrella in 1996 via Colin Powell’s son and Clinton’s Telecommunications Act. Then, they permanently banned over 900 anti-war songs after Uncle Dick’s 9/11. FREEDOM FRIES FOR EVERYBODY! They just dumbed us down, paid those Spin magazine NYU rich kids to repeat the bullshit about Beck, Kanye, Dave Grohl and the Strokes being godlike geniuses for twenty five years and all the gullible sucksups bought into it. I never had enough drugs to pretend like techno!
“The U.S. really should never be talking about how propagandized people in other countries are. Ever.” (-
MintPress News (@MintPressNews) / Twitter
William O’Neal: The Black Panther Who Betrayed Fred Hampton (allthatsinteresting.com)
Demolition of Georgia Guidestones Symbolizes Metamorphosis For Humanity (substack.com)
“You can kill a revolutionary, but you cannot kill a Revolution…” (— Fred Hampton)
GOP Senator Defends Guantánamo Bay Prison as ‘Absolutely Vital Institution’ (commondreams.org)
Covid “Came Out Of A US Lab Biotechnology” Says Lancet Chairman (rumble.com)
PRESS RELEASE
Report: Military-Industrial Complex Campaign Checks Help Explain Bloated Pentagon Budget
WASHINGTON –
The military-industrial complex contributed a combined $10.2 million in the 2022 cycle to lawmakers who voted to lavish the military with tens of billions more than either the Pentagon or the White House requested, according to a new Public Citizen report based on campaign finance data collected by OpenSecrets.org.
The report helps explain lawmaker’s eagerness to waste tens of billions more in taxpayer funds on the already bloated military budget. In June, the U.S. House Armed Services Committee voted to increase the Pentagon budget by $37.5 billion over the $813 billion the White House requested, and the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee voted to increase the Pentagon budget by $45 billion.
If the final FY 2023 budget ultimately reaches the amount approved by the Senate committee, defense contractors will have clinched a nearly 450,000% return on their $10 million investment in 2022 campaign and PAC contributions.
Senate committee members who voted to increase the defense budget and received the most from the defense sector over the past six years are:
- Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), ranking member and recipient of $874,876,
- Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), committee chair and recipient of $822,757, and
- Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and recipient of $616,152.
House committee members who voted to increase the defense budget and received the most from the defense sector over the past two years include:
- Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), ranking member and recipient of $404,525,
- Rob Wittman (R-Va.), vice ranking member and recipient of $237,799, and
- Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), recipient of $150,950
“The military-industrial complex’s campaign spending spree gives war profiteers an outsized influence over Pentagon funding votes,” said Savannah Wooten, People Over Pentagon campaign coordinator for Public Citizen and one of the authors of the report. “It creates a self-fulfilling annual cycle where money from the industry begets money for the industry. Instead of working overtime to secure defense contractor profits, Congress should prioritize the true, urgent human needs of everyday people.”
What Did The Georgia Guidestones Say? Mysterious Words On Blown Up Monument (msn.com)
“The human species is at an adapt-or-perish juncture in its history on this planet; we will either drastically change the way we operate, or we will wipe ourselves out by nuclear war or environmental cataclysm. Because we’ve been brought to this point by our unhealthy relationship with mental narrative, the adaptation we’re being challenged to make would be a collective movement into a healthy relationship with mental narrative.
We’re where we’re at because powerful people have been able to manipulate us into believing mental stories about reality which aren’t based in fact. History is one long unbroken tale of large groups of humans being manipulated by much smaller groups of humans in ways which benefit the smaller groups, and that tale continues to this day. Propaganda and other forms of narrative control are used to manufacture consent for status quo models of governance, economic and monetary systems, and foreign policy which benefit an elite few at the expense of the general population.
And what’s interesting is that underneath all the babbling propaganda stories about what’s happening in our world, humanity is indeed showing signs that we are collectively slipping out of our old relationship with mental narrative. It’s happening in the usual sloppy, awkward, two-steps-forward-one-step-back shamble which has always marked all of human progress, but it’s happening.
It’s happening in the way people are moving away from religion as we collectively discover that those ancient narratives which so long transfixed our ancestors are not necessary or helpful for finding meaning, morality and fulfillment in our lives, and as we collectively notice that doctrines about eternal reward for obedience and eternal damnation for disobedience sound made-up.
