Bulletin N° 856

 

 

“Charlotte’s Web”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YY9_cgdgi-4

animation of 1952 children’s novel by E.B. White

(1hr 54min)

&

“The Walrus and the Carpenter”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43914/the-walrus-and-the-carpenter-56d222cbc80a9

poem by Lewis Carroll from Through the Looking-Glass, 1872.

 

 

 

Subject : The Etiology of Neofascism and the Changes it Promises to Bring.

 

 

 

August 7, 2019

Grenoble, France

 

 

Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,

 

Studying fascist formations as an organic development out of the economic, political and social milieux of capitalist society - rather than as a mechanistic deviation from normative political behavior – opens up the landscape of capitalist social relationships to new vistas. Princeton University professor Lawrence Stone’s classic histoire des mentalities study, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (1977), provides many valuable insights into roots of social relationships as they developed over the centuries in early modern England, thus fulfilling the historians first task of informing readers whence we have emerged and whither we are likely heading.

 

I met Professor Stone in the spring of 1987, during his visit to San Diego State University, where I was a member of  the history faculty. One afternoon at a faculty wine-and-cheese party, we engaged in an animated discussion in which we discussed the apparent overlap of idealist theory and historical materialism. He was quite open to discussing the tentative conclusions of his research in a very matter-of-fact fashion, though I found the conclusions he had drawn, as I told him at the time, a bit underwhelming.

 

In this expertly organized treatise of some 400 pages, Stone begins with an introductory chapter on “Problems, Methods and Definitions”, and a second on “Demographic Facts”; he then moves quickly to descriptions of the “open lineage family” as evidenced in England between 1450 and 1639, discussing its structure, it values and the affective relationships that were promoted by the society and within the family. This portrait is followed by a description in the next part of the book of the “restricted patriarchal nuclear family” in England as it emerged from 1550 to 1700. Here he takes up the evidence for a decline of influences traditionally imposed by kinship, clientage, and the community in all social classes, and the sometimes brutal enforcement of patriarchy in the husband-wife and parent-child relationships within the nuclear family in the early modern history of England, emphasizing “areas of permissiveness” and “areas of repression,”  and the normative role played by formal education. The fourth part of this impressive book concerns the “closed domesticated nuclear family,” which, according to Professor Stone, made its appearance in England between 1640 and 1800. It is in this section of the book that the author discusses evidence for the emergence of “affective individualism” in early modern English society and within families of every rank. This part of his study begins chapter 6, where Professor Stone introduces the subject with an overall view of the new formations he is about to describe.

 

     The sixteenth-century trend towards increasingly authoritarian relationships within the middle – and upper-class families was progressively overtaken in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by an opposite trend towards greater freedom for children and a rather more equal partnership between spouses. It was a development that was accompanied by  a further walling-off of the nuclear family from either interference or support from the kin, and a further withdrawal from the community. Thirdly, there developed much warmer affective relations between husband and wife and between parents and children, which was itself a powerful reason for the declining influence of kin and community. A fourth feature was the identification of children as a special status group, distinct from adults, with its  own special institutions, such as schools, and its own information circuits, from which adults now increasingly tried to exclude knowledge about sex and death.

 

     Another development, which emerged only among the landed elite and hardly affected the bourgeois and professional classes, was the increasingly open recognition and acceptance of sensuality. One result was the open inclusion of eroticism in marital relations as well as in the extra-marital liaisons to which it had previously been, in theory and perhaps also in practice, largely confined. Further discussion of this fourth feature, however, will be postponed until the problem of sexuality is taken up in Part Five of this volume.

 

     Apart from eroticism, these trends first became prominent in wealthy merchant and professional households in the city in the last third of the seventeenth century; From there they spread to the upper landed classes, gathering strength rapidly in the early eighteenth century and reaching a climax towards 1800.

 

     These changes in human relations within the microcosm of the family cannot be explained except in terms of changes in the macrocosm of the total cultural system, a major reorientation of meaning among those sectors of society which experienced these changes. This being so, the search for explanation must carry us to areas far removed from the family itself, since what is involve is a change in how the individual regarded himself in relation to society (the growth of individualism) and how he behaved and felt towards other human beings, particularly his wife and children on the one hand, and parents and kin on the other (the growth of affect). Before beginning  a discussion of this very difficult subject, it should be clearly understood that what is being put under the microscope is a secondary, but highly significant , tendency at work within what still remained at all levels a deferential society based, although to a diminishing extent, on the time-honored principles of hierarchy and obedience. These principles found open expression in the elaborate rituals of doffing of hats in the presence of superiors; the giving of the wall when passing in the street; the meticulous ordering of official processions such as funerals, by which every rank was allotted his appropriate place; the socially graded arrangements for seating in churches. The array of huge family tombs which filled the chancels of so many English parish churches in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were, like the elaborate genealogies so lovingly drawn up by the heralds, evidence of a widespread and cultivated ancestry-worship, which supported the authority of the elders in the family over the younger members of it.

 

     These elaborate rituals and symbols had profound psychological significance, their purpose being to buttress the social order and protect it from the chaos threatened by the Reformation and redistribution of church property and the growing inequalities of wealth and poverty. In the long run, these efforts were successful in containing the threat of social disintegration, and by the early eighteenth century a period of calm began. The ‘quality’ were once more reunited on basic issues.

 

     It was precisely because of this underlying unity of the elites, and of the largely unquestioning habits of deference by those below, that the state apparatus could remain so relatively weak in eighteenth-century England without a total collapse of social order. It was a close thing, anarchy lay only just below the surface, and the authority of the elite was tempered by the fear and reality of the mob riot. But authority held, for, as Burk pointed out, political liberty was – and is – bought as the price of internalized respect for social discipline. Individual autonomy – contemporaries called it ‘freedom’ or ‘liberty’ – therefore, was a new luxury which could now safely be indulged in by the well-to-do, and which modified and mitigated the rigidities of a society whose fundamental cohesion was preserved by habits of obedience to legitimate authority, two of the most important aspects of which were the subordination of children to parents, and of women to men.(pp.149-151)

 

He goes on to attempt to explain the shift in mentality that began in the late seventeenth century, which saw a “different set of values, which placed the individual above the kin, the family, the society, and even in some eighteenth century judicial  pronouncements, the state”. This “very unusual phenomenon” demands explanation:

 

     It should be noted that the development of personal introspection and the growth of toleration for other individuals stem from what are in some ways antithetical psychological impulses. The most powerful influence behind the first was the overpowering sense of sin and the preoccupation with individual salvation that was the hallmark of the Puritan personality in the seventeenth century, and was greatly stimulated be literacy and the habit of private reading and meditation. The interests in the self sprang from the urgent need to discipline the self – the ‘sphincter morality’ as the Freudians describe it. Puritanism, introspection, literacy and privacy form a single affinity group of characteristics. They do not, however, necessarily lead to a willingness to respect the liberty of privacy of others. On the contrary, both in England and in New England, they led directly to the creation of suspicious and inquisitorial society, constantly on the watch to spy out the sins of others and to suppress all deviations from the true way.

 

     The spirit of toleration for the autonomy of others derives as much from indifference as from principle. With its stress on the liberation of other individuals and their freedom in the pursuit of personal goals, it is a feature of the opposite personality type, extrovert, easy-going, and willing to tolerate diversity, if only for the sake of peace. What seems to have happened was this. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, two different world views, the Puritanically ascetic and the secularly sensual, were competing for the allegiance of the ruling classes. Between 1640 and 1660 the former won, abused its victory by attempting to impose its values by force, and then collapsed. The result was a strong reaction to hedonism, while Puritanism persisted as a viewpoint adhered to by a minority.

 

     There was thus a major oscillation between two predominant personality types in England in the seventeenth century. Both types, in their different ways, made their contribution, the first to the growth of introspection and the second to the growth of respect for the autonomy of others. Puritanism in its death throes left behind it certain critically important legacies. Despite its authoritarian inclinations, it also emphasized the importance of the individual conscience and of private prayer to God, and in defeat after 1660 it had no option but to plead for religious toleration from the majority. Moreover its stress on the importance of holy matrimony – meaning marriage bound by mutual affection – helped to undermine its contrary emphasis on the need for strict filial obedience to parents. But it was the post-1660 cultural supremacy of the anti-Puritan character type which built on this foundation decisively to change attitudes towards authority, affection and sex within the middle and upper ranks of society.(pp.152-153)

 

The growth of affective individualism is seen in the changing attitudes toward cruelty, as well.

 

     Another broad philosophical movement, which gathered strength throughout the mid and late eighteenth century, was a growing antipathy to cruelty. The origins of this sentiment may be traced back to some obscure zone  of English Puritan thought, since its first clear expression is to be found in The Liberties of the Massachusetts Colony, adopted by the General Court in 1641. This document placed strict limits on the use of judicial torture to extract information, and forbade husbands to beat their wives or maltreat their servants or apprentices. It even, for the first time in history, legislated to protect domestic animals: ‘No man shall exercise any tyranny or cruelty towards any brute creatures which are usually to be kept for man’s use.’ Since 1641 was the last year’ in which the English state formally ordered the use of torture on a political prisoner, the same motives must have been working in England to place restraint on the treatment of prisoners by the Parliamentary leaders and Oliver Cromwell, despite the hatreds generated by the bitter civil war.

 

     Late seventeenth-century evidence for this trend of Puritan thought is hard to find, and the spread of revulsion against cruelty in the eighteenth century seems to have been concurrent with, and related to, the spread of Enlightenment ideas throughout Europe. Even then, it was at all times a state of mind confined to a relatively small part of the population. But it was a highly articulate and ultimately very influential part which slowly learned to employ all the devices of mass persuasion available in what was increasingly an educationally literate and politically open society. Organized in societies formed for the purpose of promoting this or that change, the reformers used the spreading bulk of  newspapers, as well as pamphlets, sermons, novels, cartoons and prints, to influence a wider public  and then mobilize that public thought through the machinery of the mass petition to bring pressure on Parliament. They were responsible in the end for such things as the abolition of the slave trade, the suppression of most cruel sports, prison reform, and reform in the treatment of the mentally sick. It is too facile to point out that the most successful of these endeavours affected others than the reformers themselves, and that it was therefore only too easy for the English elite to incorporate the concept of benevolence into their set of cultural imperatives. The movement was a genuinely moral one involving the upsurge of new attitudes and emotions, which acquired an enormous stimulus thanks to the development of the mid-eighteenth century of  a new ideal type, namely the Man of Sentiment, of Man of Feeling, the prototype of the late eighteenth-century Romantic. Conformity to this new ideal positively reinforced the legitimacy of the ruling class.

