Showing posts with label Amerika. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Amerika. Show all posts

The Empire's new Reality

SUBHEAD: From Skripal to Syria – The empire’s “New Realities” are reaching the end of the road.

By Rob Slane on 12 April 2018 for The Blogmire -
(http://www.theblogmire.com/from-skripal-to-syria-the-empires-new-realities-are-reaching-the-end-of-the-road/)


Image above: A detail of 19th century cartoon by Victor Gillam of America's Uncle Sam with the caption "A Lesson For Anti-Expansionists showing how Uncle Sam has been an expansionist first, last and all the time." From (https://fabiusmaximus.com/2018/01/12/an-anthropologist-explains-the-american-empire/).
“That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Thus spake Karl Rove, Deputy Chief of Staff in the Government of George W. Bush.
I do wish people would study Rove’s words more carefully. Judiciously study them.

If they did, then whenever the next alleged atrocity occurs and the United States, together with its coalition of supine vassals, starts yelling and hollering 10 minutes later for action to be taken, on the basis of a test-tube full of washing powder, or pictures of injured women and children in a war zone, and the entire media of dutiful stenographers shrieks that “something must be done”, then perhaps we might pause and wonder if we are being played.

Instead of falling into an emotional spasm, maybe we would instead reject the deafening drumbeats of war – wars that have a habit of killing immeasurably more women and children than the alleged incidents on which they are based, by the way — and ask ourselves whether “Rove’s Law” has come into play.


As an aside, the West’s interventionist wars remind me of that wonderfully cynical exchange in the film, The Man With Two Brains:
Dr. Hfuhruhurr: “The only time we doctors should accept death is when it’s caused by our own incompetence!”
Dr. Necessiter: “Nonsense! If the murder of twelve innocent people can help save one human life, it will have been worth it!”
Here’s Dr. Necessiter selling us into war in Iraq: “Nonsense! If it costs us the deaths of 500,000 people to topple the evil dictator Saddam Hussein, it will have been worth it!”

Here he is selling us bombs on Libya: “Nonsense! If turning Libya into a failed state, a terrorist’s playground, and causing a mass exodus of refugees is the price for getting rid of Gaddafi, it will have been worth it.”

And here’s Dr Necessiter again, this time trying to sell us into bombing Syria: “Nonsense! Risking a catastrophic clash with a country armed with thousands of nuclear weapons is worth it in order to respond to the alleged deaths of less than a hundred people in a totally unproven chemical weapons attack.”

Behold, the “logic” of the interventionists!

But back to Rove. What was he saying? Three things:

Number one: We – that is the Globalist Deep State, centred in Washington DC – are sovereign over the entire globe and we will do as we please.
Number two: That we don’t follow reality, we create it.
Number three: That we are prepared to do things that will make your jaws drop, your hair stand on end, and your eyes boggle as you wonder what is going on, and while your jaws, your hair and your eyes are busy doing their thing, we will have moved onto create our next reality.

In other words – we are God – and not a kind and merciful God, but a God who lords it over all peoples’, nations and tongues, who tells lies, and then tells more lies to cover up those lies and – when you poor saps are trying to work out what it is we’re really up to.

Before you know what has happened, those lies and those lies to cover up lies will have become the new reality. We’ll have moved on and the world with it, and the narrative we have created will have been written in the history books, which we ourselves shall write.

The cases of Sergei Skripal and the alleged chemical attack in Eastern Ghouta seem somehow to represent the zenith of this ideology.

I do not know who poisoned Sergei Skripal or for what reason.

It could be that the Russian Government was behind it, although this would mean accepting the highly improbable thesis that they decided to target a has-been MI6 spy, who they released from prison eight years ago, using perhaps the dumbest assassination method in the history of the world.

It was an ineffective, slow-operating, “military-grade” nerve agent, which could be traced back to them, and which they smeared on a door handle in rainy Salisbury –, a week or so before a Presidential election, and less than 100 days before they are due to host the World Cup.

In other words, the official narrative does not rest on accepting that the Russian state is the epitome of pure evil; it rests on accepting that it is the epitome of insanity and bumbling incompetence.

