Four-Eyes in the Big Schoolyard
To effectively protest against something stupid - you have to be LESS stupid (sigh)
Hey folks!
The weirdness continues – and Big-Media remains fanatically (grotesquely) devoted to Big-War and the Mass Murderous Racist Supremacy of the traditional white colonialist powers – which means a whole bunch of people who somehow still call themselves “progressive” and “anti-racist” are now proudly talking like actual f@cking Nazi scumbags. Very sad, to be sure – but my patience is running thin with such (staggering hordes of) imbeciles. Yes, we could imagine a clansman who is also nice in many ways – still don’t care – STOP IT – first.
The problem is of course denial – something which consumerists in the west have proven they consider a more crucial and absolute right than any other – to such an extent that indeed – they will sacrifice any decency or advance, to retain it (and with that ‘sacrifice’ steal those good things from the rest of us).
Once more I have a personal take on this, which brings it into high relief – I come from a commune which did shocking harm to every kid in it – and to this day the (null-responsibility) adults involved think the most truly horrible thing is the hurt feelings of those (themselves) who enabled the abuse.
So when I see Canadians and Europeans defying Trump by insisting on being MORE FASCIST – I see the exact kind of psychotic narcissist idiots who have been deconstructing the once vital west my whole life, while complaining every second, about every last problem their lack of responsibility CAUSED.
The particular crucial and increasingly dangerous denials I want to talk a bit about today are:
Economic – we are so much more deeply and profoundly structurally screwed, than any of the big media will ever admit – for fear of damaging their oligarch owner’s portfolios. Running for decades on “free” money (we’ve been in an economic emergency all century, and their money-printing attempts to soften-it, gave those same oligarchs EVEN MORE LEVERAGE for predation on the rest of us) – and anyhow, even when we were doing well, we’ve been stealing our wealth from the poor overseas this whole time – so every attempt to ‘return’ to traditional growth really means a return to the worst of bloody Imperialism.
Political – the ‘western’ (white, anglo-Euro hyper-violent) powers have been completely dominated by the United States for eighty years (since the end of WWII), and the US used the unipolar moment, when there were no threats or competitors, to make that leash much much tighter and corrupt every one of those countries (and my own Canada) with sick ideologies which boosted American hegemony.
Cultural – while the rich western countries still maintain deep faith in their profound moral superiority – that spell has been completely shattered to pieces, for every other country and region on the planet. We are people that rationalize mass-murder, over and over and over again, decade after decade. That’s the most important thing that we do (and as above, until we stop it, why would any sane human on earth listen to psychos who keep insisting that mass-murder and military intervention is MORAL?)
America in particular, has been smashing things around the world for a century now and just saying – “Too bad loser, you clean up the mess” – and now, in response to Trump changing that game with dizzying speed (some bad changes, and some which were not only inevitable, but long overdue) the cadre of grotesquely incompetent (stalled economies, one and all) blowhard leaders of Western Europe – and even of my own increasingly internationally ridiculous Canada, are saying “Fine, WE’LL just take over being the insane racist warmongers then, because someone has to carry the standard of violent supremacy, after all.” Outrageous and pathetic, almost beyond belief.
Trump is all kinds of crazy and infuriating, but the people calling him a fascist – ARE FASCISTS!
Once more – I don’t mean that as cheap moral suasion – not trying to smear them with an association which reliably disgusts – I mean the technical definition – a combine of corporate money and power with state institutions of force, surveillance and control, with a media which is dedicated to state propaganda and increasingly also to the brutal suppression of citizen voices and resistance. When all those forces are lined-up in perfect sync to screw the people on behalf of the oligarchs – that’s Fascism. (Biden).
Totally understand anyone who feels like we are now out of the frying pan, into the fire – but fascism was the thing we just left – the long foul hangover of complicity with state evil from the second world war, that the rich West never did fully walk away from. What is going to happen next is brand new history, could be scarier, maybe not – but that old evil game is done. (One absolutely certain path to Nuclear war averted – thankfully – now if only we can be lucky enough to get the next few right).
For all of my friends from elsewhere – please be assured – every true Canadian would rather go to war and sacrifice everything than join the goddamned Yankees – I would not be surprised if this blustering pig turns us toward the Swiss model – train every citizen as a fighter also, so it just isn’t ever worth anyone’s while, to mess with us – our identity is not and has not ever been theirs. We know them too well, and honourless mindless rapine psychopathy has never once been among our national aspirations. (In fairness, it isn’t theirs either – it’s just where they seem to end up, over and over and over again).
Even before all this, Justin’s ego had done truly incalculable damage to the integrity of the nation (should have been thrown-out years ago – and the treasonously unprincipled NDP can also rot in hell for propping-him-up so long). Worst possible empty poser to have at the helm, at such a moment.
But please don’t think the Canadian people are as lame and stupid as our present crop of leaders – they were chosen in a shallow and performative moment of ‘coasting’ – already in big economic trouble, but completely bereft of any serious ideas to address it – which seems to be why charm and BS came to seem the appropriate ‘skills’ for this whole leadership class, around much of the western world. Huge and sweeping changes are upon us (everyone in the world) now, and this will soon sort for a very different kind of leadership (everywhere). Action and boldness required – but wisdom and respect, too.
Along with denial, we could also say our present tangle of problems has to do with our addiction to poisonous “Narratives” (my sincere apologies to my sweet Opera-singing neighbour, who complained to me recently “I am soooooo sick of the word narrative” – me too, I promise, but this time I need it).
I mentioned last week that our habit of viewing the world through a consumerist (self-serving and wilfully irresponsible) lens, has given us a sense that we aren’t obligated to think hard or carefully. We don’t need to consider the moral weight of events around us – just consume a pre-made narrative that pleases us emotionally (excuses the excesses we like, while gleefully condemning those we don’t).
But as any reader of Chomsky understands (tons of those on the right now, for those who haven’t been paying attention – since Big-media was turned against them so sharply and harmfully) the pre-made Big-News (Big-Banks plus Big-War) narratives have always been crafted to look nice but serve power, at the expense of all genuine nuanced or humane understanding. This means that consumerists are ABSOLUTELY ALWAYS WRONG (morally) – because they have decided in advance to be too lazy to notice the evils their off-the-shelf story of the world allows. (I’m being nice, I could say too immoral).
Now I need to say something very clearly before I get into everything else – the reason narratives seem especially dangerous in this moment is not that free speech is dangerous – it is our our continued insistence on our right to consumerist ignorance and complicity which endangers us – our consistent and passionate defence of denial and psychopathy (which is why we love our right to kill foreigners, a thousand times more than we love our own less fortunate citizens). Graves increase – homeless too.
The other thing I have to say, super clearly (yet again, sigh) is that I don’t like Donald Trump or his approach – but the idea that every person or force which opposes him is therefore sainted and flawless, is at least a million times stupider than his worst error or most outrageous trespass against dignity.
I spent years writing about this stuff gently and sweetly – because I really do feel great affection for many people who are still spouting (that is, obediently repeating) insane ideas with violent passion.
But at a certain point you have step back and consider basic principles and fairness.
What year do we think this is – and what exactly do we think we’ve been doing all this time, eh?
