Saturday Matinee: The Great Silence

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Source: Kanopy

On an unforgiving, snow swept frontier, a group of bloodthirsty bounty hunters, led by the vicious Loco (Klaus Kinski) prey on a band of persecuted outlaws who have taken to the hills.

As the price on each head is collected one-by-one, only a mute gunslinger named Silence (Jean-Louis Trintignant, The Conformist) stands between the innocent refugees and the greed and corruption that the bounty hunters represent. But, in this harsh, brutal world, the lines between right and wrong aren’t always clear and good doesn’t always triumph.

Featuring superb photography and a haunting score from maestro Ennio Morricone, director Sergio Corbucci’s bleak, brilliant and violent vision of an immoral, honorless west is widely considered to be among the very best and most influential Euro-Westerns ever made.

“…the film’s masterful imagery…and inventive Ennio Morricone score are spectacular…” – Kenneth Turan, The Los Angeles Times

Must be a member of a major public or university library to watch here: https://www.kanopy.com/wayf/product/great-silence-0

Running Time
106 mins
Year
1968

Book Review: The Doomsday Machine

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By Alex Cox

Source: Lobster Magazine

Until recently I only knew Daniel Ellsberg as the whistleblower who made the
Pentagon Papers public, and for his peace campaigning over the years. I had
no idea that prior to releasing a trove of documents related to the American
War in Vietnam, Ellsberg had been employed by the US Air Force at the RAND
corporation, as a nuclear war planner.

He had originally intended to reveal his nuclear war materials at the same
time as the Pentagon Papers, even though he knew he might face life
imprisonment for doing so. A bizarre series of events, recounted in The
Doomsday Machine, put them beyond the reach of both the FBI and the author.
There is much in Ellsberg’s book that is bizarre, if not amusing, as he recounts
what he learned about the workings of the nuclear-military-political complex. It
is disconcerting reading.

Ellsberg reveals the officially stated policy – that only the President can
authorise nuclear weapons use – to be a fiction. Based on what he learned
reviewing nuclear armed bases for RAND, there is delegation in the use of
nukes at every level. Local base commanders had discretion – or considered
they had it – to launch their nuclear bombers rather than risk losing them. As
in the film Dr Strangelove, there were envelopes aboard each plane containing
secret nuclear go codes (Strategic Air Command [SAC]’s one-size-fits-all
nuclear launch code was 00000000), but there were no recall orders.

As Ellsburg relates, base commanders and bomber pilots had real
autonomy to use their nukes; yet there was no system in place to stop them,
in the event (for example) of an error of judgment, or a presidential change of
heart. His description of the plans to get nuclear-equipped planes airborne at
US bases in Japan is grimly absurd. Smaller bombers were meant to take off in
neat rows, with other rows of bombers following seconds afterwards. Ellsberg
soon saw the possibility that a single pilot error could cause a catastrophic pileup, and atomic explosions, on the runway. Pilots who made it out, and other
US bases, would see or hear of the explosions and assume that Russian bombs
had landed . . . .

Not that it mattered where the US forces thought the bombs came from.
One of Ellsberg’s assignments was to find areas for flexibility in nuclear
weapons use. When he started working for RAND, the US Air Force had one
plan – SIOP, the Single Integrated Operating Plan – which involved a massive,
concerted nuclear weapons salvo against Russia, China, East Germany, Poland,
Hungary, and the other ‘Iron Curtain’ states. President Kennedy and his
defence chief, Robert McNamara, wanted some other options on the table,
besides instantaneous total destruction of all foreign communists and their
neighbours. Ellsberg tried hard to separate US nuclear war plans against
Russia from US nuclear war plans for China, but it was tough going. The Joint
Chiefs preferred one massive nuclear strike (‘general war’ or ‘central war’) to a
piecemeal one.

All the while, Ellsberg writes, he was morally opposed to the bombing of
cities, with the inevitable unnecessary loss of human life. In a brief aside he
recounts his friendship with Sam Cohen – another RAND specialist who liked to
be thought of as the ‘father of the Neutron Bomb’. 1

SIOP also worried Ellsberg since it was a plan for a first strike: all-out first
use of thousands of nuclear warheads against the Soviet Union and its allies, at
a time when the Russians had merely a handful of working atomic bombs.
RAND and Pentagon estimates of damage from nuclear weapons use never
included fire or firestorms; nor the spread of radiation into allied states; nor
the likely consequences for the climate. The consequences of nuclear weapons
use therefore being vastly underestimated, thousands of additional weapons
were built. In presidential briefings, the Pentagon was confident of prevailing
with a first strike: ‘if worst came to worst . . . a preemptive attack on the
Soviet Union would result in less than ten million deaths in the U.S.’

