Organizing Notes

Bruce Gagnon is coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. He offers his own reflections on organizing and the state of America's declining empire....

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The collapsing US military & economic empire is making Washington & NATO even more dangerous. US could not beat the Taliban but thinks it can take on China-Russia-Iran...a sign of psychopathology for sure. @BruceKGagnon

Saturday, January 23, 2021

History lesson: Economic collapse & fascism

 

Michael Parenti is an American political scientist and cultural critic who writes on scholarly and popular subjects. He has taught at American and international universities and has been a guest lecturer before campus and community audiences.

Russ Baker is also heard from in the video - he authored Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put it in the White House & What Their Influence Means for America.

The video ends with an excellent and highly relevant comedic bit by Steve Hughes.

They discuss the rise of fascism during times of economic crisis. 

Similar to what we are experiencing today.

Friday, January 22, 2021

Real change? You've got to be kidding....

 







Move on folks....nothing to believe in here.  Just more of the same.

I understand it is hard for some folks to recognize that we have corporate dominated government - no matter which party is in power.

But as they say....a fact is a fact. 

Already the Washington Post had a headline yesterday that read: Biden foreign policy begins with telling the world: ‘America’s back’.

Look out world here they come!

Bruce  

Graphics made by Nodutdol, a Korean-American Solidarity Group in New York City.  Click on the images for a better view.

Thursday, January 21, 2021

What is legal about an experimental vaccine?

 

Francis Boyle explains that anyone can refuse the injection based on the Nuremberg Code on Medical Experimentation. 

One story Boyle tells was about representing a military medical doctor who refused orders to give vaccine shots to military personnel who were being sent to the Gulf War (1990-1991).  The woman doctor was prosecuted and put in military prison at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. Boyle got her out of prison after eight months. Out of about 500,000 GI's sent to the Gulf War over 100,000 came down with the deadly 'Gulf War syndrome' and became disabled while 11,000 died.

Some things we know so far. 

The vaccines that are now being stuck into people's bodies are not fully tested.  Thus currently the shots (or jabs as they say in the UK) are experimental. Not yet proven to work. Anyone who gets the jab is agreeing to be part of the testing program.

Secondly, the mega-vaccine corporations are legally exempt under the law.  That means they cannot be held responsible for any deaths or injuries if people have negative reactions. Lately there have been several reports from Norway and the US where people are having severe reactions (some even dying) from the vaccines.

Thirdly, as law professor Francis Boyle (expert on US bio-warfare program) reminds us in this video, Covid 19 is a bio-warfare agent first developed at US bio-warfare lab Fort Detrick in Maryland.

Take the jabs at your own risk.

 

~ Francis Boyle served as counsel to Bosnia and Herzegovina and to the Provisional Government of the Palestinian Authority. He also represents two associations of citizens within Bosnia and was involved in developing the indictment against Slobodan Milošević for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Over his career, he has represented national and international bodies including the Blackfoot Nation (Canada), the Nation of Hawaii, and the Lakota Nation, as well as numerous individual death penalty and human rights cases. He has advised numerous international bodies in the areas of human rights, war crimes and genocide, nuclear policy, and bio-warfare. From 1991-92, Boyle served as Legal Advisor to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations.

He served on the board of directors of Amnesty International, as a consultant to the American Friends Service Committee, and on the Advisory Board for the Council for Responsible Genetics. He drafted the US domestic implementing legislation for the Biological Weapons Convention, known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, that was approved unanimously by both Houses of the US Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush. He served as an adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) between 1987-89 and 1991-93. 

Censorship breeds more censorship....

 

 

Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti react to new calls for social media censorship.

The surveillance/censorship society will be coming for all of us before we know it.

Don't think it is just the right-wing that are being censored - and don't they have rights to free speech as well?

Free speech means free speech....for everyone. Who benefits by limiting freedom of thought and speech?

Time to speak out now! 

Wednesday, January 20, 2021

GN Annual Dues Reminder

 

Global Network Membership Form 2021


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Tuesday, January 19, 2021

Mixed bag of worldly highlights

 


  • I just had my semi-annual physical by phone with one of my two doctors.  I have to go to the hospital to get my blood work done but the rest was quite different from the past.  One can't help but wonder if things ever do return to 'normal' - whatever that was. He tried to get me to take the virus jab but I declined.  I've been studying the issues around the vaccines - corporate profits, still in the 'test phase', the corporations that so hastily made the vaccines are given legal exemption from any liabilities.  All that is enough to make me skeptical.
  • The next issue of Space Alert (newsletter of the Global Network) is now with our layout person and I should be seeing the first draft of that any day.  This upcoming issue will feature quite a few reports from around the world about growing attempts to get more spaceports built as the aerospace industry hopes to launch tens of thousands of mini-satellites (sats) in the coming years.  We are told they will be civilian but almost all sats in orbit now have 'dual use' functions - they serve two masters - big tech corporations and the Pentagon.  With all the launches there is growing negative impact on the ozone layer (helping to accelerate climate crisis) and overly crowded orbits. Soon enough the 'cars in the parking lot' are going to start bumping into each other.  When that happens things are going to get tense down here on Earth as most of what 'modern snivilization' does is hooked up to sats - cell phone, banking, TV, GPS, weather prediction, etc.

