What Are The Neocons Thinking?

Video

Abby Martin, of the RT program “Breaking the Set” does a brilliant dissection of the absurdity and lies coming from the pro-war neocons.

What reality are the neocons living in? These clips from “Monkey Dust” may give some insight into their state of mind:

Bill Hicks – Revelations

Video

The complete video of one of Bill Hick’s greatest shows. Filmed at the Dominion Theater, London in late 1992 (1:15):

Schools are Becoming Privatized Prisons

Video

A lot of interesting analysis has been coming out recently about the problematic education system, and it’s not just on obvious longstanding issues such as lack of funding and overcrowded classrooms. Peter Gray of Salon.com wrote in his article “School is a Prison – and damaging our kids”:

Parents send their children to school with the best of intentions, believing that’s what they need to become productive and happy adults. Many have qualms about how well schools are performing, but the conventional wisdom is that these issues can be resolved with more money, better teachers, more challenging curricula and/or more rigorous tests.

But what if the real problem is school itself? The unfortunate fact is that one of our most cherished institutions is, by its very nature, failing our children and our society.

School is a place where children are compelled to be, and where their freedom is greatly restricted — far more restricted than most adults would tolerate in their workplaces. In recent decades, we have been compelling our children to spend ever more time in this kind of setting, and there is strong evidence (summarized in my recent book) that this is causing serious psychological damage to many of them. Moreover, the more scientists have learned about how children naturally learn, the more we have come to realize that children learn most deeply and fully, and with greatest enthusiasm, in conditions that are almost opposite to those of school.

Read the full article here: http://www.salon.com/2013/08/26/school_is_a_prison_and_damaging_our_kids/

David L. Kirp of Slate.com writes about three new books which pick apart arguments for charter schools and vouchers in his article: The Wrong Kind of Education Reform

Today at Truthout there’s an op-ed by Marion Brady which critiques the Common Core State Standards program: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/18638-a-quiz-on-americas-core-curriculum

Jan Irvin and Clint Richardson discuss Common Core in great detail in this lengthy but well-researched conversation at Gnostic Media:

mp3 link: http://www.gnosticmedia.com/podcast/GnosticMedia_PC_173_ClintRichardson_pt8_CommonCOREeducation_md.mp3

For more great information about the history and problems of compulsory education, check out John Taylor Gatto’s site: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/

From the BBC series “Monkey Dust” (NSFW):

Podcast Roundup

A number of podcasts have been released in the past week that are extremely relevant and would be of interest to people across a diverse spectrum of worldviews.

8/29/13: A short but perceptive discussion on Syria from James Evan Pilato and James Corbett posted at MediaMonarchy.com.

8/30/13: An interview by Klint Finley and Chris Dancy with Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul on the Mindful Cyborgs podcast.

9/1/13: Modern mystic Neil Kramer shares his unique and uplifting spiritual insights in a conversation with Greg Carlwood and Kyle Prindiville on The Higherside Chats.

9/2/13: The always on-point veteran Panther Larry Pinkney speaks out on Syria and what we can do to affect positive change with host Guillermo Jimenez on Traces of Reality Radio.

9/3/13: Clyde Lewis interviews former intelligence agent and whistleblower Frank G. Ford on Ground Zero.

9/4/13: Henrik Palmgren leads a discussion with independent scholars Joseph Atwill and Ryan Gilmore on the topic of religion as a psychological weapon and its connection to modern war propaganda on Red Ice Radio.

“All Wars Are Based on Deception” – Sun Tzu

I’ve been thinking of Sun Tzu’s line from “The Art of War” a lot lately because of the blatant lies about Syria currently being pushed by U.S. government officials and the corporate media. The quote is just as true today as it was in ancient China. Another quote that applies to our current situation is “Those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it.” (Edmund Burke). There’s much truth to that, but it’s only part of the story. I would add that those who profit most from major historical events such as wars and stock market crashes are motivated to recreate the conditions to repeat them. And those who only learn the winner’s version of history and are ignorant of the truth are more likely to be okay with it and let it happen. That’s why I encourage everyone to read an important article by Michael Rivero called “Fake Terror – The Road to War and Dictatorship”. It outlines how lies and deception were used to start wars from 70 BC Rome to America in the 1990s (though the lying has ramped up quite a bit since then) . Even wars we think of as being “good wars” like World War 2 are not exempt, as explained in this excerpt from the article:

Roosevelt needed an enemy, and if America would not willingly attack that enemy, then one would have to be maneuvered into attacking America, much as Marcus Licinius Crassus has maneuvered Spartacus into attacking Rome.

…The first step was to place oil and steel embargoes on Japan, using Japan’s wars on the Asian mainland as a reason. This forced Japan to consider seizing the oil and mineral rich regions in Indonesia. With the European powers militarily exhausted by the war in Europe, the United States was the only power in the Pacific able to stop Japan from invading the Dutch East Indies, and by moving the Pacific fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Roosevelt made a pre-emptive strike on that fleet the mandatory first step in any Japanese plan to extend its empire into the “southern resource area”.

…To enrage the American people as much as possible, Roosevelt needed the first overt attack by Japan to be as bloody as possible, appearing as a sneak attack much as the Japanese had done to the Russians. From that moment up until the attack on Pearl Harbor itself, Roosevelt and his associates made sure that the commanders in Hawaii, General Short and Admiral Kimmel, were kept in the dark as much as possible about the location of the Japanese fleet and its intentions, then later scapegoated for the attack. (Congress recently exonerated both Short and Kimmel, posthumously restoring them to their former ranks).

But as the Army board had concluded at the time, and subsequent de-classified documents confirmed, Washington DC knew the attack was coming, knew exactly where the Japanese fleet was, and knew where it was headed.

On November 29th, Secretary of State Hull showed United Press reporter Joe Leib a message with the time and place of the attack, and the New York Times in its special 12/8/41 Pearl Harbor edition, on page 13, reported that the time and place of the attack had been known in advance!

The much repeated claim that the Japanese fleet maintained radio silence on its way to Hawaii was a lie. Among other intercepts still held in the Archives of the NSA is the UNCODED message sent by the Japanese tanker Shirya stating, “proceeding to a position 30.00 N, 154.20 E. Expect to arrive at that point on 3 December.” (near HI)

Read the complete article here: http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/ARTICLE5/index.php

Workers of the World…Relax

Though written more than 20 years ago, this essay by Bob Black is more relevant today than ever. It is possible to find personally fulfilling and rewarding work that allows for a decent standard of living, but is far too rare and inaccessible for too many people within the current dominant system. From “The Abolition of Work” :

But modern work has worse implications. People don’t just work, they have “jobs.” One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs don’t) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A “job” that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who contribute nothing to the project, and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or spreading the work among those who actually have to do it. This is the real world of work: a world of bureaucratic blundering, of sexual harassment and discrimination, of bonehead bosses exploiting and scapegoating their subordinates who—by any rational-technical criteria – should be calling the shots. But capitalism in the real world subordinates the rational maximization of productivity and profit to the exigencies of organizational control.

The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of assorted indignities which can be denominated as “discipline.” Foucault has complexified this phenomenon but it is simple enough. Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian controls at the workplace—surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching-in and -out, etc. Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic tators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions they just didn’t have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do. Discipline is the distinctively diabolical modern mode of control, it is an innovative intrusion which must be interdicted at the earliest opportunity.

Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren’t free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or-else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to the higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.

Read the entire essay here: http://deoxy.org/endwork.htm