I do not know what happened in Eastern Ghouta. It could be that the Syrian Government was behind what is alleged to have happened (if it indeed did happen), but this would mean having to accept the thesis that just 24 hours away from completely liberating the last pocket of resistance in Damascus, after the US, the UK and France had all warned that they would attack if chemical weapons were used, just a week or so after the US President, Donald J. Swamp, announced that the US would be pulling out of Syria (which they occupied illegally, by the way), they made the decision to use a weapon that gave them no military advantage whatsoever, but which was practically guaranteed to be used as a pretext for airstrikes against them.

In other words, like the Skripal case, the theory does not stand on accepting that the Syrian state is the epitome of pure evil; it stands on accepting that it is the epitome of self-defeating stupidity on an epic scale.

But you see what I’ve done? I’ve fallen right into Karl Rove’s trap, haven’t I?

I’m asking questions about whether the narratives in these cases stack up. In the Skripal case, I’ve been judiciously studying reality by asking lots of questions that ought to have occurred to anyone with a keen interest in arriving at the truth (here and here, for instance). I could do the same with the Syrian case, if I had the time.

Yet while I’m doing so, the narrative is moving on. I’m falling into exactly the trap that Karl and his disciples have laid.

They want two sorts of people: those who just blindly accept that it was the Russians that did it, or that it was Assad that did it; and those who spend their time asking questions about the official explanations. The first group call the second group conspiracy theorists and nutters. The second group call the first group dumb sheeple.

And the Globalist Deep State laughs and laughs and laughs as the two groups battle it out to make sense of what has happened, leaving it free to march on to create the next reality. Truly I tell you, these Bolsheviks have learned their Hegelian Dialectics well.

Now, this is not to rule out that in the Salisbury and Eastern Ghouta cases the official narratives might – just might – be the correct ones. That both Vladimir Putin and Bashar Assad might be the Laurel and Hardy of Geopolitics.

Yet it has to be said that whatever else you think about them, neither of them tends to come across in interviews as being what you might call dumb or inept.

Nor do either of them give the impression that they have sudden insane impulses to do things which have absolutely no benefit to them, but which hand their enemies massive PR victories.

But this is besides the point.

The point is not whether these particular incidents are what the official narrative says they are, or whether they are provocations.

It suffices for the “new reality creators” to create their realities on occasion, or perhaps to distort occurrences which they didn’t create, and before you know it you have your two groups battling over events which may be real or fake.

On one hand are the conspiracists – who are studying every event to try to work out the details and the inconsistencies – and the other are the sheeple – who believe that their Government is full of good hearted, white hatted chaps and lasses who would never, ever do anything bad – unlike those orcs over in Mordor.

Rove and Co have basically created a “reality” where truth is no longer discernible, where assertions of guilt are taken as fact, and where holes in these kinds of incidents only serve to divide the people further, so that the Globalist Deep State can move on to create their next reality.

But let’s not get gloomy. The good news is that although they clearly think they can get away with it indefinitely, they can’t. No kingdom or empire built on a mountain of lies can stand indefinitely. They all fall.

And can’t you start to sense the signs that the empire’s “new realities” – or what are known as lies in laymen’s terms – are reaching boiling point?

Don’t you sense that they have just got too confident and in doing so have begun to get careless? They are making mistakes. And as they do, they are having to resort to bigger and bigger lies to cover up the ones they’ve already told.

Sadly for Rove and Co, but happily for the rest of us, the world doesn’t actually work the way they think it does. Reality — I mean real reality, rather than the phony reality they have created — will catch up sooner or later. I sense that it’s on its way even now.

And when it finally comes, the whole rotten edifice that these “history’s actors” have tried to create will crash and burn. Bringing much rejoicing.

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National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

SUBHEAD: This is the American organization you don't hear about that tracks down, spies on and kills people  

By Alice Salles on 29 March 2017 for The Anti-Media -
(http://theantimedia.org/agency-dangerous-nsa/)

http://www.islandbreath.org/2017Year/04/170401gatesbig.jpg
Image above: Defense Secretary Robert Gates shakes hands with Navy Vice Adm. Robert  Murrett, outgoing director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, as incoming director Letitia Long stands at left, in Springfield, Virginia on 9 August 2010. Long is the first female to head a U.S. intelligence agency. Photo by Cherie Cullen. Click to enlarge. From (http://archive.defense.gov/photoessays/PhotoEssaySS.aspx?ID=1813)

 If you’re one of the countless Americans who was distraught to learn of the revelations made by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, the mere idea that there might be yet another agency out there — perhaps just as powerful and much more intrusive —  should give you goosebumps.

