agencies keeping us in the dark...

for some, peace is a "dirty word”


the G7 is dead, isn't it?...

The greater meaning of meaninglessness...

ditto...

completely dickies...

pushing a barrow of shit...

the nuts and boltons are taking over the world...

more coneheads...

 

 

 

Of all the pests parading as US presidents, Trump might have been the least offensive of all...

 

 

If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.

-Noam Chomsky, 1990.

Of Course Trump Should Be Convicted

Donald Trump ought to be convicted by the U.S. Senate, of course: he instigated a mass proto-fascist physical assault on Congress in a last-ditch effort to stop it from certifying his clear defeat in the 2020 presidential election – and to provoke a pretext for martial law. Five people died. Many more could have perished. It was a despicable act driven by Trump’ big fascist “stop the steal” lie. If the Senate can’t take impeachment through conviction over that, what’s the point of having an impeachment process?

There’s no basis for the Trump “legal” team’s claim that it is unconstitutional to impeach and convict a president after he has left office. The notion that the U.S. Founders wanted to give presidents a blank check to do whatever they want after they are un-elected is absurd. The preponderant majority of constitutional scholars agree that Congress has the right to convict Trump after his presidency, a prerequisite for the elementarily decent task of banning the monster from holding federal office again.

Of Course He’ll Walk

But just as obvious as the legitimacy and duty of a Trump conviction is the strong likelihood that the duty will not be met. Trump will walk. It takes a two-thirds tally in the upper body of Congress to convict. The votes aren’t there in a Senate that is evenly divided between the two dominant imperialist parties even though Democratic Senators represent 41 million more people than Republican Senators (since the nation’s anti-democratic 18th Century charter grants every U.S. state two Senators regardless of the states’ wildly different population totals.)

It seemed briefly that conviction would reach the 66 of 100 Senate vote threshold, but that’s over now. In the final week of the month in which he incited an insurrectionary fascist attack on the Capitol, the Republican party establishment reconnected with Trump. On Tuesday, January 26th, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who earlier acknowledged that Trump’s sparking of the assault was an impeachable offense, cynically voted to declare a second Trump impeachment trial unconstitutional since the 45th president is no longer in office (Malevolent Mitch cares not a whit about the counsel of constitutional experts). Two days later, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who said that Trump “bears responsibility” for the attack, traveled down to Mar a Lago to make amends with the disgraced fascist overlord. McCarthy still clings to the absurd notion that Biden didn’t legitimately win the presidency.

It turns out that Trump and Trumpism’s popularity is too strong with the Republifascist base for GOP leaders to jettison the malignant orange ex-president just for, …you know, trying to carry out a fascist coup. All ten of the Republican House representatives who had the decency to vote for Trump’s second impeachment are facing a storm of right-wing criticism in their home districts.

So, no, Trump won’t be convicted in the U.S. Senate at least and may well be free to run again if he so chooses.

War and Other Crimes

This is of course pathetic and enraging. But it is unsurprising and there is a very real question about how upset it is appropriate to get about this. Because let’s face it, what distinguishes the fascist pig Trump’s crime is not its scale and lethality but rather the fact that it was directed at the holy American capitalist-oligarchic republic itself – “our” supposed “constitutional democracy” – and not at some other country and people on the wrong side of U.S. imperial guns and propaganda.

Let’s review a number of crimes for which no U.S. presidents were impeached, much less convicted:

+ George W. Bush’s prodigiously mass-murderous invasion and occupation of Iraq, based on abject Orwellian lies (Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” and Saddam Hussein’s supposed complicity in 9/11 along with the absurd claim of a desire to export democracy). This monumental imperialist transgression led to the premature death of more than a million people.

+ George W. Bush’s torture, rendition, and assassination policies, left without prosecution by the Obama administration in the name of “looking forward, not backwards.”

+ John F. Kennedy’s failed invasion of Cuba, prelude to a missile confrontation he drove to the point of near global thermonuclear war.