We now know that even a ‘small’ nuclear war – between India and
Pakistan, say – could have climate impacts which would cause billions of
deaths. ‘General’ or ‘central’ wars would do for just about all of us. Ellsberg
was foiled when he proposed changing US targeting policy so that Moscow
would not be destroyed in a first strike: at a NATO meeting, he was told that
even if SAC agreed to spare Moscow, the French would not. Moscow remained
a prime target for French nukes – and presumably for British ones, as well.

Over time, Ellsberg writes, the Russians and the Americans built a
‘doomsday machine’ very like the one Terry Southern envisaged in his script
for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. To protect them against surprise attack,
American and Russian nuclear weapons are numerous, widely dispersed, on
hair-trigger alert. In case the civilian or military leadership is killed, or unable
to communicate, the duty to launch those weapons has been delegated to
pretty much anyone capable of doing so. If the computers say a nuclear first
strike is incoming, if seismographs report massive, blast-style earth tremors, if contact with the leadership breaks down . . . someone will still be there to
push the button/insert the key code/flip the switch.

Ellsberg considers the bombing of civilians – whatever the weapons used –
to be a terrorist atrocity, not an act of war. He calls the ongoing nuclear
standoff between NATO and Russia a ‘moral catastrophe’. If you’re interested in
how close our silly species has come to wreaking its own imminent demise,
this is a valuable and fascinating book by a committed activist and excellent
writer.

 

1 I knew Sam Cohen, too, and he considered his Bomb to be a moral weapon, as it killed
fewer people than the Hydrogen Bomb, and left most of the physical infrastructure intact and potentially usable . . . at least once radiation levels dropped. Sam was insane, of course, but most of the people Ellsberg encountered on board the nuclear weapons project appear to have been insane, in the same way.

Alex Cox is a film-maker and writer.
He blogs at <https://alexcoxfilms.wordpress.com>.

The New Zealand Psyop

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By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Another Day in the Empire\

Following the murder of fifty Muslims at a mosque in Christchurch New Zealand, the corporate media went into overdrive, describing the alleged shooter as a white supremacist Trump supporter.

This is clearly not the case. If we read a “manifesto” attributed to the accused shooter, Brenton Tarrant, we discover he followed the writing of Candace Owens, a “conservative” black woman, and predicts he will be set free like Nelson Mandela. 

Tarrant—if he is indeed the author of this professed manifesto—also criticized the leadership of President Trump and described himself as an “eco-fascist,” a socialist, a libertarian, an anarchist, and at the same time a follower of the Norwegian psychopath Anders Breivik, a self-described white nationalist. 

Despite these glaring incongruities, the agenda-driven corporate media has uniformly characterized the suspect as a white supremacist supporter of Donald Trump while either downplaying or ignoring the ideological contradictions and outright absurdity of Tarrant’s so-called manifesto. 

I believe this event is yet another psychological operation designed to 1) push anti-gun legislation (New Zealand wasted little time after the attack to call for confiscating the firearms of largely law-abiding individuals), 2) stoke and fan the flames of political division and portray “conservatives” as racist, misogynist, and fascist, and 3) conflate Trump (“Hitler”), the “Alt-Right,” and “conservatives” with “white nationalists” who are portrayed by an ideologically-driven media as the dangerous fellow travelers of psychotic murderers. 

The Southern Poverty Law Center set the tone while ignoring the massive contradictions that riddle the document, titled “The Great Replacement,” a title borrowed from the French writer Renaud Camus (“Le grand remplacement”). The book argues the French people and western civilization in Europe are being replaced by immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa. According to the left-leaning controlled information site Wikipedia, Camus is a conspiracy theorist.

“The type of racist rhetoric found in the manifesto is promoted heavily by Americans with large platforms like Rep. Steve King of Iowa and Tucker Carlson of Fox News,” writes Michael Edison Hayden on the SPLC “Hatewatch” web page. 

It should come as no surprise the SPLC would use the attack and a screed supposedly connected to Tarrant as ammunition to unfairly characterize Carlson and King as white supremacists and therefore legitimize (in the minds of progressives) the attacks on them, in particular the Antifa attack on Carlson’s family. 

I believe the shooting and others in the recent past are part of a psychological campaign first to identify and demonize critics of the establishment and then exclude them from political participation and possibly impose more draconian measures. 

In addition, this will give the state an excuse to place further restrictions on free speech and access to social media. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc., have initiated (at the behest of the state) a purge of their platforms based on a “progressive” political litmus test. 

