Living In A Place Named "Predicament"

Explosion Kitty walking away from the Zombie 

Apocalypse 

And now in this post we return to the roots of this blog (and we show how a discussion of national and cultural abnormal psychology relates to those roots). This blog began as a diary of my observations of the changes in mainstream American society which are being caused by the decline in energy and natural resources needed by the global industrial economy. Personally, I think some of my earliest posts on the topic were rather amateurish, due to the fact that I didn't quite understand at first everything I was looking at. (Petroleum geology, in particular, is not my forte.) But even people who were born yesterday can catch up a bit by staying up all night studying. ;)

When writers seriously discuss resource depletion, climate change and their likely effects on the global industrial economy, some readers tend to react as if they'd just met a conspiracy theory/zombie apocalypse nut. But these subjects actually have a very solid technical background. Let's explore that background for a moment.

First, there have been thinkers from way back who understood that the earth is finite, and who accepted the possibility that humans might one day bump against the limits of the earth's resources. Two 19th century names come to mind: Thomas Malthus postulated that the human population could grow to a level that would not sustain extravagant lifestyles. Svante Arrhenius postulated that human industrial activity could release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in such quantities that it could cause significant long-term changes to the global climate. Malthus and Arrhenius did not have the benefit of computer modeling to validate their assumptions. But in the 1970's, there were scientists who did have that benefit. A group of these scientists assembled under the auspices of the Club of Rome to study possible future scenarios for the global industrial society from the 1970's to 2100. They discovered a number of scenarios in which the industrial economy would run into hard constraints related to the amount of virgin resources which could be extracted, and the amount of industrial waste which could be dumped into the environment without serious side effects. Running into those constraints would lead to economic contraction and population distress. Their findings were published in a volume titled The Limits To Growth, which has been periodically updated to the present. The First World in general, and the United States in particular, did not heed the warnings of The Limits To Growth, and so now we see the beginnings of our society running into hard constraints.

One of those constraints deserves special mention. In the 1950's, M. King Hubbert, a petroleum geologist for the Shell Oil Company, derived a simple formula from calculus to model the flow rate of an oil field as a function of its proven reserves. (See this also.)  The implications of this formula led Hubbert to conclude that production of conventional oil in the United States would peak in the early 1970's and enter into irreversible decline thereafter. He also postulated that production of conventional oil worldwide would peak some time in the early part of the first decade of the 21st century and enter into irreversible decline thereafter. He published his conclusions in a prominent peer-reviewed journal and managed to make his Shell Oil bosses very unhappy. The trouble was, he was right.

Hubbert's assumptions were validated by Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrere in an article titled “The End of Cheap Oil,” published in Scientific American in 1998.  This article provoked a flurry of both interest and controversy and was a catalyst in the formation of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, or ASPO in short. The Oil Drum website was also born, as well as organizations like the Post-Carbon Institute. A child lately born among this brood was the Energy Watch Group which began as a collection of geologists and other scientists sponsored by the German government under the leadership of Hans-Josef Fell of the German Parliament. (The Energy Watch Group correctly stated that the peak of global conventional crude oil production (excluding shale and tar sands) had already occurred by 2008.) All of these groups were characterized by strong technical leadership consisting of scientists with strong technical backgrounds who were well-qualified to discuss the field they were addressing, namely, the likelihood of near-term declines in global conventional oil production.

The discussion of the likelihood of near-term decline in the availability of cheap oil naturally led to the discussion of the likely impact and effects of such a decline on First World economies. This led to the generation of a number of scenarios. At first, those producing the scenarios were strongly technical types very similar to the people who were studying the possibility of production rate declines. For instance, the United States government commissioned a group of respected scientists led by Robert Hirsch to study the likely impacts on American society of permanent near-term declines in availability of oil. The results of that study were published in 2005 in a document now known as the Hirsch report.