+ Lyndon Baines Johnson’s 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic, leading to at least 3000 Dominican deaths, in support of right-wing Third World fascist business and military rule.

+ Lydon Baines Johnson’s infamous Gulf of Tonkin lie, justifying his drastic escalation of the U.S. “crucifixion of Southeast Asia,” Noam Chomsky’s useful description of the so-called Vietnam War. The crucifixion, initiated under John Fitzgerald Kennedy and continuing through the presidency of Gerald Ford, killed as many 5 million Southeast Asians.

+ Richard Nixon’s bombing and invasion of Cambodia, leading to millions of deaths, one among many disgraceful Nixon acts in the Vietnam-Laos-Cambodia crucifixion.

+ Nixon’s wiretapping and murder of New Left antiwar and radical Left activists.

+ Nixon’s sponsorship of a deadly Third World fascist coup in Chile on September 11, 1973.

+ Gerald Ford’s approval and greenlighting of Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of East Timor, starting off an occupation that killed 200 000 people, a third of the island’s population.

+ Jimmy Carter’s sponsorship of extreme Islamist terrorism to defeat an exemplary pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan, a disastrous strategy that has led to mass death and misery within and beyond that country.

+ Ronald Reagan’s funding, training, and equipping of Third World fascist regimes and death squads that killed hundreds of thousands of Central American peasants, workers, intellectuals, and activists.

+ George H. W. Bush’s mass-murderous war on Iraq, which concluded with the infamous “Highway of Death,” when U.S. warplanes risked mid-air collisions in the frenzy to slaughter tens of thousands of surrendering Iraqi troops. Mafia Don Daddy Bush reflected on how the one-sided racist-imperialist “turkey shoot” called Operation Desert Storm established the principle that “what we say goes” in the post-Soviet era.

+ Bill Clinton’s economic sanctions on Iraq, which killed at least one million Iraqis, including at least half a million children.

+ Bill Clinton’s murderous bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.

+ Bill Clinton’s bombing of Serbia, causing hundreds of deaths.

+ Barack Obama’s support of a right-wing Third World fascist coup in Honduras, installing a regime that has killed and tortured untold thousands of civilians and activists.

+ Barack Obama’s record-setting drone assassination campaign, including the murder of U.S. citizens and their children.

+ Barack Obama’s many deadly bombings in Afghanistan, including the slaughter (absurdly blamed by Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on “Taliban grenades”) of dozens of children in the village of Bola Boluk.

+ Barack Obama’s sponsorship and organization of a right-wing neofascist coup in Ukraine in February of 2014.

+ Barack Obama’s 2011 bombing of Libya, which helped ruin that country for at least a generation while spreading lethal chaos across North Africa.

+ Barack “Deporter-in-Chief” (and thereby top family-separator) Obama’s war on domestic whistleblowers and his enlistment of the Department of Homeland Security in the repression and dismantlement of the Occupy Wall Street movement, an effort to confront the corporate and financial oligarchy – the unelected dictatorship of money that rules the U.S. regardless of which of the two capitalist parties hold nominal power.

I could go on, of course, reaching back into the numerous genocidal wars and attacks U.S. presidents waged on Indigenous North Americans, the mass-murderous U.S. invasion and dismemberment of Mexico (under the racist and expansionist president James Polk), the U.S. murder of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos in the late 19th and early 20th Century (under presidents William McKinley and his white nationalist imperialist successor Theodore Roosevelt), white-supremacist Woodrow Wilson’s bombing of Veracruz and invasion of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and more.

Other Stuff for Which Trump has Not been Impeached

Think also of some of the crimes for which Trump was NOT impeached by the RussiaGate-obsessed House of Representatives: denying the existence of the single greatest menace currently facing humanity, anthropogenic (really capitalogenic) climate change, and doing everything he could to accelerate global warming and other forms of eco-cide; stealing children from asylum-seeking parents at the southern border; stealing taxpayer dollars to build sections of a hated and criminal border wall; using his presidency to feed the profits of his business empire; defying international asylum conventions; murdering the top military commander of Iran (and numerous associates) on Iraqi soil (without so much as notifying the Iraqi government in advance); failing to respond properly to a devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico and then mocking the island’s pain; quasi-genocidally fanning and fueling a deadly pandemic across the nation – a virus that is likely to kill more than a million U.S. Americans before it is done.