Democrat Beto O’Rourke, a former member of the hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow, and who recently declared his intention to run for president, admitted there is no practical way to confiscate firearms owned by Americans, that number now totaling around 500,000,000 individual rifles and handguns. Instead, O’Rourke wants to circumvent the Bill of Rights and outlaw the sale of firearms, thus going the route New Zealand is now following. 

“In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way,” quipped the master socialist politician, Franklin D. Roosevelt. 

I believe many of these mass shootings, especially those committed by supposed white supremacists and nationalists (many are controlled assets; e.g. Hal Turner), are part of a psychological operation designed to destabilize both America and Europe on a number of fronts. 

From borders and mass migration to economic austerity and the slow-motion erosion of the middle class and the export of industry and wealth by international banks and transnational corporations, we are witnessing a massive plan to usher in a unified global economy with its requirement for totalitarian governance.

For global elites working behind the scenes the ultimate goal is total, unquestioned control,  consolidation of wealth, and the impoverishment of humanity resulting ultimately in a serious reduction in world population. 

Before this can occur, however, the political and intellectual playing field must be cleansed of all dissent. The only dissent tolerated will be that of token groups and individuals keeping alive the illusion that we live in a democracy.

The Alt-Media Has Way More Fun than the Mainstream Media

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

The corporate-state media lives in terror that the truth will somehow leak out of the corporate-Imperial fortress, imperiling their jobs and perks.

It’s not exactly news that the Alternative Media is under assault: skeptical inquiry and dissenting narratives are smeared as “fake news,” and new suspiciously corporate entities (NewsGuard et al.) claim to be “protecting” consumers from “fake news” as cover for their real agenda, which is limiting public exposure to skeptical, dissenting independent analysis.

Social Media and Search corporations are also censoring non-corporate, non-state media, again under the purported guise of stripping out “fake news.”

Despite this semi-official censorship, we in the Alt-Media are having way more fun that the anxiety-ridden serfs in the Mainstream Media. There are many hard-working, honest journalists slaving away in the Mainstream (more accurately, the corporate-state) Media, but there’s the neofeudal reality of their employment: If what they report undermines the ruling elites, they’re not allowed to do their job.

MSM journalists have no agency: they report what they’re told to report. They also have no control over what gets by their employers’ editorial / corporate filters: question a big advertiser and your report will quietly be buried. Question the approved narrative and conclusion, and you’ll be shunned, blacklisted, etc. If you make a fuss, you’ll be let go in the next round of lay-offs.

Everyone who labors in the corporate-state media lives in fear of the truth getting out: hence the full-spectrum freak-out whenever an insider turns leaker / whistleblower: oops, the happy-story cover is blown and the ugly truth is now revealed, including the collusion of the corporate-state media. (In the U.S. PBS / NPR is the quasi-state media, analogous to Japan’s NHK, Britain’s BBC or France’s France24.)

The corporate-state media lives in terror that the truth will somehow leak out of the corporate-Imperial fortress, imperiling their jobs and perks. Their job isn’t to report any truth that lays waste to the self-serving interests of the ruling elites; their job is to protect the ruling elites by “reporting” politically-correct narratives and playing up culturally divisive incidents to distract the masses from any awareness of their political invisibility and lack of financial independence or agency.

The MSM’s other job is to scrub any mass dissent from their “news.” So for example, U.S. corporate-state media coverage of the yellow vest movement in France is near zero. This is not random; it is all part of skewing the “news” to meaningless controversies and fawning politically correct / approved narratives stories.

A working-class rebellion against political and financial invisibility is anathema to America’s ruling elites and their corporate allies in the MSM and hence the minimal coverage. You basically have to understand French to follow on-the-ground Alt-Media coverage in France of the yellow vest protesters.

The American MSM dutifully regurgitates the bogus narrative being pushed by France’s elitist corporate-state media, that the yellow vest protesters are violent and thus need to be crushed by overwhelming paramilitary force. That the protesters are being beaten and provoked to respond to state-ordered violence is left unreported.

We in Alt-Media are confident the truth will eventually come out despite the efforts of the ruling elites and their MSM / social media corporate minions. It’s a lot more fun being on the side of skeptical inquiry and dissent than being behind the leaky dike, anxiously trying to stop the actual facts of the matter from entering the public awareness.

It’s more fun being on the side of free inquiry and meaningful analysis than being on the side of censorship, fear-mongering, propagandistic sowing of discord and the promotion of the corporate-state party line.