“Four-Eyes” was once a classic schoolyard insult – back in the days when insults were face-to-face (and then sometimes a matter of fisticuffs, immediately after). I assume its sting is denatured if not obsolete now – since they’d have to look up from their phones to notice, and we have so many more weird sorts of tribalism to spit bile about now – surely being so obvious is declasse, if naught else?
In any case, I changed the meaning of the phrase for myself, by incorporating it into a poem for the great illustrator and graphics teacher Bob Berger. He was the first teacher I ever sat for as an art model, and he changed the meaning satisfaction and weight of the work for me instantly, by addressing the class after I had taken my first pose, saying “Now, look at what the model is offering you.”
I had a whole catalogue of vintage Characters as a costume model, and Bob would often invite me to say a few words about them, to help inspire the students drawing or painting me that day. We also shared a deep fondness for the language of cartooning, so he always got-it, when I was giving them an iconic gesture (that I knew from my own drawing experience, they would need, in their later work).
One day he brought in a pair of very small and beautiful eyeglasses to show me, and he told me a bit about his early life – the sacrifices his rural prairie parents made, to buy him these lovely handmade optics – and the thrilling difference it made to him, when he was finally able to see things clearly.
I’ll attach the whole poem below – but the key part which changed “Four-Eyes” for me forever was
Four-Eyes in the schoolyard is a hard test
but Three Musketeers by the bedside light are damned good company
What really struck me most of all though, was how the thrilling artist’s life (LA in the mid-sixties) which he was soon to lead, was completely beyond his parents ability even to imagine – and yet it was their sacrifice and gift which made it possible. Also impressive was the immaculate condition of the glasses – I swear it felt like proof enduring, of his own respect for their enabling commitment.
So now, whenever I think of ‘four eyes’ I think of Bob – and the fine qualities of family, long ago.
Recontextualization – shifting the ‘feel’ of a narrative from one emotional association to another, may actually be the single best trick language and culture offers us – the easiest available magic, anyhow.
Always assuming that we’re using it to broaden our heart, witness and insight, that is. But if we’re stuck in eternal juvenile-brat (consumer) mode – forever using our thinking to justify the lousy way we feel inside (for whatever unrelated reasons) so we can then pretend it is caused by “THEM” as indicated by our favourite power-serving narrative (denomination irrelevant), we soon get into all of the backfire-hubris-downfall traps we can always expect, when messing with black magic (or revenge). The final word on this whole line of action is – “Do not call-up that, which you cannot put-down!”
Just a note (because no one says anything nice about wisdom anymore) this distinction is exactly what wisdom is FOR. Contrary to the patter of innumerable grinning new-age snake oil salesmen (eternally seeking better consumerists, instead of consumerists eternally seeking better), wisdom isn’t some airy-fairy branch of navel-gazing or enlightenupmanship – it is practical as (the difference between heaven and) hell – because when we take the path of evil then start investing all of our passionate energies there, it isn’t just that we are morally wrong and ever more so – we are no less surely on the path to utter, complete (and even well-deserved) ruin.
I’m sure it is theoretically possible to be even more in error than compounding all of mean-dumb-evil-loser but for practical purposes we can surely say that isn’t a mentality any of us would feel good inhabiting – and were we to suddenly see ourselves that way in the mirror, it would be a hard and nasty shock.
Hence Denial – and from there to – “...inevitable and even long overdue,” above.
As you get older, Politics and History seem to steadily converge. I am blessed to have many friends with a deep long-term interest in both – and am often surprised by key details they remember (which I never even noticed) which completely change or invalidate ideas and explanations I rather liked.
But I LOVE being proven wrong – that means I’m learning – and have also just got a great clue about where I have been making lazy assumptions, in comparative ignorance – yay! (Again – wisdom tells us – wouldn’t you rather gain knowledge and grace by sharing respect, than win every fight but stay ignorant forever?)
The funny thing is, even while my friends with deep knowledge of specific policy often inform me usefully, they also miss things that I see, because they are dug so far into the inertia of what they study.
To put it differently – while my pals with exquisite knowledge of Ontario politics in particular are quite correct in pointing out that the Ontario government employs more nurses than the federal government has soldiers – I still find most discussions of provincial politics are, well – too provincial!
In one very strange electoral moment, Ontario actually elected the leftist NDP (New Democratic Party) which had roots in an important early workers party, but has morphed over the decades since, into a bourgeois indulgence (that is, a narrative generator for smug middle-classers who want to feel they are left, while still maintaining their utter contempt, on every practical level, for real live actual workers).
The economy was in bad shape – and the press at the time quickly took to blaming Bob Rae (the NDP premier) for the consequences – even though this was a macro-economic recession – global in scale.
At one point, coming from old leftist ideals, but also knowing the books were being looked-at twice as skeptically, for this same reason, Rae tried to save some money on Education by giving teachers a few days off per year. More specifically, he was trying to save the jobs of roughly twenty thousand support workers (which at the time included me, as librarian/computer-lab/special-ed guy) whose employment was already marginal (I had twenty hours a week, and a screwy schedule, at that).
Rae Days – the furious protesting response from the teachers – was legendary – and to this day, three decades later, I still run into people who were teaching at the time who are seething with indignance – how dare he even ask us to make a small sacrifice for the sake of other, less well-protected workers? (some of whom, like me, were doing a whole lot of the paperwork-work of the much better paid teachers, also).
The response from the public was to elect a conservative who openly promised to slash education budgets viciously and did so – but though the teachers complained again, they’d already used up public sympathy – by relentlessly screwing their own guy, for foolishly relying on their sense of solidarity, and trying to be an actual principled policy-leftist!
It will surprise no one at all – that no one learned anything from any of this.
Two notes for the finicky/curious – Rae actually did pass some SUPERB legislation, which was quickly repealed when he left, thanks to the utter lack of support he got, even from his own base. I have friends in the construction trade who were especially upset – because he nailed safety and sane environmental practises together – losing that finely-balanced bill, has frustrated them ever since. Also – teachers in Canada are paid WAY better than teachers in the US – middle, not working class.
The key point is – nobody ever noticed that the economic problems were on a greater level than Rae could control, nor that his budget-slashing replacement increased our debt, in a time of macro growth!
As long as we were all stuck in a tribal framing and provincial narrative (in both senses) many of the main characters didn’t even enter our story directly. More like elemental offstage forces of nature, giving some vague ambience to our petty side-show. Keeps us forever debating consequences, and never even recognizing causes.
Denial may feel comforting, but it has also made engaging with reality (like building freakin’ housing and improving infrastructure) almost impossible. Not enough responsible and clear-thinking citizens by-proportion to organize and support it, politically – just hordes of consumerists (herding cats, at best).
Five Eyes, Fangs, Flippers and a Thousand Tales
For ordinary people like you and me, fear, anger and lies are poison – but to the ultra rich and their famous servants, they are the tools and fuels they use to herd us like cattle and take all of our money. Their favourite trick of all? Making all of us normal people they are exploiting in common, blame each other for their fear anger and lies, and the…
I did a whole piece about the five eyes (and our delusion of long vanished western supremacy) awhile ago – one of several, trying to bring my friends still deep in denial, ‘up to speed’ on crucial reality.