The Hirsch report predicted major disruptions to industrial society unless preparations were made sufficiently far in advance (as in, 20 years) of the peaking and decline of conventional oil production. Hirsch, et al, did not exactly talk about zombies, but the impacts described in the report were dramatic enough to inspire a number of other people (including several people without technical academic degrees) to start mapping out possible scenarios. These scenarios tended to fall into two general categories: a “fast crash” case and a “more nuanced” case.

In the “fast crash” camp were such people as the creators of the World Without Oil website, a supposed reality “game” in which people could explore the impact of a sudden drop in oil availability. (I discovered the site in 2007, and noticed that most of its scenarios tended to be variations on a violent “zombie apocalypse” theme. But I'm getting ahead of myself.) There was also Matt Savinar, a blogger who formerly devoted himself to covering the impacts of peak oil on industrial societies. Matt earned a degree in law (and thereafter started calling himself the “Juris Doctor of Doom”) while trying to build a business selling what I would call “doom preparation kits” of emergency rations and other “collapse preparation” supplies. But there came a point in 2010 where he suddenly felt “led” to switch from collapse preparation and law to astrology. Among the ranks of “fast crash” writers were also people like Guy McPherson who is trying to build a career as a traveling doom counselor, Michael Ruppert who reportedly shot himself in 2011, and James Howard Kunstler, a former journalist and writer of fiction who used to regularly predict at the beginning of each year that the stock market would crash to a level no greater than 4000 points in that year.  Over the last few years, Mr. Kunstler has expanded his offerings to include extremely racist, misogynist and right-wing statements of the sort that make it clear that he is eager to throw those whom he deems powerless under the bus if he thinks he can get away with it. 

The “more nuanced” camp also had a number of members, who generally tended to be much less colorful and much more cautious in their assessment of the future, and who also tended to be much more prudent in giving advice and recommendations for dealing with a future of economic contraction. They also tended to be strong and deep systems thinkers. Three names immediately come to mind: first, Richard Heinberg, a fellow of the Post-Carbon Institute, and David Holmgren, who together with Bill Mollison founded the discipline of permaculture (a discipline which is now being seriously taught in government-sponsored Australian universities, by the way). In looking at a future of scarcity, such people as these tended to recognize the need to play a long game.

Over the last several months, the differences in outlook between the two camps has intrigued me, not least because the way a person sees a situation tells a lot about what's inside that person. And the differences in outlook between the two camps has been interesting from a psychological, sociological and spiritual viewpoint. The key assumptions of the “fast-crashers” was that a sudden or serious shortfall in availability of the resources and consumer goods needed for a middle-class American lifestyle would result in the eruption of instant anarchy, with violent mobs (all assumed to be poor and usually dark-skinned) raping, pillaging, looting and burning everything in sight. Therefore, the proper way to prepare for such a shortfall was to buy a doomstead in Montana or some other isolated place, and to stock it with an abundant supply of guns, ammo, baked beans and gold pieces, and to outfit one's doomstead with as many trappings and gizmos as necessary to preserve “liberty!” (and a middle-class lifestyle) into the post-apocalyptic age.  (Another key to preparation was to watch the stock market obsessively every day, watching for the first sign of collapse in order to know when and how to shift one's "investments" in order to preserve maximum value.)  In such a fast-crash world, the kind of morality that regarded other lives as precious enough to share your material goods with them (especially the lives of people different from you) was to be regarded as excess baggage to be discarded as soon as possible, and the “survivors” of such a crash were exhorted to adopt a moral compass that looked a lot like the compass of selfishness that guided Ayn Rand throughout her miserable life.

One problem with such a viewpoint is that it was and continues to be contradicted by evidence from every available corner of the planet. For instance, there are hundreds of millions – even billions – of people who live in societies with per capita incomes much lower than the per capita income of the United States, and these people live quite peaceably as long as they have their basic needs met. They are not zombies. (What warfare arises among these people is usually provoked by resource-hungry Anglo-American or European powers, and not by the indigenous people themselves.) And there are a lot of poor people in the U.S. who are the salt of the earth. Who says that instant anarchy has to erupt if people don't have all the stuff that most mainstream Americans are taught to crave? Such a belief is a fallacy typical of spoiled mainstream Americans who tend to believe that if they can't have a lifestyle of “special” privilege and comfort, the end of the world must be at hand. Another problem is that people with this point of view are trying to sustain an unsustainable lifestyle by a zombie apocalypse version of hoarding, like Gollum or Smaug the dragon in Tolkien story The Hobbit. So we have people who outfit their doomsteads with several kW of solar panels and massive battery storage systems so they can enjoy all the comforts of home in case the grid goes down. (Good luck trying to get them to share any of their stash.) Why not learn to live without some of those comforts, since after all, the batteries and panels will eventually wear out?

