Touchy Subjects

How the Bullies in our Playground get some kids to beat up on some other kids // …by sneakiness and deceit.

The metaphor that we are kids on a playground run by bullies helps us understand the oftentimes confusing accounts of what’s going on in the world. There are so many wars. There are so many bad guys we, the American people, have to be persuaded to go after and bring to justice. There are so many arguments about what we should do. They all can be understood as complications of a very simple story. We are kids bullied.

The question we need to ask isn’t about which other kids we should beat up today. We’ve been persuaded to do this time after time. It seems that there is no end to the numbers of threatening children in some other part of the world. The question should be, however, whether the people persuading us to go beat up on some other kids are themselves a greater threat to us.  John Pilger argues that the bullies have ways of making us roam the earth like a mob sacking and pillaging whomever these bullies accuse. We have become their enforcers. 

If we want peace, and want the world to be less violent, Pilger wants us first to understand the ways that we create more violence in the world by being so willing to listen uncritically to the bully’s propagandists.

John Pilger’s The War You Don’t See

The following is a discussion from Pilger’s website about the efforts by governments to dupe populations into supporting wars that governments concoct.

In the US Army manual on counterinsurgency, the American commander General David Petraeus describes Afghanistan as a "war of perception... conducted continuously using the news media". What really matters is not so much the day-to-day battles against the Taliban as the way the adventure is sold in America where "the media directly influence the attitude of key audiences". Reading this, I was reminded of the Venezuelan general who led a coup against the democratic government in 2002. "We had a secret weapon," he boasted. "We had the media, especially TV. You got to have the media."

Never has so much official energy been expended in ensuring journalists collude with the makers of rapacious wars which, say the media-friendly generals, are now "perpetual". In echoing the west's more verbose warlords, such as the waterboarding former US vice-president Dick Cheney, who predicated "50 years of war", they plan a state of permanent conflict wholly dependent on keeping at bay an enemy whose name they dare not speak: the public.

Terrorism and the FBI

The FBI has a history of duping naïve people into trying to do violence and then, while  proceeding with Federal assistance,  arresting them. They’ve done it in Oregon to a Somali student  who was encouraged to use a bomb at Christmas.

The following are three video discussions of this issue.

 

Napolitano on FBI entrapment cases

Don’t blame violence on the people or their weapons // It’s all about the Maxims they live by…

The Senate has a limited view of what could be done to quell violence in America. Some feel that the only thing to do is enact more strict gun control laws. So, this…

“…Debate over the measures consumed the Senate on Wednesday, with speeches from both sides meant to stir emotions. “I choose to vote my conscience,” Mr. Reid said, announcing his decision to vote for the bans on assault weapons and magazines that carry more than 10 rounds of ammunition, “because, if tragedy strikes again — if innocents are gunned down in a classroom or a theater or a restaurant — I could not live with myself as a father, as a husband, as a grandfather or as a friend knowing that I didn’t do everything in my power to prevent it.””

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/18/us/politics/senate-obama-gun-control.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1

There are other measures that could be taken,

For example, set a better example. The large number of examples of police violence that we know about cannot teach anyone to use other, less violent methods, to resolve disputes.

It also cannot help matters that we live in a police/surveillance state where all of our communications are monitored.

Nor can it help that so many people are out of work, underemployed, or working at undesirable menial labor.

Nor can it help that so many people are languishing in prison for whatever reason without any hope that their lives will be any better when or if they ever get out.

It is also curious that no one is addressing the issues around  the reasons there are so many of these shooters. It has been claimed that  many if not most have been on prescribed anti-depressant medications and that it is these drugs which have set these people off. The fact that this is not an issue reflects the occult power of the pharmaceutical industry in our politics.

Finally, it cannot be that the people can be blamed so much for violence in general when they are under the stress of so much poverty, a failed democracy,  and bad examples from their leaders. The guns, or the knives, or the baseball bats, cannot be blamed for the violence, or the ferocity of the violence when, in fact, they are just inanimate objects.  Instead, I want to blame the lesson that our culture teaches everyone, that life is cheap, that individuals don’t matter much in the big picture, and that appeals to morality, justice, or even practicality, can make no…nada… difference to someone who thinks that if they control enough violence, sneakiness, and deceit, they can get done anything that they want.

These are  the lessons  that our country lives by, and they are why we will continue to have social conflict well into the future until somehow, they are countered.

Who is the terrorist?

Here’s a story about a man who expressed his observations about what was going on at his granddaughter's school and is now defending himself from accusations that he is a menacing terrorist.

 

We should all be concerned about what happened to this person because we could all be in his shoes. We could all express some observation about some government operation, be overheard, and be arrested.

That is, government is not infallible and in times when we are concerned about terrorist attacks and the potential for criminal wrong doing by government officials themselves, we are going to make observations pertinent to those issues and, if unguarded, those  expressed observations could be used against us in a court of law.