 

     The connection between maltreatment of animals and maltreatment (and murder) of human beings was the theme of Hogarth’s popular set of openly propagandist prints, The Four Stages of Cruelty, published in 1751. Years later, Hogarth remarked that he thought ‘the publication of them has checked the diabolical spirits of barbarity to the brute creation, which I am sorry to say, was once so prevalent in this country’. . . .

 

     This moralizing was often wrapped up in a package which to modern tastes seems nauseously sentimental, but the message was new and clear. . . . But behind the flow of tears lies a new attitude towards man’s inhumanity to man. For about half a century, from 1770 to 1820, it was fashionable to express emotional anguish concerning cruelty, a distress which finally opened the way to remedial legislation and institutional reform.

 

     In its effect on family life, the connection between hostility to cruelty to animals and to cruelty to children is clear enough, while both slaves and women were ultimately beneficiaries, along with felons and madmen, of the drive for legal protection for the helpless. At the same time, the Romantic movement encouraged a more openly emotional involvement in family relationships. Thus some of the improvements in the treatment of wives and children of the middle and upper classes, particularly in the latter half of the eighteenth century, were spin-offs from this growing desire to ameliorate the human lot and to reduce the amount of sheer physical cruelty in the world. Why this movement should have emerged with such power at this particular moment  in history remains a mystery, but its success undoubtedly owes much to the evangelistic enthusiasm of its leading protagonists and their skillful use of the new media of mass communication that had only recently become available.(pp.162-164)

 

 

While drinking from a bottle of chilled California Chablis, my discussion with Professor Stone turned to class struggle, and the fact that his focus on the history of the evolution of English mentalities excluded any reference to the historic significance of such conflicts.

 

Question: To what extent does the ruling class rule society?

Answer: To the same extent that a horseback rider rules his horse.

 

     It was in the atmosphere created by this relaxation of psychological tension, this decline in religious enthusiasm, and this new political theory that in the mid-eighteenth century some of the ideas of the Enlightenment were enabled to take root. Thus family relationships were powerfully affected by the concept that the pursuit of individual happiness is one of the basic laws of nature, and also by the growing movement to put some check on man’s inhumanity to man and animals which is so prominent a feature of eighteenth-century intellectual and political life.

 

     By the eighteenth century, complete identification had been made between the pursuit of gratification by the individual and the welfare of the public. In 1733 Alexander Pope concluded one section of his Essay on Man with the words: ‘Thus God and Nature link’d the general frame/And and self-love and social be the same.’ He then went even further, concluding the next section with the claim ‘That reason, passion answer one great aim/That true self-love and social are the same.’ In these two couplets Pope drags in God, Nature, Reason and Passion to support a proposition which can only be described as a transformation of human consciousness. For the first time, some men were beginning to believe – with very little justification – that the egocentric pursuit of self-interest contributed to the public good rather than to its destruction. Secondly, Pope’s identification of passion and reason as working to the same end rather than as polar opposites harmonized emotion and logic. It thus prepared the way for the rise of romantic love as a respectable component of marital strategy and married life.

 

     In order to answer the subsidiary question, not why individualism grew in this period, but why England took the lead over continental Europe, it is necessary to separate developments which were peculiar to England from those which were common throughout the whole of western Europe.

 

     This-worldly secularism, literacy, the pursuit of happiness, humanitarianism, physical and bodily privacy, were common to the whole of Western cultures. But it was the high development of the market economy in England that made possible and necessary the theory of economic individualism; the legacies from Puritanism of respect for the individual conscience, the ideals of holy matrimony, and the admission by Protestant theology that sex could be for purposes other than procreation were also ideas very limited in their geographical scope; the development of a large, wealthy, powerful and cultivated upper bourgeoisie was confined to Holland, England and France; the seizure of power by the gentry after a bloody civil war and the creation of a state based on the theory of a mutual contract between sovereign and people were purely English; the strong sense of cautious pragmatism engendered by such an historical experience and so delicately balanced  polity was very English; the cultural homogeneity of upper bourgeoisie and gentry, which allowed ideas to flow freely from the one to the other, was also peculiarly English, as was the absence of censorship and the creation of a large unified market of ‘ the quality’ for literary production of all kinds; the role of London as the only political, economic and cultural centre of the country was unique; the development of the novel of sensibility, and the enormous growth of novel-reading thanks to the generalized institution of circulating libraries, were especially English phenomena. One can thus identify some specifically English features over and above those shared by all of Europe, which adequately explain the wide and early diffusion of new familial ideals and practices throughout the middle and upper ranks of English society. As a result, nowhere else, so far as we know, did the landed classes accept so readily the wide ramifications of the ideology of individualism, the notion that self-interest coincided with the public welfare.

 

     The abandonment of the principle of human interchangeability and the rise of the concept that each person is unique, and cannot be exactly replicated or reproduced is adequately explained by these convergent forces. The rise of affect, however, is only partly a product of individualism, and seems to have its roots also in a basic personality change. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries there predominated a personality type with ‘low  gradient’ affect, whose capacity for warm relationships was generally limited , and who diffused what there was of it widely among family, kin, and neighbors. In the eighteenth century there predominated among the upper bourgeoisie and squirarchy a personality type with ‘steep gradient’ affect, whose general capacity for intimate personal relationships was much greater, and whose emotional ties were now far more closely concentrated on spouse and children. The cause of this personality change is not known, but it seems plausible to suggest that it may have been associated not only with the broad social and intellectual changes of the period, but also with a series of changes in child rearing, which created among adults a sense of trust instead of one of distrust. There were also two ideas which helped to stimulate affect in the eighteenth century. The first was the new confidence that the pursuit of happiness, best achieved by domestic affection, was the prime legitimate goal in life. The second was the new ideal of the ‘Man of Sentiment’ who was easily moved to outbursts of indignation by cruelty and to tears of sympathy by benevolence. Finally there was the slow structural shift that first weakened the power of the kin, and then that of the parents. With this shift in power went a change in concepts of duty and obligation.

 

     These two trends towards individualism and towards affect came together to form affective individualism . . . . (pp.178-180)

 

We can see from this history that physical violence is usually a last resort when it comes to social control. Political power - as defined as the ability to impose the will of one party upon another - is a practice that employs many different techniques, both violent and non-violent. As tactics, they can be understood only in the context of the specific grand strategies they aim for: What did these tactics accomplish? How? Why? And at What cost?

 

In the first chapter of his book, Stone discusses the methods which he employs for this study of the family and English society over a period of three centuries:

 

     Any generalization inevitably runs into the objection that any behaviour model of change over time imposes an artificial schematization on a chaotic and ambiguous reality.

 

. . .

     The historian of the family is faced with the usual problem, but in its most intractable form, of how best to interweave fact and theory, anecdote and analysis. As Lévi-Strauss has well said, ‘biographical and anecdotal history . . . is low lowered history, which is not intelligible in itself, and only becomes so when it is transferred en bloc to a form of history of a higher power than itself. . . . The historian’s relative choice . . . is always confined to a choice between history which teaches more and explains less and history which explains more and teaches less.’ This book oscillates between analysis, which tries to explain, and anecdote, which tries to teach, in the perhaps vain hope that it may thus be possible to have the best of both worlds.

 

     In dealing with the anecdotal material, the alternatives are to offer brief extracts from a large range of sources, or to use selected case studies to illustrate a point in depth. In this book the second method has been adopted, since in so sensitive an area as family relations only fairly detailed accounts can bring out the nuances of the situation. This choice has been deliberately made in full awareness that the method is open (to the charge that the case studies selected are unrepresentative of the whole sample. All that can be said in defence is the that a deliberate effort has been made to find representative examples and to eliminate exceptional sports.(pp.26-27)

 

This study of change in English family structures from 1500 to 1800 supports, I believe, the contention that liberal capitalism from the very start contained the embryo of fascist capitalism; that there is no overcoming neo-fascism without overcoming capitalism and its current incarnation as neoliberalism.

 

 

The 22 + items below represent a variety of interpretations of current events that will shape our future. The capitalist crisis seems to be spiraling out of control, and the increasing chaos takes on a suicidal cast as the ruling classes seem to find no alternatives, beyond virtual realities, which might assure higher private profits on their investments. This change affects us all . . . .

 

 

Sincerely,

Francis Feeley

---

Professor emeritus of American Studies

University Grenoble-Alpes

Director of Research

University of Paris-Nanterre

Center for the Advanced Study of American Institutions and Social Movements

The University of California-San Diego

http://www.ceimsa.org/  

 

 

a.

“It Wasn’t a Golden Age”: Cornel West Says Democrats Have to Reckon with Mixed Obama Legacy

Nobody Left

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/8/1/seg_1

 

+

 

From: "World BEYOND War" <info@worldbeyondwar.org>
Sent: Monday, August 5, 2019
Subject: Video: Civil Society and Achieving Peace

https://worldbeyondwar.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/wbwnosub300.jpg

The Role of Global Civil Society in Achieving & Supporting Global Peace and Security

What role(s) must global civil society play in promoting and sustaining global peace and security?

World BEYOND War contends that global civil society has played and must continue to play a critical role, particularly as nation states often make decisions based upon the self-interests of economic and political elites. WBW seeks to uplift the many examples of global civil society effectively challenging the state and stepping in when states fail to act to protect the human dignity and rights of citizens, and the sustainability of the planet.  