You won’t find any MSM reporting on the neofeudal structure of America’s economy and society:

Capitalism, Empire, and the Infernal Gloom Machine

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By Jason Holland

Source: Dissident Voice

Depression is built into this machine and the evidence is plastered on the morose faces of people caught in the clutches of its business as usual activities. Depression is found in the insurmountable debts we owe for spending a lifetime of preparation and labor to serve the machine. In addition to debt, the machine awards us for our servitude with trinkets, gadgets, doodads and gizmos that provide a moment of hollow amusement and then sit on shelves in garages and decay. They represent the planned obsolescence of the human heart. The sacrifice paid for our fetish with materialism is the actual quality of our lives.

The gloom machine tells us the quality of our lives is defined by the machine in the driveway, and the machine that flushes away our excrement, and the machine that chills the tortured slaughtered animal flesh for later consumption, and the machine that flashes pornographic images and supplies numbers detailing how much we are liked by our so called friends. But to us humans it seems that quality of life is more appropriately measured in the amount of disposable time we have to pursue that which we want, and the quality of the community around us, and living without being chronically stressed with threats of being displaced from the land upon which we live for not working hard enough for the machine.

Depression is waking up at 6 in the morning in darkness to sit in traffic for an hour to arrive at a job that we don’t want to be at, only to serve the machinations of people with nothing but greed in their overstuffed bellies. And we go to these jobs so that we can pay rents that are unaffordable, and to service debt we’ll never escape, and we go home in darkness to our lonely lives in places where community is absent with a view of an equally lonely tree or a man-made retention pond which is an upgrade over the view of staring directly at your neighbor’s domicile. Depression is the realization there is no vacation on the horizon, no respite, just more of the same. Depression is knowing that such a life is better than many others have it.

Depression is recognizing the cynics were right about this society, that Cohen spoke truth when he sullenly moaned:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows

Depression is watching art die. The surrealist, the bohemian, the rock ’n roll, and the anti-authoritarian soul has lain down and pledged fealty to the dollar. For money, they’re now all willing to become ready made predictable cubes to be packaged and sold in plastic wrap placed in cleverly designed boxes which deliver to the depressed public what they want, more of something that’s pretty on the outside and vacant within. We are left with monthly subscriptions of more tales of self aggrandizement for the throngs of temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

Depression is watching the worst of us rise to legitimacy and awarded iniquitous riches for it. The popular is depressive, musical hack Cardi B sings about her money money money and she is loved. Jordan Peterson sells cheap self help stolen from better written material decades ago amalgamated with misogyny and dictates of hierarchal subjugation and becomes wildly popular. Trump purveys hatred of people of color and a love of authoritarianism and the depressive people, oh do they eat it up. This is sickness, depressive sickness.

Depression is acceptance of the violent now. The grossly unhappy men with their armaments spread their gloom and horror across the planet and claim righteousness for doing so. Depression is watching society applaud murderous hearts for their crimes who don badges and camouflage and have holidays to celebrate their violent history, while villains are made of those who simply don’t want to stand up for songs of oppression. Thank you for your service to the machine.

Depression is watching notions of resistance and revolution take form in slightly altered subservience. The great reformation desired now is for a “green new deal” that doesn’t come close to mitigating the impending culling of humanity from soon to be ecological catastrophes. Their plans offer only more endless work at the behest of the gloom machine while promising healthcare that will never happen, less debt it will also never deliver, and affordable housing that still won’t solve homelessness. They don’t want to break the machine, just tweak it, and they lack the ability to do that even. Never have I borne witness to such eager slaves and such depressive aspirations. The people seem to adore their cubicle lives, their environmental destruction, their corporations, their debts, their corrupt leaders, their prisons, their banks, and their taxes.

They want to continue to be put to work under the thumb of the status quo western civilization authoritarian mind and this is all the depressed mentally dominated masses can think of as a possible improvement. Instead of wanting to taste real liberty and be actual equals, their dreams are limited to being better treated servants. The gloom machine chugs along fueled with dimwitted ideas sold by boxed-in thinkers without any possibility of escaping the darkness, rather simply offering a more cushy seat for viewing the end of everything.

The machine bellows out demanding more, more, you owe me more, and somehow those wearing red, white, and blue agree and celebrate the demands of the machine. These debts we owe are servitude. The numbers held in digital machines are immoral which demand one must wake up to a dreary existence to do more of what is killing our souls along with the flora and fauna around us.

Depression is the downtrodden plebs who celebrate their corrupt democracy, which is in reality a thinly veiled oligarchy that should be obvious to all. They prop up a system of voting that allows the election of the presidency, a position that shouldn’t exist in the first place in an egalitarian society, to be awarded to candidates who don’t capture the most votes. What little democracy there is in a representative system is lost in totality when the winner of elections need not win the majority of votes. The gloom machine is straight up tyranny.