Of course we do love our narratives – and thanks to Ian Fleming and his inheritors, we even make heroes out of our spies, and like to think of our sneakiest sneaks, as the secret good guys of the world.
The grumpy old man in me wants to say “Read a book now and then, would you?” – but it is simpler and fairer to explain, that particular narrative relies on shocking ignorance, which is unworthy of any adult mind.
Since I am that idiot who reads (and reads and reads) I can say that yes, the five eyes club of spies – (USA, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) do carry out quite a bit of odd and unexpected work for other members, when it comes to things like foreign signals intelligence and data collection.
BUT – that isn’t the main purpose of the group. The whole point of the five eyes is to give the members the ability to defeat their own domestic restrictions on spying and political manipulation close to home. They are absolutely dedicated to sidestepping all of the crucial ethical limits which we placed on them, BEFORE licensing them to do such sneaky work in secret. They found a circle-jerk workaround, (each one screwing the private citizens of the guy to the left and then “Sharing” sort of a thing) so that they could do every last thing which constitution and law was determined to prevent them from ever doing.
That illegal back-channel espionage absolutely was used against Trump and his team in 2016 (one of several reasons he’s still mad at the hilariously poorly named “intelligence community”). Thing is, they just lied and lied and lied, and did so to preserve the primacy of a national WAR PLAN, when Trump wanted to work on the economy (in wonky and disruptive ways, to be sure, but at least he was trying for prosperity and peace – rather than ever more debt and murder, the way all the ‘good guys’ were).
It isn’t just that Hunter’s laptop was real all along – the FBI had it, and absolutely knew that BEFORE all those “senior and respected figures from the intelligence community” said it was Russian disinformation.
Trump is a dick – but many of his opponents are honourless lying mass murderers – two things at once!
So now here’s the main thing about the daring new “four-eyes” in the big international schoolyard. Exactly like NATO without the USA – it is NOTHING BUT HOT AIR AND BUREACRACY (and an extraordinary engine for draining the public purse, just as Ike warned us about, so very long ago).
They have two tricks left – one is to transfer every last dollar from social programs, by fomenting a war which their depleted industrial base(s) CANNOT WIN (that is, like WWI – old idiots deep in denial, sending millions of the young of their nation to die, rather than surrender their precious supremacist delusions).
The other is to subvert their own internal political processes, to prevent anyone representing genuine popular will and national spirit from taking power – lest they dare act in any other interests than those of the ruling warmongers and banking elite. Entitled psychotic and dangerous, like no other humans on earth.
Problem is, all four of these minor powers and has-beens have got used to talking like a kid with a vicious big brother. Throwing weight around the schoolyard, which does not properly belong to them. But big scary brother didn’t like the odds, so he went home to big-up by bullying his totally friendly neighbours. Jock stealing lunchmoney from nerds
Trump has contempt for these ‘leaders’ because they are in fact contemptible – gutless hench-bullies, only a thousand times more sanctimonious than the USA, even at their lying (democratic) slickest. That observation doesn’t make him good, just canny.
Thing is, if that screwed-up imperialist-hangover quartet keeps shooting their mouth off like they used to (or even worse, as now seems frighteningly likely), someone who actually does have geostrategic power is going to give them a smack-down way harder than the humiliation of Suez – and they (we) will have in every way earned our disaster.
Third Act FAFO and the Suez Moment
Today I want to look at some more important but under-known history, while also remembering two incredibly normal human things that we almost never recognize. One is the way that we make assumptions about others, based upon ourselves. This can seem outright generous, especially when we’re arrogant, but it is always ignorant and disrespectful, even when …
I heard a few really bracing insights from afar recently, which might be a good place to dig further into the question of the reality that our four eyes of Denial and State Narrative are so completely blind to.
In China, many pundits are observing with some amusement that over the last few years – (but even more sharply, in the last few months and weeks), Europe (and tag-along Canada) have put themselves in the very weird position of having insulted and isolated themselves from all of the world’s greatest economic and military powers (them, U.S. India, Russia). Honestly, doesn’t anyone read Machiavelli anymore? (even if just so they can see those old nasty strategies coming, and be ready to meet them effectively).
Consumerist-supremacists love to insult others to assert their own ‘morality’ – but anyone competent would recognize that it is the height of stupidity to win cheap and fast-vanishing political points, by fundamentally sabotaging the long-term interests of your nation. With Trump acting like a bully, all of these suddenly panicky minor powers should be able to say – “that’s cool – you want to be a dick, we’ll just accelerate the transition to a multi-polar economic world, by working more with rising powers.”
Only they absolutely can’t, because they’ve been running around calling them all evil.
Again – if I stay on Canada, it could seem like it’s just Justin being a useless shit – but because I refuse to limit myself to a part of the story – I have also noticed that Blackrock Mertz, Chief Prosecutor Starmer, widely (and justly) despised Macron and even Ursula Fond-‘O-Lyin’ (thanks for that one, Larry Johnson) are dead-set on a new great war – and every one despises their very own citizens, for objecting to this madness!
I mean that seriously – Germany and England both now send the police to respond to people re-posting critical comments on social media. They sabotage elections in other countries and are openly PROUD of it. (when I say they are oligarch-serving brainless murderous fascists – I mean that very seriously).
Thing is – this bunch has always been a clique of liquidators – investment bankers and bureaucrats (the EU isn’t democratic at all – it is JUST BUREAUCRACY – above all, a system for taking power from nations and citizens). Asset-strippers, in idealist garb.
People – get it through your heads – Russia has been fighting all of the money, power and dirty-tricks the entire collective west could throw at it, ever since the start of this dystopian horror – and it has absolutely won (months ago, now it’s just, by how-much).
Anyone who thinks that NATO without the USA is capable of doing better – is way beyond insane. That compound of mean-dumb-evil-loser springs to mind, once again.
Anyhow, Canada was always firm about peace (in sharp contrast to our bellicose neighbours). We should have been trying to stop the conflict before it began, instead of training oligarch sponsored militias. Just as we should have let Meng Wenzhou fly home and told the yanks – “So sorry, how about this, next time you are trying to impose crazy American laws on the whole world, how about you do it yourselves?”
If we have clear and actionable evidence of Indian government involvement in assassination, we should make a clear legal case against the specific individuals named – NOTHING in public until charges laid.
Again – make no mistake – BRICS is the thing that every country outside of our “Supremacy Narrative” has been waiting for. It is the global east and south, finally throwing-off the heavy shackles which we superior-westerners still feel entitled to put them in (to our everlasting shame).
What everyone is missing about this chaotic moment is that Trump isn’t playing hardball just because he’s uniquely and deliberately dickish – he is, but that just makes him super-offensive, not strategically different.
He’s playing hardball because the USA is in truly desperate straights right now – and all of the western vassals to the conqueror are even more deeply f@cked (France may need a major bailout in months, just to stabilize their banks – but no one else is too far behind them in the race to the poor-house).