Yes, the neofascist pig Donald “Go Back to Your Shithole Countries” Trump should be convicted and banned from holding public office ever again for waging a criminal war on the 2020 election – a war that culminated in the bloody Attack on the Capitol. But let’s not pretend that American presidents haven’t long gone unpunished for much more extensive crimes committed against masses of people in other countries. And let’s face it: the fascist monster Trump’s assault on the 2020 election was a sloppy and failed version of something right-wing forces have effectively accomplished with far greater body count and the help of U.S. presidents in Third World countries for many years: a coup d’etat. Trump tried in his own sick and incoherent way to give the United States a blown-back taste of its own medicine.

I’d like to see him locked up for the rest of his life. But he’d hardly the only ex-POTUS who deserves to be serving hard time. It is disgusting that Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama walk free after all the murder and mayhem they’ve inflicted, chiefly though not exclusively abroad. Under the Nuremburg principles, consistently applied, each one of these two-term imperial chieftains would have been sent to the gallows by now.

 

 

Read more:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/02/05/on-non-conviction-empire-and-u-s-presidents/

 

Let's hope that Joe Biden is a man of peace... and thus drops all charges against JULIAN ASSANGE. SEE: free assange, president biden...

 

 

By Caitlin Johnstone, an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her website is here and you can follow her on Twitter @caitoz

 

With anyone sharing 'conspiracy theories' facing ever-harsher penalties online, we are ignoring their cause: governments so intent on keeping their secrets, not to protect their people, but to protect themselves.

The DC Circuit has ruled that the CIA is under no obligation to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests pertaining to its involvement with insurgent militias in Syria, overturning a lower court’s previous ruling in favor of a Buzzfeed News reporter seeking such documents.

As Sputnik‘s Morgan Artyukhina clearly outlines, this ruling comes despite the fact that mainstream news outlets have been reporting on the Central Intelligence Agency’s activities in Syria for years, and despite a US president having openly tweeted about those activities.

“In other words, the CIA will not be required to admit to actions it is widely reported as having done, much less divulge documents about them to the press for even greater scrutiny,” Artyukhina writes, calling to mind the Julian Assange quote, “The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security.”

My latest: Despite extensive reporting by the @WSJ & CIA-vetted @nytimes confirming it happened, a DC court has sided with the @CIA, finding that a Trump tweet doesn't constitute proof that it funded al-Qaeda in #Syria. https://t.co/NFaQBrggV5

— Morgan Artyukhina (LavenderNRed) February 13, 2021

 

The CIA’s brazen collaboration with dangerous extremist factions seeking to topple Damascus, and its equally brazen refusal to provide the public with any information about the extent of its involvement in Syria from the earliest stages of the violence in that nation onwards, will necessarily provide fodder for conspiracy theories.

It is public knowledge that the CIA was involved in the Syrian war to some extent, it is public knowledge that the CIA has a well-documented history of doing extremely evil things, and it is public knowledge that the US government has long sought control over Syria. Due to the agency’s refusal to be transparent about the exact nature of its involvement in that nation, people are left to fill in the knowledge gaps with their own speculation.

Of course they will do this. Why wouldn’t they? Why would anyone give the lying, torturing, propagandizing, drug trafficking, coup-staging, warmongering, psychopathic Central Intelligence Agency the benefit of the doubt and assume their actions in Syria have been benevolent just because the hard facts have been hidden behind a wall of government secrecy?

Yet they will be expected to. Anyone with a sufficient degree of influence who comes right out and says the CIA knowingly armed violent jihadists with the goal of orchestrating regime change in Syria will be attacked as a crazy conspiracy theorist by the narrative managers of the establishment media. If their words are really disruptive to establishment narratives, there will be calls to deplatform, unemploy, and ban them from social media.

I'd forgotten how shameless and demented the imperialist narrative managers get whenever anyone in a position of influence contradicts the imperial narrative about what's happening in Syria. Mentally replace their words with "STOP INTERFERING IN OUR GLOBAL PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGN!" https://t.co/Sd5HCCklkWpic.twitter.com/O9XonJBHfo

— Caitlin Johnstone  (caitoz) January 15, 2021

 

And really such is the case with all the melodramatic garment-rending about the dangers of conspiracy theories today. All the fixation on the way unregulated speech on the internet has contributed to the circulation of conspiracy theories conveniently ignores the real cause of those theories: government secrecy.

If the most powerful government in the world were not hiding a massive amount of its behavior behind increasingly opaque walls of secrecy, people would not need to fill in the gaps with theories about what’s happening, because there would be no gaps; they would simply see what’s happening.

“But Caitlin!” one might object. “How could America engage in all its military operations around the world if it didn’t keep information about its behaviors a secret?”

Exactly, my smooth-brained friend. Exactly.

Government secrecy is indeed necessary for winning wars. Government secrecy is also necessary for starting those wars in the first place. US government agencies have an extensive history of using false pretenses to initiate military conflicts; if they could not hide the facts behind a veil of government opacity, the public would never engage in them. The American people would never have allowed their sons to go to Vietnam if they’d known the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a lie. They’d never have sent their sons and daughters to invade Iraq if they’d known weapons of mass destruction were a lie. They would lose the support of the public, and the international community would refuse to back them.

 

Protecting the lives of foreign military and intelligence personnel is the primary argument against government transparency in the United States, a premise which takes it for granted that there need to be foreign military and intelligence personnel at all. The only reason the lives of troops and intelligence officers would be endangered without massive walls of government secrecy is because those personnel are out there facilitating imperialist acts of mass murder and tyranny. The argument is essentially, “Well we can’t tell you the truth about what’s happening in our government, because it would mean we’d have to stop doing extremely evil things.”

The argument that the internet needs strict censorship to eliminate dangerous conspiracy theories takes it as a given that simply eliminating government secrecy is impossible, which in turn takes it as a given that the US government cannot simply stop inflicting grave evils around the world. Our ability to share information with each other online is therefore ultimately being increasingly choked off by monopolistic Silicon Valley megacorporations, because no one in charge can fathom the idea of the United States government ceasing to butcher human beings around the world.

That is the real underlying argument over internet censorship today. Should people have free access to information about what their own government is doing, or should their government be permitted to do evil things in secret while people who form theories about what they’re doing are shoved further and further away from audibility? That’s the real debate here.

 

Here's how politicians, media and government could eliminate conspiracy theories if they really want to:- Stop lying all the time- Stop killing people- Stop promoting conspiracy theories (Russiagate)- Stop doing evil things in secret- End government opacity- Stop conspiring

— Caitlin Johnstone  (caitoz) January 9, 2021

 

The powerful should not be permitted to keep secrets from the public. They should not be permitted to jail journalists who try to reveal those secrets to the public, and they should not be permitted to collaborate with monopolistic corporations to censor people who form theories about those secrets. The amount of secrecy you are entitled to should be directly inverse to the amount of power that you have.

The US government has powerful agencies whose literal job is to conspire. The fact that people are punished and condemned for forming theories about how that conspiring might take place, even while those agencies are completely lacking in transparency, is abusive.

If the government was not doing evil things in secret, then it wouldn’t need secrecy. If the government didn’t have secrecy, there would be no conspiracy theories. Stop pointing your attacks at powerless people who are just trying to figure out what’s going on in the world amidst a sea of government secrecy and propaganda, and point your attacks instead at the power structures that are actually responsible for the existence of conspiracy theories in the first place.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/515596-caitlin-johnstone-conspiracy-theories-government/

 

 

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From the Political Sword comes a bubble in which the Political Sword lives. It defeats itself with good intention:

 

As we emerge from four years of disastrous Trump politics, fervently hoping for a modicum of normality in US politics, we find ourselves confronted with a growing phenomenon: the desire of many to live in a bubble of their own choice. 

