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Yearly Archives: 2019
Offering Choice but Delivering Tyranny: The Corporate Capture of Agriculture
By Colin Todhunter
Source: Off-Guardian
Many lobbyists talk a lot about critics of genetic engineering technology denying choice to farmers. They say that farmers should have access to a range of tools and technologies to maximise choice and options.
At the same time, somewhat ironically, they decry organic agriculture and proven agroecological approaches, presumably because these practices have no need for the proprietary inputs of the global agrochemical/agritech corporations they are in bed with.
And presumably because agroecology represents liberation from the tyranny of these profiteering, environment-damaging global conglomerates.
It is fine to talk about ‘choice’ but we do not want to end up offering a false choice (rolling out technologies that have little value and only serve to benefit those who control the technology), to unleash an innovation that has an adverse impact on others or to manipulate a situation whereby only one option is available because other options have been deliberately removed. And we would certainly not wish to roll out a technology that traps farmers on a treadmill that they find difficult to get off.
Surely, a responsible approach for rolling out important (potentially transformative) technologies would have to consider associated risks, including social, economic and health impacts.
Take the impact of the Green Revolution in India, for instance. Sold on the promise that hybrid seeds and associated chemical inputs would enhance food security on the basis of higher productivity, agriculture was transformed, especially in Punjab. But to gain access to seeds and chemicals many farmers had to take out loans and debt became (and remains) a constant worry.
Many became impoverished and social relations within rural communities were radically altered: previously, farmers would save and exchange seeds but now they became dependent on unscrupulous money lenders, banks and seed manufacturers and suppliers. Vandana Shiva in The Violence of the Green Revolution (1989) describes the social marginalisation and violence that accompanied the process.
On a macro level, the Green Revolution conveniently became tied to an international (neo-colonial) system of trade based on chemical-dependent agro-export mono-cropping linked to loans, sovereign debt repayment and World Bank/IMF structural adjustment (privatisation/deregulation) directives.
Many countries in the Global South were deliberately turned into food deficit regions, dependent on (US) agricultural imports and strings-attached aid.
The process led to the massive displacement of the peasantry and, according to the academics Eric Holt-Giménez et al, (Food rebellions: Crisis and the hunger for Justice, 2009), the consolidation of the global agri-food oligopolies and a shift in the global flow of food: developing countries produced a billion-dollar yearly surplus in the 1970s; they were importing $11 billion a year by 2004.
And it’s not as though the Green Revolution delivered on its promises.
In India, it merely led to more wheat in the diet, while food productivity per capita showed no increased or even actually decreased (see New Histories of the Green Revolution by Glenn Stone). And, as described by Bhaskar Save in his open letter (2006) to officials, it had dire consequences for diets, the environment, farming, health and rural communities.
The ethics of the Green Revolution – at least it was rolled out with little consideration for these impacts – leave much to be desired.
As the push to drive GM crops into India’s fields continues (the second coming of the green revolution – the gene revolution), we should therefore take heed. To date, the track record of GMOs is unimpressive, but the adverse effects on many smallholder farmers are already apparent (see Hybrid Bt cotton: a stranglehold on subsistence farmers in India by A P Gutierrez).
Aside from looking at the consequences of technology roll outs, we should, when discussing choice, also account for the procedures and decisions that were made which resulted in technologies coming to market in the first place.
Steven Druker, in his book Altered Genes, Twisted Truth, argues that the decision to commercialise GM seeds and food in the US amounted to a subversion of processes put in place to serve the public interest.
The result has been a technology roll out which could result (is resulting) in fundamental changes to the genetic core of the world’s food. This decision ultimately benefited Monsanto’s bottom line and helped the US gain further leverage over global agriculture.
We must therefore put glib talk of the denial of technology by critics to one side if we are to engage in a proper discussion of choice. Any such discussion would account for the nature of the global food system and the dynamics and policies that shape it. This would include looking at how global corporations have captured the policy agenda for agriculture, including key national and international policy-making bodies, and the role of the WTO and World Bank.
Choice is also about the options that could be made available, but which have been closed off or are not even considered. In Ethiopia, for example, agroecology has been scaled up across the entire Tigray region, partly due to enlightened political leaders and the commitment of key institutions.
However, in places where global agribusiness/agritech corporations have leveraged themselves into strategic positions, their interests prevail. From the false narrative that industrial agriculture is necessary to feed the world to providing lavish research grants and the capture of important policy-making institutions, these firms have secured a thick legitimacy within policymakers’ mindsets and mainstream discourse.
As a result, agroecological approaches are marginalised and receive scant attention and support.
Monsanto had a leading role in drafting the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights to create seed monopolies. The global food processing industry wrote the WTO Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures.
Whether it involves Codex or the US-India Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture aimed at restructuring (destroying) Indian agriculture, the powerful agribusiness/food lobby has secured privileged access to policy makers and sets the policy agenda.
From the World Bank’s ‘enabling the business of agriculture’ to the Gates Foundation’s role in opening up African agriculture to global food and agribusiness oligopolies, democratic procedures at sovereign state levels are being bypassed to impose seed monopolies and proprietary inputs on farmers and to incorporate them into a global supply chain dominated by powerful corporations.
We have the destruction of indigenous farming in Africa as well as the ongoing dismantling of Indian agriculture and the deliberate impoverishment of Indian farmers at the behest of transnational agribusiness. Where is the democratic ‘choice’?
It has been usurped by corporate-driven Word Bank bondage (India is its biggest debtor in the bank’s history) and by a trade deal with the US that sacrificed Indian farmers for the sake of developing its nuclear sector.
Similarly, ‘aid’ packages for Ukraine – on the back of a US-supported coup – are contingent on Western corporations taking over strategic aspects of the economy. And agribusiness interests are at the forefront. Something which neoliberal apologists are silent on as they propagandise about choice, and democracy.
Ukraine’s agriculture sector is being opened up to Monsanto/Bayer. Iraq’s seed laws were changed to facilitate the entry of Monsanto.