Here’s the thing (especially important for any who think my skepticism about his loudest critics, can somehow be translated into backhanded support – nope). Trump’s plans to radically re-invigorate the American economy WON’T WORK. Read that again if you have to – he’s making desperation moves (and doing it in a way which is destroying what little is left of American soft power, probably forever). But the whole creaking edifice is rotten to the foundations – and the fundamentals, especially in terms of education and infrastructure – simply are not there. (It’s no accident that Germany was born out of Bismarck’s insistence on technical education – nor that the Scotts became the engineers of the empire).
They don’t have the money, the national will, the foundations, the talent, or the shared responsible energy which every previous renaissance has made use of. Can’t bake a cake without the ingredients!
And of course, the more they wave their big stick (economic and military) the fewer friends they have left – just stick, no carrots left in the quiver. Mongol hordes, but the kind that can lose, to Afghanistan.
Alexander Mercouris (from The Duran, and his own brilliant daily commentary on world affairs) recently noted that one reason Europe is so fond of the “Appeasement” and “everything is 1939” narratives, is that 1939 was probably the last year that any country in Europe actually made an independent decision of any great consequence – cut them some slack – they’re really just nostalgic for when they last had relevance!
But the creepiest and most precisely useful insight I heard recently comes from Alex Krainer – one of my new favourite thinkers about economics – almost the equal-opposite complement, to Varoufakis – since he comes from the high-finance side, where it has to work and make money, where Yanis (former leftist Greek finance minister – who experienced a cascade of trouble he did not author) comes from policy (and watched corruption and external forces destroy everything he tried, and held dear).
Alex pointed out something I’ve been trying to say simply for ages. If the story really is 1939, and the danger, appeasement, then even with vast structural impracticalities involved, these extremist racist paranoid responses might make some sense.
But if the story of today is actually much more like 1914 (as I am myself convinced) and the danger is not appeasement of a madman with visions of conquest, but instead a trap of tensions and policy entanglements, which could very rapidly spiral into a global war (and soon after, a thermonuclear war) we MUST act differently, and use every tool of diplomacy and compromise to ease tensions and relax entanglements which increase risk, because they were structured for a different (more arrogant) age.
I have discussed military matters several times in other pieces (and will again) but I don’t want to digress there too far for today. Scott Horton very helpfully wrote an entire book called “Provoked” to make that case in detail (should I have failed to convince you, already). The shocking and repeatedly demonstrated impotence of high-tech American and Israeli anti-air systems to deal with modern drones and missiles launched by one of the poorest countries on earth, was another HUGE warning signal.
American General Cavoli – while serving as senior commander of NATO forces said very clearly that no army in NATO was capable of fighting a war at the intensity found on the battlefields in Ukraine.
We have no training which is even remotely relevant to those conditions, we have nothing but wildly obsolete drone, drone detection and counter-drone systems and WE HAVE NO INDUSTRIAL BASE.
We also have no money – and I’ll come back to this denial again in a minute – because it is the biggest and most dangerous one of all. We have La la la, I can’t hear you’d our way into ever increasing servitude to banks.
But before I go there, that missing industrial base point is incredibly important – we westerners deny it all the time, very stupidly and self-harmfully. Addicted to a nostalgia narrative from a time when we made things.
Like the French and the British, just before the Suez crisis (when America smacked them down hard, for starting a reckless war against Egypt, at the stupidest possible time) we love to think that we are still what we once were at our peak – even though the signs that we absolutely are not now that, are everywhere.
Seriously folks, when was the last time you bought anything mechanical or electronic which was made in Europe or North America? We used to do that stuff, and now we simply don’t (not for DECADES).
One part of it is our expensive workforce and basic costs – and we hear about this one part all the time, because it helps greed-heads put continued downward pressure on wages – very frustrating stuff.
Thing is – even that argument is obsolete, in a time of so much automated production. It was a reason for initial capital flows out, to Asia, but they didn’t just make our widgets, they (China especially) also built out an infrastructure which is outright superior for industrial purposes. Now, if you want to make a factory to produce anything you’ll probably need Chinese Machine tools and Robots to do it – and since they still have mid priced labour and external costs, plus a huge local market, the overall benefits are overwhelming. No one in the west can offer anything even remotely close. (Korea and Japan do, but at a premium price in terms of labour and costs, and with a much tighter local market to offer).
Please note – that’s another thing we haven’t noticed (because our favourite stories about ourselves and our status in the world, are so incredibly old and filled with ridiculous conceit and bias). Chinese labour is no longer super-cheap – they now send plenty of their own low-end production out to Vietnam and even further afield than that, to get the same cheap labour benefits, that we once got from them.
The point is, they didn’t stick with their first good trick, they developed and diversified so that they would be more and more able to compete on capitalist terms, over time – and their plan has worked.
We spent those same decades going “La la la, we’re the best!” without ever checking if we still were!
I must stop here to note – this is why I’m so frustrated with symbol people, narcissists and emotionalists – they have sustained a vast edifice of grotesque denial, damaging our whole society for generations, because they are so deeply ignorant, they think prosperity is automatic, and anyhow economics is boring and creepiness-adjacent. (what I said before about – delegating in ignorance)
Were we serious about good skilled jobs for the working class, a growing ecology of value added industries, reflecting buy-make (and dispose) local ethics, and thinking responsibly, to make sure we had enough money to support our social programs for the long term, we absolutely could do all of that – but not piecework, one little isolated project (that one political party can take credit for) at a time.
We need better transportation to go with next-generation production, and much cheaper power, also – some small modular nuclear, and some big-batteries to buffer intermittent renewables would probably help a lot there, without increasing atmospheric pollution – and anyhow, we don’t want to end up with entire landfills full of wasted lithium car batteries all over the place, do we? Wire ‘em up! (in robust fire-limiting structures only, mind you).
Roads, rail, transit, sewers, cell and fibre – all of this stuff is being improved in places where the median income remains far lower than it is here – but the belief in the future is incomparably higher.
There is literally nothing stopping us from doing that – demanding a modern infrastructure and economy – except the popular political will – to simply and absolutely require it, of our politicians.
But – having started from that hopeful insistence – we could in fact recapture some industrial relevance – let me tell you why turning our national will toward a massive armaments program, intended to fight a great war with Russia (and then China, of course) is the absolute stupidest possible thing any arrogant western nation could be doing at this moment, or any time in the next few decades.
Because we would sacrifice every last good thing about our societies for it – and we would still lose.
The absolute ultimate mean-dumb-evil-loser play. Sorry folks, but killing our own damn selves by insisting on our right to do racist hyper-violence in other countries actually is way worse than Trump.
You can’t be a warmongering imperialist madman, and also anti-racist or progressive (or sane).
Okay so – if Donald Trump isn’t going to save American power (but rather, hasten the decline, as no external power ever could) and the incompetent symbol people who represent state-corporate-fusion fascism in the modern world, more clearly and shamelessly than any other political force can or has (every key feature present – insane war-promoting propaganda, most especially) are also wrong, what should we bewildered citizens be working toward and hoping for?
With apologies to my chums on the right, I find I suddenly have a Pete Seeger banjo line playing in my head, from “Gimme that old-time religion”
“Let’s all praise Zarathustra,
let’s praise him like we used ta,
‘cause I’m now a Thustra boostah,
that’s good enough for me...”