To me, it seems that the fast-crash scenario has become something of a blank slate on which certain personalities project fantasies whose characteristics have been covered repeatedly in the psychology-related posts of the last year and a half on this blog. So it is probably not surprising that over the last few years, such zombie apocalypse/prepper thinking has been picked up by the talking heads at Fox News and similar media outlets, who have gotten into the business of hawking gold and emergency rations as part of their campaign to instill mass hysteria into a captive cult audience of aging white Baby Boomers. (That's how I knew I tasted something funny...) Another example of this is the post-apocalyptic novels of James Howard Kunstler, in which he places the survivors into ranks and social classes that suit the fantasies of Anglo-American narcissistic males. (I bought his first "collapse" novel, but I have to admit that I didn't even get halfway through it, as the prose in his novel seemed to be no better than that of the Left Behind novels.  (Although I am a Christian, I couldn't stand those books - it's a sin to make cheap art out of Scripture.)  Here are a few trenchant lines regarding Kunstler's book from a Los Angeles Times reviewer.  If you want to read some well-written post-apocalyptic fiction, I would recommend Stephen King's The Stand, although King does not deal with resource depletion and climate change.)

The more nuanced camp has thus had increasing appeal to me over the years. I now consider myself to be a member of that camp. I believe the official reports of the Energy Watch Group and of Robert Hirsch's task force. I also believe the authors of the Limits to Growth reports. I therefore believe that our global industrial society (and American society in particular) is already encountering some non-negotiable changes. But I also believe that this fact does not give us a pass to throw away our moral compass. Rather, that moral compass (and a firm grip on reality) should guide us in assessing our situation. We should be asking whether we face a problem to be gotten over, or a predicament to be lived with graciously. (I believe the evidence points to the latter.)

If then we face a predicament, how shall we address it? What are the strategic goals we should have? One reason I like people like Richard Heinberg is that he seems to be looking for solutions which benefit as many people as possible (rather than clamoring hysterically about a coming zombie apocalypse)! If helping as many people as possible is to be our goal, that goal will guide the technical adaptations we pursue. The search for technical adaptations will have to take place on three scales: the individual, the local, and the societal. And these adaptations will not be effective without first adapting psychologically, namely, in deciding whether we are willing to accept a humbler lifestyle. Dysfunctional psychology will interfere with the wise choosing of appropriate technical adaptations! Can “we” get over our modern Western, American dysfunctional psychology in an age of limits? Or will we continue to hawk the same “solutions” that got us into our present mess: guns, “liberty!!!”, selfishness, the “free market,” the exaltation of the “agentic” over the “communal” (as blogger CZBZ puts it)? The coming days will mark the end of Anglo-American “fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love,” and "we" will have to heal our diseased mindset, lest we continue to try the wrong solutions to the wrong problems. Those who keep pushing wrong approaches may end up trying to feed themselves with long spoons in Hell.  And let me tell you something.  The rest of the world will not simply roll over and die so that you can have a temporary extension of your fantasies of unlimited power.  You will have to adapt to life in a multipolar world and a multicultural society.

As far as technical adaptations, that has been my focus for the last few years, and it is the reason why I have gone back to school. I believe that the formulation of technical adaptations to resource scarcity and lower energy availability will require the presence of people with a strong background in math and the sciences. That will be the background of people who are interested in playing “the long game,” and that is the background which I have been acquiring. Those with such a background will not only be able to formulate technical adaptations, but will also be able to test and fine-tune those adaptations so that they work optimally. Along those lines, I intend, God willing, to write a post this summer about a project that I've been working on since last year. Stay tuned...