India’s edible oils sector was undermined to facilitate the entry of Cargill. And Bayer’s hand is possibly behind the ongoing strategy to commercialise GM mustard in India. Whether on the back of militarism, secretive trade deals or strings-attached loans, global food and agribusiness conglomerates secure their interests and have scant regard for choice or democracy.
The ongoing aim is to displace localised, indigenous methods of food production and allow transnational companies to take over, tying farmers and regions to a system of globalised production and supply chains dominated by large agribusiness and retail interests. Global corporations with the backing of their host states, are taking over food and agriculture nation by nation.
Many government officials, the media and opinion leaders take this process as a given. They also accept that (corrupt) profit-driven transnational corporations have a legitimate claim to be owners and custodians of natural assets (the ‘commons’).
There is the premise that water, seeds, food, soil and agriculture should be handed over to these conglomerates to milk for profit, under the pretence these entities are somehow serving the needs of humanity.
Ripping land from peasants and displacing highly diverse and productive smallholder agriculture, rolling out very profitable but damaging technologies, externalising the huge social, environmental and health costs of the prevailing neoliberal food system and entire nations being subjected to the policies outlined above: how is any of it serving the needs of humanity?
It is not. Food is becoming denutrified, unhealthy and poisoned with chemicals and diets are becoming less diverse. There is a loss of plant and insect diversity, which threatens food security, soils are being degraded, water tables polluted and depleted and millions of smallholder farmers, so vital to global food production, are being pushed into debt in places like India and squeezed off their land and out of farming.
It is time to place natural assets under local ownership and to develop them in the public interest according to agroecological principles. This involves looking beyond the industrial yield-output paradigm and adopting a systems approach to food and agriculture that accounts for local food security and sovereignty, cropping patterns to ensure diverse nutrition production per acre, water table stability and good soil structure. It also involves pushing back against the large corporations that hold sway over the global food system and more generally challenging the leverage that private capital has over all our lives.
That’s how you ensure liberation from tyranny and support genuine choice.
Colin Todhunter is an independent journalist who writes on development, environmental issues, politics, food and agriculture. He was named in August 2018 by Transcend Media Services as one of 400 Living Peace and Justice Leaders and Models in recognition of his journalism.
Biden’s Brain Is Swiss Cheese And It’s Creepy That We’re Not Talking About It
By Caitlin Johnstone
Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com
I didn’t watch the last Democratic presidential primary debates because I figured that without Tulsi Gabbard in there shaking things up it would be a boring, vapid parade of insubstantial verbal foam, and I love myself too much to go through such a horrible ordeal. By all accounts my prediction was correct, but I did miss one thing that’s been making the rounds in video clips for the last couple of days which I find absolutely bizarre.
Most of you have probably heard about Biden’s infamous “record player” comment by now, but for those of you who missed it, Biden was asked by debate moderator Linsey Davis to defend some comments he made about America’s problems with racism in the 1970s, and he responded by essentially saying that Black people don’t know how to raise their kids so they need to be taught how by social workers. Biden has been receiving mainstream criticism for his racist and paternalistic position, along with plenty of mockery for saying that parents need to be told to “make sure you have the record player on at night” so that kids hear enough words in early childhood.
It is pretty clear that Biden was trying to communicate an idea that is premised on a deeply racist and condescending worldview, so it’s to be expected that people would want to talk about that. It’s also to be expected that people would be making jokes about how the cute old man said “record player” like a grandpa. But what isn’t being discussed nearly enough is the fact that what Biden said was also a barely coherent, garbled word salad stumbling out of a brain that is clearly being eaten alive by a very serious neurological disease.
I’ve typed out a transcript of what Biden actually said, verbatim. There are no typos. I’ve also noted where Biden closes his eyes, probably to concentrate, which he does whenever he seems to be struggling especially hard to string words together. Try to read through it slowly, word-for-word, resisting the instinct to mentally re-frame it into something more coherent:
“Well they have to deal with the– Look, there is institutional segregation in this country. And from the time I got involved I started dealing with that. Redlining. Banks. Making sure that we’re in a position where– Look, talk about education. I propose that what we take is those very poor schools, the Title 1 schools, triple the amount of money we spend from 15 to 45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise that equal [closes eyes] raise to getting out– the sixty-thousand dollar level.
“Number two: make sure that we bring into the help the–[closes eyes] the student, the, the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home. We need–We have one school psychologist for every fifteen hundred kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are reca–Now, I’m married to a teacher. My deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. [Closes eyes briefly] We have make sure that every single child does in fact have three, four, and five year-olds go to school–school, not daycare. School. We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t wanna help, they don’t want–they don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television, [closes eyes tightly] the– ‘scuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the-the-the-the phone, make sure the kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school, [closes eyes] a very poor background, will hear four million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.”
Notice how it gets more garbled the longer he speaks. The response I transcribed was about eighty seconds in length. That was just one small part of a debate in which the former vice president performed no better and forgot three of his fellow candidates’ names.
Compare this befuddled, incoherent mess with footage of a younger Biden, like his famous quip about how Rudy Giuliani only ever mentions “a noun and a verb and 9/11” in a sentence, or this clip where he said if Israel didn’t exist America would have to invent it to protect its interests in the Middle East. Biden has always been notoriously gaffe-prone, but he was also sharp, alert, and articulate enough to deliver a punchline. As journalist Michael Tracey has been pointing out, what we’re consistently seeing over and over again from the former vice president now are not “gaffes”, but clear signs of cognitive decline. Contrast the difference between Biden’s younger footage and what was seen at the last debate with footage of Bernie Sanders throughout the decades, who has remained virtually identical save for appearance and hoarseness. Age does not account for this difference. Biden’s brain is dying.
