We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Tuesday, December 19, 2017

Recommended articles for 12/19/2017

  • US Plans Slash and Burn of Middle East to “Minimize” Iranian Influence by Tony Cartalucci. The author is great on accessing publications by the Deep State to determine what they are planning. (The Deep State are top capitalists in finance and industry, who function much like a board of directors for the capitalist ruling class, and function behind a curtain of secrecy, much like puppeteers, to control all institutions, most especially government and media.) I sometimes think that articles published on Brookings' website (or their surrogates) reflect important policies that they want to be considered by the wider capitalist class, but not necessarily implemented. In any case we should be informed about what they are considering as plans for our world.
  • War and Conflicting Geopolitical Agendas by F. William Engdahl. (Disregard the opening paragraphs which appear to be a commercial to sell his book Gods of Money.) I am only posting this because I think he makes a disastrous attempt to interpret history of WWII. It is very important to understand history, especially that of the 20th century so that we can understand present day issues. I will not go into a detailed review of this article, because it is not worth the effort. This article illustrates that Engdahl knows a lot about geopolitical facts, but he sometimes errors in interpreting these facts--and he misinterprets big time in this article! In it his one major error is to argue that Churchill and company refused to support the anti-Hitler camp of Germany's ruling class, a mistake that led to war against Germany. He mostly bases this on something Sir Halford Mackinder wrote in 1904! He totally omits the significance of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the obsession by the Western capitalist countries to rid the world of this blasphemy for capitalist enterprise. I wonder if he hasn't lived too long in Germany where he may have been influenced too much by German apologists for the Nazis. For my interpretation of WWII see this, this, this, this, and this.
  • Putin Is Preparing for World War III "Lookie" (def.) here at the latest cover of Newsweek magazine! Our masters may be preparing us for WWIII and it will likely be a war fought with nuclear weapons. It seems to me that our masters nowadays are frequently guilty of projection, a psychological mechanism that tries to project onto others what they themselves want to do (or did) to others.
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