Learning from these examples, WBW emphasizes the need to increase the role of global civil society in the maintenance of global peace and security. We explore these ideas and strategies in our book “A Global Security System: An Alternative to War (AGSS).”

In Study War No More, our free online study and action guide for AGSS, we develop these proposals further. We offer additional resources, provide guiding questions to help you think critically about the challenges and possibilities, introduce you to networks working on these issues, and provide suggestions for actions to get engaged in global civil society efforts.

>>Click here to access our discussion guide on The Role of Global Civil Society

The Study War No More discussion guide on this topic features an introductory video interview with study and action partner Cora Weiss who has spent her life in the movements for human rights, civil rights, women’s empowerment and peace. She is President of the Hague Appeal for Peace that brought 10,000 people together, in May 1999, for the largest civil society peace conference in history. She was also one of the organizers of the June 12, 1982 nuclear disarmament rally that gathered more than 1,000,000 people in NYC’s Central Park.

 

https://can2-unlayer.s3.amazonaws.com/1564407444966-roleof.png

 

The discussion guide also dives into the assumptions, problems, and ineffectiveness of the nation-state system in assuring human security.

Join us in learning and action in pursuit of increasing the role of global civil society in maintaining peace and security!

Be sure to check out all the other topics found on Study War No More, including Debunking the Myths of War, Demilitarization and Disarmament, Alternative visions: Human Security and a Culture of Peace, A Sustainable Global Economy as a Foundation for Peace, and many more!


World BEYOND War is a global network of volunteers, activists, and allied organizations advocating for the abolition of the very institution of war.

World BEYOND War 513 E Main St #1484 Charlottesville, VA 22902 USA

+

Tulsi Gabbard: R.I.P.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52044.htm

by Paul Craig Roberts

   

===========

 

b.

Roaming Charges: Measure for Half-Measure

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/08/02/roaming-charges-measure-for-half-measure/

by Jeffrey St. Clair

+

Tainted Meat Market

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/Democratic+Presidential+Candidates.jpg

                                                                                                 http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52037.htm

+

Russiagate Fanatic Michael Isikoff’s Curious Project

https://www.blackagendareport.com/russiagate-fanatic-michael-isikoffs-curious-project

by Ann Garrison

 

===========

 

c.

The Big Lie Democratic Centrists Are Telling About 2018

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/08/02/the-big-lie-democratic-centrists-are-telling-about-2018/

+

Robert B. Reich: The State of the Disunion

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/robert-b-reich-the-state-of-the-disunion/ar-AAFieee

+

Mackler Running Against War

https://www.blackagendareport.com/mackler-running-against-war

(audio, 17min)

with Socialist Action Party presidential candidate Jeff Mackler

 

===========

 

d.

https://u1584542.ct.sendgrid.net/mpss/o/4wA/ni0YAA/t.2tw/0rAC8gq4SN6tyxjLxeH4bQ/ho.gifJesse Ventura: “Powerful forces covered up the Epstein case the first time for a reason.”

https://youtu.be/d6UPvYSVBfY

+

Jeffrey Epstein, Trump’s Mentor and the Dark Secrets of the Reagan Era

https://www.mintpressnews.com/blackmail-jeffrey-epstein-trump-mentor-reagan-era/260760/

+

MSNBC Axed My Show for Being Anti-War

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhj0pRVqxec&feature=youtu.be

 

===========

e.

World 'will diminish role of dollar and US banking system': Russian minister at Non-Aligned Movement

https://youtu.be/5YTwSCVSm_w

+

Keiser Report: Money Printing & Landed Gentry (E1417)

https://youtu.be/aRGEmm6IRNI

+

More Fake Happy News About Jobs

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52032.htm

+

Putin’s Pledge to Ditch the Dollar Is Slowly Becoming a Reality

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-04/putin-s-pledge-to-ditch-the-dollar-is-slowly-becoming-a-reality

 

===========

f.

Walter Benjamin: How WWI Changed the Meaning of 'Barbaric'

https://lithub.com/walter-benjamin-how-wwi-changed-the-meaning-of-barbaric/

+

International bankers and WW I

https://nation.com.pk/13-Apr-2012/international-bankers-and-ww-i

+

The Economic, Political and Social Origins of Fascism

https://libcom.org/library/economic-political-social-origins-fascism

 

===========

g.

U.S. Troops Are Back in Saudia Arabia - “This Will End Badly”

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/u-s-troops-are-back-in-saudia-arabia-this-will-end-badly/

+

Iran has two nuclear options

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/iran-nuclear-options-190729112714738.html

+

Attack on Iran would be an attack on Russia
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/bolton-war-mustache.JPG

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52049.htm

by Pepe Escobar


Moscow is proposing a diametrically opposed vision to Western sanctions, threats and economic war, one that is drawing it ever closer to Tehran

===========

 

h.

From 2006 to 2019: after failures in Syria, Iraq, Palestine and Yemen, war is no longer an option for Israel

https://ejmagnier.com/2019/08/04/from-2006-to-2019-after-failures-in-syria-iraq-palestine-and-yemen-war-is-no-longer-an-option-for-israel/

by Elijah J. Magnier

+

Palestine in Pictures: July 2019

https://electronicintifada.net/content/palestine-pictures-july-2019/28031

+

"Le silence des prophètes," une réflexion sur le judaïsme

https://youtu.be/FOBzXJd9UnI

(13min)

avec l'écrivain, psychiatre, psychanalyste Gérard Haddad

 

+

News From Underground

 

From: Mark Crispin Miller
Sent: Sunday, August 4, 2019
Subject: [MCM] "I watched the terrifying way in which we Judaize the land": Israel's best are saying NO to the atrocities that "our free press" ignores (2)

 

 

This has to stop—along with the attacks on those who say so.

 

(Scroll down for Jonathan Cook's piece on the crushing of US dissent

against Israel's bloody and sadistic occupation.)

 

MCM

·          

‘I watched the terrifying way in which we Judaize the land’: an eyewitness account of the Sur Baher home demolitions

 

Ismail%20sits%20with%20one%20of%20his%20sons%20after%20being%20thrown%20out%20of%20their%20home.%20%28Screenshot%20from%20Yuval%20Abraham's%20film%20"A%20Dark%20Night%20in%20Wadi%20al-Hummus"%29

Ismail sits with one of his sons after being thrown out of their home. (Screenshot from Yuval Abraham's film "A Dark Night in Wadi al-Hummus")

 

https://mondoweiss.net/2019/08/terrifying-eyewitness-demolitions/?fbclid=IwAR3pkA4wJ5ahkJZ1_V25qltotnjo9EmXASU_HmKEQ2Jq2YA3NLvLzHWDbog

 

by Yuval Abraham on August 2, 2019

 

 

Translator’s note: Below is the testimony of Yuval Abraham, a filmmaker and journalist, who stayed with a family in Sur Baher the night their home was demolished by Israeli forces. Abraham’s account, translated from Hebrew, was originally published on Facebook and addressed to fellow Israeli Jews. The story of Ismail’s family, described here through Abraham’s eyes, is one of many. That night, 72 other families had their homes demolished by Israeli forces. Abraham and filmmaker Rachel Shor made a short film about these events, available at 972 Magazine: A dark night in Wadi al-Hummus. — Yarden Katz 

Click on the link for the rest.

+

With Criticism Crushed in the West, Israel Can Enjoy Its Impunity

https://www.globalresearch.ca/criticism-crushed-west-israel-can-enjoy-its-impunity/5684977

By Jonathan Cook

Global Research, July 29, 2019

 

https://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/plugins/print-me/images/printme.png

 

 

https://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/41884929311_86c4b17d24_h-400x240.jpg

Recent events have shone a spotlight not only on how Israel is intensifying its abuse of Palestinians under its rule, but the utterly depraved complicity of western governments in its actions.

 

The arrival of Donald Trump in the White House two-and-a-half years ago has emboldened Israel as never before, leaving it free to unleash new waves of brutality in the occupied territories.

Western states have not only turned a blind eye to these outrages, but are actively assisting in silencing anyone who dares to speak out.

It is rapidly creating a vicious spiral: the more Israel violates international law, the more the West represses criticism, the more Israel luxuriates in its impunity.

This shameless descent was starkly illustrated last week when hundreds of heavily armed Israeli soldiers, many of them masked, raided a neighbourhood of Sur Baher, on the edges of Jerusalem. Explosives and bulldozers destroyed dozens of homes, leaving many hundreds of Palestinians without a roof over their heads.

During the operation, extreme force was used against residents, as well as international volunteers there in the forlorn hope that their presence would deter violence. Videos showed the soldiers cheering and celebrating as they razed the neighbourhood.

 

‘Whoever’s on Israel’s side, we’re against’: Erdogan slams Netanyahu & US over Palestinian killings

https://www.rt.com/news/465342-turkey-slams-israel-us-palestine/

 

+

 

News From Underground

 

From: Mark Crispin Miller
Sent: Tuesday, August 6, 2019
Subject: [MCM] "Humanitarian" Irwin Kotler and the whitewashing of the (atrocious) White Helmets

 

Shame also on George Clooney, who is (or was) reportedly developing a movie further 

glamorizing those fanatics:

https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/george-clooney-syria-white-helmets-film/

 

 

On Israeli/US backing of Islamist terrorism, there's also this:

 

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-islamic-state-fighter-captured-in-syria-asks-netanyahu-to-bring-him-home/?fbclid=IwAR25J8Xy_jvG5heLylSdJbjlSMzcHcndWbN2ZTQfndmIJVzS9EPvP3mXpmk

 

 

Israeli Islamic State fighter captured in Syria asks Netanyahu to bring him home

https://www.mintpressnews.com/irwin-cotler-white-helmets-israel-whitewashing/261073/

 


OPINION & ANALYSIS

Faux Humanitarian Irwin Cotler, the White Helmets, and the Whitewashing of an Appalling Agenda

Cotler’s campaigns for foreign regime change or intervention almost always march in lock-step with neoconservative U.S. foreign policy. His “humanitarian” branding is but a thin veneer of hypocrisy to conceal his establishment policies — policies that almost always serve the interests of Israel.

by Vanessa Beeley

August 01st, 2019

By Vanessa Beeley 

18 Comments

FacebookTwitterRedditEmailMore1.5K

On July 22, 2018, Israel organized and facilitated an exceptional evacuation of White Helmet operatives from southern Syria, claiming the operatives were at risk from an advancing Syrian Arab Army. A number of NATO member states backed the move, calling on Israel to bring their intelligence assets to safety. 