Appropriate Technology, Narcissism and the Savior Complex

Over the last year or so, I've been discussing the narcissism of First World culture, and especially of Anglo-American culture.  I've noted how that narcissism drives many members of this dominant culture to cast themselves as the saviors of the world, and to cast the rest of the world as either unredeemable villains or unteachable idiots.  (It also hinders that culture from accepting the reality of a world of limits.)  But this week I realized that I had touched on these themes nearly seven years ago, in a series of posts I wrote on the topic of "appropriate technology."  Here is a link to one of those posts, titled, "The Distasteful Truth."  Some of the links in that post no longer work, so here, here, and here are links to the story of Mr. Mohammed Bah-Abba and his original invention of the zeer, or pot-in-pot refrigerator.  And here is a link to the story of a British "savior of the world" who "invented" Mr. Bah Abba's invention ten years after he invented it.  Aren't we so blessed that Emily Cummins arose as a savior of Africa?

The Night Terror Of A Multipolar World

8-22-2023: I have decided to pull this post.  When I wrote it back in 2015, I was still under the influence of information sources which were actually created by the Russian government for the purpose of spreading misinformation and propaganda.  As the events of the last few years have abundantly shown, Russia has turned out to be a narcissistic, imperialist, piece-of-garbage regime led by a thieving little man in a bunker.  Those Russians who truly desire to be decent people have renounced that regime and its leader.  Because in 2015 I was writing under the influence of false information, this post which I originally wrote will therefore need to be revised.  Once the revision is completed, I will re-publish the post.

The Drama of A Special People

Here is a link to a post I wrote a year ago, in which I described the religious and psychological roots of the grossly oversized American grandiose self.  By reading it, you can gain a bit of insight into the desperate crash that may come when that grandiose self is taken apart, and you can understand the desperation of the leaders and many of the common people of American society as they try to keep that grandiose self intact.  (That grandiose self is being taken apart both domestically and internationally, as I and others have been reporting for a while.)

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.

Holiday Ruminations For A Benighted World

It's that time of year again when millions of turkeys are losing their lives in order to fuel a feast of consumption here in the U.S., and retailers and manufacturers of gadgets, trinkets and toys (many of them for adults and many of them electronic) are using every enticement known to man in order to lure  adults with fattened wallets to financial slaughter at various Black Friday and pre-Holiday sales and movie theaters.  Only, there are not many adults with fattened wallets this season - and their numbers are rapidly diminishing.  (Maybe there's an economic "plague" among the "cattle.")

Me, I am again abstaining from spending money this season.  My reasons include the unresolved reasons of last year, and the knowledge that the owners of the present economic and political order would like to use my participation in that order in order to expand their robbery and oppression not only people of color here in the U.S., but citizens of poor nations abroad.  So this year end, as I did last year end, I am not buying anything for Christmas except food, unless a critical thing (like a refrigerator or water heater) breaks and I have to replace it.  (No "upgrades" either.)  And no movies or any other form of paid entertainment.  Whoever reads this can join me, if you'd like (and even spread the word, if you feel inspired).  Let your conscience be your guide.

To help guide your conscience, if you're open to guidance, I am also providing a link to some entertainment you can download for free.  Here is a complete audio dramatization of A Canticle for Leibowitz, a Roman Catholic science fiction novel written by Walter Miller, Jr., back in the 1950's and published in 1960.  It nicely and powerfully illustrates the role that original sin plays in the behavior of nations.  Its ending makes me think of these present days, when the governments and great and wealthy men of a number of nations are employing every weapon including outright lying to try to hold onto their endangered power and prestige.

For The First Time In Respectable Company...,

Regarding the recent terror attack in Paris, the term "false flag" has finally made it into respectable mainstream discourse, via a senior official in the German government.  According to the Huffington Post, "In Germany, Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere told reporters in Berlin that a Syrian passport found with one of the Paris attackers with the name Ahmad al Mohammad may have been a false flag intended to make Europeans fearful of refugees. (Just as I said.)  The passport showed registrations in Greece, Serbia and Croatia, which he described as 'unusual.'"  The publishing of this statement also marks the first time I know of that the concept of a false flag operation has been discussed in a mainstream media outlet in anything other than a dismissive tone.

