Will The Real Invader Please Stand Up?

Conversations between some people can seem a lot like beating a dead horse over and over again until the horse has been turned into equine hamburger.  This is especially true when one party in the conversation is trying to communicate the truth, and the other party has made up his mind to refuse to understand that truth - presumably, because it's to the other party's advantage to not understand.  As Upton Sinclair once wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it."  So it seems to be with many who are commenting on the influx of refugees from the Mideast and North Africa into Europe.

Most of these commenters have written at great length of the dangers of letting said refugees (dirty, uncouth and savage "invading hordes") into the pure, precious, civilized sanctuary that is supposed to be Europe.  Indeed, such charity has been characterized as "committing suicide" (culturally, I presume) by at least one highly placed Eurasian politician.  Granted, there are Europeans who - very, very grudgingly - acknowledge that maybe, just maybe it is a good and moral thing to give a little bit of sanctuary to the Arab and Mideastern refugees whose homelands Europe has recently helped to destroy.  Yet many of these same Europeans object fervently to letting black Africans into their special precious sanctuary.

Well, okay, if that's the way you want to be, fine (although I am of African descent, and I am black!)  But have you thought of asking why Black Africans might want to emigrate to Europe in the first place?  If so, I have some ready answers to such a question.  In an earlier post, I described how forced migrations of peoples result from the robbery and plunder of those peoples by a nation skilled at robbery which then concentrates the majority of the resources of nations within its own borders, leaving almost nothing for those nations which it has robbed.  When we look at what European nations have done to Africa, there are plenty of examples of this process.  I will name a few recent cases for you to chew on.

First, there is the case of Nigeria, where the peoples who inhabit the Niger delta have suffered for at least two decades from the petroleum extraction activities of rich multinational corporations such as Royal Dutch Shell.  The pollution, not only from routine oil extraction, but also from lax operations and oil spills, has severely degraded living conditions in the Delta, and has seriously disrupted indigenous ways of life that were far less destructive to the land than the changes which the Europeans have brought.  Not only this, but the leaders of the Nigerian government have been installed by European and American multinationals for the purpose of keeping oil extraction costs low and profits sky high, thus insuring that the ordinary people of Nigeria will not benefit from the exploitation of their nation's resources.  Many of these ordinary Nigerians have risen up in opposition to this exploitation, and are now being branded as "terrorists" and "insurgents."  (See this and this also.)  As their homelands are wrecked in order to satisfy the European and American thirst for petroleum products, where will these people go?

The Nigerian oil situation is but a very small subset of the issue of the way Europe and the United States look at the African continent and the peoples who reside there.  I am thinking particularly of recent articles I have read in the financial press, as well as press releases by various mining companies which all describe Africa as a "treasure trove" of various things wanted by Europe and the Anglo-American empire.  There are also a number of interesting "players" in the African resource-extraction market, such as African Minerals, a mining company based in Sierra Leone, which was sued by villagers in that country for violently evicting those villagers from land wanted by the company, along with violent treatment of its workers, including a fatal shooting of a worker by police.  The incidents took place from 2010 to 2012.  The head of African Minerals, a Mr. Frank Timis, led his company into bankruptcy in 2015, and is now embroiled in a bitter legal dispute with investors.  Mr. Timis, who possesses dual Romanian and Australian citizenship, was also convicted twice for dealing heroin.

Then there is the matter of coastal African nations and the peoples who make a living on those coasts by fishing.  They have a long-standing problem, namely, that European fishing operations have depleted their coastal fisheries to the extent that the locals can no longer easily make a living.  When the locals try to oppose the overfishing of their own resource because they can no longer make a living, they are branded as "pirates."  (See this also.)

Lastly, there is the issue of land grabs, either by foreign multinationals or by the local government proxies installed by these multinationals.  Take Ethiopia, for instance, whose government is taken from a minority of the population, yet which uses its power (financed in no small part by the United States) to expel members of the majority Oromo population from their lands in order to clear the way for "development."  (See this, this and this.)

The instances I have mentioned are but a small scratch of a very large surface, beneath which lies a very large reservoir of wrongdoing.  These things are the means by which life in Africa has become a painful burden for many Africans, and the motivation behind their desire to escape to places where they may live in peace and safety.  Peace and safety - two things for which almost every human being longs.  And yet, there are those in Europe, who after plundering and destroying other peoples' homelands for the sake of enriching their own, can't seem to understand why those other people would want to seek peace and safety in Europe.  Those who regularly read my blog know that I seek to promote mutual hospitality and Christian charity of all peoples one toward another.  I really mean that.  Sharing, mutual exchange, and learning from one another ought to be encouraged as much as possible.  However, if Europeans don't want to have to share their precious society with "invading hordes" whom they themselves have created, then let them get out of Africa (and other places!).  Stop looking at other people's homelands as a "treasure trove" to be exploited for the use of pure, special Europeans.  Stop stealing other peoples' stuff.  It is that simple.  (You can even stop looking at the deserts of North Africa as an untapped solar resource, as far as I'm concerned.  I am sure you'd try to find a way to exploit that resource without paying the inhabitants of the lands you used.)  Once you all start leaving other people alone, you'll be free to give up your Munchausen-false flag complaints about other people trying to overrun or "de-civilize" your pure society.  Fortunately, Europe and the U.S. are currently being helped (albeit involuntarily) to give up their thievery by the current collapse in commodities markets.  After a while, in most cases, crime really doesn't pay.  In the long run, it never pays.

An Alternative View of China

2024 Note: Please forgive the pro-Russian bias in the 2016 version of this post.  It has turned out that Russia has proven itself to be a nation of thugs ruled by a thug named Vladimir Putin, and that Russia is actually guilty of trying to turn the world into its global empire.  Witness the Russian meddling in the 2016 elections and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  I still have great respect for China, although I'm somewhat less than enthusiastic about Xi Jinping.  For a more up-to-date presentation of my views on Russia, please read the posts on Russia on the sidebar of this blog.  Also, please note that the producer of the "Saker" podcast has shown himself to be a liar, a hired mouthpiece of Vladimir Putin.

A lot has been written lately in the financial press and in the "doom-o-sphere" about the supposed implosion of China's economy.  If you read sources like the Wall Street Journal, or listen to people like George Soros, the current deflationary financial crisis which is sweeping the world is supposed to be hitting China especially hard.  Yet there is an alternative view.  Remember that China is one of the last large nations which is fighting to maintain its sovereignty in the face of efforts by the Anglo-American empire to wreck and subjugate it.  Remember also the attempt at a "color revolution" which was staged in Hong Kong in 2014.  I am also thinking of a podcast which I heard in which the speaker suggested that the West might try to punish China for its support of Russia during recent Western efforts to wreck the Russian economy.  It stands to reason that the attempted punishment of China would be performed with the same tools used to attempt to punish Russia.

To be sure, China's economic policies could stand a bit of correction.  It's not a sustainable policy to try to get something for nothing by attracting foreign investors to bet on perpetual economic growth in a finite country on a finite planet.  A much better policy at this stage of the game is to voluntarily transition one's country to the kind of society that can function well and sustain itself even in an age of scarcity.  That way, other countries can't hold you hostage.  Nevertheless, I would not be willing to bet that China is ready to collapse.  That doesn't seem to be a safe bet.

Deep Fiction and Hip Boots

It's been interesting to read much of what has been written within the last three months about Syria and the Western "fight against terror," both from the mainstream media and from those American bloggers whom Walter M. Miller would have described as a "fine patriotic opinionated rabble."  The mainstream media line began with an insistence in September and October that Russian intervention in Syria was killing "moderate Syrian rebels opposed to Assad".  Later, after several bloggers cited mainstream media sources and Wikileaks documents showing that the "moderate rebels" funded by the U.S. were one and the same as ISIS, the line shifted to statements that, "well, we made some mistakes.  But while ISIS may have arisen from groups originally funded by the West, it has taken on an identity of its own.  We have lost control of it.  It is self-funded and self-supporting, and is therefore really the bogeyman we have made it out to be!  Support our fight against ISIS!!!"