The White Helmets have been discredited and exposed as a British-government-incubated project by a number of independent geopolitical analysts, including Scott RitterPhilip GiraldiJohn PilgerSeymour HershEva BartlettGraham PorterRick Sterling Cory Morningstar and many more.  

This journalist’s extensive work has shown that the U.K. Intelligence-manufactured group of pseudo “humanitarians” — financed by the majority of member states within the U.S.-led interventionist alliance waging war against Syria — is nothing more than an auxiliary of the Al Qaeda generic offshoots in Syria. The White Helmet image has been professionally polished by a vast network of PR agencies, billionaire philanthropists, and media outlets aligned with their respective government objectives to overthrow the Syrian government and reduce Syria to a “failed state,” as they succeeded in doing with Libya.



https://www.mintpressnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Fundraiser-Icon-400x2.jpg


Israel has a history of supporting terrorism in Syria since the start of the U.S. coalition war against the nation officially began in 2011. Israel has offered medical treatment to the various militant groups previously occupying areas of southern Syria. Stories abound of Israeli troops providing covering fire for groups dominated by Al Qaeda affiliates or rebrands as they came under attack from the Syrian Arab Army legitimately reclaiming territory lost to internationally-backed armed groups. 

As journalist Sharmine Narwani pointed out in her article “Are Al Qaeda affiliates fighting alongside U.S. rebels in Syria’s south?

If forced to choose, Israel prefers the presence of terrorist groups to Iranian influence […] Israel is so heavily [in]vested in keeping Syria and its allies away from its borders, it has actively bolstered al-Qaeda and other extremists in Syria’s southern theater.”

Israel’s evacuation of the White Helmets was an extension of its terrorist-supporting operations in southern Syria — and a response to a cry for help from a U.S. ally that has also supported proxy terrorism in Syria for the last eight years. Certainly Israel would not lift a finger to help any entity opposed to its existence in the Middle East, regardless of the pressure brought to bear by its allies in the U.S. or the U.K. It must also be noted that Israel and NATO member states did not offer the same humanitarian assistance to ordinary Syrian refugees gathered at the borders with Jordan and in Israeli annexed territory. 

The following video footage of the Israel forces enabling the White Helmet evacuation process was published on Twitter by former Israeli security affairs expert Shai Ben-Ari: 

+

Time to boycott Israel?

https://youtu.be/8YFfQnwuVLo

+

How a Group of Pro-Israel Activists Blacklisted MintPress on Wikipedia

https://www.mintpressnews.com/pro-israel-activists-blacklist-mintpress-wikipedia/261022/

 

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i.

From: Cat McGuire [mailto:cat@catmcguire.com]
Sent: Tuesday, July 30, 2019 6:43 AM
Subject: First they came for the comedians. . .

 

Well, actually no, the comedians were not the first to come under fire in what is now the most unprecedented wave of censorship in US history. 

 

In case you haven't heard, hundreds of alternative voices -- both right and left -- are being memory-holed with impunity. 

 

Newly added is Adam Garrison, a comedian who is neither right nor left, but enjoys skewering both sides of the political divide. His shtick consists of impersonating liberal Dan Myers and his Trumpian doppleganger Rusty Myers, flip sides of each other.

 

Recently, without even so much as a "sorry, bro," Facebook deleted his account, wiping out his entire collection of comedy videos which had been getting hits in the millions. YouTube likewise censored Garrison, but astonishingly, only the Rusty character.  

 

Check out a couple of Garrison's comedy videos and decide for yourself if you feel democracy is safer without Rusty Myers' threatening hate speech. 

 

At the pool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETw9enm8fUM

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-Hfm5RLMKA

 

Trump

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Vcs7zQqWk0

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3uFfQl4kvk

 

Area 51

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43eN27ZpfEc

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LYpjToimww

 

 

See more of Dan and Rusty at the Organic Comedy Network where they're being heavily marginalized by algorythms.

 

Listen to a 15 min audio interview with Adam Garrison explaining how he got banned Soviet-style.

 

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j.

From: Cat McGuire [mailto:cat@catmcguire.com]
Sent: Wednesday, July 31, 2019
Subject: Charles Manson exposed as CIA mind control asset

 

Once again, yet another so-called "conspiracy theory" bites the dust as we discover that the official Helter Skelter narrative and the Manson murders were highly manipulated events that served a hidden purpose -- as reported in an exciting new book that took the author, Tom O'Neill, 20 years to investigate before the truths finally unraveled. 

 

Dr. Kevin Barrett has written a superlative review of the book (see below) in which he builds on the Manson counter-narrative to address other unspeakable crimes that to this day in the mainstream and mainstream-left media remain absurdly suppressed, saddled as they are by the CIA-invented "conspiracy theory" stigma. Dr. Barrett is a Voltaire for our age:  a preeminent philosopher-critic/public activist whose dead-on analysis can fully hold its own with the Manson book's startling revelations.

 

 

Book review by Dr. Kevin Barrett

 

The Manson Murders, JFK, 9/11, and the Psychopathy of Power

 

A Review of the book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill

 

With Alan Scheflin, a forensic psychologist and law professor who’d written a book on MKULTRA, I laid out a circumstantial case linking (CIA mind control guru Jolly) West to Manson. Was it possible, I asked, that the Manson murders were an MKULTRA experiment gone wrong? ‘No,’ he said, ‘an MKULTRA experiment gone right.’” (Tom O'Neill, CHAOS, p. 369)

Dr. Kevin Barrett:  I moved out of Southern California in the summer of 1969. I was ten years old, and my parents were fleeing decadence and depravity in favor of the more wholesome Midwest.

 

Before our move, a story had circulated about some local (Newport Beach) high schoolers who had “gone on an LSD trip” and gotten caught by police. As I understood it, the teenagers had “taken LSD” and started leaping from rooftop to rooftop, “tripping” all over the neighborhood and waking people up to the sound of thundering hoofbeats overhead. At the time I wondered whether LSD conferred a miraculous leaping or flying ability, since the houses in Lido Sands, though rather tightly clustered, were mostly spaced perhaps eight or ten feet apart, which seemed like a long way to jump.

 

I vaguely recall this “LSD-fueled teenage midnight horsemen of the apocalypse” story having something to do with my parents’ decision to move back to Wisconsin. Southern California circa 1969, a few years after the hippie movement had peaked and turned into a bad trip, didn’t seem like a good place to send your kids to high school. (Little did my parents know that the 60s would hit Wisconsin high schools ten years late, putting me and my siblings directly in the path of the psychedelic hurricane.)

 

Years later, as an “experienced” (in the Jimi Hendrix sense) subversive teenage wannabe intellectual, I would read about the Manson murders and notice how convenient they had been for the Establishment. From the moment Charlie Manson’s grinning, demonic face started leering from every front page and TV screen in America, the whole hippie-antiwar thing had seemed a whole lot scarier. I read the official version of the Manson myth, Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, and thought: This is too crazy to be true. None of the Wisconsin hippies I know are even remotely like these characters. Maybe it’s something they add to the fluoride in the Southern California water.

 

By 1975 I had seen Mark Lane’s presentation of the Zapruder film and knew that America had experienced an unspeakably evil coup d’état in 1963. In 1979 I read John Marks’ The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control and discussed it with William S. Burroughs, who told me he had been aware of such activities for many years before they were publicly revealed by the Church and Rockefeller Commissions: “The thing about these secrets is they’re not all that secret.”

 

Well, maybe not, Bill. But if you had proclaimed in 1960 that the CIA’s most heavily funded program aimed at turning people into killer zombies, you would have gotten blank stares at best. Rumors whispered in bohemian demimondes, blown up into dystopian parody in books like Naked Lunch, are hardly threats to national security secrecy.

 

Looking back, it seems doubtful that America ever recovered from the bad trip of the 1960s. Indeed, one has to wonder whether potential recovery wasn’t intentionally forestalled. The Kennedy assassinations, along with the killings of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and so many others, were a national nightmare. So was the pointless carnage in Vietnam. The protest movement that rose up against the nightmare, seeking to awaken the nation and return it to sanity, collapsed into the drug-fueled promiscuity and bloody chaos whose avatar was none other than Charles Manson. Now, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Manson murders, we must wonder whether Manson was also an avatar another kind of CHAOS: the CIA’s ultra-secret, ultra-illegal domestic counterinsurgency program.

 

That notion isn’t entirely new. In 1993, while researching my first book, A Guide to Mysterious San Francisco, I heard rumors that Manson was a CIA mind control slave. But since this was just hearsay, unsupported by citable sources, I left it out of the book, and consigned it to the relatively short list of major conspiracy theories that might actually not be true.

 

That list keeps getting shorter. Tom O’Neill’s CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties makes a convincing, thoroughly documented case that the official Vincent Bugliosi rendition of the Manson murders is as blatantly bogus as Bugliosi’s “Oswald acted alone” version of the JFK assassination. Though O’Neill doesn’t quite come right out and say so, his evidence suggests that CIA mind control maniac Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West and/or his acolytes brainwashed a psychopathic prisoner named Charles Manson, gave him a CIA get-out-of-jail-free card, set him up next door to Jolly’s safe house in the Haight-Ashbury hippie district of San Francisco, and taught him how to control human minds using drugs and hypnosis. The CIA’s Operation CHAOS, it may be plausibly surmised, first weaponized the Manson family for use against the Black Panthers, then finally turned Manson into the ultimate TV commercial against the antiwar counterculture. When Manson and one of his CIA handlers, Reeve Whitson, rearranged the Tate murders crime scene before anyone else got there, they were literally setting the stage for the upcoming theatrical production.

