…
As you can see, what the left considers “brutality” really only falls into that category of the “brutality” being carried out serves their purposes. As some users pointed out in the post, if this were a black individual being treated like this, or if this were happening for a different reason, then the tune they would be singing would be entirely different. The officer in the video would be considered public enemy number one and they’d have delved into who he is, where he lives, and more.
But since this is about enforcing strict lockdown rules revolving around the coronavirus, this kind of action is okay.
It’s never been about police brutality. It’s always about how useful police brutality could be in the moment.
via Exposed: The Left Actually Loves Police Brutality as This Video Shows
Morality
Beitrut Explosion Analysis
Questions should be raised on the Libanese official story:
1/- Do Libanese people use that much of ammonium nitrate as fertilizer (estimated 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate left unsecured for 6 years in a warehouse. https://nationandstate.com/2020/08/04/trump-calls-beirut-explosion-a-terrible-attack-a-bomb-of-some-kind-after-briefed-by-generals/).
2/- Even for countries not suffering war conditions, how could anyone get a permit to keep a warehouse of chemicals near the center of the city (see the picture with the high rise buildings, https://nationandstate.com/2020/08/04/trump-calls-beirut-explosion-a-terrible-attack-a-bomb-of-some-kind-after-briefed-by-generals/).
3/- Libanese people in Beirut know English and French and they know the basics in safety with chemicals and explosives. How can they miss the Explosion Warnings on the containers for ammonium nitrate?
4/- The cost for importation this large amount of ammonium nitrate ($550/tone, https://scienceofagriculture.org/nitrogen/fertilizer/fertilizer-comparison-02.html), its whereabout, its security from theft must have been known to officials of city/province/ministry.
Conclusion
The official attribution of cause to a neglected 2750 tons of ammonium nitrate is thus unconvincing.
And the blast was so overwhelming in its force, destroying homes up to ten miles away, …
The president further said that it “looks like a terrible attack” — leaving people to again question whether there’s intelligence he’s seen that points to an attack or bombing. According to the AFP:
His remarks were made during a Tuesday evening address to reporters:
Trump said he had been briefed by “our great generals” and that they “seem to feel” that the explosion was not an accident.
“According to them – they would know better than I would – but they seem to think it was an attack,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “It was a bomb of some kind.”
…
It will be interesting to see if the Pentagon issues a follow-up in the wake of the president’s unexpected comments.
Racism, Sexism, Classism: Incoherence of ‘Mainstream’ Ethical Debate. Obfuscating Crimes against Humanity – Global Research
via https://www.globalresearch.ca/racism-sexism-classism-incoherence-mainstream-ethical-debate/5719938
What does it mean when journalists who spent the last two decades promoting wars of aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen take a knee?
The Observer commented:
‘There is a dreadful familiarity about the killing of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, by white police
officers in Minneapolis last Monday….‘The fact that the US has been here before, countless times, does not lessen the horror of this crime nor mitigate brutal police actions.’
There was a dreadful familiarity about the West’s toppling of Gaddafi in 2011, but the Observer didn’t notice. Instead, the editors insisted that, ‘The west can’t let Gaddafi destroy his people’, ‘this particular tyranny will not be allowed to stand’.
Not ‘allowed to stand’, that is, by the destroyers of Iraq eight years earlier;
by governments with zero credibility as moral agents. The fact that the US-UK alliance had been ‘here’ before, countless times, did not lessen the horror of the crime nor mitigate brutal military actions.
When the dirty deed was done and Libyan oil was safely back in Western hands, an Observer editorial
applauded, ‘An honourable intervention. A hopeful future’, as the country fell apart and black people were ethnically cleansed from towns like Tawergha without any UK journalists taking a knee or giving a damn.
When a white policeman crushes a black man’s neck with his knee for eight minutes and 46 seconds, journalists see structural racism. When the West places its boot on the throats of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen for decades and centuries, journalists see ‘rogue states’, an ‘axis of evil’, a ‘clear and present threat’ to the West
that can be averted only by force.
Journalists see racism in the disproportionate violence habitually visited on US black people by police, but find nothing racist in the ultra-violence habitually inflicted by the US-UK alliance blitzing famine-stricken Afghanistan in 2001, in sanctions that killed 500,000 children under five in Iraq, in war that killed one million people in Iraq, in war that destroyed Libya, Syria, Yemen, and many
others.
The links between domestic and international racism are hard to miss. Theodore Roosevelt (US president 1901-1909), noted that ‘the most
ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages,’ establishing the rule of ‘the dominant world races’. (Quoted, Noam Chomsky, ‘Year 501– The Conquest Continues,’ Verso, 1993, p.23)
In 1919, Winston Churchill defended the use of poison gas against ‘uncivilised tribes’ as a means of spreading ‘a lively terror’.
Churchill wrote of the ‘satisfied nations’ whose power places them ‘above the rest,’ the ‘rich men dwelling at peace within their habitations’ to whom ‘the government of the world must be entrusted’. (Ibid., p.33)
In 1932, at the World Disarmament Conference, David Lloyd George (British prime minister, 1916-1922), insisted that the British government would continue to inflict violence for ‘police purposes in outlying places’. He later recounted:
‘We insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers.’
In 1947, renowned British Field Marshall, Bernard Montgomery, noted
the ‘immense possibilities that exist in British Africa for
development’ and ‘the use to which such development could be put to
enable Great Britain to maintain her standard of living, and to
survive’. ‘These lands contain everything we need’, said Montgomery,
fresh from combatting the Nazi’s efforts to achieve ‘Lebensraum’.
It was Britain’s task to ‘develop’ the continent since the African ‘is a
complete savage and is quite incapable of the developing the country
[sic] himself’.
In his book, ‘A Different Kind Of War – The UN Sanctions Regime In Iraq’, Hans von Sponeck,
former UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, wrote that during ‘phase
V’ of the Oil-For-Food programme, from November 1998 to May 1999, each
Iraqi citizen received a food allocation worth $49, or 27 cents per day.
Von Sponeck noted that, ‘the UN was more humane with its dogs than with
the Iraqi people’: each UN dog was allocated $160 for food over the
same period. (Hans von Sponeck, ‘A Different Kind of War’, Bergahn
Books, 2006, p.38)
If the killing of George Floyd was racism, how shall we describe US-
and UK-led UN policy that ‘was more humane with its dogs’? How to
describe corporate media that rail against domestic racism while
perennially cheerleading the infinitely more violent international
version? Why are we not taking a knee for Iraqis and Libyans? Why are
they not even mentioned in the context of institutionalised racism? Why
is no-one toppling Orwellian monuments to a ‘free press’ supporting
global oppression, like the statue of George Orwell outside BBC
Broadcasting House?
The Guardian opined:
‘It is the United States’ great
misfortune at such a time to be led by a president who sows division as a
matter of political strategy. Bunkered down, now literally, in the
White House, the president tweeted last week: “When the looting starts,
the shooting starts.”’
In 2011, after the shooting had started, the Guardian quietly
celebrated the work of an earlier president who also sowed division
without the editors perceiving any great ‘misfortune’. A Guardian leader
commented on Libya:
‘But it can now reasonably be said
that in narrow military terms it worked, and that politically there was
some retrospective justification for its advocates as the crowds poured
into the streets of Tripoli to welcome the rebel convoys earlier this
week.’
The same paper insists it did not support the 2003 Bush-Blair war on
Iraq. The truth is that it promoted every last government ruse in
pursuit of war: Saddam Hussein was a threat to the West, he was
certainly hiding WMD, US-UK were focused on disarming him, were trying
to find diplomatic solutions, were fighting for freedom (not oil, a
possibility so far-fetched and insulting it was dismissed out of hand),
and so on.
The Guardian has never seen the US-UK devastation of Libya, Iraq,
Syria and Yemen as manifestations of the same structural racism it sees so plainly in US police violence:
‘Racism is structural, and state
neglect can be as deadly as state abuse. It does not always take a knee
on the neck to kill someone. Poverty, overcrowding, and unequal access
to healthcare can be fatal.’
True enough. So can corporate greed for profits, for control of oil.
Any rational person can join the dots: corporate power subordinates
human welfare at home and abroad. Bombing, sanctions, invasion
are symptoms of the same profit-driven brutality that forces people to
suffer poverty, overcrowding and poor healthcare.
The Times wrote nobly:
‘The challenge is to harness this moment so that it leads to positive changes.’
And:
‘Of course not all of the legitimate aspirations of those protesting can be achieved overnight.
But progress can be made with determined action.’
This from the newspaper that supports every war going, aided by Perpetual War propagandists like David Aaronovitch, who wrote
an article for The Times entitled: ‘Go for a no-fly zone over Libya or
regret it.’ (See our book, ‘Propaganda Blitz’, pp.129-131, for numerous
other examples of Aaronovitch’s warmongering.)
If, as John Dewey said,
‘politics is the shadow cast on society by big business’, then liberal
media discussions of morality are a grim part of that darkness, shedding
no light.
The Human Ego – ‘I’ Matter More
The corporate system gives the impression that anti-semites, white
supremacists, sexists and the like are victims of a primitive mind virus
reducing them to the status of moral Neanderthals. With sufficient
social distancing, track-and-trace, isolation, the remnants of this
historic pandemic can finally be eradicated. The focus is always on
establishment ‘cancel culture’: erasing, banning, firing, censorship and
criminalisation.
The BBC, for example, prefers to erase the language of racism. A recent news report was titled:
‘A gravestone honouring the Dambusters’ dog – whose name is a racial slur – has been replaced.’
The report noted that the slur was one ‘which the BBC is not naming’.
The dog’s name, ‘Nigger’, appears instantly, of course, to the mind of
anyone who has seen the film, or to anyone who has access to Google.
Curiously, although the ‘N-word’ appears nowhere in the report, the
racial slur, ‘Redskin’, appears 12 times in a BBC report that appeared just three days earlier and that was actually titled:
‘Washington Redskins to drop controversial team name following review’
‘Nigger’ and ‘Redskin’ are both colour-related racial slurs with
horrendous histories – both are used to imply racial inferiority. Why
can one be mentioned and the other not? Censoring the Dambuster dog’s
name achieved little and is not attempted by broadcasters showing films
like ‘Reservoir Dogs’ and ‘Pulp Fiction’, in which the slur is repeated
numerous times.
Like other media casting Dewey’s corporate ‘shadow’, the BBC cannot
make sense of racism and other forms of prejudice because moral
coherence would risk extending the debate to the structural prejudice of
the deeply classist, racist, war-fighting, state-corporate
establishment.
Racists and sexists start to look a little different when we make the following observation:
Racism and sexism are manifestations of the ego’s attempt to make itself ‘higher’ by making others ‘lower’.
Viewing brown- and black-skinned people as ‘inferior’ is obviously
all about white and other racists asserting their ‘superiority’. This is
literally, of course, a microscopically superficial basis for
‘superiority’. Differences establishing sexist ‘superiority’ at least
involve whole organs rather than a layer of cells! But despite what the
necessarily incoherent corporate shadow culture would have us believe,
racists and sexists who view other people as ‘inferior’ are not exotic anomalies.
The human ego does not view others as equal; it places
itself and its loved ones at the centre of the universe – ‘I’ matter
more, ‘my’ happiness and the happiness of those ‘I’ love come first. The
happiness of everyone else is very much a peripheral concern. The ego
latches on to almost any excuse to reinforce this prejudice – viewing
itself as ‘special’, ‘higher’, and others as ‘ordinary’, ‘lower’ – on
the basis of almost any superficial differences, many of them even more
trivial and transient than racial and gender differences. (See here for further discussion on the striving to be ‘special’.)
This tendency is massively promoted by our culture from the earliest
age and manifests in numerous forms other than racism and sexism. We are
taught to compete with our peers, to rise to the ‘upper stream’, to
come first in exams, to be ‘top of the class’, to go to the ‘best’
schools, the ‘best’ colleges, to get the ‘best’ jobs. We are taught to
define ourselves as more or less ‘bright’, ‘academic’, ‘gifted’
(selected for receipt of an actual ‘God-given talent’!). As children, we
do not all display the arrogance of young Winston Churchill visible in this photograph, but we are all trained to be ‘winners’ over ‘losers’.
The Art Of Pronouncing ‘Hegemony’
Racism and sexism have caused immense harm, of course, but so has the
classism visible in young Winston’s face. Humans feel ‘above’ others,
‘special’, when they come from wealthy, aristocratic families; when they
attend a celebrated school, an elite university; when they gain a first
class degree (or any degree), or a Masters, or a PhD; when they buy a
‘top of the range’ car, or luxury property in a desirable postcode; when
they work in high-prestige jobs; when they achieve fame and fortune;
when Howard Jacobson writes in The Independent:
‘When Russell Brand uses the word “hegemony” something dies in my soul.’
It is agony for people like Jacobson – who was educated at Stand
Grammar School and Downing College, Cambridge (before lecturing at the
University of Sydney and Selwyn College, Cambridge) – to hear Brand –
educated at Grays School Media Arts College, Essex, a coeducational
secondary school – chatting
to Ricky Gervais, both of working class origin, without cringing at the
way they glottal stop the ‘t’ in words like ‘civili’y’, ‘carnali’y’,
‘universi’y’ and ‘beau’iful’.
The reaction of middle and upper class people to Brand preaching philosophy and ‘poli’ics’ is exactly that described by Samuel Johnson who made himself ‘higher’ by making women ‘lower’:
‘Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a
dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are
surprised to find it done at all.’
Because elite interests run the mass media, we have all been trained
to perceive elite accents as cultured and authoritative, and working
class accents as uncultured, uneducated. When we at Media Lens grew up
in the 1970s and 1980s, BBC newsreaders and continuity announcers
sounded like Etonian masters and Oxbridge dons. Even now, journalists
like Fiona Bruce and Nicholas Witchell deliver the royal pronunciation
of the word ‘years’ as ‘yers’.
The above may sound comical and absurd – it is! – but the fact is
that, as Jacobson’s comment suggests, millions of people have been
trained to perceive the accents of working class people appearing on
political programmes like Question Time, Newsnight and The Marr Show as
‘lower’. When we react this way to skin colour, rather than to accent
and class, we call it racism.
In an article titled, ‘Leather jackets, flat caps and tracksuits: how to dress if you’re a leftwing politician’, Hadley Freeman wrote in the Guardian in 2016:
‘Now, personally, some of us think
that Corbyn could consider updating his ideas as much as his wardrobe…
He must spend veritable hours cultivating that look, unless there’s a
store on Holloway Road that I’ve missed called 1970s Polytechnic
Lecturer 4 U. Honestly, where can you even buy tracksuits like the ones
he sports?’
This wasn’t racism, but it was classism. Much of the focus
on Corbyn being insufficiently ‘prime ministerial’ was establishment
prejudice targeting a working class threat. Corbyn didn’t dress like the
elite he was challenging – he wore ‘embarrassing’ sandals rather than
‘statesmanlike’ black leather shoes; an ’embarrassing’ jacket rather
than the traditional long, black ‘presidential’ overcoat – just as Brand
didn’t know the ‘correct’ way to say ‘hegemony’. Corbyn was
second-rate, Polytechnic material; not first-class, Oxford material,
like Freeman. The BBC’s Mark Mardell commented on Corbyn:
‘One cynic told me expectations
are so low, if Corbyn turns up and doesn’t soil himself, it’s a
success.’ (Mardell, BBC Radio 4, ‘The World This Weekend’, 21 May 2017)
If this was not gross, classist prejudice, can we conceive of Mardell
repeating a comparable slur about establishment politicians like George
Bush, Tony Blair, Theresa May and Sir Keir Starmer shitting themselves
in public?
Racism and sexism have monstrous consequences, of course, but so does
classism and speciesism, so does every kind of faux-elevation of the
self.
Beyond Censorship
The banning and even criminalisation of words and opinions associated
with ego inflation come at a cost. The problem is that powerful
interests are constantly attempting to extend censorship to words and
opinions they are keen to suppress. For example, the banning of
Holocaust denial prompted establishment propagandists pushing their own
version of ‘cancel culture’ to damn us at Media Lens for something called ‘Srebrenica denial’. As political analyst Theodore Sayeed noted of the smearing of Noam Chomsky:
‘In the art of controversy,
slapping the label “denier” on someone is meant to evoke the Holocaust.
Chomsky, the furtive charge proceeds, is a kind of Nazi.’
Although we had never written about Srebrenica, repeated attempts
were made to link us to Holocaust denial in this way, so that we might
also be branded as virtual Nazis that no self-respecting media outlet
would ever quote or mention, much less interview or publish.
In both our case and Chomsky’s, this was not the work of
well-intentioned individuals, but of organised groups promoting the
interests of the war-fighting state. It was actually part of a much
wider attempt by state-corporate interests to ‘cancel’ opponents of
US-UK wars of aggression. Terms like ‘genocide denial’ and ‘apologist’
are increasingly thrown at leftist critics of Western crimes in Rwanda,
Syria, Libya and Venezuela. For example, critics of Western policy in
Syria are relentlessly accused of ‘Assadist genocide denial’, which is
declared ‘identical’ to Srebrenica denial and Holocaust denial.
The ongoing campaign to associate criticism of Israel with
anti-semitism is an effort to extend the ban on Holocaust denial to
Labour Party politicians and other members promoting socialism and
Palestinian rights. This establishment ‘cancel culture’ played a major
role in the dismantling of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Again, the goal
is to anchor the need for censorship in a fixed ethical point on which
everyone can agree. On the basis that Holocaust denial is prohibited,
attempts are made to extend that prohibition to other subjects that
powerful interests dislike. The goal is the elimination and even
criminalisation of dissident free speech.
Promotions of violence, including state violence, aside, the focus of anyone who cares about freedom of speech and democracy should not be on banning words and opinions relating to racism and sexism. Both are functions of the ego’s wide-ranging efforts to elevate itself, and these efforts cannot simply be banned. Instead, we need to understand and dissolve the delusions of ego through self-awareness.
Noam Chomsky was absolutely right to sign a letter
in Harper’s magazine opposing the growing momentum of ‘swift and severe
retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and
thought’, even though many other signatories were hypocrites. As Chomsky
has said:
‘If you’re in favour of freedom of speech, that means you’re in favour of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise. Otherwise you’re not in favour of freedom of speech.’
The 8th Century mystic, Shantideva, asked:
‘Since I and other beings both, in
wanting happiness, are equal and alike, what difference is there to
distinguish us, that I should strive to have my bliss alone?’
(Shantideva, ‘The Way of the Bodhisattva’, Shambhala, 1997, p. 123)
Are ‘my’ suffering and happiness more important than ‘your’ suffering
and happiness simply because they’re ‘mine’? Obviously not – the idea
is baseless, irrational and cruel. This awareness certainly provides the
rational, intellectual foundation for treating the happiness of others
as ‘equal and alike’ to our own, but not the motivation.
However, Shantideva examined, with meticulous attention, his own
reactions on occasions when he did and did not treat the happiness of
others as ‘equal and alike’, and he reached this startling conclusion:
‘The intention, ocean of great
good, that seeks to place all beings in the state of bliss, and every
action for the benefit of all: such is my delight and all my joy.’
(Ibid., p. 49)
Shantideva’s point is that, if we pay close attention to our
feelings, we will notice that caring for others – treating their
suffering and happiness as equal to our own – is a source of tremendous
and growing ‘delight’ and, in fact, ‘all my joy’. It is also an ‘ocean
of great good’ for society. This is a subtle awareness that is blocked
by the kind of overthinking that predominates in our culture (it
requires meditation, an acute focus on feeling), but Jean-Jacques
Rousseau saw the truth of the assertion with great clarity:
‘I could sometimes gladden another heart, and I owe it to my own honour to declare that whenever I could enjoy this pleasure, I found it sweeter than any other.
This was a strong, pure and genuine instinct, and nothing in my heart
of hearts has ever belied it.’ (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Reveries of A
Solitary Walker’, Penguin Classics, 1979, p. 94, our emphasis)
The fact that a loving, inclusive heart is the basis of individual
and social happiness, and a hate-filled, prejudiced heart is the basis
of individual and social unhappiness, is the most powerful rationale for
dropping racism, sexism, classism and speciesism. It is a response
rooted in the warm truth of being and lived experience, not in bloodless
ideas of ‘moral obligation’ and ‘political correctness’, not in the
violent suppression of free speech.
It is not our ‘duty’ or ‘moral obligation’ to be respectful and tolerant of people and animals different from us; it is in our own best interests to care for them.
Enlightened self-interest, not banning and censorship, has always
been the most effective antidote to prejudice. In fact, anger,
punishment, blame and guilt-making may lead us away from the truth that
we are not being ‘selfish’ by denigrating others, we are harming
ourselves.
*
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The Essence of Evil: Sex with Children Has Become Big Business in America – Christian Patriots
…
Where did this appetite for young girls come from?
Look around you.
Young girls have been sexualized for years now in music videos, on billboards, in television ads, and in clothing stores. Marketers have created a demand for young flesh and a ready supply of over-sexualized children.
… writes Jessica Bennett for Newsweek. “Latex, corsets and stripper heels, once the fashion of porn stars, have made their way into middle and high school.”
This is what Bennett refers to as the “pornification of a generation.”
“In a market that sells high heels for babies and thongs for tweens, it doesn’t take a genius to see that sex, if not porn, has invaded our lives,” concludes Bennett. “Whether we welcome it or not, television brings it into our living rooms and the Web brings it into our bedrooms. …
In other words, the culture is grooming these young people to be preyed upon by sexual predators. And then we wonder why our young women are being preyed on, trafficked and abused?
…
Jimmy Carter’s 1979 Prophecy? — “All the legislation in the world, can’t fix what’s wrong with America.” | by Being Liberal Editor | Being Liberal | Jul, 2020 | Medium
https://medium.com/being-liberal/jimmy-carters-1979-prophecy-edc6a7712410
Jimmy Carter’s Malaise Speech, 1979
FULL
TRANSCRIPT : From Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States
Jimmy Carter 1979, Book II. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,
1980. 1235–1241.This is a special night for me. Exactly 3 years ago, on July 15, 1976, I accepted the nomination of my party to run for President of the United States. I promised you a President who is not isolated from the people,
who feels your pain, and who shares your dreams and who draws his strength and his wisdom from you.During the past 3 years I’ve spoken to you on many occasions about national
concerns, the energy crisis, reorganizing the Government, our Nation’s
economy, and issues of war and especially peace. . . .Ten days ago I had planned to speak to you again a very important subject —
energy. For the fifth time I would have described the urgency of the problem and laid out a series of legislation recommendations to the
Congress. But as I was preparing to speak, I began to ask myself the same question that I now know has been troubling many of you. Why have we been able to get together as a nation to resolve our serious energy a
problem?It’s clear that the true problem of our Nation are much deeper — deeper than
gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession. . . .I know, of course, being President, that government actions and legislation can be very important. That’s why I’ve worked hard to put my
campaign promises into law — and I have to admit, with just mixed success. But after listening to the American people I have been reminded
again that all the legislation in the world can’t fix what’s wrong with America. So, I want to speak to you first tonight about a subject even more serious than energy or inflation. I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy.I do not mean our political and civil liberties. They will endure. And I do not refer to the outward strength of America, a nation that is at
peace tonight everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and
military might.The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own
lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our Nation.The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America. . . .
In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit
communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship
self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years.
Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American
workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world.As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a
message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.These changes did not happen overnight. They’ve come upon us gradually over the last generation, years that were filled with shocks and tragedy.
We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until
the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the Presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate.We remember when the phrase “sound as a dollar” was an expression of
absolute dependability, until 10 years of inflation began to shrink our dollar and our savings. We believed that our Nation’s resources were
limitless until 1973, when we had to face a growing dependence on foreign oil.These wounds are still very deep. They have never been healed.
Looking for a way out of this crisis, our people have turned to the Federal
Government and found it isolated from the mainstream of our Nation’s
life. . . .What you see too often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a
system of government that seems incapable of action. . . .Often you see paralysis and stagnation and drift. You don’t like it, and neither do I. What can we do?
First of all, we must face the truth, and then we can change our course. We
simply must have faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern
ourselves, and faith in the future of this Nation. Restoring that faith
and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face.
It is a true challenge of this generation of Americans. . . .We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose.
One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of
freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others.
That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests
ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the
promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose
and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom
for our Nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this Nation, and it
can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of
energy we can win for our Nation a new confidence, and we can seize
control again of our common destiny.In little more than two decades we’ve gone from a position of energy
independence to one in which almost half the oil we use comes from
foreign countries, at prices that are going through the roof. Our
excessive dependence on OPEC has already taken a tremendous toll on our
economy and our people. This is the direct cause of the long lines which
have made millions of you spend aggravating hours waiting for gasoline.
It’s a cause of the increased inflation and unemployment that we now
face. This intolerable dependence on foreign oil threatens our economic
independence and the very security of our Nation.The energy crisis is real. It is worldwide. It is a clear and present
danger to our Nation. These are facts and we simply must face them. What
I have to say to you now about energy is simple and vitally important.Point one: I am tonight setting a clear goal for the energy policy of the
United States. Beginning this moment, this Nation will never use more
foreign oil than we did in 1977 — never. . . .Point three: To give us energy security, I am asking for the most massive
peacetime commitment of funds and resources in our Nation’s history to
develop America’s own alternative sources of fuel — from coal, from oil
shale, from plant products for gasohol, from unconventional gas, from
the Sun. . . .Point six: I’m proposing a bold conservation program to involve every State,
county, and city and every average American in our energy battle. This
effort will permit you to build conservation into your homes and your
lives at a cost you can afford.I ask Congress to give me authority for mandatory conservation and for
standby gasoline rationing. To further conserve energy, I’m proposing
tonight an extra $10 billion over the next decade to strengthen our
public transportation systems. . . .So, the solution of our energy crisis can also help us to conquer the
crisis of the spirit on our country. It can rekindle our sense of unity,
our confidence in the future, and give our Nation and all of us
individually a new sense of purpose. . . .Little by little we can and we must rebuild our confidence. We can spend until
we empty our treasuries, and we may summon all the wonders of science.
But we can succeed only if we tap our greatest resources — America’s
people, America’s values, and America’s confidence.I have seen the strength of America in the inexhaustible resources of our
people. In the days to come, let us renew that strength in the struggle
for an energy-secure nation.In closing, let me say this: I will do my best, but I will not do it
alone. Let your voice be heard. Whenever you have a chance, say
something good about our country. With God’s help and for the sake of
our Nation, it is time for us to join hands in America. Let us commit
ourselves together to a rebirth of the American spirit. Working together
with our common faith we cannot fail.Thank you and goodnight.
Ex-prez Carter: ‘America has no functioning democracy’ with PRISM • The Register
Comment by tonytran2015: The tittle is a smear by the journalist on Jimmy Carter. His tittle should be Former President, as he has never been removed from his Presidential office.
https://www.theregister.com/2013/07/18/carter_warns_america_no_democracy_prism/
Thu 18 Jul 2013
“America has no functioning democracy,” Carter told a meeting of The Atlantic Bridge in Atlanta on Tuesday, Der Speigel reports.
Carter said that Snowden’s revelations had been “helpful,” and said that the US was losing its moral authority in the world thanks to schemes like PRISM. During the meeting, he also criticized the influence of money in US domestic politics, the
increasing partisan divide in Congress, and election-rule manipulation.…
Jeffrey Epstein & Ghislaine Maxwell Are Just The Beginning: This Goes Much Deeper — Underground Newswire | ARLIN REPORT……………….walking this path together
Epstein’s case goes beyond just the dealings involving Maxwell and himself, and the issue of trafficking very young children, and teenaged children, is much more widespread than Epstein. Epstein is being made out to simply be a rich billionaire with connections that allowed him to entice young women into his home to be sexually abused, but we really need to talk about just how widespread this type of abuse is among people who are made out to be idols, like multiple Vatican officials, politicians and celebrities.
…
Meet the woman who ties Jeffrey Epstein to Trump and the Clintons – POLITICO
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/21/jeffrey-epstein-trump-clinton-1424120
…Maxwell first grew close with the Clintons after Bill Clinton left
office, vacationing on a yacht with Chelsea Clinton in 2009, attending
her wedding in 2010, and participating in the Clinton Global Initiative
as recently as 2013, years after her name first emerged in accounts of
Epstein’s alleged sexual abuse….One person familiar with the Maxwell-Clinton relationship said that
while Maxwell “was incredibly close” to Chelsea Clinton, “She had her
own relationship with Bill Clinton and was very close to him.”In 2010, Maxwell attended Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, apparently as
Waitt’s date. In 2012, Maxwell launched her own Ocean-focused charity,
the TerraMar Project. A year later, the Clinton Global Initiative
trumpeted a TerraMar initiative among the “commitments to action” announced at its annual meeting. No money changed hands.The initiative was the Sustainable Oceans Alliance, which sought to
ensure the United Nations included oceans in its Sustainable Development
Goals.A 2013 news release
on the website for TerraMar — which announced it was shuttering in the
days after Epstein’s arrest — describes the alliance as a four-way
partnership between TerraMar; another nonprofit called the Global
Partnerships Forum; the late Stuart Beck, who served as “ambassador on
oceans and seas” from the Pacific island nation of Palau; and a Trump
friend, Paolo Zampolli, an Italian-born businessman who has served in
diplomatic posts for Caribbean nations.Before his diplomatic career, Zampolli co-founded a model management
company and served as the Trump Organization’s director of international
development. He has long been credited with introducing Trump to his
third wife, Melania, though The New York Times reported this month that Epstein has also claimed credit for the introduction.…
Inside the wicked saga of Jeffrey Epstein: the arrest of Ghislaine Maxwell | 60 Minutes Australia – Wake Up To The Truth
Comment by tonytran2015: Despite claims to the contrary by MSM, Trump’s supporters claim that Trump’s side put more action into this investigation.
…There was little Jeffrey Epstein wouldn’t do to satisfy his lust for young women and girls. It included spending millions of dollars masterminding a worldwide sex-trafficking operation. Countless innocent lives were destroyed. A year ago Epstein was arrested and a month later he died in custody. Investigators though refused to let this scandal go to the grave with him. Instead they shifted their attention to his high-profile friends. One of them is the Queen’s son, Prince Andrew, who continues to dodge requests from the FBI for an interview. But late this week there was a significant breakthrough in the case with the arrest of socialite Ghislaine Maxwell. She’s accused of being Epstein’s right-hand woman and has been charged with multiple child sex offences. As Tara Brown reports, for the first time in a long time, the victims in this wicked saga are feeling relief rather than terror.
How Three Million Germans Mass Murdered after Destruction of the Reich | VikingLifeBlog
Nigel Jones reviews After the Reich: From the Liberation of Vienna to the Berlin Airlift by Giles MacDonogh.
…
MacDonogh argues that the months that followed May 1945 brought no
peace to the shattered skeleton of Hitler’s Reich, but suffering even
worse than the destruction wrought by the war. After the atrocities in
Europe, some degree of justified vengeance was inevitable, but the
appalling bestialities that MacDonogh documents so soberly went far
beyond that. The first 200 pages of his brave book are an almost
unbearable chronicle of human suffering.His best estimate is that some three million Germans died
unnecessarily after the official end of hostilities. A million soldiers
vanished before they could creep back to the holes that had been their
homes. The majority of them died in Soviet captivity (of the 90,000 who
surrendered at Stalingrad, only 5,000 eventually came home) but,
shamingly, many thousands perished as prisoners of the Anglo-Americans.
Herded into cages along the Rhine, with no shelter and very little food,
they dropped like flies. Others, more fortunate, toiled as slave labour
in a score of Allied countries, often for years. Incredibly, some Germans were still being held in Russia as late as 1979.The two million German civilians who died were largely the old, women
and children: victims of disease, cold, hunger, suicide – and mass murder.Apart from the well-known repeated rape of virtually every girl and woman unlucky enough to be in the Soviet occupation zones, perhaps the most shocking outrage recorded by MacDonogh – for the first time in English – is the slaughter of a quarter of a million Sudeten Germans by
their vengeful Czech compatriots. The survivors of this ethnic cleansing, naked and shivering, were pitched across the border, never to return to their homes. Similar scenes were seen across Poland, Silesia
and East Prussia as age-old German communities were brutally expunged.…