So many mainstream outlets are spouting that line nowadays that it's becoming increasingly hard to go back to the primary sources which show that all that noise is in fact a pack of lies.  But if one is determined and has the time for it, one can still dig out the truth.  This weekend, I have a rare bit of spare time, and that is exactly what I've been doing with my time.  Today's post is designed to equip you, the reader with a sturdy, leak-proof pair of hip boots so that you may be able to wade through piles of "deep fiction" without being sullied and without losing your footing on the firm ground of truth.  Let's go for a walk, shall we?

First, then, let's discuss the origins of the movement now known as ISIS.  Those origins go back to the late 1970's, when a pro-Marxist government came to power in Afghanistan, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security advisor,  proposed a program of fomenting armed rebellion against the new regime.  In an interview later, Brzezinski admitted that one of his goals was to draw the Soviet Union into a bloody armed conflict in Afghanistan.  Unfortunately, the Soviets fell for the gambit, and sent in troops in December 1979.  The Soviets found themselves facing an armed opposition which was largely drawn from radicalized Muslims who were foreign to Afghanistan, who had been recruited by the United States or its proxy countries.  These warriors were at first deemed by the CIA to be more reliable for American interests than the native Afghans.  However, a program was begun to radicalize the Afghan population, and this program reached even into Afghan schools with the supply of very violent propagandistic textbooks to Afghan children.  (See this also.)  The documents to which I have linked also show that U.S. funding of jihadist groups continued even after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, and into the 1990's.

From 1992 until circa 2005, the trail of money and arms becomes somewhat harder to trace.  I am sure that it could be traced, but it would take me quite a bit longer than a weekend to do so.  (Here's a homework assignment for some adventurous soul, if you want it.  And here is a good starting place.)  However, the trail becomes easy to pick up again if we look at the last decade and a half.  The trail is crystal-clear in Syria.

For instance, we now know without a doubt that a major goal of U.S. policy from 2005 onward has been the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.  The chosen pretext for this overthrow has been concern that President Assad stood in opposition to "human rights" and "democracy" in Syria.  (Bloody hypocrites!  If you're so concerned about "human rights," why are so many of you silent in the face of the abuses perpetrated by the prison-industrial complex, the police and the schools against people of color and dark-skinned immigrants right here in the U.S.?  Serpents!  Brood of vipers!)  So starting from 2005 onward, various foreign actors (including Israeli and Turkish special operatives) staged "incidents" which "proved" that Assad was "abusing his people" and had to be removed.  (There's also this, this and this.  Note that the Turkish journalists who reported the role of Turkey in Syria are now in Turkish jails.)

So it was that the U.S. found it desirable to create, fund and grow an "opposition" movement in Syria, a movement which quickly became an armed rebellion with arms supplied by the U.S.  As it was in Afghanistan, so in Syria also this movement is largely composed of fighters who are foreigners to Syria, fighters who are loyal to al-Qaeda, who was the bogeyman du jour prior to the emergence of ISIS (and whom the U.S. blamed for the 9/11 attacks, thus starting the American "War on Terror").  Here is a list of sources who trace the direct funding and equipping of these fighters by the United States from 2013 onward:

• "Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With Aid from CIA"
• "West Training Syria Rebels In Jordan"
• "Americans Are Training Syria Rebels In Jordan: Spiegel"
• "Secret CIA Effort In Syria Faces Large Spending Cut"

As to my assertion at the beginning that we know with dead certainty that many, if not all of the "moderate rebels" who were trained and equipped by the U.S. to overthrow Assad are one and the same as ISIS, see this, this and this.  The last link in that previous sentence shows that the Pentagon saw ISIS as a strategic asset to weaken Shia influence in the Mideast.

So then, what exactly has the U.S. been doing in its "fight against ISIS"?  First of all, the U.S. has been knowingly fighting a bogeyman of whom it is well known that it poses no threat to the U.S.  The fight has also been a sham fight, in which after Obama's public vow to "crush ISIS," ISIS managed to overrun more than 70 percent of Syrian territory and large swaths of Iraq while U.S. warplanes destroyed infrastructure (oil refineries and other petroleum facilities, power plants, water treatment plants, and the like) located in territory belonging to President Assad, thus helping to create the current refugee crisis.  Note also that U.S. warplanes recently bombed Syrian troops under the pretext of "fighting terror," then lied about it.  Meanwhile, the U.S. was, until very recently, very sparing in its attacks against known ISIS targets - until the Russian intervention in October, which targeted, among other things, ISIS convoys illegally smuggling oil out of Syria and into Turkey.  The fact that Russia is genuinely trying to crush these terrorists and is not playing games became a major embarrassment to the U.S., which responded by delivering an airstrike of its own against an ISIS oil convoy - but not without dropping leaflets warning ISIS truck drivers of the attack nearly an hour beforehand.

As for that stolen oil, it is also well known that ISIS has been benefiting the West by providing illegal sales of stolen Iraqi, Libyan and Syrian oil at less than half the fair market value, and that one of the major beneficiaries of this oil has been Turkey.  (See this also.)  This illegal oil trade has been known for at least a year, by the way.

So there you have it - ISIS as a bogeyman who is also a secret teddy bear of some well-placed, powerful interests in the West, and specifically in the United States.  You can see how ISIS the bogeyman has been used as an instrument to divide and break strong sovereign states into failed states that are easily controlled and looted by the West.  (You can also see the parallels between the uses made of ISIS and the use by the West of a bunch of foreign mercenaries and thugs of the worst type to break up the Ukraine.  Too many of our "revolutions" have relied on "lewd fellows of the baser sort.")

You also have a bit of history to put the ISIS bogeyman into proper perspective.  Out of that history I have fashioned a sturdy pair of hip boots.  Yet I know that there are those, both great and small, in America who would rather wade through fields of deep fiction without any protection for their feet, because, while the truth will set a person free, it will also smash any patriotic narcissistic "grandiose self" he or she may have erected.  There are those as well who want you to wind up with stinky feet, as the mainstream media engages in a frenzied effort to distort and bury the history of the last several years.  (This is why, for instance, after the beginning of Russian military action, there were ludicrous assertions in mainstream outlets that U.S. efforts to train and arm "moderate Syrian rebels" were really for the purpose of training these "rebels" to fight ISIS.  What a bunch of - er, um, ahem, "deep fiction"!)

The trouble is, lying to oneself and distorting one's personal history are the marks of a personality-disordered person.  And some suggest that the longer a disordered person engages in such a game with himself, the more likely he is to wind up in a permanently demented condition.  (See this and this also.)  I am thinking of President Reagan, who testified during the Congressional hearings into the Iran-Contra affair that there were some things he simply couldn't remember.  A few years later, he began to suffer from an actual inability to remember anything.  Maybe he is a warning.

BMNT/EENT As A Dangerous Time

Once again, I find myself writing about a gruesome subject, in the aftermath of the mass shooting in San Bernardino.  I certainly do not wish to make light of the loss of life or of the pain being endured by the survivors and the relatives of the deceased.  Yet I believe that the best way to honor the victims is to look at this incident dispassionately and analytically, in order to discern those factors which may reduce the likelihood of similar incidents in the future.

So I thought it good to discuss ISIS again, since this incident is being treated by authorities and the mainstream media as an ISIS attack.  As I have pointed out in a previous post, inciting fear in Western populations by raising up a bogeyman like ISIS is very convenient for those now in charge of Western governments, particularly the United States government and various State governments now controlled by Republicans.  It also bears mentioning that the "moderate rebels" and "freedom fighters" whom the United States has been supplying with money and arms in the Mideast have turned out to be one and the same as the supposed ISIS whom the United States is supposed to be fighting.  (See this and this also.)