How to think about the Boston bombings // Are they “senseless”?

 

President Obama talking about the “senseless” bombing in Boston.

 

The President is not the only one who says the Boston bombings are “senseless.” I can understand the President’s remarks as expressing how little we understand about who did this bombing, or why. The immediate causes might be unknown, and that’s what police investigations are going to try to clear up.  I have below two additional videos talking about various puzzlements and curiosities having to do with Boston’s events. These go to the question of whether we have no clue as to who or why anyone would bomb us.  Unfortunately, it’s not like we should have no clue. Anyone who has been paying attention should be able to come up with several handfuls of reasons why or possible culprits. So, in a sense,  the claim that these are “senseless” acts of brutality is not true.

I can put together three conflicts which could lead to an event like the Boston bombing. The first is our “class war.” There is a hardening conflict between the powers-that-be and the rest of us over wealth distribution and control.  Gladio teams were set up in Europe and the middle east after world war 2 and were responsible for several bombings in Italy, and elsewhere, committed by operatives of these units, supported by our intelligence services, intended to be blamed on the left in order to discredit the left critique of capitalism in those countries.  These kinds of operations might now be going on here now. There’s always “blowback” whereby after our armies have gone out into the world and muscled away from foreigners their valuables and killed whomever might have tried to put up any kind of effective resistance, the relatives and survivors of those killed and the countries ruined still think about payback. This should remind us of Tripoli and the Marine fight song where pirates had been making a living off of stealing valuables from us until we sent in the Marines to deliver our “blowback.”   As the U.S. gets financially and socially weaker those we’ve been attacking for so long will start coming after us like Marines.  And third, there’s what the right calls the “new civil war” where they believe there is a conflict between the left which is driven to undermine the freedoms and wealth of  innocent Americans, the right wingers in this country. They believe the Obama administration is provoking an armed conflict in this country - a new civil war.

You could make a case that any one of these three conflicts could be responsible for a bombing here or there. These acts are not “senseless” in the sense we cannot think of why they occur. Our problem is that we can think of far too many reasons why others would want to harm us.

Glenn Greenwald on State Power

The following is Glenn Greenwald talking about everyone’s present problems with our government.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/02/assange-sweden-saadiq-barrett-brown

Does Gun Control do anything to Control Crime?

These videos argue that Gun Control does not reduce crime or gun violence.

 

 

We also have to worry about “Currency Wars” // Are they just as dangerous as “Shooting Wars?”

The following videos discuss the issue of “Currency Wars,”  what are they supposed to do, how do they get started, why should we care. 

 

http://spookyweather.blogspot.com/2013/03/keiser-report-e419-financial-pearl.html

 

The following is a n essay from The Weekly Standard,

Currency Wars

12:00 AM, FEB 9, 2013 • BY IRWIN M. STELZER

Growth is the summum bonum of economic policy. Tough to arrange at home: stimulus packages don’t work very well, and monetary policy produces lots of fiat money but not very many jobs. The solution: export-led growth—the other guy will buy so much of your goods and services that your economy will grow. There are two ways to make this sort of growth happen. Lower the international value of your currency so that your output is cheaper overseas, or increase productivity at home by lowering labor and other costs and therefore the prices you need to charge foreigners. The first is painless, or so it seems initially. The second requires a politically difficult assault on benefits and union created labor market rigidities.

We are told: DOJ RULES: 'It Is Legal To Photograph And Film The Police' // Let’s hope this becomes enforced everywhere

We have seen many examples of where the police have arrested bystanders for filming interactions between the police and the public.  This has been understood to be an effort by the police to intimidate anyone from recording police behavior that might  be used against them in court.

Apparently, the Department of Justice has ruled that the laws protect people when they film police in public doing public work.

The following videos discuss this issue.

 

http://dailybail.com/home/doj-rules-it-is-legal-to-photograph-and-film-the-police.html

This quote came from a cited Politico essay,

In the statement filed this week in a federal court in Maryland, the Justice Department argues that not only do individuals have a First Amendment right to record officers publicly doing their duties, they also have Fourth and 14th Amendment rights protecting them from having those recordings seized without a warrant or due process.

Journalist expresses Dismay about NDAA

The following is a video discussing the NDAA signed recently by President Obama. About this video,

This is an excerpt from Journalist Amber Lyon`s speech at Harvard Law School on Feb. 27, 2013. Investigative journalists who cover those the U.S. Government deems ¨terrorists¨ fear they could be indefinitely detained under the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in retaliation for giving a voice to the other side.
The NDAA allows for the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without trial until the end of hostilities and is perhaps the most egregious violation of the U.S. Constitution in history.

http://xrepublic.tv/node/2494

http://www.stopndaa.org/