 

Tom O’Neill’s twenty years’ research definitively demonstrates that a massive cover-up of the truth about the Manson murders is no longer a hypothesis, it is established fact. Federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, as well as the courts and big media, have been effectively corrupted and muzzled. But the truth, or at least enough of it for us to get the picture, is tucked away in the documents they forgot to shred. Though the most important Manson-related documents have either “mysteriously disappeared” from various archives or are being stubbornly withheld for undisclosed reasons, O’Neill—an obsessively persistent journalistic gumshoe—managed to get his hands on enough of them, and to find and interview enough witnesses, to turn the conventional picture of the Manson family upside-down and inside-out.

 

The whole story, in its multilayered complexity of detail and documentation, is beautifully told in O’Neill’s book. Like many authors with mainstream publishers, O’Neill generally refrains from speculating about the big picture; instead, he lays out the hard facts and invites the reader to connect the dots. So let’s accept his invitation and consider the the CIA’s Operation Manson in historical perspective.

 

Political Demonization and the Creation and Maintenance of Public Myth

The Manson op was an exercise in demonization. Manson, an ordinary psychologically-disturbed small-time criminal with psychopathic tendencies, became, under the expert tutelage of Jolly West & Co., an avatar of the demonic second only to Hitler in the mass mediated popular imagination. Manson’s long hair and scraggly beard became an icon of pure evil, as Hitler’s mustache had before, and as Bin Laden’s beard would later. In literally demonizing Manson, Jolly and The Company (wasn’t that a ‘60s Bay Area band? No, you’re thinking of Big Brother) figuratively demonized the antiwar counterculture that was giving the Establishment fits.

 

By demonizing Manson, the CIA “skunked” the antiwar counterculture’s message of “peace, love, freedom” by associating it with an image of violence, hatred, and extreme authoritarianism. After all, the people behind such operations know that the best way to discredit a message is to put it in the mouth of an unpleasant spokesperson. That’s why criticism of the world’s worst crime syndicate, the international bankster cartel, has come to be associated with Hitler’s evil mustache. In like fashion, resistance to Zionism and other Western assaults on the Islamic world has come to be associated with Bin Laden’s big black beard. These associations didn’t just happen by accident. They were engineered.

 

Philip Zelikow, effectively the sole author of that work of fiction known as the 9/11 Commission Report (which he completed in chapter outline before the Commission even convened) is a history professor and self-styled expert in “the creation and maintenance of public myths.” Zelikow defines public myths as “beliefs (1) thought to be true (although not necessarily known to be true with certainty), and (2) shared in common within the relevant political community.” The public myths he is most interested in are those that most powerfully shape political perception and behavior; the first example he gives is the myth of the dastardly Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, which transformed America from an isolationist republic to an interventionist empire.

 

Anyone who has studied the alternative literature on such events as Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassinations, and 9/11 knows that any overwhelmingly powerful mythic event that changes public perceptions and, in so doing, changes history, ought to be greeted with profound suspicion and subjected to the most painstaking scrutiny. As Philip Zelikow wrote in a 1998 Foreign Affairs article, a catastrophic terror attack on America, such as the destruction of the World Trade Center, would be a “transforming event,” a “watershed event in American history” that would, “like Pearl Harbor…divide our past and future into a before and after.” The “after” would feature “draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force.” Zelikow’s 2001 false flag operation would achieve all that and more. It succeeded in demonizing opposition to Zionism and empire, and to tyranny in general, by associating resistance with the fearsome image of a scary looking guy sporting an easily-identifiable villain’s beard.

 

Indeed, bearded heavies like Bin Laden and Manson seem to come straight out of central casting. They remind us of neoconservative guru Leo Strauss’s advice to Machievellian operators: Make your operation like a B-grade Hollywood Western: slap a big white hat on the good guy and a big black hat on the bad guy. And if you don’t have a real enemy to play the villain’s role, invent one.

 

The official version of the Manson myth is told by its self-aggrandizing, profiteering hero, Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor who put the bad guy behind bars. In somewhat similar fashion, the official version of the 9/11 myth, ventriloquized by Zelikow, seems told by a sort of Greek chorus representing the heroic victims, the American people. But in both cases, the ostensibly heroic narrator is the real villain. In the case of 9/11, Zelikow must be suspected of involvement in writing the script for the 9/11 false flag operation itself, and then plagiarizing that script for his Report. And in the case of Bugliosi, it’s clear that he consciously crafted a big lie for the jury that he later adapted for his bestseller, committing numerous crimes, including subornation of perjury, in the process.

 

As for the villains, both Manson and Bin Laden were manufactured by the CIA. As O’Neill’s evidence suggests, Manson was Jolly West’s golem, taught by Jolly how to manufacture more golems…preferably 14-year-old female ones. Bin Laden, for his part, was created by the CIA and its Saudi assets as a front man for the CIA-Saudi war to expel the Russians from Afghanistan. Originally assigned the hero role for an audience of Muslims, Osama was later transferred to a different movie in which he played the villain for an audience of Americans.

 

Though the official Manson narrative demonizes hippies, O’Neill’s revisionist account shows that the worst decadence and depravity was located not at the corner of Haight and Ashbury, but in Hollywood and the entertainment industry; Los Angeles, as Faulkner famously said, is “the plastic asshole of the universe.” The movie and music business, O’Neill shows, was (and presumably remains) infested by gangsters, intelligence agency criminals, and an astonishing variety of perverted human vermin. (There is considerable overlap between those three categories.) The worst part is that these people, the scum of the earth, literally run the show. Real power and authority is invested not in elected officials and the courts, but in supermob  [Cat: absolute, must-read, jaw-dropping article] gangsters and their intel agency partners in crime. The cops, courts, and media are terrified of such people, and basically do whatever they’re told. 

 

The Manson murders and the JFK assassination, two nightmarish crimes, bookended “the 1960s”: that brief period from 1964 to 1969 that witnessed the meteoric rise and fall of youthful idealism, whose chief expressions were the civil rights and antiwar movements. Like 9/11, the JFK assassination divided time into a more innocent “before” of wholesome family sitcoms and a less innocent “after” of protests, violence, and social breakdown fueled by pills, especially of the psychedelic and birth control varieties. Between JFK and Manson, youthful idealism looked like it might win the day. After Manson, America entered a “whole new world” of extreme disillusionment.

The JFK and Manson murders aren’t just linked in the American mythic imagination; they also intersect by way of a certain already-mentioned CIA mind-control psychopath, Dr. Jolly West. O’Neill’s Chaos presents evidence that Jolly West brainwashed and rendered mad two key figures in the respective dramas, Charles Manson and Jack Rubenstein a.k.a. Ruby. We have already seen how West made a madman of Manson. As for Ruby, it seems he was very likely programmed to kill Lee Harvey Oswald, just as Sirhan Sirhan was later programmed to fire in the general direction of Robert Kennedy. And though there is no hard-and-fast documentation proving West mind-controlled Ruby, O’Neill does document West’s suspiciously quick and intense post-assassination interest in Ruby, which culminated in West getting a private audience with the gun-smuggling cop-bribing Mickey Cohen organization hit man. Prior to West’s closed-door no-witnesses one-on-one with Ruby, the latter had been perfectly sane, though puzzled about being accused of a crime he had no memory of committing. From the moment West stepped out the door of Ruby’s cell, Ruby was stark, raving nuts.

America has real enemies, people like Jolly West and his bosses, psychopathic vermin who have infested the highest echelons of power. In the wake of their murder of JFK, they understandably feared exposure. The biggest threat was coming from honest, idealistic, politically-engaged citizens, most of whom leaned toward the political left in general, and the civil rights and antiwar movements in particular. To neutralize that threat, they flooded the civil rights and antiwar communities with LSD and amphetamines (as well as Cointelpro and CHAOS agents provocateurs). After several years of this, they administered the coup de grace by immortalizing the iconic evil hippie, Charles Manson, in a mass mind-control operation that sounded the death knell of the 1960s and set the stage for the age of dystopian neoliberal authoritarianism that followed.

The takeaway is that our real enemies conceal themselves by fabricating ersatz enemies and elevating them to mythic, iconic status. Their controlled mainstream media summon us daily to engage in the obligatory Orwellian two minutes of hate. When will we wake up and learn to hate not the cartoon figure on the screen, but the psychopath behind the curtain?

 

Listen to an excellent interview with Tom O'Neill on Coast to Coast.

 

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k.

Ship of Fools: Britain, America and the Iranian Oil Tanker Incidents

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/08/02/ship-of-fools-britain-america-and-the-iranian-oil-tanker-incidents/

by T.J. Coles

+

Defying U.S. Sanctions, China and Others Take Oil From 12 Iranian Tankers - The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/03/world/middleeast/us-iran-sanctions-ships.html

 

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l.

A "No Deal" Brexit Would Spark an Economic Cold War with the EU

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/07/31/a-no-deal-brexit-would-spark-an-economic-cold-war-with-the-eu/

+

On Contact: British government psyops

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOBzXJd9UnI&feature=youtu.be

(27min)

with Mohamed Elmazzi

 

===========

m.

Notes From a Caribbean Colony in Turmoil

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/07/31/notes-from-a-caribbean-colony-in-turmoil/

+

"Regime change begins at home” - Max Blumenthal speaks in Venezuelan presidential palace

https://youtu.be/ITEXpzCAy2c

 

 

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n.

Weapons of Mass Destruction: 21 Minutes, 27 Dead

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/weapons-of-mass-destruction-21-minutes-27-dead

+

News From Underground

 

From: Mark Crispin Miller
Sent: Tuesday, August 6, 2019
Subject: [MCM] El Paso shooter's father is a very spooky guy

 

.... assuming that this Patrick Crusius was the shooter, or the only shooter.

