Engage in Solidarity
What in individual life can be better?
How do we make the world better?
Find thing to WIN.
Heal ourselves
Trust each other and movement
Build community and solidarity
Stratified Society
Grift
Powergrabs
Failed revolution of the 60-70s
We are a sailor ... on a tall ship... exploring
The sea
Images .. metaphors
Pictures with pictures
Wish I were an artist and could draw my thoughts
or a Mathematician and plot the connections.
The “deep state” seems to be currents that flow under the sea of politics and societies.
There are the main currents and the wind currents
Each has an impact on the true course of a boat upon the seas.
Journalists... the watchers, the weather forecasters and reporters. Shut down by all 'strongman' or authoritarian governments and groups. In the US. SLAPP is a tool to facilitate the silence of the journalists and scribes.
Slapp https://youtu.be/n2Qsf1r8U0I
The Family - christian power 'deep state' players ..
Washington (RNS) — The National Prayer Breakfast is under new management, distancing the decades-old event from the secretive organization that founded it after years of controversy and a scandal that showed the yearly gathering in the nation’s capital is vulnerable to espionage.According to a statement sent to reporters by former Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor, the prayer breakfast, whose highlight is typically a speech from the sitting U.S. president, is no longer run by The International Foundation, a Christian group more familiarly referred to as “The Family.” Instead, the 2023 breakfast, to be held this year on Feb. 2, has been coordinated by the newly created National Prayer Breakfast Foundation, which emerged “following numerous meetings in 2022,” according to Pryor’s statement.
What is the Family? Netflix has a documentary... Interview with Jeff Sharlet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU8cHsj0ucM
“The Family” is a new Netflix docuseries exploring a conservative Christian group’s connection to the Washington, D.C. Journalist Jeff Sharlet is one of the executive producers and tells Soledad how this group has remained hidden in plain sight.
They knew - Book Club Ch 7 America is Purple - like a Bruise
The Great Recession birthed an unequal recovery. Big coastal cities like New York and San Francisco thrived and became unaffordable, driving out native residents through gentrification. Meanwhile, small towns, lower-class suburbs, and run-down Midwestern cities like Detroit and St. Louis—which had enjoyed a brief comeback in the late 1990s and 2000s—nearly collapsed. The Midwest’s assets were bought up by American plutocrats as well as foreign oligarchs—like Ihor Kolomoyskyy, a dual citizen of Ukraine and Israel who became the largest real estate holder in Cleveland in the recession’s aftermath. Officials either ignored or encouraged the takeover.
In Obama’s first two years in office, both the Democrats and the Republicans bailed out Wall Street while doing little to remedy the hardship of Americans outside their donor base. In 2010, the Supreme Court upheld Citizens United, deeming corporations to be people and removing constraints on campaign financing. That ruling was a decisive moment in the movement to end America, and it was followed three years later by the Supreme Court’s partial repeal of the Voting Rights Act. Those two Supreme Court decisions stripped away what was left of American representative democracy, allowing the puppet masters to emerge from behind the curtain and flaunt their strings.
Laws are both more formidable and more fragile than propaganda. Laws overrule the best intentions and codify the worst. Ordinary people can combat bigotry and stereotypes, and reject the contrived animosity that prejudice breeds. But once legal rights are lost, they are very difficult to recover, particularly when a key mechanism to protect them—voting—is harmed. The judiciary acts as the cage bars of autocracies. How it wields its power sets the stage for the future, overriding other avenues of liberation.