Foreign Policy reports that the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or NGA, is an obscure spy agency former President Barack Obama had a hard time wrapping his mind around back in 2009.

But as the president grew fond of drone warfare, finding a way to launch wars without having to go through Congress for the proper authorization, the NGA also became more relevant. Now, President Donald Trump is expected to further explore the multibillion-dollar surveillance network.

Like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA), the NGA is an intelligence agency, but it also serves as a combat support institution that functions under the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).

With headquarters bigger than the CIA’s, the building cost $1.4 billion to be completed in 2011. In 2016, the NGA bought an extra 99 acres in St. Louis, building additional structures that cost taxpayers an extra $1.75 billion.

Enjoying the extra budget Obama threw at them, the NGA became one of the most obscure intelligence agencies precisely because it relies on the work of drones.

As a body of government that has only one task — to analyze images and videos captured by drones in the Middle East — the NGA is mighty powerful. So why haven’t we heard of it before?

The Shadow Agency That Sees It All

Prior to Trump’s inauguration, the NGA only targeted the Middle East or whatever spy satellites orbiting the globe captured. As far as most of us knew, the agency refrained from pointing its ultra-high-resolution cameras toward the United States. That alone may be why the NGA has been able to stay out of scandals for the most part.

But under Trump, things may look much worse — as if spying on countless people abroad weren’t enough.

Recently, for instance, he gave the CIA the power to wage covert drone warfare, shielding important information on such operations simply by allowing the agency to carry out missions without first seeking authorization from the Pentagon.

Now, Trump might as well move on to NGA, hoping to boost “national security” by turning the agency’s all seeing eyes toward American soil.

As the president hopes to get more money for defense, many have speculated whether he will start to use drones at home, especially since he has already suggested he supports agencies like the NSA based on his desire to target “terrorists.” There’s nothing that implies he wants to slow down the surveillance state.

The White House has expressed its desire to renew Obama-era spying powers — even as the president battles critics who deny his claims that his conversations were intercepted at the same time foreign nationals were under surveillance in 2016.

A partially redacted March 2016 report released by the Pentagon revealed that drones had already been used domestically on about 20 or fewer occasions between 2006 and 2015.

Though some of these operations mostly involved natural disasters, National Guard training, and search and rescue missions, quotes from an Air Force law review article found their way into the report. In it, Dawn M. K. Zoldi wrote that technology designed to spy on targets abroad could soon be used against American citizens.

“As the nation winds down these wars,” the report explains, and ”assets become available to support other combatant command (COCOM) or U.S. agencies, the appetite to use them in the domestic environment to collect airborne imagery continues to grow.”

Up until 2015, oversight was so loose that the capabilities provided by the DOD’s unmanned aircraft system weren’t under scrutiny by any other agency. Without statutes that specify the rules such federal government agencies should follow, watchdogs find it hard to keep track. But would it be any better if there were an agency or a branch of the same government overseeing what the government itself is doing?

The short answer is no.

NGA Has A Precedent, And Trump May Want To Explore It

As fears grow that Trump will revamp the NGA, domestic stories of police departments using drones to spy on locals are also resurfacing.

Some of the most highly publicized instances involved Baltimore and Compton, where police departments deployed aerial surveillance technology without issuing a warrant or seeking authorization from local or state lawmakers.

With a precedent already set, the president might as well ignite a new fight in his continued efforts to fight a war against an imaginary, impossible-to-target enemy. After all, he’s not a stranger to scandals and likely wouldn’t feel overwhelmed one bit if he decided to turn the country’s ultra-high definition cameras toward its citizens.