It’s happening with the rise of cryptocurrencies as people figure out that money is made up and we can change the rules whenever we want. Money is nothing more than an agreed-upon story that’s only as true as we all continue to pretend it is, a collective narrative that we can collectively rewrite at any time.
It’s happening as people figure out that a romantic relationship doesn’t need to look the way they’ve looked throughout most of our recorded history; that it’s only narrative which says one man and one woman must love and have sex with only each other throughout their lives, or even throughout their relationship. That those rules have only ever been made of empty narrative fluff and can be replaced with an entirely different set of guidelines.
It’s happening as people figure out how much narrative overlays things like gender and sexuality, that there’s nothing inscribed upon the fabric of reality which prescribes our longstanding models of men and women and what their roles are and how their sexualities should express. Rearranging societal narratives that deeply entrenched in our culture is causing a lot of chaos and confusion, and the arguments it’s bringing up are very upsetting for a lot of people, but it’s gradually working itself out as people pick through the narratives and sort out fact from story.
Indeed each issue I’m describing here has brought in its own set of quandaries, challenges, bad faith actors and abuses that had previously been avoided under the old models, but it’s not like the old models have been free of those things either. And as we all discuss, argue, push and pull and muddle our way through these obstacles with each other, we are collectively sinking into the real important insight which underlies all those more superficial areas of contention: that our society is made of narrative, and we can change the rules whenever we want.
We’re still in the early days of this growing insight, but if you look at the conceptual rigidity we had as a society even a few decades ago around our how-it-is stories and our how-it-ought-to-be stories, it’s clear that there’s a real unravelling happening. A relaxation in our collective certainty about how the various components of our civilization are meant to look.
This relaxation and unravelling is the first step in transforming into a healthy society. It’s the first step in the adaptation we’re going to have to collectively make to survive as a species.
But it can’t stop at insights into the fluid nature of narratives around faith, money, gender and relationships. We’re going to have to unlearn the how-it-is and how-it-ought-to-be narratives we have learned about everything over the course of our entire lives.
We’re going to have to learn that we’ve been lied to since we were children about how the world works, how our government works, how our political and economic systems work. We’re going to have to learn that the very building blocks of our culture are mostly just made-up stories from people who want to control us and from long-dead people who wanted to control our ancestors. We’re going to have to learn that all the metrics by which we measure our personal success and failure and the frameworks we use to decide what our lives are about are fictions implanted in our minds by the powerful. We’re going to have to learn that even our most absolutely fundamental ideas about who and what we are have been built on faulty assumptions.
You can’t rewrite a rule if you still believe it’s written in stone. You can’t rewrite a story if you don’t know that you are its author. We can’t rewrite the structure of human civilization if we haven’t yet learned that none of the old rules are real. We can’t collectively withdraw our consent for status quo systems until we collectively understand that our consent is actually required. We can’t bend the spoon until we realize that there is no spoon.
And we are collectively moving toward that realization. We are learning as a collective and as individuals that we don’t have to be what we’ve been told we are, that things don’t have to be how we’ve been told they must be, that all the how-it-is narratives and how-it-should-be narratives we’ve been indoctrinated with are just fairy tales for adults made up by highly confused people whose only qualifications were that they got here before us.
So don’t worry when you see the old rigid boundaries start to blur and wobble. Don’t panic when you see the old stories being met with incredulity. It might look awkward and sloppy right now, but that’s just what it looks like when a thinking species begins moving into a conscious relationship with thought.
(-Caitlin Johnstone)
“NATO expanded its footprint, violating promises to Moscow, once the Cold War ended, to incorporate 14 countries in Eastern and Central Europe into the alliance. It will soon add Finland and Sweden. It bombed Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo. It launched wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, resulting in close to a million deaths and some 38 million people driven from their homes. It is building a military footprint in Africa and Asia. It invited Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, the so-called “Asia Pacific Four,” to its recent summit in Madrid at the end of June. It has expanded its reach into the Southern Hemisphere, signing a military training partnership agreement with Colombia, in December 2021. It has backed Turkey, with NATO’s second largest military, which has illegally invaded and occupied parts of Syria as well as Iraq. Turkish-backed militias are engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Syrian Kurds and other inhabitants of north and east Syria. The Turkish military has been accused of war crimes – including multiple airstrikes against a refugee camp and chemical weapons use – in northern Iraq. In exchange for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s permission for Finland and Sweden to join the alliance, the two Nordic countries have agreed to expand their domestic terror laws making it easier to crack down on Kurdish and other activists, lift their restrictions on selling arms to Turkey and deny support to the Kurdish-led movement for democratic autonomy in Syria.