It is certainly understandable that people are concerned about the presidential frontrunner having a racist worldview. But what’s really weird and creepy is how few people are discussing the obvious fact that the presidential forerunner is also clearly suffering from the early stages of some kind of dementia. The brain that spouted the gibberish transcribed above would probably score poorly on a basic test for the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, yet discussion of his inability to complete a coherent sentence is relegated to the margins of political discourse. This is someone who is campaigning to have access to the nuclear codes, yet we’re only talking about how he’s kind of racist and not about the fact that his brain is turning into Swiss cheese right before our eyes. It’s freaky.
It’s freaky, but it kind of makes sense. One common difficulty in getting early treatment for people with Alzheimer’s disease is that those suffering from it often go to great lengths to hide their impairments, and another difficulty is that their families are often deeply in denial about their loved one’s mental decline. According to the Mayo Clinic, “Some people hide their symptoms, or family members cover for them. That’s easy to understand, because Alzheimer’s dementia is associated with loss, such as loss of independence, loss of a driving privileges and loss of self.”
I think we’re seeing precisely this happening, both with Biden, and with his supporters. Biden himself is clearly doing everything he can to feign mental competency, and as a powerful politician aiming to accomplish a lifelong ambition to become the US president he’d certainly have a lot egoically invested in doing so. His supporters seem to be doing all kinds of denial mental gymnastics around his cognitive decline as well; just check out the responses to this Washington Post tweet for its article about Biden’s “record player” response.
Here are a few examples:
“Don’t pretend you didn’t understand what he was saying.”
“Actually, I recently saw a turntable for sale at Best Buys & vinyl records are back on the market. Try to keep up, WaPo.”
“My 22 year old son and all his friends play records on record players these days. If you’re insinuating that Joe is out of touch, you’re out of touch.”
“Actually currently, there are some people playing record players because they find the vinyl record has better sound quality. I think you are just picking and choosing who to go after.”
“He was saying they not hearing enough words. We did. We were read to. We listened to children’s albums. We had conversations. He was trying to get at the importance of those things. He didn’t do a great job on communicating it but he was right.”
“Twitter snark aside, there are studies to back up that claim.”
“He got 80% of the way through the debate without an embarrassing gaffe that highlights his age. Of course, Trump couldn’t get halfway through a debate without threatening his opponent with imprisonment.”
“Honestly…so what. I got the sentiment.”
“Not sure why people are being so condescending. Vinyl outsold CD last year, so, you know, record players are everywhere these days. You could say he’s stuck in the past or you could say he’s trending. Be kind.”
We saw this same impulse to protect and compensate for Biden’s mental decline from audience members during the debate, who gasped out loud when Julian Castro suggested that Biden had forgotten what he’d said two minutes ago. Many rank-and-file Democrats are so desperate for an end to an administration that is making them increasingly anxious and neurotic that they find it cognitively easier to compartmentalize away from the obvious fact that Biden is in a state of mental decline than to turn and face that reality. So they make excuses and pretend that his demented word salads are perfectly rational, hip references to the resurging popularity of vinyl records.
The only people who are absolutely acutely aware of Biden’s cognitive decline and yet still want him to become president are his handlers. There is no way his consistent pattern of verbal unintelligibility has gone unnoticed by those who are responsible for facilitating his election, and indeed The Hill reports that his “allies” have been floating the idea of scaling back his campaign appearances and scheduling them for earlier in the day when he’s not tired to help minimize his “verbal flubs”. These people are aware that Biden is losing his mind, but they are pushing him toward the White House anyway.
If Biden supporters were really intellectually honest with themselves about what’s going on, they’d see that they don’t actually want Joe Biden to be president, they want his unelected, unaccountable handlers to be president. From a position of intellectual honesty they’d be taking the position of arch neocon Bill Kristol, who once said he’d “prefer the deep state to the Trump state.”
And of course that wouldn’t be a first among US presidents even in recent history. Ronald Reagan had early signs of Alzheimer’s disease during his presidency according to his own son, and George W Bush was infamously just a puppet of his handlers like Dick Cheney. Indeed it would be possible to have an actual, literal Jim Henson puppet as president of the United States without America’s unelected power establishment skipping a single beat.
But that’s exactly the point: having a real human being in there with even a semi-functional mind can put some inertia on the most sociopathic impulses of America’s unelected permanent government. Both Trump and Obama are of course horrible presidents who have continued and expanded the Bush administration’s most evil agendas, but Obama slowed down the push to arm Ukraine against Russia and slammed the brakes on a full-scale bombing campaign on Syria, while Trump was unable to get along with John Bolton and is losing interest in Venezuela while resisting the push to start new wars. Despite all their flaws, they’ve resisted the permanent government’s worst impulses in some key ways. If it’s just Biden’s handlers and the unelected power establishment, there’s no humanity anywhere near the brake pedal.
https://twitter.com/BetaODork/status/1164553547960246272
So this makes sense to talk about no matter how you look at it. But we’re not. In mainstream discourse we’re speaking as though this is just a charmingly gaffe-prone old man who makes a few controversial statements from time to time but would still make a fine president, when really he shouldn’t even be allowed a driver’s license.
And I just find that really creepy and uncomfortable. As someone who’s never been able to leave elephants in rooms alone, the fact that the leading presidential contender is neurologically incapable of speaking coherently for eighty seconds sticks out like dog’s balls and it’s absolutely freakish that this isn’t front and center of our political discourse right now. Biden’s dementia should be the very first thing we discuss whenever his name comes up, not the last.
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Spaciousness: How to Free Your Mind and Stop Living Reactively
By Jordan Bates
Source: High Existence
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
— Viktor Frankl
‘Spaciousness’ is a Buddhist concept that has been profoundly useful and liberating for me.
Perhaps it will prove nourishing for you as well.
Spaciousness feels like having more space in your mind.
It feels like widening the space between stimulus and response, such that you can stop living in reaction and begin responding skillfully to reality.
David Chapman on Spacious Freedom
A couple years ago while perusing David Chapman’s remarkable work, I happened upon an intriguing post on ‘Spacious Freedom.’ [1]
Reading it, I was struck by the clarity and conciseness with which David articulated the powerfully liberating Buddhist concept of ‘spaciousness.’