In the United States, the new state voter suppression laws made possible by the partial repeal of the Voter Rights Act codify the tyranny of the minority into the law of the land. Republican legislatures can lock down a “red state” identity by preventing people from voting while flooding the state with dark-money propaganda as local news sources disappear. They can redraw its districts through gerrymandering so that their permanent rule is all but guaranteed. When confronted with citizen dissent, they can simply decide that certain people’s votes do not count, as Missouri did after residents state-wide—including most Republicans—voted in progressive ballot initiatives that included the protection of labor unions, an increased minimum wage, and the Clean Missouri Act, which would ban dark money in politics. The will of the majority was clear, but the Missouri GOP representatives ignored it and disregarded the measures. As Missourians struggled to defend their fading democracy, coastal pundits crowed that Missouri—once known as the bellwether state for its propensity to fluctuate between parties and reliably back the winner of the presidential election—was a “deep red state” that got the terrible policies it deserved. They went on to say the same about Texas, Georgia, and other states whose legislatures ignored the stated will of the people or created new laws to prevent or disregard their votes. The idea of a “deep red state” was a lie, part of a litany of lies. But repetition is necessary for the political elite to attain its goal. Hostile operatives want their prophecies of monolithic political cultures to prove self-fulfilling, because that will make the partitioning easier. If you keep telling people that their states—states with fluctuating populations and complex histories and vacillating political preferences—have been immutable entities since time immemorial, perhaps they will come to believe it. Perhaps they will look to the distant past—in particular, the Civil War—to justify the crises of the present, like the crisis of a government apathetic to their despair. Perhaps, in desperation, they will seek to revive what they have been told is their “true” political culture: the “good old days” that were only good for a select population. When that fails, perhaps they will see differences as irreconcilable, and back secession plans peddled by elitist plotters who would never leave their gated citadels to live in the regions they seek to dominate and destroy. These tactics are not limited to conservatives; they work on anyone. Maybe liberals will view themselves as above countrymen they have now reduced to clichés, envisioning themselves as residents of a future “blue paradise” removed from the backwards “red states”—even though the “blue states” are just further fodder for an oligarch takeover.
Wherever you live, you must remember you are no longer a human being in this scenario. You are a pawn to push, an asset to mine, and an imposition should you grasp the plan. At every step of the way, you are seen as disposable.
Should the red state–blue state divide reveal itself as a fallacy, operatives will reach deeper into the darkest moments of the American past for inspiration. They rewrite losers as winners, sinners as saints, and treason as triumph. This is why the GOP is working to redefine accurate history as “critical race theory”—an academic term right-wing conspirator Christopher Rufo admitted they chose to repurpose and weaponize into whatever they need it to mean at a given time. “We have successfully frozen their brand—‘critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category,” Rufo wrote in March 2021. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”19 They need the culture war to distract from the war on national security— a war that all Americans are losing, because the government has decided to forfeit its sovereignty.
In November 2021, the Federal Election Commission ruled that it would become legal for foreigners to fund US referendum campaigns—subversion that was until recently not only reviled but illegal. Another loophole has been created to function as a noose around the neck of American democracy.
If you want to know who owns the United States of America, follow the money—it is in offshore accounts—and monitor who pays the people rewriting the laws and marketing these policies as normal. These donors give to both parties, often in record amounts. Billionaire Len Blavatnik, for example, a USSR-born partner of sanctioned Russian oligarchs, gave millions to the Republicans until House Democrats announced in 2019 that they were investigating Trump, at which point he gave the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee the largest donation in its history. Under pressure, the DCCC returned part of the funds, but as of 2021, he is again lavishing the Democrats with money, including $50,000 for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi alone. In 2019, Blavatnik was a useful vehicle for foreign interests because his American citizenship meant that his donations were legal; now, the FEC is eliminating the need for such go-betweens.
This crisis is not a matter of Democrats versus Republicans, or “red” versus “blue.” The crisis is a matter of people who seek to protect the United States versus elite operatives who want to destroy it. The latter are stripping down the country and selling it for parts and trying to convince ordinary Americans that it was their own idea.
Kendzior, Sarah. They Knew (pp. 164-168). Flatiron Books. Kindle Edition.
The New Civil War is being fought so that you will forget that the Old Cold War ended as a corporate merger. Kleptocrats and oligarchs, pedophiles and criminals, technocrats and white supremacists: that is who runs what is indeed a New World Order, a phrase that merited the apprehension it provoked. Men of multiple passports, men of copious currencies, criminal elites who tell you their plots outright to test not only the limits of their own might but whether civic obligation still exists. No one powerful intervenes, no matter how blunt and blatant they get.
Kendzior, Sarah. They Knew (p. 169). Flatiron Books. Kindle Edition.