We saw this coming as the likes of Fox News in the US fostered a cult of Trump followers, feeding them with a consistent diet of what they wanted to hear. They lapped it up and came back for more. Trump was their idol, a reliable source of intelligence. They needed no more. Rather than seeking uncontaminated truth, they sought only re-affirmation of their pre-existing views, their ‘truth’. Fox gave it to them in spades.

Herein lies an impending disaster. If individuals and groups choose to insulate themselves from what they don’t want to hear or know, what happens to our inherent sense of curiosity, to humankind’s constant search for truth, for knowledge, for understanding, for advancement? It atrophies and dies. The death of curiosity would herald the death of science.

Yet we know that is what is happening. So many do not want to wrestle with new concepts, new revelations, new facts. As Robert Kuhn so persuasively argues in his seminal book; The Nature of Scientific Revolutions, the inclination of humans is to cling tenaciously to what they already believe, to ignore conflicting evidence no matter how sound. The classic example is phlogiston theory that asserted that substances that burned in air were rich in a substance named phlogiston; the fact that combustion soon ceased in an enclosed space was taken as clear-cut evidence that air had the capacity to absorb only a finite amount of phlogiston. The logical conclusion was that when air had become completely devoid of phlogiston, it would no longer be able to support combustion. 

Despite steadily increasing evidence that the phlogiston theory was no longer tenable, believers adhered to it tenaciously, twisting and turning to find supporting evidence, even though there was none. The complexity of their arguments was astounding, but as ingenious as were their attempts to avoid having to concede that their theory was untenable, they eventually had to admit that they were wrong, As a radical change of belief became unavoidable, they experienced a profound yet sudden epistemological change that Kuhn labelled ‘a paradigm shift’, a term now in common use. 

It was only when Lavoisier developed his theory that combustion was a reaction between the burning substance and oxygen, that the phlogiston theory eventually died from inanition. 

` Even while this piece was being written, we saw Sean Hannity of Fox News bad-mouthing newly- installed US President Joe Biden with these words: “Biden’s speech was ‘forgettable’ and akin to that of a high school president’s acceptance speech “from a guy who was desperately craving a nap.” He went on to dismiss Biden’s calls for unity as “hollow” and “total and complete BS” and said he spouted “worn-out, liberal socialist cliches.” But that was not what really ticked off supporters of the new president. It was when Hannity called him “the weak, the frail, the cognitively struggling Biden” that even his sycophantic audience called him out. The major news networks raced to distance themselves from him, appropriately leaving him looking isolated and stupid.

Hannity lives in his own bubble, where he feels comfortable. Let’s leave him there to stew in his own juice.

It is a sad reality that more and more people are choosing a bubble in which to live where they are never confronted with facts that they simply don’t want ever to know about. They are content to wallow contentedly in a thick sickly soup derived from their preferred ingredients, lapping up their chosen diet of ‘facts’, no matter how implausible. 

This is the world in 2021!

 

 

Read more:

http://www.thepoliticalsword.com/posts.aspx?postid=e5230efe-c348-44a6-b5fc-88ec86b15c95

 

 

Politics is a game of deceit and democracy suffers from this. Despite what we think, Trump was president of the USA for four years and got only defeated by Covid-19, not by false facts, real facts nor implausibility. He was pursued by falsities concocted by the Democrats (re Russia, etc) and others, including republicans, because, in his madness, he did not want to play "their" traditional game of deceit politics. We all live in bubbles and the management of information in politics is full of soap suds. Sciences are more defined, yet there are still "unresolved" knowledge. Meanwhile religions are full of assumption that are not worth knowing, yet Biden is resurrecting the "faith office". Tragic. Any solution to poverty and lifting of spirits in the USA should be 100 per cent secular. 

 

 

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