A non-depressed society would reject being served faux democracy. They’d reject a system absent of reason or compassion and disdain would be for ideas of continuing to support such a destructive way of being. But instead, within the gloom machine shame is reserved for those who don’t want to take part in the busted system, and it venerates those who cast votes for imperialist conquerers and planet destroyers, and those voters are lauded as doing their civic duty for taking part in open public corruption.

Depression is the insincere know it all crowd who are incapable of honest debate and have rarely endeavored to open a book of substance or engage in critical thought, but they know trivialities which they mistake as facts and wisdom. They know arrogance well and emanate it with aplomb. They know how to believe all they see in the corporatized media, but thinking without boundaries or limitations is beyond their capacity. This is not even depression, this is tragedy.

Depression is watching the trees be plowed down for more tract housing, a portion of which will sit empty for years because no one can afford to move there, and even if they could it’s a heinous boring life that awaits which is only significantly better compared to being homeless. Depression is knowing this is the reason why we are rapidly destroying our habitable environment and commencing a 6th mass extinction event which is now accelerating.

Depression is to know there is nothing we can do to stop the country we live in from mercilessly killing innocent people all over the world for no reason other than more economic expansion and our sadistic ideas of exceptionalism that entail spreading pain and hardship so a few elites can have more of what they already have more than enough of.

Depression is the powerlessness to change anything of significance. There is no other way they say other than the desolate gloom machine, they say this is how it must be. And so we remain here waiting for the horror that is soon to approach us all as the gloom descends in ever quickening waves.

A zombified indoctrinated populace can see no other way than capitalism and beating each other over the heads to satiate egos in needless competition that is unnecessary for survival and deleterious to the common good. Capitalism is the primary tool of empire, and a word that should be synonymous with depression. It’s the accumulation of resources in an effort to gain more power in man-made markets to leverage that power over other people and get them to do what the person with the most power desires. Capitalism’s depressing ideology is defined by the lecherous desire for more for the sake of it so the winner can pound their simian chest in victorious celebration of the devastation they’ve created.

Capitalism is inherently unsustainable due the way it allows power to coalesce via the leveraging abilities given to money to buy land, the means of production, elections, and advertising. It allows the whims of the few to overrun the needs of the many where those with the worst intentions aspire to gain more than others because they will attempt to fill the void in their hearts with self importance expressed via power over others. This is why it cannot be used.

If there is no central currency or advantage to collecting huge amounts of resources then the motivation to hoard would evaporate, as those resources would simply rot or become a burden to maintain. There’s no fun in that kind of hoarding. The “fun” comes to the simpleton power seeker when they acquire power to make others do what they want and thus gain the ephemeral validation they so desperately seek.

If one runs the math on players competing for money at different rates of gain over a certain amount of time, there will be a doubling effect which becomes exponential. And this effect will accelerate as it plunders along due to gains in leverage which allows for ever greater amounts of money to be made at faster rates. Eventually it always ends the way a game of monopoly ends, someone has all the power and everyone else is subservient to that entity/person.

These dour thoughts manifest from the recognition of the stranglehold empire has over our lives. The depression is the result of the myriad of expectations I can’t let go of that wants to see a kinder more egalitarian and sustainable world emerge while knowing how unlikely it is. Our collective depression is rooted in the foundations of social hierarchy and its economic tools of control, and understanding what a perfect trap it is, and so it goes, and everyone doesn’t know, but they feel it, though.

Why only fools trust America’s mainstream ‘news’

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: CounterCurrents.org

Here will be yet another current example to demonstrate that all U.S. mainstream ’news’ media hide from their respective public that the U.S. government is lying, when the U.S. government lies—i.e., that all of the mainstream ’news’ media in America hide the truth, when the government itself is lying. In other words: the U.S. mainstream ’news’ media are propaganda organs for the U.S. government.

While some American news media are Democratic Party propagandists, and others are Republican Party propagandists, and therefore all of them eagerly expose lies that are of only a partisan nature, none of them will expose lies that both parties share—such as, in 2002 and 2003, the central fact at that time. They hid that George W. Bush and his administration were outright lying to the public in each and every instance in which they said they possessed conclusive evidence that, as Bush himself put it on 7 September 2002 (and no mainstream and only one alt-news medium exposed as being a lie): “a report came out of the Atomic—the IAEA that they [Iraq] were six months away from developing a [nuclear] weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need [before invading].” That was his answer when he was asked at a press conference on 7 September 2002, “Mr. President, can you tell us what conclusive evidence of any nuclear—new evidence you have of nuclear weapons capabilities of Saddam Hussein?” Immediately, the IAEA said then that there was no such “new report,” and that the last they were able to find, there was nothing at all left of WMD, nor of an ability to make any, in Iraq. The American news media simply ignored the IAEA’s denial that they had issued any new report at all such as Bush had alleged they had issued. Republican ‘news’ media hid that Bush’s allegation was a lie, and Democratic ‘news’ media likewise hid it. And, so, the American people trusted Bush, and destroyed Iraq. (Anyone who says that America’s invasion didn’t vastly harm the Iraqi people is either a liar or else ignorant of the realities, such as the last two links document.)