The post was one of the most concentrated doses of wisdom I’ve ever absorbed, and I’d like to share its essence with you.
I’ll let David take over:
“‘Spaciousness’ is freedom from fixed meanings. Spaciousness liberates you from automatic interpretations, and from habitual responses.
Lacking spaciousness, here is the pattern of life:
- Something happens
- You perceive the event
- You immediately interpret it, based on some familiar framework of meaning-making
- An emotion arises in response to the meaning you have given
- The energy of the emotion demands action
- You do something that seems mandatory based on the emotional interpretation
This is unnecessarily limited at steps 3 and 6:
- There may be other ways to interpret the event. And it may not be helpful to interpret it at all.
- There may be other ways to react to the emotional energy. And it may not be helpful to react at all.
Spaciousness is an attitude: the willingness to suspend the process of meaning-making. Spaciousness is the willingness to allow unknowing, uncertainty, confusion, ambiguity, meaninglessness.
Spaciousness values astonishment, perplexity, and groundlessness. Spaciousness gives experience a quality of freshness: every situation appears unique, not merely as another instance of a familiar category.”
Spaciousness is closely related to cultivating a Beginner’s Mind: a mind that is wide open, non-rigid, non-dogmatic, ready to receive the raw, vivid reality of each moment without immediately judging, filtering, and categorizing it based on preexisting beliefs.
Non-reactive spacious awareness is freedom. The experience of gaining spaciousness is the experience of increasingly feeling that you can choose how to interpret events and choose how to respond to emotional energy, rather than being a slave to habitual patterns.
It is not easy to attain a state of wide-open spaciousness, but it is easy to begin walking the path of cultivating more spaciousness.
You can do this simply by beginning to observe yourself closely. Observe how your automatic reactions and habitual interpretations create your reality. Observe how it would be possible to create a different reality by loosening your grip on your default reactions.
A Story: Flat Tire
Let’s say a person’s car suddenly gets a flat tire.
A person deep in self-pity and resentment will reactively start telling themselves a story like: “God dammit, why does this shit always happen to me? I swear this universe just fucking hates me. Everything is out to get me. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Nothing goes my way.”
This will reinforce their habitual response to reality—that of viewing themselves as a pitiable victim and scanning their environment for evidence to confirm this story.
A spacious, awakened, deeply peaceful person, on the other hand, might respond internally like this: “Ah, I see that this is happening now. Okay. I’ll have to change the tire and will be running a bit later than expected. This could be a fine chance to get some fresh air, appreciate the setting sun, maybe meditate a little. Perhaps this change of timing will have some happy results; we never know what things are good for, after all.”
This simple example illustrates how our state of being and mode of perception create our reality. The very same situation can be experienced as night-and-day different by two people in dramatically different states of being.
This points to the possibility of liberation; it suggests the massive quantity of suffering we can transcend by cultivating a spacious way of being.
Stop Creating “Good” and “Bad”
“… the very search for pleasure is the cause of pain.”
— Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That
A wise woman told me that the root of all our problems is the mental process of judging some experiences as “good” and others as “bad,” some as desirable and others as undesirable.
This dichotomy becomes a torture chamber.
To cultivate spaciousness, I find it useful to practice not judging events, experiences, emotions as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ desirable or undesirable.
Practice seeing whatever is happening as simply ‘what is happening now,’ and trust that whatever is happening is workable, manageable, and likely contains hidden lessons or gemstones.
“Accept — then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your whole life.”
— Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
As you begin to practice this, you’ll find that it’s very difficult, as we’re heavily conditioned to dichotomize the content of our reality into that which is desirable and that which is undesirable.
When we do this, though, we suffer. A lot. If one feels anger, fear, or guilt, yet remains neutral about these things and simply experiences them, they wouldn’t be so difficult. They may even be useful; they may teach us about ourselves. There is nothing wrong with experiencing negativity; this is a universal aspect of the human experience.
But when we experience such things and immediately condemn ourselves for experiencing them, grit our teeth and resist them, and concoct a self-judging story about them that we keep replaying in our minds, we pour kerosene on the fire and make everything feel exponentially worse.
A spacious person will still experience pain in life, as this is unavoidable; but they will suffer far less by responding more skillfully to their pain.
Stop Thinking and End Your Problems
Nothing is inherently a problem; the mind makes it so.
This is why, 2,500 years ago, Lao Tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching, “Stop thinking and end your problems.”
To be sure, we need to think sometimes, but the vast majority of humanity’s mental activity is not helpful; it’s often downright insidious.
When you begin to watch closely, you increasingly notice how the mind is the source of all “problems.”
When you drop your narratives about reality and focus on the sensory data of this moment, “problems” dissolve.
The essence of meditation is to come into a state of deep presence and see clearly the traps of the monkey mind by observing its neurotic movements with openness, gentleness, non-judgment, compassion, and humor. This practice increases spaciousness.
One can do this through forms of sitting meditation, such as focus meditation: Dropping one’s mental stories about reality and simply following the breath, or repeating a mantra, or focusing on the energy of aliveness coursing through the body. The mind will doubtlessly try to pull you away; this is perfectly okay; this is how you learn to see its funny tricks; you simply smile at it then return to the breath, mantra, the aliveness of the body, or another object of focus.
Or, you can practice choiceless awareness: Simply sitting in open awareness, watching thoughts, feelings, phenomena arise but not clinging to them, not choosing one thing over another, allowing all things to drift past like leaves on the breeze. This becomes easier when you begin to see that you are not your thoughts.
One can also practice cultivating spaciousness at any time in day to day life, by observing closely how your conditioned mental-emotional system reacts to reality, conjures up over-dramatic stories about it, and gets you in trouble by ‘hooking’ you into this drama.