 

  • The sun is out today but it is cold - 34 degrees. This past summer in Maine was the warmest in history. I saw an article in the paper the other day about a local business that rents shacks on the frozen river for ice fishing shelter.  This year, the first time in the life of this business, the river has not iced over. It should have happened at least a month ago. No mention of 'global warming' in the article. We've not had one night below zero this winter as far as I can recall.
  • So far Biden's picks for most posts give us clear indication that no big changes are expected in US foreign and domestic policy. The rhetoric will change and White House tweets will be boring to a fault. Expect lots more Washington pressure on Russia and China.  The demonization of both those nations will increase. A story was circulating widely yesterday in mainstream American media that a laptop had been stolen on January 6 from Nancy Pelosi's office at the besieged capital building and the woman who allegedly took it wanted to 'sell it to Russian security services'.  They just make this shit up. There can be no doubt that the CIA is firmly in charge of running this country.  CIA and Wall Street are basically the Deep State.
  • I've been to Okinawa a couple of times with VFP and Nipponzan Myohoji (Buddhist) delegations. We always joined the protests at Camp Schwab where a runway for the US Marine base is being built on top of pristine Oura Bay which is filled with amazing coral reefs and the endangered Dugong. They are dredging the bay now and need lots of fill-dirt to build the runways above water level.  So the US came up with a sickening idea which appears to be moving forward. A new plan has been released that says the earth and sand containing the remains of victims of the WW II (Battle of Okinawa) will be used to construct the new airfield. At least 150,000 civilians were killed in that 1945 US against Japan battle. They were buried in mass graves. There is no need to explain why Okinawan people oppose this plan. Please sign the petition opposing this here.

                     


  • My primary distraction from the current 'madness of the world' is basketball and baseball.  My favorite basketball team now has half their squad out after testing positive for covid and their last four games were cancelled. The team is the Washington Wizards and they have come up with a chilling new logo that reads 'DC Above All'.  Wow, reminds of Deutschland über alles. I wonder if there is something more to this than meets the eye.  The Wizards are actually a chronically bad team and management keeps signing players from other countries, and not always the best players available for the same money. So currently they have players from Israel, Germany (2), Latvia, Spain, Japan, Ukraine and the US. Recently they also had players from Poland and the Czech Republic (2). Management has said they want to be a 'global team' and my guess is that ownership is tied in some way to US foreign policy making.  The Wizards are to become one more piece of 'American culture' that gets used to promote the image of American 'exceptionalism'. Something like 'We love and embrace the world!'  Oh boy....

Bruce

Parting words: A view of the clown called Trump

 


Someone asked "Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?" 

Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England, wrote this magnificent response:

"A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. 

For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace - all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed.

So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.

Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing - not once, ever.

I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility - for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman.

But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is - his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.

Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers.

And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults - he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.

There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface.

Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront.

Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul.

And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist.

Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that.

He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat.

He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.

And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully.

That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a sniveling sidekick instead.

There are unspoken rules to this stuff - the Queensberry rules of basic decency - and he breaks them all.
 
He punches downwards - which a gentleman should, would, could never do - and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless - and he kicks them when they are down.

So the fact that a significant minority - perhaps a third - of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think 'Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:

* Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.

* You don't need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.

This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss.

After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum.

God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid.

He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart.

In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws - he would make a Trump.

And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish:
'My God… what… have… I… created? 

If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set." 

More trouble as Biden picks Power at USAID

  


Samantha Power at the helm of USAID should set off alarm bells globally as Obama’s deadly foreign policy returns for an encore

 By Helen Buyniski
 

President-elect Joe Biden has rounded out his hyper-belligerent cabinet with Obama enabler Samantha Power, whose infamous ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine freed that president to bomb seven countries – a post-WWII-record.

Power has officially been tapped as head of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), a soft-power cutout allegedly used by US intelligence to enact regime change and other questionable dealings under cover of administering humanitarian aid or “promoting democracy.”

USAID, an ostensibly independent agency with ties to the State Department, is notorious for pouring taxpayer dollars into “civil society” groups in countries where Washington-backed ‘revolutions’ subsequently germinate, whether it’s Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ukraine, or elsewhere.

In taking up leadership of the agency, Power would effectively be picking up where she left off as ambassador to the United Nations under Barack Obama, traveling around the world to “fix” what the US has broken over the last few decades and helping to topple any leaders who try to stand in the way.

Under Obama, the US didn’t just launch an unprecedented number of drone strikes. Thanks to the “responsibility to protect” doctrine Power helped create, in which military intervention is “justified” by the mere potential of genocide or mass slaughter, the commander-in-chief’s hands were freed to start wars without even the fig leaf of Congressional approval. Recasting acts of war as acts of humanitarianism was a stroke of brilliance, if a supremely evil one, and epitomized the double-standard the US has set for itself and NATO versus the rest of the world.