The example this time will be taken from The Week magazine, which is a compendium of summaries of the week’s ’news’ from America’s major ‘news’-media. The 1 March 2019 issue had this, on its page 8:

“Aid for Venezuela: U.S. military planes delivered more than 180 tons of humanitarian aid for Venezuela to the Colombian border city of Cucuta this week, setting up a showdown with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who has vowed to block the supplies. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) made a surprise visit to Cucuta and told Venezuelan troops stationed at the border that it was their patriotic duty to let aid through. ‘Will you prevent the food and medicine from reaching your own people?’”

The presumption there is that readers are simply too stupid to wonder, “Why should I trust that this military plane doesn’t also carry weapons for supporters of a coup to overthrow Venezuela’s president and to replace him with Trump’s choice, Juan Guaido—trust that weapons aren’t included in the cargo of ‘food and medicine’? Is Trump really so kind a person as to care about the Venezuelan people? Or is this instead yet another U.S. set-up for a brutal coup, such as the U.S. did in 1953 to Iran, and in 1954 to Guatemala, and in 1973 to Chile, and, more recently, in 2014, to Ukraine?”

That ‘news’ report, since it’s from The Week, is about what other U.S. propaganda agencies are saying, and it’s true about that (they actually are saying this), but it’s summarizing from two very untrustworthy ‘news’ media, one being a tweet from Senator Rubio on 18 February 2019 that was immediately posted at sites such as ABC News, and the other being a ‘news’ report from the Miami Herald, which added that this shipment came from USAID—and yet they ignored that USAID is a major part of almost every U.S. coup.

Here’s more context about this incident of ‘aid’ shipments: On 6 February 2019, Britain’s Daily Mail, which is less dishonest about the U.S. government than U.S. ‘news’ media are, headlined “Venezuelan officials accuse the US of sending a cache of high-powered rifles on a commercial cargo flight from Miami so they would get into the hands of ‘extreme right fascist’ groups looking to undermine Maduro’s regime”, and reported that:

Officials in Venezuela have accused the US of sending a cache of high-powered rifles and ammunition on a commercial cargo flight from Miami so they would get into the hands of President Nicolás Maduro’s opponents.

Members with the Venezuelan National Guard [GNB] and the National Integrated Service of Customs and Tax Administration [SENIAT] made the shocking discovery just two days after the plane arrived at Arturo Michelena International Airport in Valencia.

Inspectors found 19 rifles, 118 magazines and 90 wireless radios while investigating the flight which they said arrived Sunday afternoon.

Monday’s bust also netted four rifle stands, three rifle scopes and six iPhones.

And here’s yet more context: the independent American journalist Aaron Mate, tweeted on 18 February 2019:

Aaron Mate

Page 136 [near end of Ch. 4] of [Andrew G.] McCabe’s new [and only] book [THE THREAT, which was published on 19 February 2019], recounting a [July] 2017 Oval Office meeting: “Then the president talked about Venezuela. That’s the country we should be going to war with, he said. They have all that oil and they’re right on our back door.” [Stated there by the authoritarian McCabe, in order to prove how crude Trump is, and McCabe was not condemnatory of such international thefts of Venezuela’s natural resources, but only of Trump’s crudity.]

12:59 PM – 18 Feb 2019

Furthermore, yet another independent journalist, Ben Norton, at “The GrayZone Project,” headlined on 29 January 2019, “Corporate Interests—Militarist John Bolton Spills the Beans”, and he provided a complete transcript of a brief interview that John Bolton had done with Fox Business Channel five days before, on January 24. That interview wasn’t publicized by Fox, and its headline was as dull as possible, “Venezuela regime change big business opportunity: John Bolton”, and the ‘news’ report posted below it was empty of anything important, but Ben Norton captured the entire interview, and on January 29 he posted it to YouTube and to The GrayZone Project as a news report, with the full interview-segment also being transcribed there by Norton. In it, Bolton had said, on January 24:

We’re looking at the oil assets. That’s the single most important income stream to the government of Venezuela. We’re looking at what to do to that. … We’re in conversation with major American companies now that are either in Venezuela, or in the case of Citgo here in the United States. … It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.