So if elements of the German government are now admitting that the perpetrators may not be the agents named by the French government in the first minutes after the attack, why is France still extremely hot on bombing Syria and taking over the Sahel in West Africa?  I can't give a definite answer, but I want to point out that there is oil there - and China has already established a presence in Chad, where the Sahel is located.  There are also other minerals there.  Something to think about as stressed people watch the remains of their counrtries' resources seized and their infrastructure destroyed to feed Western rage.  Pray that some of these may be able to find a good night's sleep.

Munchausen's Empire: A False Flag Primer

France is using last Friday's "terror attack" exactly as I predicted in my most recent two posts.  Indeed, they seem to be almost exactly copying the script the U.S. followed after the 9/11 "terror attacks", except that they are more rabid and vehement and less interested in appearing to be "compassionate" conservatives.  They intend to target "ISIS" in West Africa as well as Syria, Libya and Iraq.  This should lead the serious student of world affairs to ask what natural resources, and especially mineral resources reside in the Sahel of West Africa.  That will give students a clear idea as to why France decided that ISIS is a "threat" there.  (Serious students can also look at Haiti's natural resources and the percentage of that country owned by foreign interests, and decide what the U.S. was really trying to "protect" when it sent thousands of troops there after the devastating earthquake in 2010.)

I have noticed that there are two audiences of this blog.  The first consists of those who have studied the impact of resource depletion on industrial societies and the global economy.  I am flattered by your readership, especially since many of you know much more than I do about these things.  The second audience is more recent, and consists of those who have been interested in my analysis of the dysfunctional psychology of an empire in decline.  Some in the second audience may be unfamiliar with terms familiar to the first group.  One of those terms is "false flag operation."

For those of you who want to know what that means, and why it matters (especially why it matters whether the Paris attack was a false flag operation), here are a few links to help introduce you to the subject.

This Wikipedia article defines the term, and provides historical examples of false flag operations.

This article examines some disturbing characteristics of the Paris massacre.  (Language warning.)

This article provides testimony from a retired member of the U.S. military concerning American uses of false flag operations.

This article provides background information on the origins of Al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Here and here are articles listing several admitted false flag operations that were either planned or planned and executed by various governments.  See where the U.S. is in this list.  Here is an article describing Turkey's role in false flag operations in Syria.

And lastly, here is an article describing Munchausen syndrome, a serious personality disorder.  (Munchausen's by proxy is even worse.)

These sources should provide a few hours of riveting, yet macabre, reading.

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.

Resilience, Healthcare and Cooperation

Here is a link to a post I did over five years ago concerning the Cuban health care system and the ways in which it is both different from and better than the U.S. health care system.  That post also contains an audio interview I conducted with Rachel True, who is a member of the staff at MEDICC, a health care education cooperative group which has partnered with Cuba to train doctors for the developing world and for underserved communities in the United States.  In that interview we discuss the Latin American School of Medicine, a medical school founded by the Cuban government under Fidel Castro to provide free medical education to prospective students from poor countries and communities who would not be able to afford tuition at medical schools in developed countries such as the U.S.

The Cuban medical system is a prime example of the good that can arise in a society that is founded on cooperation and collaboration and not on ruthless Calvinist cut-throat competition.  For that reason, such an arrangement is not likely to arise in mainstream Anglo-American society unless that society undergoes a radical change.  Until then, we in the U.S. will have to content ourselves with window-shopping (or, for the richest among us, with medical tourism.)

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.

For Those Who Want To Take Charge Of Their Own Growth

I am very busy with grad school just now, so I won't be able to write a new post this week.  However, grad school (and self education in general) line up nicely with a post I wrote a few months ago, a post which I have decided to share again with interested readers who are trying to improve themselves in the midst of a society that is trying to scapegoat and destroy them.  Here then, for your enjoyment and edification, is Not Someone Else's Bonsai.