Don’t mean that direction in particular (though all of my Zoroastrian pals are really sweet) but rather – we actually did used to know how to do quite a lot of these things – civic society, culture and education most especially. French – be French again! Britain – same (though please, leave the Churchillian chest-thumping aside for a little bit ‘kay? Gettin’ real old, guys... especially with all those graves around)
And I mean being whatever each of our cultures decides as we go – not one standard-model human, as the investment banker globalists (fascist string-pullers) arrayed around the west right now, have been seeking all these many ruinous years. Sure, I can understand how such a crippled creature would be easier to sell to – but so what?
As I was saying above – f@cking well stop it, first – and by “It” I mean ripping-off the poor of the world at the point of a bayonet, while sneering at them and murdering them wholesale, for not sharing our ever-so-modern “Values”.
As for Canada, I have to share a line I heard from one of the brilliant (and internationally respected) Canadian writers on the ‘new right’ (I keep thinking of them as paladins – brave and principled, but also capable of being wasted as a force, or misdirected entirely – fingers-crossed they take the wholesome-vanguard high road).
I share it because the writer is both very thoughtful and passionate, and I believe in learning from EVERYONE and EVERYTHING – and also simply because I haven’t been able to get it out of my head, since first reading it. So strong and useful.
“Canada is not and has never been a propositional nation.”
This country isn’t a theory or a philosophical exercise – no mere construct of words.
Which means it is time at last for serious practical fierce-wolverine spirit to overwhelm all those theory-crazed bureaucrats and fascist collaborators who have been selling us out, to let what we actually are underneath all the manners, show itself again.
Or we can stick with comforting denial, stay irresponsible and manipulated suckers, continue to be dumb killer-henchmen for the worst Yankee/Anglo imperialists alive – and fully earn our own pathetic demise.
I know where I stand. You?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Now – before getting into my latest “this wonky world” selection, here’s that poem I wrote for Bob
And now, some fresh offbeat “Wonky World” witness of the (increasingly chaotic and hard to track) planet.
And for those who may find my wide range of sources (left, right, ornery and sweet) ‘problematic’ try this thought exercise.
Is free media utterly safe (like a padded cell) for self-obsessed responsibility-rejecting consumerists? Nope. But are consumerists safe for the entire world as a whole – no folks, they (we) absolutely are not – a thousand times No! Fix problems, not symptoms!
First up is an amazing first-meeting conversation between two very smart thinkers I admire greatly – professor Glenn Diesen and Alex Krainer – discussing – where exactly does war come from, anyhow?
For the skittish, who usually avoid economics and geopolitics – do this one anyhow – you can’t hope to understand the real problems (and thus, back viable solutions, wherever you find yourself) unless you appreciate the actual dimensions and players involved. Our economies are war-junkies. Has to end, even if the change is uncomfortable.
More precisely – every student of economics understands that we issue our currency as debt – but nobody ever stops to realize that the collateral for that debt is outright stolen from the poor in other countries!
Here’s something superb from Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten) who combines deep insight into matters medical, psychological and computing, with probably the smartest high-expertise comments section on the web. More than once I’ve seen him rapidly crowd-source rigorous and useful new ideas. He also arrived via popularity followed by controversy (both doxed and attempted-cancelled) so he’s now very comfortable being unorthodox! (And a more rational thinker and explainer than ever).
“...Conflict theory is the belief that political disagreements come from material conflict. So for example, if rich people support capitalism, and poor people support socialism, this isn’t because one side doesn’t understand economics. It’s because rich people correctly believe capitalism is good for the rich, and poor people correctly believe socialism is good for the poor. Or if white people are racist, it’s not because they have some kind of mistaken stereotypes that need to be corrected – it’s because they correctly believe racism is good for white people.
Some people comment on my more political posts claiming that they’re useless. You can’t (they say) produce change by teaching people Economics 101 or the equivalent. Conflict theorists understand that nobody ever disagreed about Economics 101. Instead you should try to organize and galvanize your side, so they can win the conflict.
I think simple versions of conflict theory are clearly wrong. This doesn’t mean that simple versions of mistake theory (the idea that people disagree because of reasoning errors, like not understanding Economics 101) are automatically right. But it gives some leeway for thinking harder about how reasoning errors and other kinds of error interact.”
Here’s a written piece by Krainer, which better explains England’s strange new hatred for Russia (and it isn’t what you think, if you’re still living in the NYT and Guardian supported land of warmongering delusion)
Some people are crazy enough to risk the entire world and kill millions, all for spite and greed. (We used to all know that, didn’t we?)
As usual – it is cartoonists who always win the prize for clarity and concision
And here’s one that proves my point about equal opposite to Varoufakis – a simple practical idea to help investors do direct benefit to their own economies (and the younger people in their society). Bankers don’t solve problems, they create justifications for debt. But many many individual good actions, might just be the boost we need.
Also – I have been saying this (in complete ignorance of finance, for pure social-value reasons) for years – so I’m absolutely delighted to see someone make the case on most strictly pragmatic profit-seeking terms also – yay!
Here’s a short one from the Duran – about Fredrich Mertz – who won an election ten days ago promising that he would faithfully respect the German debt limit – and is now calling to scrap it, so that he can put Germany on a war footing (destroy their economy completely). Are there people so stupid that they both call Putin a Nazi and demand GERMAN RE-ARMAMENT (nukes, even) – why yes, there are!
Honestly – we need new words for new degrees and intensities of stupidity. Mark my words - Europe will indeed fight another major war – very soon – but not against Russia (at this point, they aren’t even in the right league for that fight) – they’ll fight against Europe itself. Only this time, the whole rest of the world will stay home (and some especially exasperated black-humour fans, will definitely roll their eyes and laugh).
Here’s a far better informed thinker than I, discussing some of the structural realignments underway – and why, as I suggested, they were bound to happen soon, Trump or not. The present empire has become completely unaffordable to the hegemon – so they decided on a whole new business model.
Which, for those adapted to the old system, feels quite a lot like when a social media platform changes the algorithm and just casually screws thousands of established web businesses – incredibly infuriating stuff – (and yet, for some strange reason, Zuckerburger still ain’t taking my calls).
“...The emerging consensus among some commentators I take seriously is that the actions of the Trump 2 regime so far mark a massive structural shift in how our world is ordered, one that has been inevitable for some time, one whose current reactionary inflection is significant but far from the full story of what is happening, and one in which Trump himself by now has far more the character of a weaponized meme than of a properly historical actor. Thus Bruno Maçaes observes that he could “write a history of the present moment in American foreign policy without mentioning Trump. That’s how structural these forces are.”
Here’s a bit of resh contrarian fiestiness from dear Eric Margolis (a brilliant international journalist and a stalwart voice of geopolitical wisdom in Canadian media for many decades).
Chainsaw The Paper Passers! - By Eric Margolis
Here’s Kit Klarenburg with even more disturbing stories about how our “sneaks” are always infinitely more evil bastard than hero.