It is quite a record for a military alliance that with the collapse of the Soviet Union was rendered obsolete and should have been dismantled. NATO and the militarists had no intention of embracing the “peace dividend,” fostering a world based on diplomacy, a respect of spheres of influence and mutual cooperation. It was determined to stay in business. Its business is war. That meant expanding its war machine far beyond the border of Europe and engaging in ceaseless antagonism toward China and Russia.
NATO sees the future, as detailed in its “NATO 2030: Unified for a New Era,” as a battle for hegemony with rival states, especially China, and calls for the preparation of prolonged global conflict.
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China has an increasingly global strategic agenda, supported by its economic and military heft,” the NATO 2030 initiative warned. “It has proven its willingness to use force against its neighbors, as well as economic coercion and intimidatory diplomacy well beyond the Indo-Pacific region. Over the coming decade, China will likely also challenge NATO’s ability to build collective resilience, safeguard critical infrastructure, address new and emerging technologies such as 5G and protect sensitive sectors of the economy including supply chains. Longer term, China is increasingly likely to project military power globally, including potentially in the Euro-Atlantic area.”
The alliance has spurned the Cold War strategy that made sure Washington was closer to Moscow and Beijing than Moscow and Beijing were to each other. U.S. and NATO antagonism have turned Russia and China into close allies. Russia, rich in natural resources, including energy, minerals and grains, and China, a manufacturing and technological behemoth, are a potent combination. NATO no longer distinguishes between the two, announcing in its most recent mission statement that the “deepening strategic partnership” between Russian and China has resulted in “mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order that run counter to our values and interests.”
On July 6, Christopher Wray, director of the FBI, and Ken McCallum, director general of Britain’s MI5, held a joint news conference in London to announce that China was the “biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security.” They accused China, like Russia, of interfering in U.S. and U.K. elections. Wray warned the business leaders they addressed that the Chinese government was “set on stealing your technology, whatever it is that makes your industry tick, and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market.”
This inflammatory rhetoric presages an ominous future.
One cannot talk about war without talking about markets. The political and social turmoil in the U.S., coupled with its diminishing economic power, has led it to embrace NATO and its war machine as the antidote to its decline.
Washington and its European allies are terrified of China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) meant to connect an economic bloc of roughly 70 nations outside U.S. control. The initiative includes the construction of rail lines, roads and gas pipelines that will be integrated with Russia. Beijing is expected to commit $1.3 trillion to the BRI by 2027. China, which is on track to become the world’s largest economy within a decade, has organized the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the world’s largest trade pact of 15 East Asian and Pacific nations representing 30 percent of global trade. It already accounts for 28.7 percent of the Global Manufacturing Output, nearly double the 16.8 percent of the U.S.
China’s rate of growth last year was an impressive 8.1 percent, although slowing to around 5 percent this year. By contrast, the U.S.’s growth rate in 2021 was 5.7 percent — its highest since 1984 — but is predicted to fall below 1 percent this year, by the New York Federal Reserve.
If China, Russia, Iran, India and other nations free themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network financial institutions use to send and receive information such as money transfer instructions, it will trigger a dramatic decline in the value of the dollar and a financial collapse in the U.S. The huge military expenditures, which have driven the U.S. debt to $30 trillion, $ 6 trillion more than the U.S.’s entire GDP, will become untenable. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military in 2021, $ 801 billion which amounted to 38 percent of total world expenditure on the military, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined. The loss of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency will force the U.S. to slash spending, shutter many of its 800 military bases overseas and cope with the inevitable social and political upheavals triggered by economic collapse. It is darkly ironic that NATO has accelerated this possibility.
Russia, in the eyes of NATO and U.S. strategists, is the appetizer. Its military, NATO hopes, will get bogged down and degraded in Ukraine. Sanctions and diplomatic isolation, the plan goes, will thrust Vladimir Putin from power. A client regime that will do U.S. bidding will be installed in Moscow.
NATO has provided more than $8 billion in military aid to Ukraine, while the US has committed nearly $54 billion in military and humanitarian assistance to the country.
China, however, is the main course. Unable to compete economically, the U.S. and NATO have turned to the blunt instrument of war to cripple their global competitor.