Also, there are the similarities between the San Bernardino massacre, the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the Paris massacre, such as:

• The deaths of all immediate witnesses to the attack;
• The use of a getaway vehicle by the attackers;
• A very public attempt to link the attackers to ISIS, the Mideast, and Islam (or to any other party whom the United States deems to be a convenient enemy);
• The fact that all the attackers are eventually killed by police, and thus are never brought to a public trial;
• And the fact that the attacks make no tactical or strategic sense, but only serve to provoke and justify increasingly fascist and destructive responses from the very nations who are supposedly being attacked.

Lastly, it bears mention that there is an increasing backlash of an unexpected kind against such "terror" attacks: namely, the rise of an increasing number of people who refuse to believe the official government/mainstream media narrative of the incidents, and who choose instead to believe that these are false flag operations.  Such people increasingly believe that those who run Western governments, Western media and Western economies are manufacturing external enemies who are actually bogeymen created to keep Western populations in line and to justify Western resource wars.

The point of view which therefore doubts the official mainstream narrative ought therefore to be publicly examined and logically discussed.  Until recently, this has not been done.  Instead, the dominant voices in American and Western society have sought to silence the doubters by ad hominem attacks, asserting that to doubt the official narrative was somehow a distasteful, improper and uncouth act in and of itself, regardless of the evidence.  It's sort of like the people in the story of the Emperor's new clothes who were cowed into believing that it would be ill-mannered and utterly uncouth to accept or point out the visual evidence that the Emperor was actually naked.

Therefore, I think it would be good to have a very open and public discussion of the belief that the "War on Terror" has been marked by a number of false flag incidents perpetrated by the very governments who are supposed to be "fighting terror."  We should openly discuss the evidence for and against this belief, and should discuss the criteria by which people would be able to accurately judge the evidence.  This is particularly important now, because the United States is losing its reason du jour for meddling in the Mideast, as Russia is systematically destroying ISIS in Syria, and has been invited by the Iraqi government to do the same thing in Iraq.  Thus we are now living in a dangerous twilight time.  By this I mean that if the U.S. were really corrupt enough to stoop to the level of false flag attacks to get its way, we'd be faced with three possible outcomes.  First, if the U.S. was at the moment enjoying having everything its way, false flag terror attacks would be unnecessary, and thus the likelihood of such attacks would be greatly diminished.  (Only idiots do things which are totally unnecessary.)  Similarly, if an overwhelming majority of American citizens responded with jaded cynicism to supposed terror attacks, there would be no point in perpetrating false flag terror, and again, the likelihood of further attacks would be greatly diminished.  (Only the insane do things that clearly don't work.)

But it is the territory between these two extremes which is so dangerous, as an increasing number of people begin to very publicly question the official narrative, and as a result, those who would benefit from false flag operations are motivated to push those operations into overdrive in order to "prove" to the skeptics that the bogeymen whom we have been taught to fear are for real (and are distinct from us).  Thus it would not surprise me if there was an escalation of terror attacks in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West in coming days.

The Mirror Image Of A Certain Hairstyle

My intuition was piqued after a Turkish Air Force F-16 shot down a Russian fighter-bomber within Syrian airspace.  As I read about the Turkish response to the downing of the Russian jet, and to Moscow's protest of the incident, a pattern began to emerge.  For Turkey refused to apologize for the incident, insisting instead that the Russian jet had violated Turkish airspace for 17 seconds without identifying itself.  But along with that excuse came a few Freudian slips as Turkish President Recep Erdogan revealed some of the true reasons for his anti-Russian animosity (and his probable true motives for downing the jet), namely, that he is upset that Russia is helping Syria oust foreign fighters who are being financed by the West to overthrow the government of Syrian President Assad.  It appears that when Washington enlisted Turkish help to cannibalize Syria, Erdogan was promised a rib or a thigh from the cannibal feast, and now he is seeing his chances of chowing down evaporating before his eyes.

Erdogan's response - his dishonesty and the impunity of his actions - reminded me of none other than Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination to represent the Republicans in the next presidential election.  Both men are narcissistic, reckless and impulsive, men of very strong ambition who boldly assert their right to do whatever they please and who show utter disregard for any possible consequences of their actions.  In this they are like the heads of many nations which have been Murdochified, NATO-ized, or neoliberalized by the West.  Men like Stephen Harper and Tony Abbott also come to mind.  But when I heard of what Erdogan had done, I immediately thought of Trump.  It seems that I am not the only one who sees similarities between the two.  Certainly, I am not the first.

So if anyone is wondering what life in the U.S. might be like under a Trump presidency, he or she would do well to study what's been happening in Turkey over the last several years.  Note especially the ways in which President Erdogan has tried to amass unilaterally overwhelming state power to himself, as well as his extreme intolerance to criticism.  Note also how in letting his grandiose self run amok, he has brought on himself consequences which he refused to foresee.  One of those consequences may be that Turkey faces a very cold winter without access to Russian gas.  Another consequence may be that the southern part of Turkey becomes a no-fly zone - as in, any unidentified Turkish aircraft that gets too close to the Syrian border may be standing into danger, even if it's still inside of Turkey.  Alternatively, consider that, with people inside of Turkey comparing Erdogan to Gollum, a wise and skillful agent outside of Turkey (such as another nation) could easily win the hearts and minds of Turks who are finding Erdogan to be rather burdensome just now.

A Guess At Motives, Part 2

After yesterday's post, I thought about further information on the Paris attacks.  This was information I had not considered while writing yesterday's post.  One item of information is that Syrian refugee passports just happened to turn up near the attack scene.  It has also been revealed that these passports are probably fake.  The second is that the attack occurred during efforts by Russia to negotiate a political settlement to the Syrian war.  The third is that French attack aircraft have stricken Raqqa, which is in a major oil-producing region in Syria.  It may well be that Washington, Paris and Brussels, who have been intent on overthrowing Syria since 2006, may have "found a reason" to launch a retaliatory fight against "terror" which will conveniently also secure (or at least destroy) Syria's oil production, as well as derailing Russian efforts to stabilize the region.  The "Empire" seems hell-bent on seizing and smashing Syria, no matter what it has to do to engineer a pretext for doing so.

Trying To Win A Fight By Punching Yourself In The Face

A co-worker ran into me yesterday afternoon in the office kitchen. “Did you hear what happened in Paris?,” he gravely asked. “I can't hear a word you're saying,” I replied, and groped to turn down my headphones. (Headphones are a sanity saver in an open office environment.) Once my co-worker saw that I could hear him, he proceeded to tell me about a supposed terror attack in France that had killed 27 people. That was the only information I received at the time about the attack; yet it got me thinking about a few things. (Today I see that the death toll has gone up.)

One of the first things I thought of was intuition and the role it plays in helping people formulate an accurate mental picture of the world. I will define two types of intuition. Taking things backward, I call the first “Type B intuition”, and the second I call “Type A intuition.” By Type B intuition I mean the very natural ability to make a complete mental picture out of incomplete parts. A simple example of this is answering the question “2 + x = 4. What is x?” Type A intuition is what we arrive at when we ask a person to make a complete mental picture of a situation out of fewer and fewer parts. Those who are able to form accurate mental pictures as the number of parts approaches zero are either prophets or magicians. Prophets are Divinely appointed, and magicians are playing with fire and in danger of getting burned. My interest in this post is with neither, so I will not write further of Type A intuition here.

Type B intuition, on the other hand, arises out of the interplay of left-brained and right-brained thinking. It can be honed and sharpened by experience and practice (although it can be dulled and short-circuited by prejudice). It often plays a key role in the practice of medicine, engineering and the sciences. The reason it can be honed with practice is because a major part of this kind of intuition consists of the art of pattern recognition. A very important application of pattern recognition, and hence of intuition, lies in learning to recognize human predators. Unfortunately, the development of this kind of intuition usually involves repeated exposure to painful experiences.