“...As the CIA’s man in Port-au-Prince at the start of the millennium, Foley was on the frontlines of a brutal coup that displaced popular, legitimately-elected, anti-imperialist President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from power, and all the horrors that followed. As this journalist and academic researcher on Haiti Jeb Sprague exposed in February, Aristide’s ouster was orchestrated by the Agency, in direct coordination with the most extreme, murderous local opposition elements. This tragic event produced a neverending descent into nightmarish lawlessness, which endures to this day in the country.
Jean-Bertrand Aristide
Massacres of innocent civilians are now a daily staple of life in Haiti, civil society is non-existent, and major powers exploit the chaos to road-test techniques of repression and pacification subsequently deployed elsewhere. Yet, there is a fundamental component of this nationwide misery that has hitherto remained unexamined. In September 2004, USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives, which avowedly “advances US foreign policy interests…by seizing emerging windows of opportunity ” - in other words, oversees regime change - deployed Kosovo Liberation Army veterans to Port-au-Prince:
“Training and management specialists of the Kosovo Protection Corps, a civilian response unit consisting primarily of former Kosovo Liberation Army members, have been brought to Haiti to assess how the Kosovo model might be applied there.”
The KLA was a sadistic, civilian-targeting, organ-harvesting CIA and MI6-backed narcoterrorist militia that for years waged a savage insurgency in Yugoslavia. Their aim was to forge an ethnically-pure Kosovo, in service of recreating Nazi-era Greater Albania. Once Yugoslav forces departed the province following a three-month-long NATO bombing campaign against Belgrade in June 1999, the KLA began carrying out a total genocide of local non-Albanian inhabitants, killing countless Bosniaks, Roma, Serbs, and other minorities, while sending survivors scurrying.”
Even in countries dedicated very seriously to peace, the bastards conspired…
“…Describing collaboration between British intelligence and P-26 as “intense”, the summary was deeply scathing of this cloak-and-dagger bond, describing it as wholly lacking “political or legal legitimacy” or oversight, and thus “intolerable” from a democratic perspective. Until P-26’s November 1990 exposure, elected Swiss officials were purportedly completely unaware of the unit’s existence, let alone its operations. “It is alarming [MI6] knew more about P-26 than the Swiss government did,” the summary appraised.
P-26 was moreover backed by P-27, a private foreign-sponsored spying agency, partly-funded by an elite Swiss army intelligence unit. The latter was responsible for monitoring and building up files on “suspect persons” within the country, including; “leftists”; “bill stickers”, Jehovah’s witnesses, citizens with “abnormal tendencies”; and anti-nuclear demonstrators. To what purposes this information was put isn’t clear. Many documents detailing the activities of both P-26 and P-27, and the pair’s coordination with British intelligence, apparently couldn’t be located while Cornu conducted his investigation.
Now – a few things about the war in Ukraine. I understand the propaganda has been VERY deep for a long while, decompression takes time – please just keep swimming steadily upward for now, I swear you’ll get to sunlight and fresh air again, eventually.
Caitlin Johnstone is on point
“...As the Trump administration pauses military aid to Ukraine and western liberals continue their shrieking meltdown over Trump hurting Saint Zelensky’s feelings, it’s probably worth reminding everyone that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was indisputably provoked by western aggressions. That’s why so many western experts and analysts spent years warning ahead of time that western aggressions were going to provoke an invasion of Ukraine.
Now, some may hear this and say “Okay but Russia still shouldn’t have invaded even though our western leaders were aggressively provoking them to.” But before you do that it might be a good idea to look inside yourself and ask where that impulse is arising from. Why are you so eager to skip past the part where you criticize your own rulers for their role in starting this war and focus solely on criticizing the leader of an eastern government who has no power over you? What is it inside of you that’s flailing all over the place trying to avoid any forceful scrutiny of the reckless warmongering of your own government and its allies?
The last time a foreign rival placed a credible military threat near the border of the United States, the US responded so aggressively that the world almost ended (if you want to know just how close we came to nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis, look up the name Vasili Arkhipov). Western liberals have been conditioned to insist that Russia should have responded differently to the US empire amassing proxy forces on its border than the US would respond to the same kind of threat on its own borders. The frenetic mental contortions needed to justify this ridiculous double standard are only possible because the west is saturated in domestic propaganda manipulating the way they think about the world.”
Here’s Aaron Mate with more
Here’s a superb in-depth review of the lessons from the Ukraine war by Big Serge
And since that one is kind of an epic – here’s Mark Wauck with a ‘condensed highlights’ version of it
Here’s Glenn Diesen talking to the former director of Russia Analysis for the CIA
And here’s Aaron Mate (yes, Gabor Mate’s son) again – this time on the minerals deal in particular (so much Big-Media BS)
“...From the standpoint of objective analysis of logical fallacies, at best, this is an Ad Hominem. At worst, it is yet another example of actively and repeatedly deployed Psychological Warfare- PsyWar- and propaganda. Socialist-leaning left-wing politicians and reporters who routinely deploy accusations of Fascism against their opponents reveal the weakness and failure of their political philosophy and ideas. Borrowing from the jargon of US Football, this is akin to a desperate ‘Hail Mary” pass. This is really just bullying, and it is also projection.
In psychology, projection is a defense mechanism where an individual unconsciously attributes their own unacceptable thoughts, feelings, or behaviors to someone else. This process helps the individual cope with internal stress and avoid confronting their own traits or emotions that are difficult to acknowledge. For example, if someone feels jealous but accuses their partner of being envious, they are projecting their own feelings. Another example is when someone is a fan of socialist-corporatism (“democratic socialism”) but accuses others of being Fascist (the definition of “Fascism” being socialistic corporatism).
We must stop permitting corporate media and the far left to demonize the center-right with these terms as a way to keep our voices, thoughts, and ideas from being heard and considered by others. These are the tactics of bullies, specifically those losing a political battle in the marketplace of ideas and political philosophies.”
Krainer on that same subject
“...But within that framework of analysis, so much about this story doesn't make sense. How is Ukraine free and sovereign when it's completely dependent on Western financial and military aid? How is it a democracy when Zelensky can ban any political party by decree, when Ukrainian men are being abducted in their thousands and thrown into the trenches on the Eastern front?
How are the war's main cheerleaders democracies when they rig, cancel or otherwise sabotage elections any time their populations choose the wrong candidates? And how are all these liberal democracies so bent on waging war and sacrificing Ukrainians, that they flatly refuse any negotiations with Russia?
It’s a basic hustle
On the other hand, if we analyze the situation with a street hustler mindset, things begin to make sense. In Tuesday's TrendCompass report I suggested that the whole "rare earths deal" between Ukraine and the US is a ruse, and that Zelensky can't sign it because he already committed Ukraine's resources to British interests. So far, that hypothesis has aged well over the decades that passed since last week. Agent Zelensky travelled to Washington on Friday where he antagonized his hosts and perhaps made sure that no deal was signed while the blame could be cast on Trump.”
Krainer again with some deep high-level weirdness that just explains so damn much about everything.
“...All this was true about Russia's oligarchs in the 1990s; they were always presented as young maverick businessmen reforming the economy and breaking new grounds, bringing capitalist free markets to Russia, etc, etc. Then there was the case of Elizabeth Holmes who likewise came out of nowhere to become the youngest female self-made billionaire until her company, Theranos collapsed in disgrace and it turned out that she invented nothing and controlled nothing.