You can then practice dropping your stories and simply feeling the energy in your body, allowing it to be just what it is without judging it, and watching it gradually run its course and dissolve. Through this process you begin to un-learn your automatic interpretations/reactions. A lighter way of being becomes possible.
Parting Words: Spacious Flow
“Flow with whatever may happen, and let your mind be free: Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.”
— Chuang Tzu
Much more could be said about spaciousness, but hopefully this introduction has been useful and curiosity-inducing for you.
Meditation—gently observing the mind and non-judgmentally feeling whatever you are feeling—is the key to unlocking ever greater degrees of spaciousness.
If you feel drawn to dive deeper into meditation, I highly recommend reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle; Letting Go by David Hawkins; and taking our self-liberation course, 30 Challenges to Enlightenment.
I’ll leave you with one of my favorite Zen stories. I have a tattoo on my arm that says “we’ll see,” a reference to this story. Ponder how the protagonist in this story embodies spaciousness:
A farmer had only one horse. One day, his horse ran away.
His neighbors said, “I’m so sorry. This is such bad news. You must be so upset.”
The man just said, “We’ll see.”
A few days later, his horse came back with twenty wild horses following. The man and his son corralled all twenty-one horses.
His neighbors said, “Congratulations! This is such good news. You must be so happy!”
The man just said, “We’ll see.”
One of the wild horses kicked the man’s only son, breaking both his legs.
His neighbors said, “I’m so sorry. This is such bad news. You must be so upset.”
The man just said, “We’ll see.”
The country went to war, and every able-bodied young man was drafted to fight. The war was terrible and killed every young man, but the farmer’s son was spared, since his broken legs prevented him from being drafted.
His neighbors said, “Congratulations! This is such good news. You must be so happy!”
The man just said, “We’ll see.”
Cheers to non-reactive spacious awareness.
Cheers to freedom.
Cheers to flow.
Cheers to peace.
Go forth and be spacious.
Saturday Matinee: Trust
“Trust” (1990) is an independent comedy written and directed by Hal Hartley about the relationship between misfits Maria (Adrienne Shelly) and Matthew (Martin Donovan) who are equally alienated in their stifling Long Island town. Equal parts stylized and realistic with a focus on the struggle to live with intelligence and integrity in a society hostile towards such traits, Trust is a quintessential Hal Hartley film.
Watch the full film on Hoopla here: https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/11374855
RFK Jr. Slams Gov’t & Big Pharma In Eye Opening Speech About Forced Vaccinations
By Arjun Walla
Source: Collective Evolution
California has very strict compulsory vaccination laws for children in school, and as a result more parents are deciding to homeschool their children. The latest information regarding vaccines in California that’s making noise is Senate Bill 276 by Senator Richard Pan. The bill eliminated nearly all vaccine medical exemptions. Under this bill, politicians, not physicians, are in charge of deciding whether or not children may receive medical exemptions, which in turn would determine whether or not they can attend school.
This bill, which was recently signed into law, represents medical tyranny that is similar to a police state. Forcing vaccinations on any segment of the population and taking away their freedom of choice is ridiculous. All of this is done under the assumption that unvaccinated children pose a danger to vaccinated children, and this is simply not true for several reasons.
Herd immunity is a largely theoretical concept, yet for decades, it has furnished one of the key underpinnings for vaccine mandates in the United States. The public health establishment borrowed the herd immunity concept from pre-vaccine observations of natural disease outbreaks. Then, without any apparent supporting science, officials applied the concept to vaccination, using it not only to justify mass vaccination but to guilt-trip anyone objecting to the nation’s increasingly onerous vaccine mandates.
In a 2014 analysis in the Oregon Law Review by New York University (NYU) legal scholars Mary Holland and Chase E. Zachary (who also has a Princeton-conferred doctorate in chemistry), the authors show that 60 years of compulsory vaccine policies “have not attained herd immunity for any childhood disease.” It is time, they suggest, to cast aside coercion in favor of voluntary choice.
This is true, in fact, there has been a history of disease outbreaks in heavily vaccinated populations. I wrote an article not long ago providing multiple studies showing this, and the studies are elaborated on and linked in that article, which you can go through here.
According to a MedAlerts search of the FDA Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database as of 2/5/19, the cumulative raw count of adverse events from measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines alone was: 93,929 adverse events, 1,810 disabilities, 6,902 hospitalizations, and 463 deaths. What is even more disturbing about these numbers is that VAERS is a voluntary and passive reporting system that has been found to only capture 1% of adverse events.
How can vaccines produce herd immunity if they’re not safe for everybody? It’s impossible.
The various forms of vaccine failure not only make herd immunity impossible to achieve, but also feed the occurrence of “vaccine-preventable illnesses” in highly or even fully vaccinated populations. There are numerous examples of this in published literature, again, some of which I link and go into greater detail about measles here.
Vaccines Aren’t Safe For Everyone
It’s no secret that vaccines are not completely safe for everyone, it’s clearly not a ‘one size fits all’ product, and that’s evident by the fact that nearly $4 billion has been paid out to families of vaccine injured children via the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA). As astronomical as the monetary awards are, they’re even more alarming when you consider that only an estimated 1% of vaccine injuries are even reported to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). If the numbers from VAERS are correct – only 1% of vaccine injuries are reported and only 1/3 of the petitions are compensated – then up to 99% of vaccine injuries go unreported and the families of the vast majority of people injured by vaccines are picking up the costs, once again, for vaccine makers’ flawed products.
This completely debunks the validity of herd immunity.
Speech From Kennedy
While California’s tragic fall into what might rightly be described as a Medical Police State has many up in arms, RFK Jr. spontaneously delivered a speech outside Gov. Newsom’s office, helping to transform the anger and grief experienced by thousands of shaken onlookers into inspiration and hope, no doubt catalyzing further what is clearly becoming this country’s next grassroots civil rights movement.