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.

This Is How You've Lost Me

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.  Not only has the United States lost me, but so has Putin's Russia.  Putin is garbage.
 
Many years ago, just for fun, I took a creative writing class at a community college.  In that class we read an excerpt from a story which was part of Drown, an anthology written by Junot Diaz.  (The part we were assigned was the part where Yunior, the protagonist, got carsick while riding in a van with his father.)  A long time after that, I read that Junot Diaz had written another anthology titled, This Is How You Lose Her, in which Yunior was again the main character.  That anthology was an examination of the life of a young man, inwardly sensitive and looking for genuine love, yet outwardly macho, whose machismo led him to sabotage all his relationships with women by using them as objects and cheating on them.  At the end of the road, the pain of multiple rejections caused him to introspect and face the reality of his character and cultural influences, and to own the consequences of his actions.

Here's a disclaimer: The summary I have just sketched is a condensed version of other summaries of the book.  I haven't read it personally, other than skimming excerpts of a couple of its stories, because although I could see the strength and talent of Diaz in the story I read for the creative writing class, I found his style a bit too gritty for my taste.  Yet the central premise of This Is How You Lose Her is intriguing in light of current events.  I am thinking of "The Cheater's Guide to Love," and wondering how widely a cheater's reputation spreads among his potential victims once one of them catches on to the fact that he's a cheater.  I am also thinking of how rare it is that people who look at others as objects to be exploited ever come to the point where they are genuinely, healthily sorry for their actions.  I am also thinking of the perspective of the characters who were cheated by Yunior: were there ever any instances in which two or more of them met and began to compare notes on him as a way of making sense of their own experiences?  (In order to find out, I guess I'd have to read the book.)

That last question is central to today's blog post.  Each of us deals with diverse characters in the course of day-to-day life.  And sometimes those dealings involve conflict between individuals.  Each side in such conflicts has his or her own story, and frequently each side tries to recruit a "jury" of his or her peers to render a favorable judgment on his or her side of the conflict.  But if you're a member of such a potential jury, and you have been trashed by one of the parties in the conflict, your experience will color your judgment of each side's claims in the present conflict.  Let's say then that a few of Yunior's exes met by chance, and that they all knew a woman who was currently involved with him (and being cheated on by him).  If she complained to her acquaintances about his cheating, whom would they be more likely to believe?  Her or him?

In the same way, there now exists a dispute which involves more than individuals.  It now involves entire nations.  I am referring to the struggle between the West and those nations who have refused to submit themselves to Western economic domination.  The United States is the chief protagonist for the West, and Russia has begun to emerge as the chief protagonist for the other side.  The two most recent conflicts between these sides have involved the Ukraine and Syria.  In these conflicts, in addition to armed combat, there has been an information war.  In the early months of 2015 it became clear that Russia is winning the information war, and that the United States is none too happy about this.  Concerning military action in Syria, Russia has strongly extended its winning streak, with an increasing number of people ready to believe the Russian side of the story even here in the United States.

What is the American side of the story? It is that Syrian President Bashir Assad is a threat to peace and democracy who has committed horrible atrocities against his own people and who has sought to suppress the birth of genuine democracy in his own country.  Therefore the United States felt compelled to involve itself in Syria by arming rebel groups and bombing Syrian forces loyal to Assad.  Oh, and by the way, there was also this terrible Islamic threat that sprang up out of nowhere and was guilty of great atrocities, so we had to bomb them as well.

And what is the Russian side of the story?  Namely that the United States intervention in Syria was an illegitimate action designed to topple a legitimate government in order to gain geopolitical advantage, that ISIS was a threat manufactured entirely by the United States to destabilize the entire Middle East for American economic and geopolitical advantage, and that the real objective of American and NATO use of force ostensibly against ISIS was to destroy targeted Middle Eastern countries in order to facilitate the installation of puppet governments favorable to American economic and geopolitical interests.