The disintegration of that business model showed for the whole world to see, that Ms. Holmes was a stand-in, controlled by her board of directors (every last member was a veteran of the Deep State and US defence establishment) and the people who funded the whole fraud (I dissected that fraud in the article titled, “Theranos Scandal: the real story” The video version of that report is below:
Returning to Mr. Khodorkovsky's revelations today, they also suggest the ultimate reasons why today we find ourselves at the precipice of nuclear war: Lord Rothschild stole Yukos fair and square and then came the evil Mr. Putin and took back Yukos, which accounted for 20% of Russian oil production. So of course, now we must bring freedom, democracy, human rights, transparency, rule of law and property rights back to Russia even at the cost of setting the whole world on fire in the process.”
Here’s the angry and determined “El Gato Malo” with his take on Ukraine (the cartoon is a pretty good summary)
Ex CIA analyst Larry Johnson with more detail about how CIA took over American charity, to do evil (then paused, then started up again, more crazily than ever).
“...Shortly after Kennedy’s creation of USAID, the CIA used USAID as “official cover” for some of its case officers and as a vehicle for carrying out covert operations. This partnership involved several controversial activities:
In the 1960s and 1970s, USAID’s Office of Public Safety worked closely with the CIA’s Office of Public Safety to train foreign police forces. This program was accused of teaching “terror and torture techniques” and encouraging official brutality in various countries1.
The CIA often operated abroad under USAID cover, using the agency’s humanitarian mission as a front for intelligence gathering and covert operations4.
In Indonesia during the 1960s, USAID, the State Department, and the CIA collaborated on counterinsurgency efforts, blurring the lines between development aid and military assistance3.
The CIA changed its policy about working with USAID in the early 1970s. In 1973, Congress directed USAID to phase out its public safety program, which had been collaborating with the CIA to train foreign police forces2. This decision was made largely due to allegations that the program was involved in training foreign police in “terror and torture techniques” and encouraging official brutality, which were hurting America’s public image abroad2. By the time the program was closed, USAID had helped train thousands of military personnel and police officers in various countries2.
The relationship between the CIA and USAID was revived sometime after George W Bush took office. I do not have a precise date, but we do know the following:
In 2009-2012, USAID was involved in a covert operation in Cuba called “ZunZuneo,” which aimed to create an anti-government digital social network. This project involved CIA agents disguised as aid workers and tourists attempting to stir up anti-government sentiment34.
The CIA has also used USAID’s resources for intelligence gathering. For instance, in 2009, a USAID-funded project to map Afghan populations in Pakistan was allegedly used to gather intelligence2.
And we know that CIA, using USAID, was involved in pushing propaganda through Ukrainian media outlets that the outside world mistakenly believed were independent journalists. I am not suggesting I have all, or even some, of the answers about how the CIA and USAID have collaborated over the past 20 years. But there is little doubt that USAID funds — under CIA direction and guidance — were used to spark color revolutions in the Arab world, Ukraine, Georgia and Hungary.”
USAID and the CIA - by Larry Johnson - on Sonar21.com
Here is a fantastic example of why I consider “Meaning in History” (Mark Wauck) essential reading. While I may disagree with him sometimes, I know of no one else on earth who would put all of this together. (kinda reminds me of me) ;o)
Here he is again, talking about the Russia-hating “Chief Diplomat” of the EU – Kallas. (And if you don’t understand how evil the Hudson institute is yet, you haven’t been reading my stuff enough!)
“....Interestingly, Kallas visited ground zero for Anglo-Zionism on her trip to the US—the Hudson Institute. There she spoke truth that far too many “conservatives” need to internalize. Mind you, Kallas is committed to the delusional Anglo-Zionist program, but if you understand what’s going on in the world then her words make sense for the US going forward: If you reject the premise of the Anglo-Zionist project—subjugating Russia and looting it of its natural resources—then you need to abandon the rest: subjugating China. Kallas, of course, is urging that the US needs to get on with the war on Russia and then “pivot” to China, as planned. To the applause of the Anglo-Zionists at Hudson. But if we accept the reality that the Anglo-Zionists cannot defeat Russia, then what Kallas says is true, even if she is advocating for more failed wars:
"If together we are not able to put enough pressure on Moscow, then how can we claim that we can defeat China?"
The point, of course, is that we can’t, and therefore should stop beating our heads against the wall of reality. Geopolitics, like domestic politics, is the art of the possible. Now, in fairness, that may have been Trump’s plan, too, and may still be. DoD under Trump 2.0 remains stocked with China Hawks. We need to get over that, as Macgregor has urged: Just walk away. Walk away from war on Russia and walk away from war with China. America has no legitimate interest in policing East Asia, thousands of miles away. MAGA has nothing to do with that—it starts right here at home.
Remember when a car bomb went off in Moscow, killing the daughter of a man the editorialists for Big-War-Media kept calling “Putin’s brain?” Aleksander Dugin is that man – (though the designation was always silly – he’s a professor and a philosopher – not a strategist or Kremlin schemer).
Glenn Greenwald gets a thousand nerve and truth points for going to Moscow to do this interview. Dugin is extremely lucid and insightful, and once again – the man himself speaks better and more usefully than all of those who gossip about him.
Aleksander Dugin interviewed by Glenn Greenwald on System Update
Matt Stoller comes through once again – why is it important to watch economics? Because sometimes quantities have a quality all their own! This one – on food production in America, is especially shocking.
“...The immediate problem with eggs, for instance, is high prices and shortages, but the longer-term problem is that the industry is destroying itself. Usually what happens is that monopolists or cartels impose bureaucratic hurdles inside an industry, which manifest as endless red tape, junk fees, bullshit certification requirements, exclusive dealing arrangements, kickbacks, or otherwise fake prices. The increasing Soviet-style experience we’re having opens the space for someone like Elon Musk to make a broad claim about an unaccountable bureaucratic elites running roughshod over everyone else, and use it to dismantle public institutions. Musk is framing America as in crisis, unable to build or solve problems. And he’s not wrong about the diagnosis.
Take food, writ large. When North Carolina farmer Jeff Bender talked with us a few weeks ago about risks that go beyond avian flu, he noted a historic anomaly. America has some of the most fertile land in the world, and has always been a place with cheap food, so much abundance in fact that we were a powerhouse exporter. But today, we don’t actually grow enough food, because the knowledge passed down from generations of farmers is being destroyed.
And the data bears this observation out. A few months ago, the USDA reported something quite shocking. As of 2023, the U.S. is now a net food importer.”
Matt Bivens is both a first rate investigative journalist and a practising physician (who worked all through the covid crisis). No faulting the fellow on civic commitment or principles. Big big heart, too.
“...When a patient dies in the emergency department, the physician in charge will announce a time of death. Often, the physician will then call for a few moments of silence. This honor’s the death of a person about whom we often know next to nothing. (We will learn more later, from grieving family.) Outside of the room, the usual emergency department chaos burbles along. Inside, nurses, doctors, techs, paramedics and others stand quietly.