As I trace the development of this aspect of my own intuition, I think of how I was exposed to an abusive church many years ago when I was young and inexperienced, and how reluctant I was to see the pattern of abuse and hypocrisy in that church. But once my eyes came fully open, it became easy to see the same pattern repeated in other settings, both sacred and secular. One element of the pattern I saw was a leader who was roundly praised by his lieutenants and sycophants as a man of unquestionable virtue who just happened by accident to be the head of an organization that somehow wound up hurting people for reasons that no one in charge seemed to be able to figure out. The shattering of our leader's virtuous picture came when the evidence of the dirty dealings of the leader and his family was unearthed. Then I began to see that church for what it was: a whitewashed tomb full of folks who put on a beautiful public face, yet whose leader and lieutenants had a hidden and hurtful agenda.

That knowledge stayed with me during the middle years of the last decade, and began to have an unsettling effect on some of my political convictions. I had become a Christian many years ago, and while I am still most definitely a Christian, I have to say that my initial faith was tainted by teaching, books and “Christian” media which reflected a white American cultural captivity. So I was groomed to equate patriotism with godliness, and to be a good little Republican. Therefore, I was overjoyed by George W. Bush's capture of the White House. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, I was glad that we had such a strong leader to guide this nation through “dangerous times.”

But then the Iraq war happened, and a funny thing happened along with it, namely, that no evidence of weapons of mass destruction was ever found in Iraq. And the threat of WMD's had been a main reason for Bush's decision to invade Iraq. And after that came the resignation of Colin Powell, the uncovering of abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison, and the shooting deaths of unarmed Iraqi civilians by Blackwater. As these things came to light, the nation was treated to a recurring spectacle of a President who seemed to be all heart and all sincerity, yet who just happened by accident to be the head of an administration that somehow wound up hurting people for reasons that no one in charge seemed to be able to figure out. Repeatedly, we all kept hearing that he “just wanted to get to the bottom of things, to just get the facts,” and that he would most certainly fix things so that people didn't keep getting hurt by Americans working to make the world “safe from terrorism.”

And it kept getting better, as 2005 rolled around, and Hurricane Katrina rolled around with it, and the world saw what a train wreck the Bush administration made of the disaster response effort. We also got to see how severely people of color suffered as a direct result of the guidance and direction of National Guard troops and FEMA officials whose guidance and direction seemed deliberately designed to hurt these people. Once again, we all saw Bush's mug on TV screens and newspaper front pages as he praised his FEMA director for doing a “heckuva job” while promising to get to the bottom of some unfortunate lapses in FEMA's performance. But I began to get the uncomfortable feeling that I was seeing a repeat of a whitewashed tomb full of folks who put on a beautiful public face, yet whose leaders had a hidden and hurtful agenda.

So it was that in the fall of 2006, as I was traveling on business, I finally began to question allegiances that had heretofore been unquestioned, and to entertain the voices of critics whom I had heretofore dismissed as being part of “the liberal media.” And so I spent a couple of very late nights in a hotel room reading Wikipedia accounts of the run-up to the Iraq war (including the yellowcake uranium story (see this also) which was debunked by the husband of Valerie Plame, and the Bush administration's retaliation against her), and I read about how Lewis Paul Bremer, appointed by George Bush as the provisional governor of Iraq after the U.S. invasion, helped the United States to steal everything that wasn't nailed down (and a great deal that was nailed down) from the Iraqi people during his “reign.”  (There's this also, but unfortunately, it's behind a paywall.)  The Wikipedia articles I read all contained publicly available knowledge, including documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

That information helped to complete a mental picture for me – a picture of the true motives and the actual agenda of the United States concerning Iraq and the Mideast from the beginning of the Bush presidency onward. For I saw that the rape and plunder of Iraq were the result of deeply laid plans, and not some spur-of-the-moment reaction to external events. I saw how 9/11 had been used as a tool for implementing those plans, and thus 9/11 fell into perspective as well. As a result, I became deeply suspicious of the official narrative concerning the 9/11 attacks – and this happened without any input from the “truthers”.

That same mental picture has guided my view of the destruction of Libya (whose leader was murdered by NATO) and the attempted destruction of Syria. For in the case of Libya and Syria, I saw a repeat of the same pattern that led up to the destruction of Iraq by the U.S. Key elements of that pattern were the branding by the U.S. of the leaders of Libya and Syria as “supporters of terrorism” who “opposed democracy” and thus “had to go”. This branding was used as the justification for U.S. and NATO intervention which destroyed the infrastructure of those countries and made much of their oil available for seizure by the U.S. and Europe. In the case of Syria, incidents were conveniently manufactured by certain “actors” in order to demonize Bashar Assad and to mobilize popular support for U.S. efforts to overthrow him. Those efforts began as long ago as 2006 – four years before the onset of the Syrian civil war, by the way.

So then, with this mental picture in place, how should I interpret this most recent terror attack? What kind of mental picture should my intuition create? I think the answer to that question is that there are now so many verified pieces to this picture that intuition is no longer necessary; instead, we have moved to the realm of analysis which engineers call “trending.” Intuition is as superfluous here as driving in broad daylight with your headlights on. (Consider for instance the evidence that ISIS and the “moderate Syrian opposition” are one and the same entity, funded willingly and knowingly by U.S. dollars.) So I think the picture that is emerging is influenced by certain factors, listed below:

What's at stake now in the Mideast and Europe
The situation: We now have three and a half smashed countries (not to mention the sub-Saharan African countries which have been perennial targets of exploitation), hundreds of thousands of victims now turned into refugees, and a number of vampire nations on a couple of vampire continents which have benefited from the smashing. As the victims of the smashing seek refuge in the countries that did the smashing, many of the vampire citizens of these vampire nations are loudly declaring that they want no part in helping the refugees and victims they have created. But there is one Mideastern country now being rescued by Russia from further smashing and exploitation, and this rescue is a situation which threatens to upset the balance of power in the Mideast and possibly lead to the rescue of other smashed nations from the vampires now feeding on them.

Patterns: Note the similarities with 9/11, the Charlie Hebdo attack, and the Boston bombing. One such similarity is that either the accused are never brought to trial because no bad guys are taken alive, or that if suspects actually are arrested, they are subjected to secret, non-televised trials, the results of which are reported to us by word of mouth from monopolistic mainstream media outlets. There is no publicly available evidence for examination by members of the public who might want to decide on their own the guilt or innocence of accused parties. The mainstream media outlets always cast the supposed perpetrators as a monolithic Hollywood stereotype bad guy entity whose soul and inner workings we never get to see, except that it ontologically “hates our freedoms!!!” and speaks with a foreign accent. Once that Hollywood bad guy has done his work for the day, he is pulled back behind the stage curtain until his next required appearance.

Motive: So whose interests benefit from a supposed Islamist terror attack in Europe now? To answer that question, you have to ask whether the perpetrators of the attack are really as stupid as they're being made out to be. If, as many right-wing racist neo-Nazi types would have us believe, the attacks were perpetrated by Arab Muslim terrorists who sneaked into Europe with the wave of Syrian, North African and Afghan refugees, what would they stand to gain from such an attack? The answer is obviously nothing. Such an attack would only hurt their interests by making it easier for right-wing elements in Europe to justify inhumane treatment and expulsion of refugees, and by making it easier for Western war-hawks to justify the ongoing destruction of the home countries of these refugees. I don't think that the Arab refugees, Muslim or otherwise, are stupid enough to start a fight that they cannot win. On the other hand, consider how much the racist elements in Europe and the warmongers leading the West have to gain from such an attack. Especially given that some of them were predicting that just such an attack would arise from allowing Arab refugees into Europe.  Ever heard of a guy named Nero?