Which side to believe? And on what basis does one make the choice?  Making the choice might involve much research, including reading Wikileaks documents authored by the governments in question.  It might also involve much tedious analysis of evidence.  But one thing would help greatly to shorten the process: if you as a potential juror in the court of public opinion had ever been trashed by one side or the other, remembering your experience would help you to arrive at a speedy verdict.  So if we look at Russia's claim that the intervention and use of force by the United States in the Mideast, and especially now in Syria, has nothing to do with the stated aims of the United States to "protect and promote democracy" and to "fight terrorism," we can ask whether the United States has on any other occasion used force for ulterior purposes which had nothing to do with its ostensible stated objectives.

The answer to that question is a resounding "Yes!"  I am thinking of the "War on Crime" and the "War on Drugs," wars which have been waged ostensibly to protect American citizens from supposed violent threats within its borders, wars whose actual effect has been to destroy lives, families, neighborhoods and communities by locking up a disproportionate number of people of color for very petty and nonviolent offenses, and in far too many cases, to lock up people who never committed any crimes in the first place.  As far as locking up innocent people, the following links should be an eye-opener:

• 'Three black men, convicted as teens, exonerated in Ohio after serving 20 years in prison',

• 'Three black men released after 18 years in prison on wrongful murder convictions' (this group is different from the three in the first article),

• 'Exonerations in the United States, 1989-2012' (especially starting at page 30),

• 'Race and Justice: Wrongful Convictions of African American Men',

• 'Wrongfully Convicted African-Americans Wait Longer To Be Exonerated Than Others: Study',

• 'How Often Do Wrongful Convictions Involve Black Defendants?' (The answer is between 71 and 73 percent.)

Minorities (especially African-American) make up a disproportionate number of those incarcerated or sentenced to death in this country, yet the available data seems to indicate that the majority of prisoners of color in the United States are innocent. It is a real challenge for the innocent to prove their innocence and to obtain release from prison, because the criminal justice system purposely makes it hard for convicted prisoners to prove their innocence. Indeed, in 2009, the United States Supreme Court ruled that prisoners have no constitutional right to DNA testing that might prove their innocence.  And there is the continued slaughter of unarmed people by American police, who have killed 928 people so far in 2015.

It is also true in this country that most of the mainstream media is being used to spread lies and misinformation about the prevalence of crime among minorities and the necessity of harsh policing of minorities.  In this weekend's New York Times is a piece in which FBI Doofus (Oops! I mean, "Director") James B. Comey insinuates that scrutiny, criticism and video recording of police misconduct is leading to a rise in crime in "certain cities" which he refuses to name.  Another paper ran an article a few weeks ago in which chief pigs (Oops, I mean "police chiefs") at a national convention expressed frustration that citizen scrutiny and the threat of Youtube video footage of police brutality were hindering cops from "fighting crime."  My question is, if the police are fulfilling their ostensible goal of "fighting crime," then why should they object to scrutiny?  They should have nothing to hide, should they?  Unless, of course, they themselves are criminals, and their "ostensible goal" is really a pretext for destroying the designated scapegoats of a narcissistic country.

This country keeps trying implacably to trash certain scapegoated populations within its own borders.  (And I am a member of one of those scapegoated populations, being a Black male.)  So it's easy - oh, so easy! - for me to believe Russia's assertion that this country would trash other nations on a lying pretext, and that American media is full of lies.  It's also easy to believe that the United States would spend over $500 million to train mercenaries and thugs to overthrow a foreign government while refusing to spend any money to help the poorest of its own citizens or to clean up injustices within its own borders.  (Don't you wish you had a brand new ISIS Toyota truck?)  Doofuses like Republicans Dana Rohrabacher and Ed Royce are trying to recapture my "heart and mind" by spending U.S. tax dollars for better, louder media to fight Russia's "weaponization of information."  They refuse to do the one thing that might change my mind concerning this country and its real aims, and that is to start treating its own citizens differently.  In this they are utterly lacking in the humility and introspection that enabled Yunior to own his mistakes.

And this is how they've lost me.

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.