As the one who often calls for this open-ended moment of silence, it also falls to me to indicate when it’s over. I never know how long to draw the quiet out — but I guarantee I’ve never made it anywhere close to a full minute. Even 15 seconds of quiet contemplation in an emergency department feels like an enormously powerful statement.
We are more than a year into the Israeli war in Gaza, and more than three years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Successive U.S. governments have poured billions of dollars into fanning the flames of both of those conflicts. Our leaders could have worked for peace. Instead, they invited relatively unsavory individuals like Benjamin Netanyahu and Volodymyr Zelensky to come address our Congress, and then roared approval in standing ovations, and voted to spend billions of dollars on senseless violence. American-supplied weapons have by now killed thousands of children, and since we have supplied land mines and cluster bombs, our weapons will continue to kill children into the future.”
Here’s a “Disinformation Chronicle” whistle-blower report behind-the-scenes of NIH
“...The NIH is now in the press almost every day for alleged “funding cuts for research” but that’s not really true. The NIH has cut costs that universities can charge for administrative fees, but they have not cut the grant money provided directly to scientists. I can’t explain why this is being twisted in the news, but I’m sure that people in the director’s office are doing this to harm the credibility of the incoming NIH Director.
These are the games that NIH leadership play all the time. They use the media to manipulate coverage and maintain control, often to cover up things they fail to deliver to the public.
Some of this misinformation you are reading about NIH funding cuts is likely also coming from universities who have grown used to fat checks from the NIH, but nobody is really taking money away from them. It’s about being fair with taxpayer money.
Throughout the pandemic, America was consumed by debate over whether the pandemic started from a lab accident, and most scientists seem to believe it didn’t. But in his final week, President Biden handed Tony Fauci a preemptive pardon, and the pardon stretched all the way back to 2014. That was the first year Fauci began funding EcoHealth Alliance, which subcontracted with a lab in Wuhan, China for gain-of-function virus research. A few days after President Trump was sworn in, the CIA released a Biden administration assessment that found the coronavirus is "more likely" to have leaked from a Chinese lab than to have come from animals.
When Congress investigated Fauci’s management of the grant to EcoHealth Alliance they found a lack of transparency and a blatant cover-up. These congressional hearings are available online, as are the Committee reports and the NIH documents and emails Congress released. Yet Tabak nor anyone inside the Director’s office ever discussed these matters with the broader NIH community, nor did they inform NIH scientists of what Congress uncovered.”
Here’s another gem from the energy world – BP hasn’t just completely abandoned their “Beyond Petroleum” rebrand, in search of better profits – they are now embarking on unprecedented (unwise/insane) projects, just to prove it!
BP’s latest and riskiest venture, for example, is in the Gulf of Mexico where it is drilling more than 35,000ft into the seabed, in 6,000ft of ocean, to exploit the Kaskida field.
The oil is so hot, at 120C, and under such great pressures – 500 times greater than a lorry tyre – that no one has dared touch it until now.
Here’s Freddie DeBoer again – with some fine insight on how weird control over-reach did much to power the cultural side of the backlash.
“...But of course, a core way that the alt-right/new right/MAGA tendency grew was precisely through this kind of normative overreach on the part of progressives, the assertion of shared community expectations for language and behavior that simply weren’t actually shared. Put another way, one of the most consequential elements of the social justice era was the implication that certain language and discourse norms had been broadly accepted when they had in fact only been adopted by a small elite. This is politically damaging because, first, it breeds resentment among people who observe the distance between the idealized, top-down social rules suggested by someone like Reeve; people say “This lady says I’m a far-right cretin if I use the word ‘retard,’ but I hear it all the time on my college campus,” prompting them to further reject Reeve’s worldview. Second, it defines extremity downward - if someone is saying that you’re a radical MAGA freak if you use a word that’s certainly ugly but also not remotely uncommon in American parlance, then it inevitably serves to make MAGA seem less radical. This isn’t complicated, and it’s a dynamic that has played out again and again and again in the past fifteen years of American political life, where progressives insist that some belief or language is radical when in fact it’s common, leading not to more widespread adoption of progressive mores but instead to the further mainstreaming of what they call radically offensive.
Like so many progressives before her, Reeve is asserting a norm that’s not normal.”
Here’s one of my favourite writers about new media (and the consequences) talking about one of the greatest culture critics in the west (and best students of Marshall McLuhan) Neil Postman.
“...By flooding us with attention-grabbing content condensed for rapid consumption, electronic media turned information into a stimulant.
The visual nature of the screen further degraded information:
Television gives us a conversation in images, not words. The emergence of the image-manager in the political arena and the concomitant decline of the speech writer attest to the fact that television demands a different kind of content from other media. (p. 7)
Though some people strive for quality and truth, screens naturally favor what’s catchy in 30 seconds, what’s pleasing to the eye, and what flatters our prejudices. These are the demands of show business, and they are in direct tension with the dissemination of high quality information. For, “if politics is like show business, then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether.” (p. 126)
The effect?
Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world. I say this in the face of the popular conceit that television, as a window to the world, has made Americans exceedingly well informed… what is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation... misleading information—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented, or superficial information—information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. (p. 106-107)
Substitute “television” for “social media” and Postman’s critique remains remarkably sharp. The rapid, hyperconnected flow of information brings real benefits. But look around: demagoguery and political theater, “flooding the zone with shit,” activists who barely understand their causes, and steadily declining trust in institutions. If we accept Postman’s view, these crises of truth and discourse stem in part from the form of the technology, which inherently favors instant, fragmented, and amusing information.
Here is something near-thrilling, for the super-smart and skeptical. William Briggs is the most clear and rational critic of ‘scientism’ (stupid belief pretending to be science) out there, and his surgical precision and clarity are fantastic fun, also. He’s got a whole course online, about how to reason your way out of (the maze of) mental traps.
But this one is especially clear, easy to get into, and exciting in implication!
Finally, here is something superb and long-overdue – stepping back from political theories to think about ART (and yes, even beauty) again
“...Those who deem the nude in art a “sex object” betray themselves as prudish and crass. Certainly history has seen its share of plastic-seeming nudes. The most candidly erotic paintings of 19th-century French academicism are largely artifacts of the past, and those artists barely remembered. Their marks on canvas captured something synthetic, not life; their works have more in common with modern advertising imagery than with the finest nudes in art.
Every nude is an occasion for the eternal drama between realism and idealism to play out. From the art historian Kenneth Clark, we can discern three senses, at least, in which a nude may be “ideal”: as in beautiful, as in unreal, as in expressing an idea or concept. The last meaning is most significant to Clark’s study of the form. For him, the foremost nude figures in art are substantiations of the archetypal forces and states that distinguish our species—ecstasy, pathos, energy, Apollonian clarity and order, divine and physical love. Much of our sight we owe to him.
Here's a truly outstanding truth-drop from Jeffrey Sachs - talking to Alex and Alexander from the Duran. FIRST HAND WITNESS - no gossip whatsoever. All the context you need (and would have already had, if Big-News was doing the job so many still seem to think they are, despite all shocking, dangerous and overwhelming evidence to the contrary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbFvPFgJW5c
And Mr Fish - (the best political cartoonist alive?) has once again absolutely nailed it.
https://scheerpost.com/2025/03/10/nothing-left/