The provocation of China replicates the NATO baiting of Russia.
NATO expansion and the 2014 US-backed coup in Kyiv led Russia to first occupy Crimea, in eastern Ukraine, with its large ethnic Russian population, and then to invade all of Ukraine to thwart the country’s efforts to join NATO.
The same dance of death is being played with China over Taiwan, which China considers part of Chinese territory, and with NATO expansion in the Asia Pacific. China flies warplanes into Taiwan’s air defense zone and the U.S. sends naval ships through the Taiwan Strait which connects the South and East China seas. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in May called China the most serious long-term challenge to the international order, citing its claims to Taiwan and efforts to dominate the South China Sea. Taiwan’s president, in a Zelensky-like publicity stunt, recently posed with an anti-tank rocket launcher in a government handout photo.
The conflict in Ukraine has been a bonanza for the arms industry, which, given the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, needed a new conflict. Lockheed Martin’s stock prices are up 12 percent. Northrop Grumman is up 20 percent. The war is being used by NATO to increase its military presence in Eastern and Central Europe. The U.S. is building a permanent military base in Poland. The 40,000-strong NATO reaction force is being expanded to 300,000 troops. Billions of dollars in weapons are pouring into the region.
The conflict with Russia, however, is already backfiring. The ruble has soared to a seven-year high against the dollar. Europe is barreling towards a recession because of rising oil and gas prices and the fear that Russia could terminate supplies completely. The loss of Russian wheat, fertilizer, gas and oil, due to Western sanctions, is creating havoc in world markets and a humanitarian crisis in Africa and the Middle East. Soaring food and energy prices, along with shortages and crippling inflation, bring with them not only deprivation and hunger, but social upheaval and political instability. The climate emergency, the real existential threat, is being ignored to appease the gods of war.
The war makers are frighteningly cavalier about the threat of nuclear war. Putin warned NATO countries that they “will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history” if they intervened directly in Ukraine and ordered Russian nuclear forces to be put on heightened alert status. The proximity to Russia of U.S. nuclear weapons based in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Turkey mean that any nuclear conflict would obliterate much of Europe. Russia and the United States control about 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, with around 4,000 warheads each in their military stockpiles, according to the Federation of American Scientists.
President Joe Biden warned that the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine would be “completely unacceptable” and “entail severe consequences,” without spelling out what those consequences would be. This is what U.S. strategists refer to as “deliberate ambiguity.”
The U.S. military, following its fiascos in the Middle East, has shifted its focus from fighting terrorism and asymmetrical warfare to confronting China and Russia. President Barack Obama’s national-security team in 2016 carried out a war game in which Russia invaded a NATO country in the Baltics and used a low-yield tactical nuclear weapon against NATO forces. Obama officials were split about how to respond.
“The National Security Council’s so-called Principals Committee—including Cabinet officers and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—decided that the United States had no choice but to retaliate with nuclear weapons,” Eric Schlosser writes in The Atlantic. “Any other type of response, the committee argued, would show a lack of resolve, damage American credibility, and weaken the NATO alliance. Choosing a suitable nuclear target proved difficult, however. Hitting Russia’s invading force would kill innocent civilians in a NATO country. Striking targets inside Russia might escalate the conflict to an all-out nuclear war. In the end, the NSC Principals Committee recommended a nuclear attack on Belarus—a nation that had played no role whatsoever in the invasion of the NATO ally but had the misfortune of being a Russian ally.”
The Biden administration has formed a Tiger Team of national security officials to run war games on what to do if Russia uses a nuclear weapon, according to The New York Times. The threat of nuclear war is minimized with discussions of “tactical nuclear weapons,” as if less powerful nuclear explosions are somehow more acceptable and won’t lead to the use of bigger bombs.
At no time, including the Cuban missile crisis, have we stood closer to the precipice of nuclear war.
“A simulation devised by experts at Princeton University starts with Moscow firing a nuclear warning shot; NATO responds with a small strike, and the ensuing war yields more than 90 million casualties in its first few hours,” The New York Times reported.
The longer the war in Ukraine continues — and the U.S. and NATO seem determined to funnel billions of dollars of weapons into the conflict for months if not years — the more the unthinkable becomes thinkable. Flirting with Armageddon to profit the arms industry and carry out the futile quest to reclaim U.S. global hegemony is at best extremely reckless and at worst genocidal.(-Chris Hedges)
Veglam 