In the astoundingly powerful and uplifting speech by RFK Jr. below, one senses the historical importance of what just transpired. And that the fall of California into medical fascism also marks the beginning of a new, broad-based civil rights movement, including all sexes, races, walks of life, religions, and socioeconomic classes — as it concerns the primary, inviolable human right of bodily self-sovereignty and health freedom, and a parent’s right to make informed health choices for their children, which can have life and death consequences. [From the Youtube video description]
Another Informative Statement From Kennedy
Via Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Merck introduced its measles vaccine in 1963, claiming the vaccine would convey lifelong immunity equivalent to a natural infection, with health officials promising that 55% vaccine coverage would produce “herd immunity” sufficient to eradicate measles by 1967.
Leading scientists of the day, including the world’s preeminent bacteriologist, Sir Graham Wilsonand Harvard Virologist John Enders, who first isolated measles, warned against introducing a vaccine unless it provided lifelong immunity. Measles, they cautioned, would rebound with increased virulence and mortality as the vaccine forced the evolution of more virulent strains and shifted outbreaks away from children—biologically evolved to handle measles—to the elderly who could die from pneumonia, and young infants now unequipped with maternal immunity.
A 1984 Johns Hopkins University modeling study predicted that Merck’s population-wide experiment would increase measles outbreaks by 2050, (when the last generation subject to natural immunity died off,) compared to the pre-vaccine era. This is exactly what has happened. Merck’s vaccine, with a growing failure rate has been incapable of abolishing the disease. Vaccine failure has left millions of adult Californians effectively unvaccinated. And 79% of people affected by measles in this year’s California outbreak were adults.
When eradication predictably didn’t materialize and measles attacked fully-vaccinated populations, Merck simply moved the goalpost saying that herd immunity required 75% vaccination, then 85%, then 95%, then 98%. And now 99%. To distract the world’s citizens from its failed vaccine, Merck started blaming “anti-vaxxers.” (The Vaccine Safety Movement)
California’s bought or brain-dead lawmakers are proposing to “fix” Merck’s vaccine failure problem by punishing 4,000 vulnerable children with medical exemptions. In an act of legislative savagery, Democratic politicians propose to forcibly vaccinate children whose doctors have told them that a vaccine could kill or severely injure them. SB276 will not fix the measles outbreak or solve the problem of vaccine failure, it will only reward a corrupt company for a defective product.
The Takeaway
The idea that politicians can force children to be vaccinated, including those deemed to be in danger of severe adverse reactions, and strip them of their rights to attend public school is insane. Freedom of choice and medical freedom should always exist, especially with regards to vaccines. If parents want to vaccinate, fine, but parents who wish to not vaccinate their children for whatever reasons should always have the freedom to do so.
Mandatory vaccination is tyrannical.
“The fight for liberty and health freedom in California is far from over. There will be legal challenges,” said RFK. Jr., “all the way up to the Supreme Court if necessary. In fact, this incident brings to the forefront a deep, dark problem in the United States that has been festering for decades: the rise of the Pharmaceutical industry’s influence on the government to mandate products that the free market would otherwise reject, due to the profound liability these products have now underwritten completely by the government via their indemnification through the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Compensation Act (NCVIA) of 1986. Now, over three decades since the inception of NVICA, that same industry is starting to use the police powers of the state to enforce these mandates.” [Taken from the Youtube description in the video posted above]
Pentagon Joins the War on Alternative Media
By Kurt Nimmo
Source: Another Day in the Empire
Fake news is so threatening to America’s national security, the Pentagon’s DARPA research agency has announced it will launch a project to repel “large-scale, automated disinformation attacks,” according to Bloomberg.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wants custom software that can unearth fakes hidden among more than 500,000 stories, photos, video and audio clips. If successful, the system after four years of trials may expand to detect malicious intent and prevent viral fake news from polarizing society.
As usual, a translation is in order. DARPA is working on a system that will prevent news and analysis contrary to the establishment narrative from rising above the mosh pit that is the lower depths of social media.
U.S. officials have been working on plans to prevent outside hackers from flooding social channels with false information ahead of the 2020 election. The drive has been hindered by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s refusal to consider election-security legislation. Critics have labeled him #MoscowMitch, saying he left the U.S. vulnerable to meddling by Russia, prompting his retort of “modern-day McCarthyism.”
It should be obvious there isn’t any “election-security.” Even with alleged Russian interference—which has zero credibility and is remarkably evidence-free—can’t overcome the fact the election system is rigged in favor of the establishment’s handpicked “public service” careerists. Bernie Sanders knows about this and Tulsi Gabbard is learning.
No amount of “fake news” will change or even marginally impact the system. An astute eleven-year-old, after examining the evidence or lack thereof, would conclude the Russians are not hijacking elections. That job is left up to the DNC, RNC, and the corporate propaganda media.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly rejected allegations that dubious content on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google aided his election win. Hillary Clinton supporters claimed a flood of fake items may have helped sway the results in 2016.
Hillary Clinton followers are simply sore losers. In order to push the fallacy we live in a pluralistic democracy, the state provides the appropriate cover to effectively obfuscate the “deep fake” that is performed every election cycle.
This cover allowed Donald Trump to win the election. Trump didn’t collude with the Russians, he didn’t need to. He took advantage of the widespread discontent of the American people and promised the Make America Great Again.
Beyond Trump’s egotistical flourishes and daily tweet diatribes against enemies real and imagined, he has done little to move the MAGA agenda forward. He is little different than his predecessors—the national debt is in the stratosphere, the wars continue and expand, and the Federal Reserve scam of pumping up the stock market to make it appear all’s well while facilitating the upward shift of wealth to the elite.
But never mind that.
“Where things get especially scary is the prospect of malicious actors combining different forms of fake content into a seamless platform. Researchers can already produce convincing fake videos, generate persuasively realistic text, and deploy chatbots to interact with people. Imagine the potential persuasive impact on vulnerable people that integrating these technologies could have: an interactive deepfake of an influential person engaged in AI-directed propaganda on a bot-to-person basis,” Andrew Grotto at the Center for International Security at Stanford University told Bloomberg.