Objective: So what use will be made of this terror attack? Here, I will let informed intuition guide me. I think we will see (and are already beginning to see) loud calls for retaliation against ISIS by the leaders of France, NATO and the United States. Iraq will be identified as the place where the targets of retaliation should be located. This will be for two reasons: first, that expanded Western intervention in Syria cannot be justified due to the denial of Syria as a target by Russian and Syrian forces; and secondly, in order to try to seize enough of the assets of Iraq to prevent Russia, Syria and Iran from removing Western agents from Iraq. I think this attack will also be used by wealthy Westerners such as Rupert Murdoch and his European counterparts to mobilize an intense racist backlash against the refugees now seeking to enter Europe. This makes the deaths of people in yesterday's attack all the more tragic, yet not nearly as tragic as the suffering which the West is about to unleash against people who are not guilty of any crime against the West, yet who have already suffered horribly at the hands of the West.

The picture that emerges, then, is not some sinister attack by a radicalized, non-European savage race of impure souls, but rather, a narcissistic empire so overcome by fear at its impending demise that rather than accepting that demise gracefully, it seeks to rally its citizens to a last unjust fight by creating a last outburst of self-inflicted drama. And that's what that picture looks like.

Not Just An Anglo-American Disease

Many Europeans are becoming quite upset at the refugee crisis in Europe.  There is increasingly violent rhetoric being directed against the refugees, along with increasing acts of violence.  The perpetrators conveniently forget that the refugee crisis is the result of by Europe's collusion with the United States in the destruction of Iraq and Libya, and the attempted destruction of Syria.  In other words, Europe has brought this on itself.

Europe is finding out (as the U.S. is also finding out) that you can't wreck other people's countries and steal their resources without eventually having them show up at your doorstep. Do "pure" Europeans (especially the northern Europeans) and "pure" White Americans want to curb their "immigration problem"? Then let them live within their means. If you leave other people alone and don't enslave them, wreck their homelands or conquer them in order to steal their stuff, they won't feel any pressure to migrate to your homeland. It really is that painfully simple. When Europe participated in the wrecking of Syria, Libya and North Africa, they knew that the present crisis would be a likely outcome.

We are indeed heading toward a future in which a small minority of the world's population will no longer be able to command the lion's share of the world's resources.  When that happens, at least one reason for mass migrations will go away.  This is resulting in a fair amount of existential fear in many members of the privileged small minority, and the fear is being expressed as a rabid ferocity which seeks to demonize those who are different from the members of the minority.  Today I found two refreshing antidotes to the demonizing voices:

• "Globalization and Terror," by Helena Norberg-Hodge, and
• "The Racialization and Nationalization of the Image of God," by Dr. Soong-Chan Rah.

Take them by eye, as often as needed, for relief from selfishness, willful blindness, and xenophobia.

Iraq Redux, Reflux, Upchuck

Many of you may not know this, but the United States has resumed combat operations in Iraq.  It seems that the US is deathly afraid that it will lose its fragile hegemony in Iraq and Syria which it won by breaking one of those countries and attempting to break the other.  (Oops, I mean, the U.S. is ramping up its efforts to achieve its "elusive" goal of destroying ISIS.)  Oh, and by the way, I made another mistake.  The U.S. isn't actually using the words "U.S. troops in combat."  Unless, that is, they are asked the sort of direct questions that leave no wiggle room.

I am greatly comforted in knowing that our great military is "defending our freedoms!!!" in such a selfless way, just as our brave policemen are fighting a rising tide of violent crime brought on by the fact that citizens have been posting YouTube videos of police being unnecessarily violent against innocent people.  If only we could ban those videos!  Then the police could really do their jobs.  And it's comforting to know that the folks who run things now are serving us a second helping of a war for which most sensible people have lost their appetite.  (The Iraqis certainly did not ask for a second helping.)  It's also interesting in a perverse sort of way to realize that many of the American patriots who are now joining the military are likely to suffer the consequences of a really bad decision.  Willful blindness is not helpful for survival when you've decided to play on a freeway.

The Export of Hedonism

The Russian military intervention in Syria has produced a lot of interesting fallout.  It is now becoming clear that the militants whom Russia is targeting were financed by the United States (via the CIA) for the specific purpose of overthrowing the legitimate Syrian government, and that most (if not all) of these militants are one and the same as ISIS, who have been responsible for much of the havoc wrought on the Syrian nation and surrounding regions over the last few years.  It is also becoming clear that the one of the goals of U.S. intervention in Syria over that same time frame was delusional, for the U.S wasted over $500 million trying to raise an independent militia (and state) who were "moderate".  The word "moderate" should be understood to mean, "friendly to the interests of the United States."

What are those interests?  They are, by and large, corporate commercial interests.  The goal of American foreign policy seems to be to create a world which is friendly to a economic order ruled by the United States, a world which doesn't mind being exploited by the United States, a world whose citizens come to resemble the citizens of the United States in their consumerism and utter dependence on the commercial networks established by the corporate masters of the United States.  Consumerism is but a facet of hedonism.  Temptations to hedonism are therefore used by the United States to export "democracy" to "markets" closed by national leaders unwilling to sacrifice their sovereignty to the United States.  The "opposition" movements which spring up in such countries are often composed of people whose hedonism has been successfully awakened, and who are thus enticed to grumble against their existing national order because of the lack of "fleshpots, leeks and onions and garlic."  Thus they are led to grumble against regimes which were often quite successful at meeting the basic needs of their citizenry.

We can see the export of hedonism in the British empire, where Britain legalized and fought to protect the opium trade in China during the 1800's.  We can see it now in Afghanistan, in that the growing of opium - forcibly ended by the Taliban prior to the U.S. invasion - is back in full swing, thanks to U.S. involvement.  These are but two of the fruits of the foreign policy of nations which have at one time or another called themselves both "Christian" and "defenders of freedom."  What they really meant, it seems, was the "freedom" to be made into addicts.

I think the export of hedonism by Anglo-American society deserves much more research, and even several well-informed blog posts providing further elaboration.  However, I am fighting for my life right now in grad school.  So if anyone else wants to take up the topic, please feel free.  If you wish to write on the subject, I ask that your focus be on the role of the Anglo-American export of hedonism in the fomenting of revolutions and attempted regime change by the U.S. and its allies, focusing especially on the time from the beginning of the Cold War onward.  Thanks, and have a good day.

An Unexpected End to Uninvited Guests?

Update - 9 March 2020: This post should be taken with a grain of salt.  I wrote it during a time in which most of the West was being flooded with propaganda from Russian sources such as The Vineyard of the Saker, Russia Today, and the blog of Dmitry Orlov, to name a few.  These sources were created as part of a larger Russian campaign of disinformation designed to fragment and fracture the West in order to bring the fractured pieces under Russian influence.  This was in accordance with the geopolitical strategy of Aleksandr Dugin and Vladimir Putin.  Unfortunately I drank some of their Kool-Aid, but I have now detoxed, as can be seen in my much more recent post titled, "A Clarifying of Stance."  Everything the Putin regime has touched has turned to garbage.  One of his garbage deeds was to help install a racist, narcissistic, idiot President into the United States government in 2016.
 
Graduate school is starting again, and I am enrolled in coursework on top of working nearly full time.  Therefore, I can't really do a lot of the research and analysis which has typically gone into many of my blog posts.  I can only formulate opinions based on cursory glances at things of interest.

One thing that has caught my eye over the last four years is the Syrian "crisis", which was manufactured by the United States and its allies in order to secure and maintain American economic hegemony in the Middle East.  It had nothing to do with "human rights violations" or "democracy."  The results of the insurgency which the United States fomented and financed have been ISIS, a partially wrecked country, and a refugee crisis which has exploded into Europe.  The refugee crisis has evoked much hand-wringing in the West, along with the pointing of Western fingers at the Syrians as a nation and a people and accusing them of not being able to manage their own affairs.  This has also been accompanied by the usual round of horrified xenophobia at the thought of pure Europeans having to extend neighborly hospitality to people with dark skin and dark hair from the Middle East.  (Some of that hand-wringing and xenophobia have crossed the Atlantic to the United States.)

But now Russia is rapidly building a military presence in Syria, to the tune of thousands of troops and large amounts of tanks and warplanes.  I don't know what the Russians are planning, and they haven't volunteered to tell me.  (Only fools openly discuss their strategy.)  But what if Russia (along with China, Iran and Iraq) is about to solve the problem of "uninvited guests" in Europe by kicking uninvited "guests" out of Syria?  What if the result of such an action is the immediate cessation of the current refugee "crisis"?  (If outside interests are stopped from further tearing apart the Syrian homeland, why would Syrians choose any longer to be refugees?)  What if a further result is another huge step toward the complete loss of the legitimacy of the West, and particularly of the United States?  What if the United States begins to learn that you can't loot other people's countries and wreck other people's homelands without consequences showing up at your doorstep?

The Beginnings of Damnation - An Expanded List

Here's an article on another blog which illustrate the point I made in my last post, namely, that the United States is beginning to reap the consequences of its materialist evil (as is Europe):

• "Eventual Consequences"

And here's a news article which expands on the climate consequences for the United States:

• "Drought and Heat Waves Are Much More Likely to Mix, Researchers Say"

Beneath The Event Horizon

As I have watched the unfolding events in Greece over the last several weeks, I've had a strong sense of deja vu.  Consider the trajectory of Syriza: in a country where the majority of citizens are oppressed by the current ruling regime, and where the majority of citizens are sick of the current regime, a party of "outsiders" and "mavericks" comes to national attention.  What brings them to national attention is their very outspoken criticism of the current ruling regime, combined with boasts of how they will change things to relieve the oppressed masses.

Once they reach a critical mass of popularity, however, these "outsiders" and "mavericks" begin to become more "nuanced" in their confrontation of the existing regime and the systems created and managed by the existing regime.  The fight for ostensible political power between the outsiders and the entrenched regime becomes quite colorful and emotional, yet a day comes when the dust settles and the "outsiders" find themselves in power.  This event is heralded with great celebrations of "hope" for "change," and many self-styled spokespersons for the oppressed masses write letters or blog posts addressed to the new regime, outlining their desires to see their hopes fulfilled.  However, during the fight and afterward, the "outsiders"-turned-rulers become so nuanced that eventually they become indistinguishable from the entrenched regime they replaced.

Sound familiar?  The political career of the current President of the United States has followed just such a trajectory, as foreseen in a long-winded post I wrote a while back.  But this phenomenon is not limited to Obama.  The entire Democratic Party is guilty, as we have seen with Governor Jay Nixon of Missouri, with Hillary Rodham Clinton, and with John Kerry, who ran against George W. Bush in 2004 on a platform of vacuous and vague promises of "change" that was remarkably similar to the platform on which Barack Obama ran for the Presidency in 2008.

I'd like to suggest that Syriza's capitulation shows that not just in the United States, but throughout the West, participation in the official political process has become a complete waste of time for ordinary people.  How could it be otherwise, when the wealth of the world is concentrated in the hands of such a small number of people?  The political process is no longer of any value precisely because, once wealth concentration exceeds a certain percentage of the total wealth available to a society, it is economic power that trumps all other forms of power.  How can ordinary Americans - no matter how numerous - influence the trajectory of government when most of the wealth in America is held in the hands of a few?  And how can the ordinary citizens of any country in the West take charge of the governance of their own countries when most of those countries are beholden to the world's richest banks?  (By the way, according to the list of banks I linked, if the size or assets of a bank are computed according to "Generally Accepted Accounting Principles" as is done in the United States, then JP Morgan and Bank of America are the #1 and #2 banks in the world.  Citigroup is #5.  These are all American banks.  The list of top investment banks is even more interesting.)

We therefore find ourselves - most of us - in a situation where we no longer have any real control over where we are headed as a nation or as a world. It's like being sucked beneath the event horizon of a black hole; once you go under, there's only one direction left to go. Therefore, in 2016, why look for a supposed "outsider" or "maverick" to vote for? If they're famous enough to be voted for, they're already bought and paid for. Why not rather look for non-political avenues for carving out a meaningful life for yourself? If you must vote, vote for one of your pets - at least they won't lie to you. Кошка за президент!

The Breakup of Pathological Spaces

To summarize last week's post, present-day American narcissism stands on the following legs:

• A 1700-year legacy of the preaching of national exceptionalism in Europe by state churches who tried to justify the disconnect between the words of the New Testament and the actions of the states in which these churches were embedded.

• Exceptionalism “taken to the next level” through Calvinism: first, the belief that some people were predestined from before the womb to eternal salvation, and others predestined from before the womb to eternal damnation, this election being completely independent of the choice of any of those so predestined. Second, the belief that all that happens in the world happens because God has willed it; therefore, all that happens must have been approved by God. This morphed into “social Calvinism”: the belief that the sign that one was a member of God's elect was material prosperity and success in earthly business, the belief that those who were not successful or who were poor were so because they were not of God's elect but were under God's curse, and the belief that whatever “God's elect” got away with doing to the rest of the people in the world was approved by God and a sign of His “Providence.”

As I said in last week's post, this is the foundation of American narcissism, the belief that this nation is above all nations in that it has a special mission from God (a mission which conveniently lines up with American imperial ambitions), that Americans (specifically, white Americans) are a special, chosen people, and the belief that both Scripture, Providence and nature bear this out.

The effect that such beliefs, combined with a long string of seeming “successes” has had on the Anglo-American psyche is that this has become the unconscious foundation of national identity and the unconscious justification of white privilege. Americans know they are special just because they are. Therefore many of them have begun to compete with each other to see who is most “special.” (“Mirror, mirror, on the wall...”)

Today's post will consider the environment which narcissists create for themselves and in which they operate. That environment is the narcissist's Pathological Space: “the network of relationships in their home, extended families, workplace, and neighborhood.” (Krajco, 2004-2007). Its purpose is to feed the narcissist by providing victims and mirrors who reflect back the narcissist's grandiose self. Garden-variety narcissists don't care about anything outside their pathological space, even though they know that there is a world full of people who live outside that space. Therefore they don't trouble themselves with that outside world unless someone mentions it to them, in which case they disparage the outside world and turn back to contemplating their own glory. Within the pathological space, everyone else is either a victim or a mirror. A person can choose to be a victim or a mirror, although sometimes mirrors are turned into victims apart from their own choice.

A mirror is an adoring lackey or sycophant, who always gives the right answer when asked the All-Important Question: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest one of all?” A victim is anyone who contradicts the narcissist. Contradicting is extremely easy to do. You can give the wrong answer to the All-Important Question – first, by pointing out someone (other than the narcissist) whom you admire or look up to, second, by being someone of obviously praiseworthy virtue or competence yourself, or third, simply by being obviously different in any way from the narcissist – especially if your “difference” makes you “vulnerable” in the narcissist's eyes.

So what happens to you if you contradict or refuse to validate the grandiose self constructed by a narcissist? You become the target of attack while you are in the narcissist's pathological space. The attack is designed to destroy you, for a contradiction to the narcissist's grandiose self must not be allowed to survive, as the contradiction is an existential threat to the narcissist's identity. If you fight back or defend yourself, you simply provoke a drastic multiplication of the narcissist's rage – he has to be right and victorious, or his grandiose self will suffer an intolerable injury. Therefore, it will be a no-holds-barred, knock-down and drag-out fight from his point of view. Even if you win a round, you'll have to be forever on your guard, because the narcissist will never quit – even if at times he seems to surrender. The only way to rid yourself of the narcissist is to cut off all contact with him, and that introduces an entirely different set of dynamics and risks into the situation.