Of course, that’s an attempt at theft of the property of another sovereign nation—theft of natural resources assets of Venezuela, from the people who live in Venezuela—it’s a huge theft attempt, which is being bragged about by the U.S. regime. Though they’ve done this type of heist in many instances during the past few decades (including in Iraq, where U.S. oil companies now extract), Bolton’s outright bragging about it is certainly extraordinary, and thus is major news. This was major news that however hasn’t been focused upon except in the few honest sites, all of which are non-mainstream (most non-mainstream sites are just as dishonest as America’s mainstream ones are—they’re fake ‘alt-news’ instead of authentically against false ‘news’, but all mainstream national news sites routinely report lies stenographically, as if what the government says is always true, and so they’re propaganda). The GrayZone Project is one of the few honest sites, and Norton luckily discovered this huge news-break from the blunder by Fox Business Channel to have aired it—that revelation having been a freak event by America’s major media, a rare slip-up.

And, finally, the great investigative journalist Wayne Madsen headlined sarcastically but truthfully on 4 March 2019, “Military Intervention and Mercenaries, Inc. (MIAMI)”, and he (a journalist whose trustworthiness I have checked and verified for many years—he’s really one of the best) opened with:

The city of Miami, Florida may have started out as a retirement mecca for winter-worn pensioners from northern climes. However, after the beginning of the Cold War and US military and Central Intelligence Agency intervention in Guatemala, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Guyana, the Bahamas, and other Western Hemisphere nations, Miami became a refuge for exiled wealthy businessmen escaping populist revolutions and elections in South and Central America and spies. The retirement and vacation capital of the United States quickly became the “Tropical Casablanca.”

Now home to thousands of limited liability corporations linked to the CIA, as well as private military contractors, sketchy airlines flying from remote Florida airports, the interventionist US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), and exiled oligarchs running destabilization operations in their native countries, Miami—or MIAMI, “Military Intervention and Mercenaries, Inc.”—serves as the nexus for current Trump administration “regime change” efforts. …

Earlier, on February 18, President Trump had delivered a lengthy speech in Miami, titled “Remarks by President Trump to the Venezuelan American Community”, and this was obviously aimed at passionate enemies of Venezuela’s government. Here is a typical passage, with accompanying documentations of the actual truth regarding his lies as stated there. Trump’s allegations are in boldface italics, and my commentaries are in regular type within brackets, and linked there to my sources:

Not long ago, Venezuela was the wealthiest nation, by far, in South America. [The allegation that Venezuela’s economy has done less well since Hugo Chavez became President on 2 February 1999 is disconfirmed by World Bank data showing that Venezuela reached its all-time-high economic-growth rate in 2004, 5 years after Hugo Chavez became democratically elected and took office as the country’s President. The economy rapidly declined as soon as the U.S. started its coup-attempts. Furthermore, a scientific study of the data showed in 2017 that: “Mexico’s and Venezuela’s numbers on this question [[of ‘Where would you place our country ten years ago?’”]] with a 1 to 10 scale, from absolutely democratic, to not democratic, throughout the period of 2013-2017, compared to those of other countries in the region, clearly show Venezuela as the country where the highest percentage of people believed that democracy had increased during the 2003-2013 decade. Mexico ranked in twelfth place, out of eighteen surveyed countries. “This comparison helps to dimension the solid sense that Venezuelans had about the strength of their democracy during the Chávez administration, and the weak one that Mexicans had.”] But years of socialist rule have brought this once-thriving nation to the brink of ruin. [That too is false—socialism wasn’t the cause of Venezuela’s economic come-down. Venezuela’s boom-time was the period of massive public-debt buildup prior to the exceptionally high oil prices in 1973-1985, as shown in “Figure 4: Venezuela Real GDP per Capita”. Moreover, as the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia says about Venezuela: ”The election in 1973 of Carlos Andrés Pérez coincided with an oil crisis [[the OPEC oil-embargo]], in which Venezuela’s income exploded as oil prices soared; oil industries were nationalized in 1976. This [oil-nationalization and oil-production investment all at the worst possible time] led to massive increases in public spending, but also increases in external debts, which continued into the 1980s when the collapse of oil prices during the 1980s crippled the Venezuelan economy.“ That “oil crisis” was actually the period of exceptionally high oil prices resulting from Israel’s 1973 invasions and OPEC embargoes, but it was actually hell for Venezuela because Venezuela was losing money on each barrel of oil sold because only the Arabic countries and Iran were able to sell profitably their oil after the period of OPEC”s oil-embargo. Venezuela, seller of the world’ dirtiest oil, after 1976 was losing money on each barrel, when they had to repay all those foreign loans amassed during the boom-period.]  That’s where it is today.

