Sunday, November 15, 2015
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.
Saturday, November 14, 2015
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.
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.
Saturday, November 7, 2015
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.)
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.)
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
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:
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.
Sunday, November 1, 2015
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.
Thursday, October 29, 2015
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.
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.
Saturday, October 24, 2015
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:
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.
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?
'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),
'How Often Do Wrongful Convictions Involve Black Defendants?' (The answer is between 71 and 73 percent.)
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