Gaslighting: State Mind Control and Abusive Narcissism
[Social]
Gaslighting: State Mind Control and Abusive Narcissism
by Vanessa Beeley
Posted May 29, 2020
Exceptionalism: the condition of being different from the norm; also: a theory expounding the exceptionalism especially of a nation or region.
There are many theories surrounding the origin of American exceptionalism. The most popular in US folklore, being that it describes America’s unique character as a “free” nation founded on democratic ideals and civil liberties. The Declaration of Independence from British colonial rule is the foundation of this theory and has persevered throughout the often violent history of the US since its birth as a free nation.
Over time, exceptionalism has come to represent superiority in the minds and hearts of Americans. Belief in their economic, military and ideological supremacy is what has motivated successive US governments to invest in shaping the world in their superior image with little or no regard for the destruction left in the wake of their exceptional hegemony. More…
As Chief Prosecutor, Klobuchar Declined to Bring Charges Against Cop that Killed George Floyd
[Justice]
As Chief Prosecutor, Klobuchar Declined to Bring Charges Against Cop that Killed George Floyd
by Alan Macleod
Posted May 28, 2020
While serving as Minnesota’s chief prosecutor between 1999 and 2007, Klobuchar declined to bring charges against more than two dozen officers who had killed citizens while on duty – including against the cop that killed George Floyd.
Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, who Joe Biden recently asked to undergo vetting to be his running mate for November, issued a very tepid statement about the incident, describing the police killing of an unarmed black man over an alleged forged check as merely an “officer involved death,” – a copaganda word often used by police as a euphemism for “murder.”
Klobuchar also called for a “complete and thorough outside investigation into what occurred, and those involved in this incident must be held accountable.” However, this is unlikely to occur, in no small part because of Klobuchar herself and the precedent she set while serving as the state’s chief prosecutor between 1999 and 2007. In that time, she declined to bring charges against more than two dozen officers who had killed citizens while on duty – including against Chauvin himself, who shot and killed Wayne Reyes in 2006 and would later go on to shoot more civilians while in uniform. More…
Why The World Health Organization Treats Bill Gates Like A President
[Social]
Why The World Health Organization Treats Bill Gates Like A President
By Johan van Dongen
Posted May 28, 2020
The WHO is a very corrupt organization and amongst other crimes was involved in stealing Ebola blood samples for profits and biowarfare purposes and sex abuse during the Ebola vaccine trial and error studies in the Democratic Republic Congo.
The WHO is the highest authority on health in the world. It should be an independent organization, but for a very large part, it is financed by one person: Bill Gates. The ‘Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’ has donated more than $ 2 billion to the WHO since the ’90s. Gates’ hobbyhorse is to eliminate the polio virus. He wants to achieve that by vaccinating as many children around the world against polio.
He proclaimed the year 2010 as the start of: ‘The Decade of Vaccinations.’ But we call this decade the beginning of the end for those who receive mostly contaminated or genetic engineered vaccines.
But Bill Gates is a businessman and knows that the “global vaccine market” is undergoing rapid growth, which, according to the WHO, will be translated into a turnover of no less than 100 billion dollars a year by 2025 if all goes well. More…
Why the Political Class Freaked Out
[Politics]
Why the Political Class Freaked Out
by Robert E. Wright
Posted May 27, 2020
It’s unsurprising that governments around the world have reacted so strongly to COVID-19. I think the game-theoretic model below explains the first round nicely. It also provides insight into what round two might look like.
If politicians act and the outcome is good, they can take credit and campaign on it for re-election, as many former military officers on both sides did by “waving the bloody shirt” of the Civil War for decades afterwards. A big win in other words.
If they act and the outcome is bad (i.e. if lots of people die) and again this is round one of the way politicians think, they can always portray it as a (comparatively) good come out with the refrain that “it’s a good thing we did something or this would have been much worse.” Some people will accept, while others reject, the validity of the statement—probably along party lines, so the expected outcome is better than in either of the two inaction squares. More…
Why Humanity Should Look To Its Roots As We Revillage Our Towns And Cities
[Community]
Why Humanity Should Look To Its Roots As We Revillage Our Towns And Cities
By April M. Short
Posted May 26, 2020
Our current ways of living are life-threatening and unsustainable. Our increasingly individualized society is contributing to epidemic levels of loneliness and isolation, depression, anxiety and other mental health crises. There is a serious need for people to reconnect with community—and also with the planet as there is perhaps an inextricable link between our anxiety and depression epidemics, and the existential threat of climate change (which has very real physical, mental and emotional impacts).
Faced with this dire need for something to change, there is a growing movement of communities and individuals looking to new ways of living—and old ones.
The potential solution to all of the above issues could be as simple as looking back in time at the structures and cultural dynamics of our villager ancestors, explains Mark Lakeman, an urban architect, permaculture pioneer and national leader in the development of sustainable communities and public spaces. More…
David Stockman on the Destruction of the Financial Markets and What it Means for You
[Economic]
David Stockman on the Destruction of the Financial Markets and What it Means for You
by David Stockman
Posted May 25, 2020
Overwhelmingly, 90% of the households in America have been told that they’re the Energizer spending bunny of American economics, and if you don’t have enough wages this week, borrow some money on your credit card and just keep on spending.