The tyrannical socialist government nationalized private industries and took over private businesses.  They engaged in massive wealth confiscation, shut down free markets, suppressed free speech, and set up a relentless propaganda machine, rigged elections, used the government to persecute their political opponents, and destroyed the impartial rule of law.

In other words, the socialists have done in Venezuela all of the same things that socialists, communists, totalitarians have done everywhere that they’ve had a chance to rule.  The results have been catastrophic.

In conclusion, then, no country in the world has a press that’s more dishonest than the United States of America does. “More dishonest” than this press would even be a ludicrous concept. Though the particular lies that are being promoted elsewhere might happen to be different, they can’t be worse. America’s having destroyed Iran and Libya, etc., is proof of this.

Consequently: Only people who possess a thoroughly scientific orientation toward confirming and disconfirming allegations, are capable of extracting from such ‘news’ a realistic understanding of what’s actually happening. The vast majority of people can be fooled, and they can be fooled constantly and even for (as in the instance of America, since at least 2003) decades, and yet still trust the institutions that have deceived them so mercilessly through all of those decades. This is the major reason why the United States is a dictatorship, not a democracy—and why any ‘news’ site which calls the U.S. a ‘democracy’ is thereby clearly demonstrating its untrustworthiness. But, of course, only honest news reporting organizations are publishing this report. And there will probably be very few that will do that, though all are receiving it for publication.

GIVE AMERICA’S ‘HELICOPTER PARENTS’ A BREAK

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Hovering parents don’t need lectures. They need a more equal nation.

By Sam Pizzigati

Source: OtherWords

A good many of us aging baby boomers are having trouble relating to the “helicopter parents” of our modern age — those moms and pops constantly hovering over their kids, filling their schedules with enrichment activities of every sort, worrying nonstop about their futures.

Back in the middle of the 20th century, baby boomers didn’t grow up like that. We lived much more “free-range” childhoods. We pedaled our bikes far from hearth and home. We organized our own pick-up games. We spent — wasted! — entire summers doing little bits of nothing.

We survived. So did our parents. So why do parents today have to hover so much?

The standard explanation: Times have changed. Yes, today’s parents take a more intense approach to parenting. But they have no choice. The pressures of modernity make them do it.

Economists Matthias Doepke of Northwestern University and Fabrizio Zilibotti of Yale have followed all the debate over helicopter parenting, and they’re not jumping on this blame-modernity bandwagon. If the pace and pressures of our dangerous digital times are driving parents to hover, the pair points out, then we ought to see parents helicoptering across the developed world.

We’re not.

In fact, researchers have found significant differences in parenting styles from one modern industrial nation to another. Parents in some nations today have parenting styles as relaxed as anything aging baby boomers experienced back in the 1950s. In other nations, by contrast, parents seem as intense as today’s helicoptering norm in the United States.

How can we account for these differences?

Doepke and Zilibotti have a compelling explanation. Levels of helicopter parenting, they note, track with levels of economic inequality. The wider a society’s income gaps, the more parents hover.

The two countries most notorious for their helicopter parenting, China and the United States, just happen to sport two of the world’s deepest economic divides. And those more relaxed parenting days of mid-20th century America? They came at a time when the United States shared income and wealth much more equally than the United States does today.

What’s going on here? Why should economic inequality have any impact on parenting styles?

In severely unequal nations, the evidence suggests, childhoods have become high-stakes competitions. Only the “winners” go on to enjoy comfortable lives when they grow up. You either make it into the ranks of your nation’s elite or you risk struggling on a treadmill that never ends.

In more equal societies, you don’t have to matriculate at the “best” schools or score a high-status internship to live a dignified life. In societies with income and wealth more evenly distributed, broad swatches of people — not just elites — live comfortably. That leaves parents, as Doepke puts it, “more room to relax and let the kids just enjoy themselves.”

Parents in highly unequal nations can’t afford to relax. They have too much to do. They have to shape their kids into winners. But the competition their children face will always be rigged, because the already affluent in deeply unequal societies have more time and money to invest in that shaping.

Researchers Doepke and Zilibotti call for greater public investments in social services — like quality child care — to narrow the competitive advantage that wealth bestows upon affluent American families.

The investments they recommend would certainly help ease the pressure on working households. Would they be enough to get our parents more relaxed? Not likely, not so long as rewards keep concentrating in the pockets of the few at the expense of the many.

Our helicopter parents, in short, don’t need fixing. Our economic system does.