Because “vulnerable people” are supposedly at risk, the state and its agencies are prepared to implement some sort of fantastical (and likely ineffectual) AI solution to stop unacceptable content from going viral.
The target is not Russians per se, it’s millions of American citizens the state and its secret political police, the FBI, are attempting to prevent from participating in social media and the larger political discussion that is ostensibly democratic but is, in fact, a form of hippodroming, that is to say rigging the political process for a favored outcome by the fixers.
Meanwhile, the state and its Silicon Valley partners are picking off targets one by one, the latest victim being Daniel McAdams at the Ron Paul Institute. His account was permanently suspended for the crime of criticizing Sean Hannity.
“They said I would not be reinstated. My crime? I called Sean Hannity ‘retarded.’ But do a Twitter search on use of the term and you will see its use millions of times with impunity,” McAdams emailed Robert Wenzel after the suspension.
The corporate propaganda media has marginalized dozens of people and ruined careers and reputations by characterizing them as white nationalists, peddlers of fake news and conspiracy theories, and now, directly from the FBI, as national security threats, evil conspiracy-bearing domestic terrorists bent on filling every American head with the illusion of “deep fakes,” fomenting and spreading lies, misinformation, participating in Russian collusion, and keeping company with bad actors (paid agents or dupes for Russia) steering the nation into a white supremacist nightmare.
I was wrong about Hillary. I thought she’d win the election hands-down with the help of the Deep State and its media. I’m making another prediction, but I could be wrong again.
Donald Trump will be roundly defeated next November.
If Democrats take control of the House and Senate, we will witness an inquisition against those of us not on-narrative, beginning with revenge exacted on hardcore MAGA supporters. How effective this jihad is will remain to be seen.
As we have witnessed over the last few months, the state is serious about taking back the narrative and disallowing any contrary narratives put out by “bad actors,” largely libertarians like Daniel McAdams, dissidents on the “New Right,” and disillusioned former MAGAites opposed to endless war and a bankster-dominated state drifting into total authoritarian control freak mode.
EMPIRES ARE A SECRET UNTIL THEY START FALLING
By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese
Source: Popular Resistance
In the past, we have written about the 2020s as a decade when the United States Empire will end. This is based on Alfred McCoy’s predictions (listen to our interview with him on Clearing the FOG). Sociologist and peace scholar John Galtung believes US Empire will fall much faster, losing world dominance by 2020. Much of what he predicted when he said this in 2016 is happening now. In particular, there is a rise in “reactionary fascism” or a desire to go back to the “good old days,” the cost of maintaining the empire is taking an increasing economic toll and other countries are starting to rebuke the US, both its requests for military assistance and its unfair economic demands.
What this means for people in the United States and around the world depends on whether we can build a mass popular movement with the clarity of vision, skills, and solidarity necessary to navigate what is and will surely be a turbulent period. There are no guarantees as to the outcome. Failure to act could result in a disastrous scenario – at best, that the US will continue to try to hold onto power by waging economic and military warfare abroad weakening the economy at home and undermining necessities such as housing, healthcare, education and the transition to a Green economy. At worst, as Galtung describes, there could be “an inevitable and final war” involving nuclear weapons.
When Empire Is In Decline
Alfred McCoy says that it is only when empires are in decline that people begin to recognize they live in an empire and start to talk about it. While discussion of empire hasn’t broken into the corporate media, it is certainly happening in the independent media. A concerted effort by a popular movement could bring it to the fore, just as Occupy changed the political dialogue about wealth inequality and the power of money. People in the US need to face some stark realities when it comes to declining US global power.
For starters, the United States does not currently have the capacity to wage a “Great Power Conflict” even though that is the goal of the national security strategy. The loss of its manufacturing base and lack of access to minerals necessary for producing weapons and electronics means the US does not have the resources to fight a great war. Much of the US’ manufacturing has been outsourced to other countries, including those targeted by US foreign policy. Resources necessary for weapons and electronics are in China, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Venezuela. It’s no surprise that the US is maintaining a military presence in Afghanistan, has increased its presence in Africa through AFRICOM and is struggling to wrest control of Venezuela.
Despite these attempts, the US is not having success. There is no military solution for the US in Afghanistan. As Moon of Alabama explains, the Taliban has taken control of more territory than it has had since the US started the war and has no reason to negotiate with the US. He advises, “The U.S. should just leave as long as it can. There will come a point when the only way out will be by helicopter from the embassy roof.”
Alexander Rubinstein writes the failures in Afghanistan can be attributed to Zalmay Khalilzad, currently the US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation. Khalilzad has led US foreign policy in Afganistan and Iraq since the presidency of George W. Bush, and before that worked with Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who provided crucial support for the Mujahideen to draw the Soviet Union into a quagmire. The writing is on the wall that the US must leave Afghanistan, but that is unlikely to happen as long as people such as Khalilzad and Elliott Abrams, who has a similar ideology, are in charge.
As the US-led coup in Venezuela continues to fail due to a lack of support for it within the country, resilience to the effects of the unilateral coercive economic measures (sanctions) and exposure of attempts to create chaos and terror by paramilitary mercenaries, the US grows increasingly desperate in its tactics. There has already been a failed assassination attempt against President Maduro, a US freight company tied to the CIA has been caught smuggling weapons and the US and its Puppet Guaido have been implicated in a terrorist plot as the failed coup enters a more dangerous phase. This week, the Organization of American States voted to invoke a treaty, the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR), which would allow military intervention. Mexico strongly opposed that possibility. This comes as Venezuela has strengthened troops at the Colombian border after discovering terrorist training camps on the Colombian side. With allies such as Russia and China, an attack on Venezuela would not only hurt the region but could go global.