This has created a hand-to-mouth economy that has no immunities—if you want to use that metaphor in an economic sense. It cannot cope, and it has no antibodies to fight back against the interruption of paychecks and cash flow.
There is going to be broken furniture everywhere as it filters through an economy that is sitting with $74 trillion of public and private debt on its back. That’s how much we have today.
People need to focus on this fact, that we thought we had a warning back when the great financial crisis occurred in 2008 when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, the Great Recession, all that. More…
[Economic]
Jeff Bezos, World’s Richest Man, Wants Your Donations To Help Amazon Employees
by Alan Macleod
Posted May 24, 2020
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the world’s first centibillionaire, a man who vies with Bill Gates for the title of the planet’s richest individual, is asking the public for donations to provide basic support to his 800,000 employees who are suffering in poverty in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A man worth over $100 billion, who makes, on average, $230,000 per minute calling on the public to help his own impoverished employees was not met well by many. Amazon itself is worth over $1 trillion, and some felt Bezos himself was in a better position than others, especially members of the public also economically hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, to help his own staff. Furthermore, the company is notorious as a bad employer. Forced to forego bathroom breaks, many company warehouse workers are effectively compelled to wear diapers during their shifts. Other employees report working in unsafe environments and being punished for injuries sustained on the job. The company also does not provide its employees with regular access to clean water.
Amazon workers are poor. Really poor. In Arizona, for example, the company’s own data suggests that one in three employees depend upon food stamps to put food on the table. It is the twenty-eighth largest employer in the state. However, it ranked fifth on the list for most employees enrolled in the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP). More…
Genetically Modified Seeds: Conceived as a Weapon Part III
[Social]
Genetically Modified Seeds: Conceived as a Weapon Part III
By Larry Romanoff
Posted May 23, 2020
GM seed is neither more productive nor healthier than traditional heritage crops, and is far more expensive and destructive, but it presents almost irresistible military advantages against any nation that becomes dependent on this source of food grains. One is that the US can use it as a political weapon, refusing to supply seed to a disfavored nation, perhaps causing widespread famine and dislocation. The other is more sinister, in that many groups have experimented with gene-splicing technology, inserting unrelated DNA into various seeds.
The US Defense Department has invested huge sums in research directed to splicing lethal genes into these GM crop seeds, including smallpox, bird and swine flu viruses, coronaviruses, the plague, AIDS, and more. As a military weapon, such science is priceless. Why begin a shooting war when Monsanto or Cargill can sell rice, corn and soybeans that contain smallpox, H5N1, or a coronavirus? When the seed is harvested and passes into the nation’s food supply it could, within weeks, exterminate 50% or more of the population without firing a single shot.
And this was precisely the reason GM seed was conceived and developed by the Americans. It is a weapon of war, designed and meant to deliver to a nation’s entire population a lethal virus or other disease, to literally exterminate an enemy with no risk to the aggressor. More…
America’s Super-Rich See Their Wealth Rise by $282 Billion in Three Weeks of Pandemic
[Social]
America’s Super-Rich See Their Wealth Rise by $282 Billion in Three Weeks of Pandemic
by Alan Macleod
Posted May 22, 2020
America’s billionaires have accrued more wealth in the past three weeks alone than they made in total prior to 1980.
A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies found that, while tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs during the coronavirus pandemic, America’s ultra-wealthy elite have seen their net worth surge by $282 billion in just 23 days. This is despite the fact that the economy is expected to contract by 40 percent this quarter. The report also noted that between 1980 and 2020 the tax obligations of America’s billionaires, measured as a percentage of their wealth, decreased by 79 percent.
In the last 30 years, U.S. billionaire wealth soared by over 1100 percent while median household wealth increased by barely five percent. In 1990, the total wealth held by America’s billionaire class was $240 billion; today that number stands at $2.95 trillion. Thus, America’s billionaires accrued more wealth in just the past three weeks than they made in total prior to 1980. As a result, just three people – Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffet – own as much wealth as the bottom half of all U.S. households combined. More…
Quotable Sayings
You do not become a billionaire through labor. You become a billionaire through inheritance, corruption or economic rents – or, in most cases, some mixture of all three.
Grace Blakeley
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Mainstream American liberals think they’re clear-eyed because they can see the propaganda strings being pulled by Fox and Donald Trump, and mainstream American conservatives think they’re clear-eyed because they can see the propaganda strings being pulled by MSNBC and the Democrats, but the propaganda strings on both trace back to the same puppet master. And seeing that is just the beginning.
Caitlin Johnstone
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You alone are the judge of your worth and your goal is to discover infinite worth in yourself, no matter what anyone else thinks.
Deepak Chopra
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It is obvious that the US government is destroying Assange to signal to journalists the consequences of publishing information. It is therefore also obvious that any journalist who fails to use whatever platform they have to speak out against Assange’s persecution has no intention of ever publishing anything that the US government doesn’t want published. Their silence on or support for what is being done to this man can and should be taken as an admission that they are nothing other than state propagandists.
Caitlin Johnstone
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It’s quite fitting that the – imperially pre-determined – judicial fate of Julian Assange is being played out in Britain, the home of George Orwell.
Pepe Escobar
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