Based not on a congressional vote but on a UN resolution, the US jumped into the disastrous war with Libya in 2011, following Power’s recommendation to declare a no-fly zone under the bogus rationale that leader Moammar Gaddafi was going to slaughter his own people. Power’s “responsibility to protect,” a.k.a. military virtue-signaling, allowed Washington to lay waste to what had been the most advanced country on the African continent before its leader committed the unforgivable crime of suggesting African nations sell their oil under a new gold dinar currency. Propagandists skilled in the lurid art of atrocity-porn were deployed to divert the world’s attention to the Libyan leader’s supposed proclivity for feeding his soldiers Viagra so they could rape more helpless civilians [which was later completely discredited].

 


Coupled with such cartoonish depictions of evil, Power’s deft sleight of hand at turning illegal wars of aggression into warm fuzzy “humanitarian bombing” proved a great gift to the Obama presidency. Congress’ sign-off, previously required to take the US to war, had become superfluous. Unsurprisingly, she was a major proponent of taking the Libya approach in Syria, where the Obama administration instead focused on training “moderate” rebels with ties to the same Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) and al-Qaeda head-choppers Washington was supposedly fighting, and appears to have taken great creative liberties regarding her support-turned-opposition to the US-backed Saudi war in Yemen.

Former President George W. Bush may have started the ill-advised war on terror that has shredded the Middle East and bankrupted the US both literally and morally, but he at least made a show of wrangling approval out of a spineless, neutered Congress. Armed with a Nobel Peace Prize, Obama continued bombing Afghanistan and Iraq and expanded the combat theatre to five more countries before his second term was over – bombing more nations than any other US president since World War II.

While the term “responsibility to protect” has not crossed the lips of the Trump administration – President Donald Trump wouldn’t be caught dead praising an Obama-era policy – the paradigm of “bomb first, ask questions later” has remained very much in effect. Trump broke Obama’s records in terms of airstrikes ordered and civilians killed, and very nearly took the US into war with Iran, ordering the airstrike that killed Iran’s Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani without bothering to clear it with Congress first.

 

Power made it clear in a recent Foreign Affairs article that her convictions have not shifted – it’s Trump’s blunt aesthetics, not his affinity for bombing countries that don’t pose a threat to the US, that she disdains. She calls for the US to demand a certain level of anti-corruption measures from any country seeking preferential trade agreements, as if the US (and particularly her new boss) has a moral leg to stand on regarding corruption. Power even name-drops the Global Magnitsky Act, named after the tax adviser of notorious scam artist Bill Browder, as if daring the reader not to laugh.

But reading between the lines of that lengthy paean to American exceptionalism, it’s clear her sudden interest in international corruption is rooted more in the surge in anti-corruption protests around the world than any sincere concern. As leader of USAID, she will be tasked with finding and exploiting weak spots in target states through the “civil society” groups the agency bankrolls. And if that means pretending to care about corruption while working for an administration that’s soaking in it, so be it. Power didn’t win an award from Henry Kissinger himself for having morals or ethics.

~  Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT.

Monday, January 18, 2021

MLK: 'Approaching spiritual death'

 

 

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., took a public and unpopular stand against the Vietnam War, declaring it an enemy of the poor in the United States. 

In his 1967 speech, Beyond Vietnam, King argued that young African-American men were sent “to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia or East Harlem”.

This other side of MLK is not often acknowledged during the annual national holiday remembrances.  

But MLK's assassination by the CIA-FBI was most likely carried out because of his anti-war position - just one year to the day after making his controversial Vietnam War speech at Riverside Church in New York City.

Sunday, January 17, 2021

January 6: Closer look inside the capital

 

At 2:12 p.m. on Jan. 6, supporters of President Trump began climbing through a window they had smashed on the northwest side of the U.S. Capitol. “Go! Go! Go!” someone shouted as the rioters, some in military gear, streamed in. It was the start of the most serious attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812. The mob coursed through the building, enraged that Congress was preparing to make Trump’s electoral defeat official. “Drag them out! … Hang them out!” rioters yelled at one point, as they gathered near the House chamber. 

Officials in the House and Senate secured the doors of their respective chambers, but lawmakers were soon forced to retreat to undisclosed locations. Five people died on the grounds that day, including a Capitol police officer. In all, more than 50 officers were injured. 

 To reconstruct the pandemonium inside the Capitol, The Washington Post examined text messages, photos and hundreds of videos, some of which were exclusively obtained. By synchronizing the footage and locating some of the camera angles within a digital 3-D model of the building, The Post was able to map the rioters’ movements and assess how close they came to lawmakers — in some cases feet apart or separated only by a handful of vastly outnumbered police officers.

Meet the Rambler....

 


In 1991 I quit my job in engineering and become a full-time eco-freak. I thought I’d last six months; a year tops till the money ran out. Well, the money’s been running out for thirty years this year, and I’m still (barely!) keepin’ on keepin’ on.

In this short review I look at some of what has been. More importantly I drop a few ideas about where I’ll be going next. Most of all, I just want to share with you the fact that we’re still here (barely!) and we have all to play for – if you’re willing to raise the lifestyle stakes *low* enough!

For more information, see my blog here
Enjoy!

Paul Mobbs

England 

Sunday song