Despite the Asian Pivot under President Obama during his first administration and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper’s comment this week that the US is directing a lot of energy toward China, analysts predict the US will fail to achieve dominance in the Asia-Pacific. China is purchasing weapons from Russia that are superior to US systems, is strengthening its military coordination with Russia through drills and is expanding its global ties through the Belt and Road Initiative. Matthew Ehret writes in Strategic Culture, “Those American military officials promoting the obsolete doctrine of Full Spectrum dominance are dancing to the tune of a song that stopped playing some time ago. Both Russia and China have changed the rules of the game on a multitude of levels….”
Protests in Hong Kong, as we described in a recent newsletter, are being used to stoke greater anti-China sentiment in the US. As often occurs, the sophisticated propaganda arm of US-backed color revolutions excites leftist activists, but each day it becomes clearer just how deep the US’ influence is. K. J. Noh provides a helpful guide – a list of seven signs a protest is not a popular progressive uprising. One sign is Hong Kong protesters are supporting a bill in the US Congress, the so-called “Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act.” The bill would allow the United States to sanction Hong Kong officials.
Andre Vltchek attended a recent protest and interviewed some of the participants. He found the democracy protesters have little grasp on the oppression Hong Kongers faced under British colonization, they attack anyone who disagrees with them and they are destroying public infrastructure. One of the protest leaders, Joshua Wong, is openly meeting with figures connected to US regime change efforts, and NED-backed organizations are planning an anti-China protest in Washington, DC on September 29. Their new propaganda symbol is a Chinese flag with a Swastika on it. No surprise that was evident at the protests in Hong Kong this weekend.
The US is already at war with China with battlefronts on trade and the Asian Pacific. The propaganda around Hong Kong showing prejudice against China is part of manufacturing consent for the conflict between the US and China, which will define the 21st Century. US militarism is also escalating to involve space. This week, the US conducted its first space war game and Putin warned of a space arms race.
Our Tasks as Activists
It was good news this past week that President Trump asked John Bolton, a white supremacist neocon who disrupted any attempts at negotiation, to resign from his position as National Security Adviser. Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report writes, “Every sane person on the planet should be glad to see Bolton go.” But, even with Bolton gone, the US War Machine will rage on with bi-partisan support. Whether Trump starts to live up to his campaign rhetoric of non-intervention remains to be seen. The appointment of Michael Kozak as the new US envoy to Latin America is a bad sign.
Almost two centuries of Manifest Destiny that went beyond North America to spread US Empire across the globe will not end overnight. It will take a concerted effort to build a national consensus against the dominant ideologies of white supremacy and US exceptionalism to change the course of US foreign policy. Fundamental tasks of that effort include education, organizing and mobilizing. Below are some examples of each.
Education:
The Palestinian Great March of Return, a weekly nonviolent protest in Gaza demanding the right of return granted by the United Nations, continues and each week Israelis injure and murder unarmed Palestinians. Abby Martin and Mike Prysner of The Empire Files produced an excellent documentary about it, “Gaza Fights For Freedom,” and are touring the country to raise awareness. Listen to our interview with Abby Martin on Clearing the FOG. Find a showing near you or organize one.
The United States uses unilateral coercive measures (sanctions) that are illegal under international law to wage war on other countries. The Treasury Department currently lists 20 countries sanctioned by the US, but the US also uses threats of sanctions to wield power. Sanctions are warfare, even though they are not commonly viewed that way. They result in the suffering and death of mostly civilians. Kevin Cashman and Cavan Kharrazian explain how sanctions work, why they violate international law and how they threaten global stability.
Organizing:
Alison Bodine and Ali Yerevani encourage activists to avoid the organizing pitfall of getting caught up in debates about the internal politics of countries targeted by US imperialism. Our tasks, as citizens of imperialist countries, are to stop our governments from intervening in the affairs of other countries and demand they respect international law. We also have a task of building solidarity with civilians of other countries. It will require a global mass movement to address major issues such as the climate crisis, wealth inequality, colonization, and violence.
Citizen to citizen diplomacy is critical in building this mass movement and solidarity. Ann Wright, retired from the military and State Department, writes about the challenges of citizen to citizen diplomacy as she tours Russia. Ajamu Baraka, national organizer of Black Alliance for Peace, reminds us that war and militarism are class issues in his address to an international meeting of trade unions held in Syria.
We are strong believers in breaking out of the confines of the narrative presented by corporate media about countries outside the US. Our trips to Iran and Venezuela this year were invaluable learning experiences. We hope to visit more targeted countries. An effort that came out of these trips is the new Global Appeal for Peace, first steps toward creating an international network to complement the more than 120 non-aligned movement countries that are resolved to respect international law and sovereignty and take action to create peace and prevent the catastrophic climate crisis. Sign on to this effort at GlobalAppeal4Peace.net.
Mobilizing:
The People’s Mobilization to Stop the US War Machine and Save the Planet starts next weekend. On Saturday night, Black Alliance for Peace is sponsoring a discussion, “Race, Militarism and Black Resistance in the ‘Americas’” in the Bronx. On Sunday we will rally and march to the UN with Embassy Protectors, Roger Waters and many more. On Monday night, we have a special solidarity night at Community Church of New York. Registration is required as there will be high-level representatives of impacted countries speaking about the challenges they face. Click here to register.
Rage Against the US War Machine will take place October 11 and 12 in Washington, DC. This is the second annual event organized by March on the Pentagon. Click here for details.
We also ask you to join the Embassy Protectors Defense Committee. Sign the petition to drop the Trump administration’s charges against us for protecting the Venezuelan Embassy this spring. We are facing up to a year in prison and exorbitant fines even though it was the US State Department that violated the Vienna Convention by raiding the embassy in May. We will tour Northern California in October and are planning more tours to raise awareness that the struggle to end the US coup and interventions in Venezuela continues.
John Galtung predicts that the fall of the US Empire could have a devastating impact on domestic cohesion in the United States. As the US loses its position of global supremacy, we have an opportunity to fundamentally reshape what we as a nation represent. We can become cooperative global citizens in a world free of oppression, violence, and poverty if we do the work of joining in international solidarity for these goals.
After the Crash 