What happens when a narcissist or narcissistic nation manages to turn the world into a Pathological Space? I think when that happens, you get the sort of foreign policy which the United States has enacted from the late 1800's until now (with more than a little help from England, another nation ruled by narcissists). The war against “contradictions” has involved the following nations:

• Haiti, a former slave colony which obtained its independence by revolting from France in 1804. In the aftermath of the revolution, the United States sided with France in trying to economically isolate Haiti in order to destroy its self-determination and its government. France imposed a fine on Haiti in order to recoup the losses to its earning power resulting from the loss of its African slaves in Haiti, and the United States assisted France in its economic punishment of Haiti. Moreover, the United States has invaded the country numerous times during the 20th and 21st centuries. (For an example, see this.)

• The Philippines during the Filipino-American War, where the United States inflicted casualties to the tune of at least 220,000 and possibly over 300,000 people, according to some historians.

• The Dominican Republic, which was invaded four times by the United States from 1900 to 1965.

• Vietnam, whose citizens fought a war of independence against France from 1946 to 1954. The French had become involved at the behest of the British government after World War 2. During that war, the United States supported the French with arms, intelligence, and funding. However, the French lost the war. Once the French were kicked out of the country, the United States brokered a partition of the country into North and South Vietnam. When the South Vietnamese government proved itself to be inept and corrupt, the Vietnamese people began fighting to overthrow it, thus triggering the American involvement of the 1960's and early 1970's which ended when Nixon negotiated a “peace with honor” that enabled America to walk away without having to admit defeat.

• The sabotaging of the attempts of Central and South American nations to escape from “banana republic” status (note the overthrow of Salvador Allende , the Iran-Contra Affair, the 2009 coup in Honduras (a contributing factor in the current child refugee crisis on the southern border of the United States), and other meddlings).

• Both Gulf Wars, ISIS, Syria, and Afghanistan, where American intervention has caused from 1,200,000 to possibly 2,000,000 (yes, that's two million) civilian deaths so far, according to several sources (such as this one);

• And many, many more!

In People of the Lie, M. Scott Peck wrote a chapter on the Vietnam War titled, “My Lai: An Examination of Group Evil,” in which he states that we fought so hard to conquer that country because psychologically we just had to be right, even though the facts on the ground contradicted us. We would rather have destroyed the contradiction entirely than admit that we had been wrong. Our zeal in fighting therefore shows our narcissism. It can be argued that this nation has never truly backed down from a war which it has started as an attempt to conquer a nation whose citizens plainly showed that they did not want to be ruled by the United States. After the U.S. was forced militarily out of Indochina, it used economic policies to enforce a partial subjugation of the region. And the U.S. has never truly left Iraq.

When the “good angels” in a narcissist's pathological space get together to compare notes, often the result is an exodus of people from the pathological space. Many writers describe this as “going No Contact (NC)” with the narcissist. Narcissists are enraged by contradiction, but they are made desperate by No Contact. Under No Contact, people who were mirrors to the narcissist, or who were used as sources of supply by the narcissist, are no longer there to reflect the narcissist's glory or power or influence back to him. Without such people, the narcissist faces an existential crisis even worse than the crisis provoked when he is contradicted by someone, for under No Contact, the narcissist sees his former victims and mirrors living meaningful lives completely independent of him, and he sees that his formerly grandiose self can no longer have any effect on them. This is the ultimate contradiction of his Grandiose Self.

Over the last thirteen to fifteen years, other nations have begun to go No Contact with the U.S. The diminishing of contact has taken place in the economic arena, as nations have sought to build trade agreements with each other independently from the United States, and to move away from the dollar as the world's reserve currency. This move was provoked initially by the American use of sanctions to subjugate Iraq after the first Gulf War. This move has accelerated in response to the unilateral American military and economic acts of aggression which have taken place since 2001. This move has not been without risk, as Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi found out. Nevertheless, in spite of economic and military warfare waged by the United States, the U.S. dollar as a percentage of all foreign exchange holdings droppped from 55 percent in 2001 to 33 percent in 2013.  Further, new bilateral and multilateral trade agreements and trade zones continue to be enacted throughout the world, independently of the United States, which is not being invited to enter these agreements. American attempts to wreck foreign economies through sanctions are backfiring, as targeted nations are learning that one can indeed survive without the U.S. dollar.

I think it's safe to say that we are witnessing the emergence of a new world order, but not one that is pleasing to the United States. What is emerging is a multipolar world, in which everyone must be polite, wait his or her turn, and say “Please” and “Thank you,” and in which no one nation will get to enjoy outlandishly “special” prerogatives or privileges over any other nation. The holders of concentrated privilege and power in the United States fear and hate the emergence of such a world, but increasingly, there doesn't seem to be a thing they can do to stop it. The long-term response of the United States to that emergence is likely to be some form of “decompensation.” That “decompensation” will be in part comically stupid, and in part dangerously ugly in many parts of this country, and in many sectors of American society. I'll talk about that in a future post.

A last note: when narcissists lose most of their current sources of supply, one sign of their resulting desperation is that they go back to former sources of supply and try to re-establish relationships with these people, in the hope of rebuilding a pathological space of mirrors and victims. Going back to former sources is called “hoovering” by many writers. As I think about hoovering, I think about the recent news that the United States is seeking to normalize relations with Cuba. Cuba – a nation which was ostracized by the United States over a span of 55 years – from the overthrow of the Batista regime until now. Cuba – a nation which has discovered that it is possible to live a meaningful and worthy life independent of the United States. Cuba – a nation which is now famous for having a first-rate medical system and which exports medical expertise and medical technology to the rest of the world. Cuba – a nation which is only 90 miles away from the American coastline. Cuba – a nation now being “hoovered”?  ¡Ten cuidado, Raul Castro!

Why I don't Entirely Believe In The ISIS Crisis

ISIS has been in the news a lot lately. I don't have a lot of time to search out links, but I will give a summary of my impression of the news. According to American media, ISIS has grown from a smattering of formerly American-funded and American-trained Islamic militants into a powerhouse of radical terrorist jihadism threatening to destabilize the entire Middle East. Not only that, but they are behind the barbarous beheadings of a number of foreign journalists who were unwise enough to be caught hanging out in places where they should not have been. And to top it all off, several ISIS plots have been uncovered recently to attack public targets in the United States, Australia and France.

In response to all of these things, President Barack Obama has declared a war to the finish against ISIS. (Never mind that we attacked ISIS first, thus prompting the first beheading of a foreign journalist.) So far, this has involved American and British airstrikes against targets in Syria and Iraq. Some members of the U.S. government have also talked of the need to initiate a ground campaign in the Mideast in order to eradicate ISIS.

That's my impression of the official story line, anyway. Now, I am not a national security analyst, but a few things smell quite fishy about the official story line. They have to do with how the U.S. and Britain are using the ISIS crisis (hey, that rhymes!) to accomplish a few policy objectives which they have long wanted to achieve, but which have to date been stymied. First is the overthrow of the Syrian government and its replacement by a puppet government constructed by the United States, which tried for many months to find a pretext for military operations against President Hassad, and which failed to motivate enough Americans to back such a stinky business. First, we tried to foment a fake revolution. Then we carried out a number of false flag operations. Then certain highly placed government officials told outright lies to a bunch of “news” outlets unworthy of the title of journalists. Now ISIS provides a convenient excuse to do something which was never legitimate in the first place.