 

MCM

 

Published: August 6, 2019

Follow the Dots: MKUltra & the El Paso Shooting » Sons of Liberty Media

https://sonsoflibertymedia.com/follow-the-dots-mkultra-the-el-paso-shooting/

 

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o.

News From Underground

 

From: Mark Crispin Miller
Sent: Tuesday, August 6, 2019
Subject: [MCM] Slow death by 5G (2)

 

Be sure to scroll down for Richard Gale and Gary Null's comprehensive survey of the hazards of 5G. Please share that, and the powerful video linked just below. Families injured by Verizon cell antenna testify before Sacramento City Council for the 8th time since early May:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgxd1X8as-U&feature=youtu.be

 

Their story:

 

In December Verizon installed a cell antenna approximately 45 feet from my family's home as part of the 5G testing here in Sacramento. A month later my nieces came down with cold/flu like symptoms. A month later they were still sick. We began researching the safety of cell antennas and the radiation they emit. Our lives have not been the same since. My nieces were sick for another month. They went from being perfectly healthy, active, and happy children to chronically ill and low energy. It was a devastating transformation to watch. We hired a local Certified Electromagnetic Radiation Specialist to come take measurements in our home. Measurements in my niece's bedroom were the highest he had ever measured indoors. He suggested we move them to a back room and install shielding on the walls facing the antenna. We took his advice and a weak later their symptoms went away. We still worry that they are continuing to be harmed and that the symptoms might not manifest until sometime in the future. It is a horrible way to live and it is a direct result of Verizon's antenna. We have been fighting to have this antenna removed since March 2019. In June I organized a group of family, friends, and neighbors to attend and speak at a city council meeting on the topic of 5G (fifth generation wireless technology). 5G will require millions of small cell antennas to be installed closer than ever to people's homes and schools exposing us to unprecedented levels of RF radiation. 5G also uses a higher energy frequency of RF radiation than all previous generations of wireless technology. As a result the long term health effects are completely unknown. Experts around the globe are warning against the deployment of 5G without any evidence that it will be safe. We do not want to be guinea pigs in this experiment.


A Slow Death by 5G Wireless Technology

A Slow Death by 5G Wireless Technology

Richard Gale and Gary Null PhD
Progressive Radio Network, July 9, 2019



https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#inbox/FMfcgxwChcpNLbppqRQTSzZdkFRFlJvd



During the past year, Senate hearings leading up to the roll out of 5G wireless technology have made it quite clear that the race to capture first prize in the Internet of Things has little do to with popular consumer demands for improved internet access. Being called the fourth industrial revolution, the hype is that 5G will provide internet speeds up to one hundred times faster than 4G. Yet aside from the idealized and perhaps hyperbolic benefits of faster internet connections and downloads, 5G is best understood within the context of the US’ competitive race against China to establish global wireless dominance.  The Obama administration’s FCC, under the influence of the telecommunication industry’s insider Tom Wheeler, who served as the chair of the agency, launched the Spectrum Frontiers rules to mandate the 5G rollout as a “national priority.” Therefore, rather than the fundamental incentive to improve the lives of citizens, more important is 5G’s role to reinforce American global economic expansionism and military hegemony. For past presidents, and Trump in particular, economic figures hold all-consuming importance. One estimate claims 5G will bring over $12 trillion into the global economy, about $3.5 trillion in the US while providing 22 million new jobs. While 5G surely holds the promise of a huge windfall for the economy, these benefits will be eventually be neutralized by medical and environmental catastrophes.  

For the Defense Department, 5G will further harness global military dominance and strengthen the US’ lead as the planet’s policeman. For the Department of Homeland Security, other federal intelligence agencies, and local law enforcement 5G assures more far-reaching surveillance and policing on the American public. International spying and interference in other nations’ internal affairs will also advance exponentially. All the while the telecommunications industry wets its lips over the certain forecasts of rising stock prices and enormous executive compensations. 

For the Trump administration, the 5G roll out is imperative. Last December the White House released an announcement that “[I]t is imperative that America be first in fifth-generation (5G) wireless technologies — wireless technologies capable of meeting the high-capacity, low-latency, and high-speed requirements that can unleash innovation broadly across diverse sectors of the economy and the public sector.”  What we are really looking at is a competitive war the US is waging with China, which has already installed 1.9 million wireless sites.  As the US continues to lag behind, it is equally imperative that 5G opponents keep careful watch of the predictable rise in disease and mental health disorders in China. 

5G smart cities will provide the government with total surveillance of society. This was announced by T-Mobile’s Chief Technology director Neville Ray at the 2018 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Sprint Vice President Ron Marquardt remarked that city government officials will have the capacity to monitor “security issues.” The new generation technology, therefore, will offer a boon for the private security industry. 

Writing for The New Yorker, investigative journalist Sue Halpern describes how the new era of electromagnetic connectivity will increase the risks and severity of cyber attacks. “Ransomware, malware, crypto-jacking, identity theft, and data breaches have become so common that more Americans are afraid of cybercrime than they are of becoming a victim of violent crime.” writes Halpern.  “Adding more devices to the online universe is destined to create more opportunities for disruption.” 5G will not simply connect your alarm clock and television to your mobile unit. It is estimated that millions of new 5G base stations will be installed, 20,000 new satellites orbiting in space, and 200 billion objects with wireless antennas will be transmitting EMF waves by 2020. A few years later it is expected to expand to one trillion electronic objects.  5G technology will be fully integrated into airplanes, automobiles, trains and subway systems. Imagine being in a commercial flight 6 miles above the earth and a major 5G disturbance occurs. 

5G servers are already being utilized for spy operations. Halpern reports on the discovery of Huawei wireless servers installed in the African Union’s headquarters in Addis Ababa “sending sensitive data back to China every evening.”  Israel, Russia and the US have already been accused on many occasions for conducting industrial and defense cyber espionage. On all accounts, the threats of cyber warfare will worsen after 5G is functioning fully on a global scale. 

In the meantime, Washington and our mainstream media proclaim 5G is perfectly safe and the next great stride for America’s utopian progress. Yet it may very well be the trojan horse that brings the US into an electronic dark age. 

The overarching question being ignored by Congress concerns 5G’s public safety and environmental implications. During a Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee hearing last February, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) challenged representatives from the telecommunication industry about the technology’s health risks. When queried on the industry’s commitment to comply with the FDA’s insistence to fund “independent research” on EMF’s biological effects, Brad Gillen, an executive VP for CTIA – the leading trade association representing the wireless communications industry — denied there were any industry-funded studies and no research on 5G’s health risks were active. Nor was Steven Berry, President of Competitive Carriers Association, aware of any ongoing research. Blumenthal also sent a formal request to Trump’s FCC Secretary requesting information about the scientific evaluation of 5G’s risks. The FCC failed to acknowledge his request. 

Besides the unbelievable arrogance displayed by the industry’s spokespersons, from our perspective it is perhaps worse that Senator Blumenthal, a ranking committee member and highly respected in Congress, failed to present any of the scientific literature confirming 5G’s health risks. He could have also subpoenaed the FCC for ignoring his request. He has unlimited resources through the National Academy of Sciences, the National Institutes of Health medical database, the EPA, and FDA yet didn’t cite a single study nor invite an independent medical expert to testify what we already know about 5G’s and earlier generation’s EFM adverse effects on the human body. Dr. Henry Lai, a DNA researcher at the University of Washington could have been called to testify. Prof Lai was quoted in the British Medical Journal for stating “I can name 600 studies showing bioeffects of microwaves off the top of my head.” Earlier this year, a petition signed by 26,000 scientists, medical doctors and environmental experts warned the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the EU and Council of Europe and the governments of all nations that “the deployment of 5G constitutes an experiment on humanity and the environment that is defined as a crime under international law.”  

The Senate hearing was another typical dog and pony show that we have become accustomed to over the decades, with pro-industry shills declaring ignorance of facts, and pleading for a green light while repeating false promises to conduct further research. In the meantime, Congress concedes to industry demands because revenues are being lost and shareholders are becoming impatient. We have heard this all before with the approval of asbestos, Monsanto’s glyphosate and genetically modified crops, tobacco and countless pharmaceutical drugs with questionable safety and efficacy records.  

May’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on 5G was even more of a charade. Senators Lindsay Graham and Barbara Feinstein completely avoided the evidence supporting 5G’s detrimental effects on human, animal, insect and environmental health. The 5G rollout was a certainty in the mind of every Committee member. Questioning of industry representatives focused solely on national security and cyber threats to the Internet of Things. Nor were the larger public consequences of safety from having all electronic systems controlled by artificial intelligence suddenly being disabled discussed. Clearly national security, protecting the country’s military, intelligence and the elite trumps health issues.  Since no modern military can realistically win a conventional war, then how likely will the next war between superpowers be waged in the cyber world? This possibility seemed foremost in the minds of our Senators.

The FCC is a fully industry-captured agency. In 1996, President Clinton willingly handed over to the telecommunications industry carte blanche power over state and local governments to install 5G technologies. Clinton’s Telecommunications Act (TCA) is a corrupt piece of legislation. It decrees that no health or environmental concern can interfere with telecom installations. In addition, the TCA gives full power to the FCC to regulate telecom EMF’s health effects. This ruling was a dangerous joke because the FCC is not a health agency, nor does it employ biomedical experts. The Act also overrides the authority of towns, cities, and county councils to rule against 5G stations and cell tower installments. 

Under President Obama, FCC chair Tom Wheeler in no uncertain terms called for the private industry’s technology to drive national policy rather than vice versa. In other words, the telecommunications industrial complex has been handed precedence over elected legislators, including Congressional leaders, such as Senator Blumenthal, who voice deep concerns about 5G’s human and environmental risks. Wheeler, a principal architect behind the 5G strategy, has never acknowledged that there is an enormous body of medical research concluding EMF threats. He is a product of the same private industrial mindset that has churned out climate change deniers in the fossil fuel corporations and the GMO-risk deniers in Big Agriculture. 