What could help to put an end to his plans might be exactly what helped halt President George W. Bush’s attempts at setting up spy satellites domestically. In 2007, Bush’s Department of Homeland Security set up an agency known as the National Applications Office with the goal of establishing direct spy satellite stakeouts in America. Thankfully, Congress stepped in and cut off the agency’s funding.

But with Americans seldom showing any interest for important violations of privacy or even basic human rights here and abroad, it’s easy to see how this massive spying agency could end up getting a carte blanche to do whatever it wants once Trump realizes he has the power to order it done. After all, who will pressure Congress to stop him?


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Find and Limit Ourselves

SUBHEAD: The only way into the future for humanity is a reduction in our numbers by an order of magnitude.

By Juan Wilson on 17 February 2017 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2017/02/find-and-limit-ourselves.html)


Image above: Painting "The Concert" by Gerard van Honthorst, 1623 From (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_van_Honthorst).

Yes ! I drone on - but I can't help it.

I'm afraid it is too late for the Earth, America, Hawaii and Kauai. At the international, national, state, and county level our organizational institutions have failed... or more precisely ...they have failed because we failed to put down the fossil-fuel crack-pipe and face the music of reality.

County Level
I do not think that is possible anymore. As I watched our county planning department push through a ill conceived update to the Kauai General Plan it became obvious that the old plan's motto of "Keep Kauai Rural!" was to be replaced with "Make Kauai Suburban!"

This new General Plan proposal is based on doubling the population of Kauai over the next few decades and the requirement for transforming thousands of acres of agricultural land into suburban sprawl. It's exactly the wrong formula for the future.

State Level
Hawaii continues its dependence on tourism and the military for much of its economy. It has ignored the imperative of achieving food independence. It has put off reaching energy self sufficiency. It encourages the growth of American Consumerism.

The State of Hawaii has avoided any implementation of Hawaiian sovereignty, and delayed the promise of Hawaiian Homelands.

National Level
Since last year America dropped the Democratic and Republican parties that had governed the nation  through the 20th century. Some called it Pax Americana or The American Century. It was in actuality the century of America's military-industrial domination of the a world.

Well, that is over and done. We've replaced it with a flawed duopoly of the Deep State and Trump-Bannererism seeking a way towards war with Russia, China or both. 

International Level 
With the reduction of world natural resources andc heap energy modern industrialization the world has come to rely on  globalization and financialization to keep wheels of the economy spinning - all a giant Ponzi Scheme.

The Earth's nations are incapable of putting together and sticking to a plan for the future. The Conference of the Parties (COP) refers to the countries that signed up to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It is now twenty-five years old and has barley nudged the needle on the speedometer measuring our rush to extinction.

Natural Level
To the living Earth we appear to have become a malignant cancer. Something, if not cut our or reduced will destroy Gaia along with ourselves. I know, I know. That sounds harsh, but sadly it is an apt analogy.

As the planet's resources have dwindled humanity has become obsessed with virtual reality.  We are stuck with our self absorbed delusions on tiny handheld screens that have replaced nature and the reality of collapse. TIME TO WAKE UP! Turn off the fascination devices.

Solutions?
For nature to be whole again we must cease breaking it into small parts by roads, suburban squalor and flattened-out industrial agriculture. Nature's continuity is more important than ours. We can live in distinct separate self-contained communities, or even better yet - in Nature itself - as do some of our still indigenous cousins.

That means giving up oil for our muscle and the delusions it provides. In a practical sense it was the replacement of coal by oil as the means by which to plunder the Earth's resources and run industrial civilization that did the trick of defeating Nature. Our leverage over Nature increased by nearly order of magnitude as did our population.

We must return to a balance with nature that provides some continuity forward. Continuity cannot be achieved without achieving Sustainability. That means a smaller population using much less of the worlds resources. At this point that means something like the Renaissancein Europe - If we're lucky or the Middle Ages - if we are not.

That should not be not news to you - but it is still necessary. Have you stopped flying in jets for your own amusement yet?

Sustainability is not a means for the continuing the status quo.

Nature herself will provide the solution to her problems if we cannot. A short bitter worldwide nuclear exchange between nations would suffice. Even ignoring the current of human caused disasters, like meltdown Fukushima Daiichi, will do the trick in a generation for two.


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