Global
Asia, Europe, Immorality, North America, South America
Nicholson Baker’s new book, Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, is staggeringly good. If I point out any minor complaints with it, while ignoring, for example, the entirety of Trump’s latest press conference, this is because flaws stand out in a masterpiece while making up the uniform entirety of a Trumpandemic Talk.
Baker begins as if he has an unanswered and possibly unanswerable question: Did the U.S. government use biological weapons in the 1950s? Well, yes, of course it did, I want to reply. It used them in North Korea and (later) in Cuba; it tested them in U.S. cities. We know that the spread of Lyme disease came out of this. We can be pretty confident that Frank Olson was murdered for what he knew about U.S. biological warfare.
“There are so many . . . primitive tribes — they don’t understand anything.”
The global movement to end racism must turn its attention to the world’s most vulnerable cultures — the indigenous people of Planet Earth — who are still enduring the forces of colonial genocide.
They are, after all, still obstacles to the planet’s moneyed interests.
I say these words not simply because protecting tribal cultures is humane, but also because it could well be crucial to everyone’s survival, including yours and mine. The dismissive arrogance evident in the above quote remains all too common. Those people are . . . savages, whatever, choose your judgmental noun.
The speaker above — the founder of India’s Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences, a.k.a., KISS, which is the world’s largest “boarding school” for indigenous children — called them monkeys. Some 30,000 indigenous, also known as Adivasi, children attend KISS, where, according to Survival International, they are shamed and forced to give up their languages and their cultures and become, you know, regular people.
Fully Referenced Facts About Covid-19 that Refute Most of the US Mainstream Media’s Biased Pro-Big Pharma/Pro-Big Vaccine Corporate Narrative, Provided by a Group of Unbiased Medical Experts in the Field, to Help Readers Make Realistic Risk Assessments
By a Consortium of Unbiased Swiss Physicians – Updated July 2020 (1981 words)
The following is an important extended excerpt from a 54 page report, which can be accessed at: https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/
“The only means to fight the plague is honesty.” (Albert Camus, 1947)
Any serious study of the relevant scholarly literature reveals at least four possible paths to imminent human extinction, that is, human extinction within five years: nuclear war, the climate catastrophe, the deployment of 5G and biodiversity collapse.
Moreover, as I have documented previously, under cover of the non-existent ‘virus’ labeled COVID-19, the global elite is conducting a coup against humanity. That is, by bombarding us with fear-mongering propaganda to focus our attention on the ‘virus’, the capacity of virtually all people, including activists, to devote attention to the coup, and to resist it, has been effectively eliminated. See ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup: Fighting for Our Humanity, Our Liberty and Our Future’.
Even as the door-knocking teams begin their work in contacting as many families in the targeted constituency as possible, the organizing committee and the organizer have a new challenge in modern organization. It’s not the pandemic, which is more than enough to handle, but how to manage social media.
Part of the magic of an organizing drive is the ability to control and develop momentum in the drive working up to a crescendo of excitement at the time of the first meeting. The advent of social media adds some challenges and opportunities to our ability to manage the timetable of the drive and the message being delivered on the doors. Now, many people will be posting on Facebook, tweeting on Twitter, and perhaps even raising alarms on Nextdoor as the teams hit the doors. Not everyone is involved in each of these platforms, but many are involved in at least some of them, and some are involved in all of them, so this becomes a task to add on the list for the committee.
On June 12, 2020, Matt Taibbi published a rather confrontational article entitled “The American Press is Destroying Itself.” In it, he laments that “the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres, who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.” Taibbi cites a litany of recent “newsroom revolts,” which signal, in his mind, an editorial crisis of political correctness, where journalists have been beaten into submission by the new leftist brigade of groupthink.
To be sure, Taibbi’s concerns are not entirely misplaced. Anyone who’s spent a day on Twitter knows it poses a uniquely high reputational cost for publishing anything even mildly controversial. But Taibbi talks in existential terms. He presents a grand narrative in which the left is cannibalizing itself, supplanting “traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance” and “free inquiry” with “shaming, threats, and intimidation” of those who deviate from the accepted view.
The new film, The Vow From Hiroshima, tells the story of Setsuko Thurlow who was a school girl in Hiroshima when the United States dropped the first nuclear bomb. She was pulled out of a building in which 27 of her classmates burned to death. She witnessed the gruesome injuries and agonizing suffering and indecent mass burial of many loved ones, acquaintances, and strangers.
Setsuko was from a well-off family and says she had to work at overcoming her prejudices against the poor, yet she overcame an amazing number of things. Her school was a Christian school, and she credits as influence on her life the advice of a teacher to engage in activism as the way to be Christian. That a predominantly Christian nation had just destroyed her predominantly non-Christian city didn’t matter. That Westerners had done it didn’t matter either. She fell in love with a Canadian man who lived and worked in Japan.
The U.S. Congress has 100 Senators and 435 House Members. Out of the full 535, there are 20 thus far who have made themselves sponsor or cosponsor of a resolution to do what is most badly needed, move major amounts of money out of wars and war preparations and into human and environmental needs.
There are members of both houses who have arranged for there to be votes in the coming weeks on moving a mere 10% of the Pentagon budget to useful things. One way in which we can help them grasp how powerfully we demand yes votes on this is to start celebrating the 20 who have put a more serious proposal on the table. These are the 20 to thank and support and further encourage: