THE FAILURE OF GERMAN LEADERSHIP Merkel Whores For Washington

From Paul Craig Roberts:

Washington, enabled by its compliant but stupid NATO puppets, is pushing the Ukrainian situation closer to war.
German Chancellor Merkel has failed her country, Europe, and world peace. Germany is the strength of the EU and NATO. Had Merkel said “No” to sanctions on Russia, that would have been the end of the crisis that Washington is brewing, a crisis unlikely to be ended short of war.
But Merkel has signed away the sovereignty of the German nation and assigned the fate of Germany to a province in the American Empire. Thus has Merkel and the weak
German leadership consigned the world to war. Already blamed for World War 1 and World War 2, now Germany will be blamed for World War 3.
Washington’s mismanaged Ukrainian coup has cost Washington Crimea, which Washington wanted most of all in order to deprive Russia of its warm water naval base on the Black Sea. In addition, the mismanaged overthrow of an elected government in Ukraine is threatening to also lose the Russian cities of eastern Ukraine. Like Crimea, eastern Ukraine is more Russian than Ukrainian.
In what is clearly a fruitless and pointless effort to get Crimea back, Washington is demanding that Russia interfere in Crimea and prevent Crimea from seceding from Ukraine. If the Russian government refuses to follow Washington’s orders, Washington has announced that it will inflict “damaging sanctions” on Russia. Initially, EU countries expressed an unwillingness to go along with Washington, but with bribes and threats, Washington has conquered Merkel and has its European puppets lined up following orders.
Washington understands that economic sanctions are a far less threat to Russia than the loss of its Black Sea naval base. Washington also understands that Putin cannot possibly abandon the millions of Russians in eastern and southern Ukraine to the mercy of the anti-Russian and unelected government imposed by Washington in Kiev. As Washington knows that its threat of sanctions is empty, why did Washington make it?
The answer is in order to drive the crisis to war. Washington’s neoconservative nazis have been agitating for war with Russia for a long time. They want to remove one of the three remaining restraints (Russia, China, Iran) on Washington’s world hegemony. Washington wants to break up the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) before these countries form a separate currency bloc and avoid the use of the US dollar.
Russia will respond in kind to Washington’s sanctions. European peoples and Western banks and corporations will suffer losses. It would be at least two or three years before Washington has in place means of delivering US natural gas achieved by fracking and contamination of US water supplies to Europe to take the place of Russia’s cutoff of energy to Europe.
The Western presstitute media will dramatize the Russian response to sanctions and demonize Russia, while ignoring who started the fight, thereby helping Washington prepare Americans for war. As neither side can afford to lose the war, nuclear weapons will be used. There will be no winners.
All of this is perfectly clear, just as was the obvious conclusion of the march of events leading up to World War 1. Now, like then, the people who see the outcome are powerless to stop it. Delusion rules. Arrogance and hubris overflow. Statements and actions become ever more reckless, and then there is hell to pay.
Americans and Europeans, if they had any awareness at all, would be in the streets violently protesting the coming war toward which the insane criminals in Washington are driving the world.
Instead, the German chancellor, the French president, the British prime minister and the Western presstitute media continue to lie: It was legitimate for the West to steal Kosovo from Serbia and to steal the Ukrainian government, but it is not legitimate for the Russian population of Crimea to exercise self-determination and return to Russia. Washington and its EU puppets even have the audacity to declare falsely, after overthrowing an elected government in Ukraine and installing an unelected one, that Crimean self-determination violates the Ukrainian constitution, which no longer exists because Washington destroyed it.
The criminally insane government in Washington has pushed the Russian bear into a corner. The bear is not going to surrender.

We’re Just Not That Special

by ANDREW J. BACEVICH

Unless Barack Obama is even a weaker president than he appears to be, the effusion of editorial emoting unleashed by the Ukraine crisis is unlikely to have any effect on U.S. policy. Pray, let that be the case.
Should Obama’s advisers look for guidance to the opinion pages of the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal, much less the Weekly Standard or Fox News, we’re in deep trouble. One might as well leaf through the latest Victoria’s Secret catalog for guidance on empowering women.
Still, the recent flurry of angst-filled opining provides a concise tutorial on what we might call the theology of American Exceptionalism, the irreligious religion that flourishes in certain quarters of the American elite and periodically finds favor with the larger body politic.

Central to that theology are several tenets, vividly displayed by overwrought commentators over the last several days.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/03/american-exceptionalism-russia-ukraine-104318.html#ixzz2vDpG6JqC

Capitalism vs. Democracy

 Thomas Piketty’s new book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” described by one French newspaper as a “a political and theoretical bulldozer,” defies left and right orthodoxy by arguing that worsening inequality is an inevitable outcome of free market capitalism.

Piketty, a professor at the Paris School of Economics, does not stop there. He contends that capitalism’s inherent dynamic propels powerful forces that threaten democratic societies.

Rest of article here, from the New York Times.

Demystifying Nuclear Power What the Japanese Government Isn’t Saying About Fukushima

http://vimeo.com/82044516

MAY THE ODDS EVER BE IN YOUR FAVOR – HOPE & DEFIANCE

President Snow and his chief propagandist, Seneca Crane, have a discussion that could be taking place between president Obama and chairman Bernanke today. Hope is a funny thing. If the ruling class removes all hope, then the masses begin to feel they have nothing to lose and revolution becomes a foregone conclusion. For the elites of Panem, hope is used as a method of control. President Snow understood the danger of allowing the downtrodden multitudes too much hope. The Hunger Games allows one child to survive out of 24. The districts are forced to remember the iron grip of the Capitol every year, while rooting for an unlikely hollow victory of one child surviving. 

The parents of children in the districts hope their children aren’t chosen. They hope they’ll scrounge up enough food to survive another day. They hope they don’t get killed in a mine explosion. They hope the peacekeepers don’t break down their doors and imprison them for illegal hunting. They hope they can endure another week. Snow knows that as long as they have only a faint hope to maintain their subsistence level lifestyle, they are unlikely to rebel. Seeing a sixteen year old girl openly defying the Capitol and awakening a spirit of humanity and courage in the subjugated masses is a huge threat to the ruling class.

Reflections on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, 50 Years Later

Excerpt below. Full article here:

Unfortunately, we now live in a country where to say that Oswald is innocent is tantamount to committing a “thoughtcrime”. Americans increasingly practice what Orwell terms “crimestop,” the faculty of stopping short at the threshold of any dangerous thought. But given the facts of the matter, believing the Oswald-did-it-alone official truth is like saying 2 + 2 = 5.
We who are alive today may not live to see the truth on the Kennedy assassination finally win out. But it will, sooner or later. For truth is the daughter of time, not of authority. It has taken more than 500 years for the truth to be realized that Richard III did not kill his nephews. One hopes that it doesn’t take that long with the JFK assassination.

One man has come up with a solution: the Finlander Pentii Linkola. Excerpt here.

Humanflood

By Pentti Linkola
Translated by Harri Heinonen and Michael Moynihan
Introduction by Michael Moynihan.
Is Pentti Linkola posing the most dangerous thoughts mankind has ever considered? Or is he this planet's only remaining voice of sanity? Living an ascetic existence as a fisherman in a remote rural region of his frigid homeland, the Finnish philosopher has pondered mankind's position vis-?-vis the earth it inhabits and dares to utter the unspeakable. In order for the planet to continue living, man - or homo destructivus, as Linkola names him - must be violently thinned to a mere fraction of his current global population. Linkola's metaphor for the predicament is as follows:
What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and only one lifeboat, with room for only ten people, has been launched? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship's axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides of the boat.
As time creaks onward, Linkola's predictions and indictments grow more dire. He has come to realise that extreme situations demand extreme solutions:
"We still have a chance to be cruel. But if we are not cruel today, all is lost." The sworn enemy of Christians and Humanists both, Linkola knows that the fate of the earth will never be rescued by those who exalt "tenderness, love and dandelion garlands." Neither the developed nor under-developed populations of the planet deserve to survive at the expense of the biosphere as a whole. Linkola has urged that millions will starve to death or be promptly slaughtered in genocidal civil wars. Mandatory abortions should be carried out for any female who has more than two offspring. The only countries capable of initiating such draconian measures are those of the West, yet ironically they are the ones most hamstrung by debilitating notions of liberal humanism. As Linkola explains, "The United States symbolises the worst ideologies in the world: growth and freedom." The realistic solution will be found in the implementation of an eco-fascist regime where brutal battalions of "green police," having freed their consciences from the "syrup ethics," are capable of doing whatever is necessary.

Full article here.

The Twilight of Capitalism

‘Worst’ is the product of twilight capitalism. Managers expect nothing of us but our worst behavior … they rely upon it; our position within the marketplace is ‘fools’. We are never asked what we can do for our country or anyone or anything other than ourselves. It is, ‘What’s in it for me right now?’. The Invisible Hand runs amok: we are children. To satisfy ‘now’ we have become purposefully ignorant, greedy, corrupt and ruthless: these most ‘efficiently’ exhibiting these characters are rewarded, everything outside is excluded. We are encouraged to be as complacent as possible, to ignore risk, to accept falsehoods at face value, become judgmental, impatient, irrational and filled with fear and self-loathing as if all these are virtues; to believe violence and waste represent ‘freedom’.

Arctic Death Spiral and the Methane Time Bomb (+playlist)

R. Buckminster Fuller, William S. Burroughs & Allen Ginsberg: The Americ...

Why the American Empire Was Destined to Collapse | Alternet

Why the American Empire Was Destined to Collapse | Alternet

Morris Berman is an amazing social historian. He is interviewed about his last book in the article above.

I read the book... it's a must read, but be forewarned: you may start to contemplate emigration from the USA upon finishing it.

UBC Reads Sustainability - Morris Berman

This man is a perceptive, sensitive intellectual who has analyzed the state of the USA.
I highly recommend his book, Why America Failed, and everything else he has written.

The JFK War: Welcome coverage from CBS and the Santa Barbara Independent

The JFK War: Welcome coverage from CBS and the Santa Barbara Independent

Thanks, Professor Jim Fetzer of UMD, for laying out a lucid, compelling case regarding who was really responsible for the JFK assassination.

Such an event is basically never the result of a lone gunman. It was far too well-planned, and JFK was hit by too many shots to make a pre-WWII piece-of-junk Italian rifle even remotely plausible as the weapon.

THE SEA GYPSY PHILOSOPHER: BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS ... ALTHOUGH THEY SHALL BE GUNNED DOWN

THE SEA GYPSY PHILOSOPHER: BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS ... ALTHOUGH THEY SHALL BE GUNNED DOWN

Former FBI Agent Reveals Who Really Killed JFK

No, Folks, It's Not Going To Work - Denninger on health care

Excerpts below. See original article.

President Obama has now changed his tune, trying to defend the lie he sold young adults (most of whom voted for him twice), now saying that his line about "if you like your health insurance (or doctor!) you can keep it" by claiming that what you were buying was a substandard ("defective") policy and that he knows better than you.
Really?  Does that apply to who your doctor is as well?  Or to which hospital you can use without getting a $500,000 bill (which you don't have, of course.)

Chances are the individual plan you purchased outside Obamacare would allow you to go to these facilities. For example, fourth-ranked Cleveland Clinic accepts dozens of insurance plans if you buy one on your own. But go through Obamacare and you have just one choice: Medical Mutual of Ohio.

Isn't that special?
It's even better -- in many counties, including mine, there is exactly one company offering Brosurance, otherwise known as Obamacare, and Obamacare prohibits shopping across county lines.  In other words it's now a "take it or leave it and get taxed" situation.
...

No, folks, this is not just, it is not right, and it won't work.  The political calculus is that if the government can get you to believe you're the "winner" of such discrimination you'll vote for and support it.  But you're never in fact the winner -- you're the loser, and their cronies in industry are the only winners.
You are literally being robbled blind and not only are consenting to it in your own delusional state you're demanding it continue and accelerate!
Consider the medical situation again.  Your "win" is pyrrhic, because while you pay "just 20%" of the bill the bill itself was inflated by 500% and thus you paid the entire bill anyway and then on top of it you spent thousands on what is on any dispassionate analysis worthless "insurance."
Why worthless?  Because but for the scam that you voted for and supported the price would be 1/5th or even 1/10th of what it is today, your cost out-of-pocket would be the same or less than it is today, and you'd still have all the money you paid for the so-called "insurance" to spend on something else!
Wake up folks and burn this crap to the ground in all areas of our economy.  Do it peacefully and politically, but do it and do it today, because if you don't you, and your children, will be the ones who are destroyed.

Computers suck - a prescient computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum critiques their so-called "intelligence" in 1985

  An amazing computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum turned against computers as a general force for good in the 1970's. He led an amazing life - he was a refugee from Nazi Germany as a child, and ended up at MIT. He did in 2008, unfortunately. An excerpt of an amazingly prescient interview from 1985:

Q: Do you think that the computer is creating a technical elite, reinforcing old power structures, or remaking American society?
A: I think the computer has from the beginning been a fundamentally conservative force. It has made possible the saving of institutions pretty much as they were, which otherwise might have had to be changed. For example, banking. Superficially, it looks as if banking has been revolutionized by the computer. But only very superficially. Consider that, say 20, 25 years ago, the banks were faced with the fact that the population was growing at a very rapid rate, many more checks would be written than before, and so on. Their response was to bring in the computer. By the way, I helped design the first computer banking system in the United States, for the Bank of America 25 years ago.
Now if it had not been for the computer, if the computer had not been invented, what would the banks have had to do? They might have had to decentralize, or they might have had to regionalize in some way. In other words, it might have been necessary to introduce a social invention, as opposed to the technical invention.
What the coming of the computer did, "just in time," was to make it unnecessary to create social inventions, to change the system in any way. So in that sense, the computer has acted as fundamentally a conservative force, a force which kept power or even solidified power where is already existed.

The Website is Fixable, Obamacare Isn’t

This great article by Peter Schiff explains why "Obamacare" is a real failure, and will adversely affect both US healthcare, and government finances. In fact, it may be the straw that breaks the camel's back, and sends the US economy into recession.

This boondoggle is another reason I am neither a Democrat, nor a Republican. Both parties are in league with horrid special interests, with nothing but their profit maximization as a goal.

The problem with late-stage, pre-collapse democracy, is that the public good is completely ignored. Special interests spend a lot of time and energy gaming the system, and lobbying the government. The public, who have a lot to gain as a whole by opposing the acts of looting by special interests, are feeble in their opposition, because no single voter or family stands to lose that much from a single special interest's coercive goals. When you add up all the special favors doled out to corporations and special interests, however, it starts to really add up. In fact, such special interests and public corruption doomed the Roman Empire. Thus, we begin the slide into the dustbin of history.

Excerpt of Peter Schiff's article below. Click article to read entire essay.

Since Obamacare made its debut, discussions have focused on Ted Cruz' efforts to defund the law and the shockingly bad functionality of the Website itself. Fortunately for Obama, polling indicates that Senator Cruz has lost, at least for now, the battle for hearts and minds. The President has not been nearly so lucky on the technological front. If current trends continue, the rollout may go down as the worst major product launch in history. But given the government's enormous resources, it's safe to say that the site itself will ultimately be fixed. But when it is finally up and running, the plan's many deeper, and more intractable, flaws will come into focus. That's when the fun will really begin.
Put simply the program is built on a mountain of false assumptions and is covered by a terrain of unanticipated incentives. Any cleared-eyed observer should conclude that it is perfectly designed to raise the costs of care and wreck the federal budget. However, like just about every other complicated problem that bedevils the nation, the public has become far too caught up in the politics and has ignored the horrific details.

Our Invisible Revolution

by Chris Hedges

Excerpt below. Click for full article.

By the time ruling elites are openly defied, there has already been a nearly total loss of faith in the ideas—in our case free market capitalism and globalization—that sustain the structures of the ruling elites. And once enough people get it, a process that can take years, “the slow, quiet, and peaceful social evolution becomes quick, militant, and violent,” as Berkman wrote. “Evolution becomes revolution.”
This is where we are headed. I do not say this because I am a supporter of revolution. I am not. I prefer the piecemeal and incremental reforms of a functioning democracy. I prefer a system in which our social institutions permit the citizenry to nonviolently dismiss those in authority. I prefer a system in which institutions are independent and not captive to corporate power. But we do not live in such a system. Revolt is the only option left. Ruling elites, once the ideas that justify their existence are dead, resort to force. It is their final clutch at power. If a nonviolent popular movement is able to ideologically disarm the bureaucrats, civil servants and police—to get them, in essence, to defect—nonviolent revolution is possible. But if the state can organize effective and prolonged violence against dissent, it spawns reactive revolutionary violence, or what the state calls terrorism. Violent revolutions usually give rise to revolutionaries as ruthless as their adversaries. “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. “And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

The End of Hypocrisy: American Foreign Policy in the Age of Leaks

Must read, if you have a subscription. Even the introduction, though, is revealing as to why US officials are really so angry about Wikileaks, Bradley Manning, and Edward Snowden:

The End of Hypocrisy

American Foreign Policy in the Age of Leaks
Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore
HENRY FARRELL is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University. Follow him on Twitter @henryfarrell [1]. MARTHA FINNEMORE is University Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University.The U.S. government seems outraged that people are leaking classified materials about its less attractive behavior. It certainly acts that way: three years ago, after Chelsea Manning, an army private then known as Bradley Manning, turned over hundreds of thousands of classified cables to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, U.S. authorities imprisoned the soldier under conditions that the UN special rapporteur on torture deemed cruel and inhumane. The Senate’s top Republican, Mitch McConnell, appearing on Meet the Press shortly thereafter, called WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, “a high-tech terrorist.”
More recently, following the disclosures about U.S. spying programs by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency analyst, U.S. officials spent a great deal of diplomatic capital trying to convince other countries to deny Snowden refuge. And U.S. President Barack Obama canceled a long-anticipated summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin when he refused to comply.
Despite such efforts, however, the U.S. establishment has often struggled to explain exactly why these leakers pose such an enormous threat. Indeed, nothing in the Manning and Snowden leaks should have shocked those who were paying attention. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who dissented from the WikiLeaks panic, suggested as much when he told reporters in 2010 that the leaked information had had only a “fairly modest” impact and had not compromised intelligence sources or methods. Snowden has most certainly compromised sources and methods, but he has revealed nothing that was really unexpected. Before his disclosures, most experts already assumed that the United States conducted cyberattacks against China, bugged European institutions, and monitored global Internet communications. Even his most explosive revelation -- that the United States and the United Kingdom have compromised key communications software and encryption systems designed to protect online privacy and security -- merely confirmed what knowledgeable observers have long suspected.
The deeper threat that leakers such as Manning and Snowden pose is more subtle than a direct assault on U.S. national security: they undermine Washington’s ability to act hypocritically and get away with it. Their danger lies not in the new information that they reveal but in the documented confirmation they provide of what the United States is actually doing and why. When these deeds turn out to clash wit...

Link to article.