Obama’s FCC also established a criterion whereby  the technology antecedes the warnings voiced by medical, health and environmental institutions and agencies. And under Trump and the chairmanship of Ajit Pai, the FCC’s corruption has entered steroidal hyper-drive to destroy net neutrality laws and “dismantle existing consumer protections.” Pai, a former Verizon attorney, was originally appointed by Obama and has been accused by the New York Times for running the department in secrecy and failing to make the agency’s internal policy decisions public. 

It therefore seems certain that Washington, in full collaboration with the telecommunications industry, has been scheming full spectrum dominance of the global wireless connectivity for two and half decades. During this time, the tactic has been to demolish public protections. In return for America’s efforts to achieve telecommunication hegemony in order to expand the police state and the nation’s imperium, average citizens are handed the leftover crumbs of faster internet speeds.  The real victims in the US’ cyber chess match with China is the world’s population.  No animal, bird, insect, plant or human will be able to avoid exposure. 5G will expose us to levels of radiation that are tens to hundreds of times greater than what we face today. And this exposure will be uninterrupted throughout the day, throughout the year and well into the future. It is now just a matter of a short period of time before we will all be saturated with microwave pulses. 

Unfortunately, the telecom industry and its contracted scientists remain in complete denial.  A plethora of medical and environmental research has accumulated about the health and ecological risks of electromagnetic frequency radiation (EMF) and microwaves. Four hundred new studies on electromagnetic radiation risks have been compiled by public health Professor Joel Moskowitz at the University of California at Berkeley. These studies cover earlier generation technologies, whereas 5G will be far more evasive and less safe. Compared to 4G technology in use today, every 5G base station will contain hundreds of thousands of antennas each aiming laser like microwave beams to all devices. 

In a study published in the August 2018 issue of Journal of Medical Imaging and Health Informatics, after an extensive review and analysis of the medical literature researchers concluded that “incidence of cancer cases was remarkably higher among people who resided in 400 meters from mobile antennas, in comparison to those who lived further away. Inhabitants living close to cellular antennas are also at increased risk for developing neuropsychiatric complaints.” Under the 5G regime every American in a suburb or city will be living 100 meters or less from an antenna. In 2016, the Europa EM-EMF guideline found “strong evidence that long-term exposure to certain EMFs is a risk factor for diseases such as certain cancers, Alzheimer’s disease, and male infertility…Common EHS (electromagnetic hypersensitivity) symptoms include headaches, concentration difficulties, sleep problems, depression, lack of energy, fatigue, and flu-like symptoms.”

In our opinion, the 5G rollout is an irresponsible experiment with potential holocaust-like consequences in the long term. Neither the US nor China have ever felt obliged to follow UNESCO’s Precautionary Principle to avoid “morally unacceptable harm” when the science is plausible but still uncertain. In the case of 5G, the harm to human life is conclusive, and in the view of Dr. Lennart Hardel, an oncology professor at University Hospital in Orebro, Sweden, it may be in violation of the Nuremberg Code.

Among the many research papers on the adverse effects of electromagnetic radiation, some are especially worrisome:

Nearly 100% of studies employing real mobile phone exposures reveal adverse effects, which include associations to brain tumors, declines in animal populations, and symptoms of un-wellness. (published in BioMed Research International).

Children are at greater risk than adults and absorb more microwave radiation than adults. (Journal of Microscopy and Ultrastructure)

The geometry of a child’s head significantly increases mobile phone EMF absorption in the brain, eye, cortex, hippocampus, and hypothalamus. Children have especially high bone marrow conductivity, greatly increasing EMF absorption.(published in the journal Physics in Medicine and Biology)

Simultaneous exposure to lead and RF from mobile phone use was associated with increased ADHD symptom risk.(Published in PLOS One)

Chronic multi-system illness” correlates electromagnetic hypersensitivity to 3 MHz-300 GHz, with headaches, concentration difficulties, sleep problems, depression, lack of energy, fatigue, and flu-like symptoms. (published in Reviews of Environmental Health).

Oxidative stress due to 900 MHz and 1.8 GHz microwave exposure associated with cognitive impairment and inflammation in rat brain (Published in the Indian Journal of Experimental Biology)

Use of laptop computers connected to internet through Wi-Fi decreases human sperm motility and increases sperm DNA fragmentation (published in the journal Fertility and Sterility)

Radiofrequency waves emitted from conventional Wi-Fi devices poses potential effect on both fertility and the integrity of sperm cells. (Published in the Journal of Pediatric Urology)

Population living within 350 meters of an 850 MHz, 1500 watt cell phone tower in Netanya, Israel experienced a 4 fold cancer increase (i.e., carcinoma of the breast, ovary, lung, kidney, bone, and Hodgkin’s disease). (published in the International Journal of Cancer Prevention).

In addition there is something largely missing from the 5G debate in the US, whereas some European nations are paying attention to it; that is, existing safety standards for wireless technology are obsolete. This conclusion was arrrived at independently by Vienna Medical University in Austria and Carl Blackman at the University of North Carolina, published in the journal Pathophysiology. The problem herein lies in the failures of federal regulatory agencies to be truthful to the scientific evidence rather than show favoritism to the wireless industry’s own junk science and commercial interests. Again, private interests profit, and the public is harmed. 

Finally, we may consider 5G’s vulnerability and dangers to society in the event of a solar storm, such as a massive coronal plasma emission (CPE). Such a threat is very real, as University of Michigan professor of space sciences Justin Kasper told members of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security last February. Kasper specializes in how solar activity effects society. His fears are that a solar flare similar to the one that engulfed the earth in a “magnetic tsunami” in 1859 could potentially wipe out the country’s electrical power grid. Power transformers are massive utilities costing tens of millions of dollars each and generally there are no backups. Therefore, imagine if such a solar storm were to assault a fully installed global 5G wireless network whereupon everything modern culture depends upon is interconnected. Satellite communications will be an essential component of the 5G infrastructure and are defenseless against massive radiation emissions from the sun. Without operative electrical and water utilities, septic systems, gas pumps, air conditioning in summer or heating in winter, for weeks, months and perhaps a year in the event of a massive coronal plasma emission, society as we know it would come to a standstill. Nuclear power plants would likely spiral downward into meltdown. Transportation as we know it would come to a halt. And in the event of a super “magnetic tsunami” chaos could follow.  

Therefore, 5G poses far more problems than even its sharpest critics voice. It is not simply a threat to human health and the environment from constant exposure, but the security of the entire international community of nations is in peril. Our Congressional leaders are a national disgrace for failing to side with the public rather than the telecommunications industry. Obviously contaminating all life on the planet is too insignificant of a concern. In fact, 5G holds the possibility in being another tipping point in the sixth extinction. 


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p.

News From Underground

 

Aug 5, 2019 

Can the Progressive-“Conspiracy” Divide be Bridged?

https://off-guardian.org/wp-content/medialibrary/jfkprotestersign.jpg

https://off-guardian.org/2019/08/05/can-the-progressive-conspiracy-divide-be-bridged/

by John Kirby

 

People from a variety of advocacy communities who tackle issues ranging from the assassinations of the 1960’s to vaccine safety are rightly upset by a recent NBC News.com op-ed authored by Lynn Parramore, a progressive journalist known for her insightful pieces for Alternet and other outlets.

In the article, Parramore argues that those who espouse “conspiracy theories” might be displaying “narcissistic personality traits,” suffer from “low self-esteem,” and share a “negative view of humanity.” Various studies are cited in support of this claim.

As a filmmaker acquainted both with the author of the op-ed as well as a number of people from the communities under fire, I hope it’s possible to dispel some of the misconceptions on all sides and even find some common ground.

At the outset, it should be acknowledged that Parramore’s piece is an uncharacteristically harsh ad hominem smear, taking its place in a long line of similar attacks on people who have dared question—sometimes at great personal cost—a whole range of suspect official narratives over many years.

But Parramore and many journalists like her are neither assets of an intelligence service nor unthinking tools of big media; she is fully conscious of the ways in which power and wealth can be used collusively (one might even say conspiratorially) to deceive and abuse the public.

So what accounts for a piece like this one?  Why does it rankle a progressive like Parramore so intensely when she hears someone mention that the U.S. military-industrial complex had the most to gain from the September 11th attacks, or that Big Pharma may be applying the same racketeering techniques to the ever-expanding vaccination schedule she discovered at play in the opioid crisis?

Those of us who have labored long to publicize state crimes against democracy have our own list of the psychological, political, and economic factors that may be preventing smart people from seeing evidence that we regard as overwhelming.

The primary difficulty may lie in just how smart and thoroughly educated many of these writers are: no one who has spent a lifetime looking into the way the world works wants to think they might have missed something big.

And as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the more educated we are, the more we are a target for state-corporate propaganda. Even journalists outside the mainstream may internalize establishment values and prejudices.

Which brings us to Parramore’s embrace of the term “conspiracy theory.”   Once a neutral and little-used phrase, “conspiracy theory” was infamously weaponized in 1967 by a memo from the CIA to its station chiefs worldwide.

Troubled by growing mass disbelief in the “lone nut” theory of President Kennedy’s assassination, and concerned that “[c]onspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization,” the agency directed its officers to “discuss the publicity problem with friendly and elite contacts (especially politicians and editors)” and to “employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose.”

As Kevin Ryan writes, and various analyses have shown:

In the 45 years before the CIA memo came out, the phrase ‘conspiracy theory’ appeared in the Washington Post and New York Times only 50 times, or about once per year. In the 45 years after the CIA memo, the phrase appeared 2,630 times, or about once per week.”

While it turns out that Parramore knows something about this hugely successful propaganda drive, she chose in her NBC piece to deploy the phrase as the government has come to define it, i.e., as “something that requires no consideration because it is obviously not true.”  This embeds a fallacy in her argument which only spreads as she goes on.

Likewise, the authors of the studies she cites, who attempt to connectbelief in >em>“conspiracy theories” to “narcissistic personality traits,” are not immune to efforts to manipulate the wider culture. Studies are only as good as the assumptions from which they proceed; in this case, the assumption was provided by an interested Federal agency.

And what of their suggested diagnosis?

The DSM-5’s criteria for narcissism include “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity…a need for admiration and lack of empathy.”  My experience in talking to writers and advocates who—to mention a few of the subjects Parramore cites—seek justice in the cases of the political murders of the Sixties, have profound concerns about vaccine safetyor reject the official conspiracy theory of 9/11, does not align with that characterization.

On the contrary, most of the people I know who hold these varied (and not always shared) views are deeply empathic, courageously humble, and resigned to a life on the margins of official discourse, even as they doggedly seek to publicize what they have learned.

A number of them have arrived at their views through painful, direct experience, like the loss of a friend or the illness of a child, but far from having a “negative view of humanity,” as Parramore writes, most hold a deep and abiding faith in the power of regular people to see injustice and peacefully oppose it.

In that regard, they share a great deal in common with writers like Parramore: ultimately, we all want what’s best for our children, and none of us want a world ruled by unaccountable political-economic interests.

If we want to achieve that world, then we should work together to promote speech that is free from personal attacks on all sides. Even more importantly, we should all be troubled by efforts to shut down content and discussions labeled “false and misleading” on major social media platforms.

Who will decide what is false and what is true? 

In the case of vaccines, there is actually no scientific consensus that they are safe—only a state-media consensus, emanating from groups like the CDC, which act as sales agents for Big Pharma. 

A terrible precedent is being set, and both unfettered scientific inquiry and free speech are suffering greatly. Today it is vaccines and “conspiracy theories” that are being banned and labeled “dangerous” by the FBI. What will we be prevented, scared, or shamed away from discussing tomorrow?

President Kennedy said:

a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”

Perhaps we should take a closer look at ideas that so frighten the powers-that-be. Far from inviting our ridicule, the people who insist that we look in these forbidden places may one day deserve our thanks.

John Kirby is a documentary filmmaker. His latest project, Four Died Trying, examines what John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were doing in the last years of their lives which may have led to their deaths.

 

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q.

‘Regime change begins at home’ – Max Blumenthal speaks in Venezuelan presidential palace

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/venez-blockade.JPG

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52034.htm

by Max Blumenthal


The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and the Embassy Protection Collective address the media after meeting with President Nicolás Maduro at Miraflores palace in Caracas, Venezuela.
+

U.S. Americans Should Be Very Skeptical Of Calls For New “Terrorism” Laws

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/eye-data.JPG

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52047.htm

by Caitlin Johnstone

 

  Two mass shootings have rocked the United States in less than 24 hours, leaving dozens dead and many more wounded. The first in El Paso, Texas was allegedly perpetrated by a white supremacist whose racist motives are outlined in a rambling “manifesto”, the second allegedly by a self-described “leftist” whose motives, like the 2017 Las Vegas shooter, are presently unknown. These incidents occurred a week after another mass shooting in Gilroy, California.

All the usual US gun control debates have of course reignited, which is understandable. Alongside this debate, however, we are seeing another, far more pernicious agenda being raised that I would like to address here.

 

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r.

Algérie. Ceux qui, toutes les semaines, « vendredisent »

https://paroles-citoyennes.net/spip.php?newsletter30

 +

Macrone on Brink: French president crisis as support plummets

- shock poll

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1162109/emmanuel-macron-france-news-macron-approval-ratings-yellow-vests-gilets-jaunes

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s.

'A Dystopian Surveillance State Being Built in Plain Sight': Pentagon Tests Radar-Equipped Balloons to Spy on Vehicles Across Midwest
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/1984-manual.JPG

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52050.htm

by Julia Conley

 

"These programs are not about stopping violence, they're about social control."

Millions of Americans across the Midwest this summer are being subjected to surveillance from above as the Pentagon experiments with the use of surveillance radars attached to high-altitude balloons.

As The Guardian reported Friday, the defense and aerospace contractor Sierra Nevada Corporation was authorized by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to send up to 25 balloons across six states to track vehicles.

U.S. Southern Command commissioned the project for the stated purpose of creating a "persistence surveillance system" to deter drug traffickers and perceived "homeland security threats."

Civil liberties advocates were distressed at the newly-reported project on Friday, which the Sierra Nevada Corporation obtained a license to begin on July 12 and end on September 1.

"The deployment of this kind of surveillance capability in the United States is incredibly alarming," Mana Azarmi, policy counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology, told Common Dreams. "Persistent government surveillance, such as that facilitated by this technology, raises many civil liberties concerns and should not be permitted in the absence of a warrant."

"Mass surveillance doesn't make us safer," the digital rights group Fight for the Future tweeted.

Mass surveillance doesn't make us safer
Mass surveillance doesn't make us safer
Mass surveillance doesn't make us safer
Mass surveillance doesn't make us safer
Mass surveillance doesn't make us safer
Mass surveillance doesn't make us saferhttps://t.co/jpHTWfwItd

— Fight for the Future (@fightfortheftr) August 2, 2019

Programs like the Pentagon's balloon experiment "pose a grave threat to basic human rights, freedom of expression, and civil liberties," Fight for the Future Deputy Director Evan Greer told Common Dreams. "These programs are not about stopping violence, they're about social control."

 

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t.

Let’s admit it: This is who we are
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/el-paso-killer.JPG
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52045.htm

by Nestor Ramos

“This is not who we are.”

We hear these words again and again in the hours after a mass shooting. A politician will speak them, or perhaps a police officer. They clatter out of the television or the computer screen like an incantation.
And so it was no surprise to find these words echoing through the aftermath of Saturday’s shooting in El Paso — 20 dead — and it was tempting to once again believe them. They are defiant words reserved for moments that demand strength and fury and indignation. They sound earnest and true.
Then, not quite 13 hours later, someone opened fire in Dayton, and the lie revealed itself yet again.
We are what we repeatedly do, and in this country what we repeatedly do is mow down civilians with .223-caliber semiautomatic rifles. The mass shootings pile on top of each other, occurring so close together this weekend that cable news covers them in split-screen, like playoff games.
And so, according to all the available evidence, this is exactly who we are.
It’s obvious if you confront the reality. Mass shootings are so routine now that it is possible, unless you have a personal connection to a particular massacre, to forget quite recent tragedies entirely.
The shooting at a garlic festival in Gilroy, Calif., a week ago would already be totally forgotten by the public at large were it not for the unusual setting. By next week it will be subsumed entirely.
How much do you remember about the shooting at a Virginia Beach municipal building three months ago, where 12 people died? Before El Paso, it was the deadliest American mass shooting of 2019. It happened three months ago. I had to look it up.

This is who we are.

 

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u.

News From Underground

 

From: Mark Crispin Miller
Sent: Wednesday, August 7, 2019
Subject: [MCM] Official stories of El Paso/Gilroy/Dayton triad are full of gaping holes . . . which anyone who really cares about them can't ignore. 

 

Mass Shooting Marathon: Red Flags and Anomalies Galore in Gilroy, El Paso and Dayton

https://www.winterwatch.net/2019/08/shooting-events-red-flags-and-anomalies/

 

 

To the many stark anomalies and contradictions noted in the piece that's
linked below, I'd add the strange exclusion of the 7/27 Brownsville shooting 
from the narrative now flooding "our free press" (with eleven pieces in today's 
NYTimes—not including two op-eds and six letters to the editor). 
https://nypost.com/2019/07/28/shooting-at-brooklyn-block-party-leaves-six-injured-one-dead/ 

 

Or maybe this exclusion isn't strange at all, inasmuch as Brownsville was
"off-script"—i.e., not (seemingly) explicable as an explosion of "white
nationalist hate," the shrieking theme of what may (or may not) one day be 
acknowledged as a classic propaganda drive. 

 

Of course, this sort of dispassionate analysis is likely to enrage those who've 
been swept away by the emotional effect of all that wrenching coverage (the 
usual effect of all atrocity propaganda). In their eyes, anyone who's not on 
board with this whole push against "white nationalist terror" and—especially
—hate speech, along with stricter gun control, is morally obtuse, or an apologist 
for "terror," if not a terrorist himself. 

 

Meanwhile, those official stories are so clumsy and, in many ways, absurd that 
it's not hard to see why Beto burst out laughing while attempting to deplore the 
carnage in El Paso.

 

MCM

p.s. As I've urged before, please read Paul L. Williams' Operation Gladio.

 

For more, see CEIMSA Bulletin n° 853 :

 

 

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v.

We’re All Enemies of the State: Draconian Laws, Precrime & the Surveillance State

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/police-state-5.JPG

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52051.htm

by John W. Whitehead

 

 “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”—H.L. Mencken

 

We’ve been down this road many times before.

If the government is consistent about any one thing, it is this: it has an unnerving tendency to exploit crises and use them as opportunities for power grabs under the guise of national security.

As David C. Unger, a foreign affairs editorial writer for the New York Times, explains, “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have given way to permanent crisis management: to policing the planet and fighting preventative wars of ideological containment, usually on terrain chosen by, and favorable to, our enemies. Limited government and constitutional accountability have been shouldered aside by the kind of imperial presidency our constitutional system was explicitly designed to prevent.”

Cue the Emergency State, the government’s Machiavellian version of crisis management that justifies all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security.

Terrorist attacks, mass shootings, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters”: the government has been anticipating and preparing for such crises for years now.

It’s all part of the grand plan for total control.

The government’s proposed response to the latest round of mass shootings—red flag gun laws, precrime surveillance, fusion centers, threat assessments, mental health assessments, involuntary confinement—is just more of the same.

These tactics have been employed before, here in the U.S. and elsewhere, by other totalitarian regimes, with devastating results.

It’s a simple enough formula: first, you create fear, then you capitalize on it by seizing power.

For instance, in his remarks on the mass shootings in Texas and Ohio, President Trump promised to give the FBI “whatever they need” to investigate and disrupt hate crimes and domestic terrorism.

Let that sink in a moment.