So what about those beheadings? Well, all I know for sure is that they were carried out by a bunch of guys in Arab costumes with masks on their faces and speaking in funny accents. No sane or reasonable person would venture to try to identify any of those masked men by name – or by nationality. In the absence of more substantive identification, I feel the same way I felt after watching a grainy, low-resolution video broadcast by some mainstream media outlets purporting to prove that someone who looked like Michael Brown held up a convenience store before he was shot to death by a white cop while unarmed. Pardon me, but I need to see faces that I can recognize before I will even begin to consider any video “evidence.” Who knows, the beheaders might be my next door neighbors in Halloween costumes.

Compare the Anglo-American portrayal of ISIS to the portrayal of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, and you'll notice a striking number of similarities. Bin Laden served for years as America's bogeyman in order to legitimize two stupid wars, huge losses of life, oppression of two nations (three if you count the progress that has been made in turning the U.S. into a police state), and untold damage. Osama was America's Goldstein from 2001 until his untimely death at the tusks of a bunch of trained seals in 2011. I guess it was time for a new bogeyman, a new La_Llorona to keep us properly scared, compliant and willing to support our raging, uncontrollable addiction to war. Thanks, ISIS!

Oh, and one other thing. ISIS is being used to help us conveniently forget our own self-inflicted problems, such as the oppression of people of color by holders of white privilege in this country, the continued oppression of women by dominating, narcissistic men who legitimize domestic violence and rape, the oppression of sick people by a predatory system of “insurance”, “medicine” and Big Pharma, the environmental consequences we are now suffering due to the non-negotiable American way of life, the predation of the poor by the rich, etc, etc.

NPD Nation

I've been reading a lot lately about Narcissistic Personality Disorder, or NPD for short. My reasons for doing so involve people in long-playing difficulties of the sort which I don't want to discuss on this particular blog. However, in my reading I have discovered a few principles which seem to apply to the current world situation, and to the response of the people and politicians of the United States to that situation.

One of the things which has impressed me about NPD is the way in which malignant narcissists blame their victims for the abuse perpetrated by the narcissists. Often the blaming takes place as part of a combat which is solely verbal. Even when the combat is confined to the merely verbal, the narcissist's blaming tactics can become quite bizarre, to the point of reality-altering distortions of events (also known as “gaslighting”). But without a doubt, one of the most bizarre instances of victim-blaming and gaslighting of which I have read involved physical violence. It seems that while a narcissist woman was physically attacking her sister (who did nothing to retaliate), the attacker started yelling through open windows demanding that the victim stop attacking! (What Makes Narcissists Tick, 2004-2007, Kathleen Krajco, pg. 196.)

Which brings us to current events. I am in Southern California this weekend to visit family, and as I did during my last trip, this time I rode the Amtrak train down here. I had dinner in the dining car, sharing a table with an elderly retired couple who live in Klamath Falls, Oregon. We didn't really hit it off very well, though there were attempts at polite conversation. One of the difficult points came when the wife mentioned recent weather in Klamath Falls, observing that there had been a few days this summer during which the temperature had gotten above 90 degrees, and that “we usually never get that hot! Usually the temperature doesn't get much above 80!”

“Well,” I remarked, levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide have recently exceeded 400 parts per million. What you are experiencing is a consequence of climate change.”

“Yes,” she said, “and I think the whole world should do its part to reduce pollution,” indicating by her tone and emphasis that she considered the rest of the world to be equally as culpable as the United States.

“The United States has five percent of the world's population and uses over a third of the world's natural resources,” I replied.

“Yes, but there's lots of pollution in other countries,” she replied, a bit desperately.

“That's because the United States has exported much of its manufacturing capacity to those countries,” I rejoined.

“And that's terrible,” she said, then, “and I'm sure you don't want to wreck a perfectly good evening.” Then her husband started talking. “What college did you graduate from, since you've been saying all this about global warming?” I told him, having earlier told him that I had an engineering degree. “Good school,” he remarked. The conversation died out shortly thereafter. Later in the evening, I thought, “How American – to blame others for the problems we ourselves cause.”

I got off the train at Bakersfield, having discovered that one can make the remainder of the trip from Bakersfield to So. Cal. much more quickly by car than by train. While driving a rental the remainder of the distance to my destination, I tuned in to KNX Radio 1070, a CBS news station whose broadcasts cover most of Southern California. I was listening to the news that the United States is preparing to attack Syria for allegedly using chemical weapons against its own citizens, and that no other nation on earth supports the United States in this course of action. I also heard a great deal of hand-wringing on the part of spokesmen describing the “terrible humanitarian toll which has been exacted by the ongoing civil strife in Syria.”

Having learned long ago to read between the lines of mainstream news, I know that American eagerness to attack Syria has nothing to do with “democracy” or alleged cruelty by the Syrian government toward its people or the possible existence of weapons of mass destruction. It has everything to do with the fact that the United States is hopelessly addicted to a lifestyle of undeserved extravagance, and that this country can no longer afford to pay for that extravagance. Therefore, we are exporting violence to the remaining corners of the earth in which significant reserves of natural resources (particularly, oil) may be found, in order to obtain something for seemingly almost nothing. Our glorious country has therefore tried a steadily escalating series of destabilizing moves designed to remove the sovereign government of Syria, starting with trying to engineer a “revolution” through means of mercenaries.

Now we are at the point where, “while beating Sue [Syria], Mary [the United States] screams at her to stop attacking.” Naturally, we will try to scream loud enough for the neighbors to hear. But by now, the neighbors have our number.

Scoring Some Big Books

Our knowledge of history is under threat in the United States – especially our accurate knowledge of recent history. An accurate knowledge of recent history and of the role the United States has played in that history might well cause a great deal of unease of conscience among the masses of consumatrons who make up the vast majority of native-born Americans. Therefore, powerful institutions are at work to try to make everyone forget. Their efforts seem to be working. As an example, I was talking to a couple of kids a month ago and found out that they knew very little about the origins of the war in Iraq.

Accurate online histories are also under attack, and false histories abound. Even accurate online histories can be subject to sabotage.

So I am happy to report that I scored a big prize today. I finally got my hands on two copies of Fuel On The Fire: Oil And Politics In Occupied Iraq by Greg Muttitt. The book was devilishly hard to get. I wanted to purchase it by a particular method: namely, walking into a bookstore and handing over cash in exchange for the book. I didn't want to order it online or use a credit card or Paypal account to buy it. (Partly, this was because I don't want to let the U.S. Government know what sorts of books I like to read ;) ). It seems that you can only buy this book in person if you go to bookstores in Britain. In the U.S., Borders Books only offers an e-book version. Barnes and Noble doesn't offer it at all. Amazon sells both paperback and e-book versions, but you have to tell them a bit about yourself (things like credit card numbers, for instance). Powell's Books right here in Portland deserves special mention. Powell's will sell you the book, but their website states that the book is “available for shipping only. Not available for In-store Pickup.” (Powell's has made a name for themselves as “progressive” and “locally owned,” but as far as I am concerned they are just as evil and consumerist as Starbucks.)

Anyway, I circumvented a few roadblocks by getting a very small, locally owned bookshop to order me a couple of copies. The bookshop was happy to take my cash in return. These books are thick (as a former boss of mine used to say, “Enough paper to choke a horse), and chock full of U.S. and British government and industry documents obtained from the British government under their version of the Freedom of Information Act, which is a lot freer than the U.S. version of the FOIA has become. Now that I have them, I'll be sharing some highlights from my reading over the next several months, as well as discussing and reviewing a couple of other books that are pertinent to adaptation to economic contraction and energy descent.

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P.S. I am sad to report that Naomi's Organic Farm Supply will be closing soon. Neil and Naomi Montacre are the proprietors of the place, which includes a large organic garden and greenhouse as well as an organic gardening store. They are situated on a plot of land that is owned by Les Schwab's Tire Stores, and Les Schwab wants to build another store on that plot of land. A Les Schwab store seems a very poor substitute for Naomi's. Wherever Neil and Naomi go from here, I am sure they will enrich the place of their sojourning, as they have done up to now.