The reality of secession and dissolution is that your countrymen—your friends and family members—are suddenly living in other countries that you may not be able to visit. The reality is a military transformed into mercenaries trading weapons and operating with brutal impunity on what used to be fellow citizens. It is the loss of basic infrastructure and it is privatization by the most corrupt actors in your region: a process already underway in the United States by operatives who know that the privatization of public goods can be accelerated by the shock tactics of partition. It means the most vulnerable people in the country—people who are not white or wealthy—will suffer even more under right-wing extremist regimes whom they did not elect and cannot control, while wealthy liberals in “blue enclaves” blame them for their fate. It means the “blue enclaves” will be invaded by the “red territories,” because no oligarch is going to let resources go unexploited. The idea that a liberal paradise will be tolerated in the Partitioned States of America is absurd; the right-wingers who treat small liberal arts colleges as major threats are not going to let actual nations rest in peace. They will raid you and then you will be one of us, only with more stigma and less recourse. There is no paradise in partition: all that will happen is that the things you hate most about America will multiply. This is true no matter who you are or what your political predilections may be.
Kendzior, Sarah. They Knew (pp. 170-171). Flatiron Books. Kindle Edition.
When a country collapses under the weight of its own corruption, as the USSR and Yugoslavia did and as the United States seems set to do, it is common for people to say that the people of that country got what they deserved. What they usually mean is that bad actions have consequences, but we, the people, do not deserve what we have now or what may be coming. There is a great difference between what citizens bear due to the cruelty of the powerful and what they deserve as regular people who dream of more.
Kendzior, Sarah. They Knew (p. 171). Flatiron Books. Kindle Edition.
They Knew..... book club. (4) Preemptive narrative inversion
https://www.britannica.com/topic/QAnon Origin of QAnon .. escalation of violent propoganda...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q-3qwEDyPM
Edward Bernays: The father of "Public Relations" Master of Propoganda 1916.
Booknotes The Father of Spin: Edward BernaysAuthor Larry Tye spoke about his book and the life and career of Edward Bernays, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and The Birth of Public Relations, published by Crown. Mr. Bernays was considered the founder of the public relations field.
("If you Believe" by Jim Quin ..The Burning Platform) If you still believe JFK was assassinated by a lone gunman; the official story of what really happened on 9/11; that Epstein killed himself and numerous celebrities, politicians, and financiers aren’t pedophiles; the Federal Reserve isn’t controlled by Wall Street; Klaus Schwab and his WEF acolytes are not trying to Reset the world where you will eat bugs, own nothing, and be happy; Bill Gates is not creating viruses and investing in vaccine makers, while buying up farmland, as part of his dream to decrease the “surplus” population; Soros is not funding the election of communists whose sole purpose is to destroy the cities and states they are running; scientific experts like Fauci are not swayed by the vast amounts of money they are paid by Big Pharma to fake their research and ignore the deaths from these products; Covid was not the weaponization of the annual flu with a billion dollar marketing campaign used to implement government control of the population, which will be expanded during the next engineered crisis; January 6th was an armed insurrection; Putin is literally Hitler and the U.S. did not blow up the Nordstream pipelines while waging a proxy war against Russia; a drug addict nudist from Berkley with a pride flag and BLM flag hanging outside his dilapidated bus is a MAGA underwear terrorist and not a male prostitute picked up by Paul Pelosi; and the Democrats are not cheating again in these 2022 mid-term elections, you are the real conspiracy theorists.
Eric Jay Dolin
Videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7sGh5gYNgc
Texas Republican Party today approved platform planks rejecting
On today’s Bulwark podcast, I talk with the Atlantic ‘s Jennifer Senior about her remarkable new profile of Bannon: “American Rasputin”. She opens her piece by describing the extensive text exchanges she had with him. “You can discern much of Bannon’s mad character and contradictions in these exchanges,” she writes.
The chaos and the focus, the pugnacity and the enthusiasm, the transparency and the industrial-grade bullshit. Also, the mania: logomania, arithmomania, monomania (he’d likely cop to all of these, especially that last one—he’s the first to say that one of the features of his show is “wash rinse repeat”). Garden-variety hypermania (with a generous assist from espressos). And last of all, perhaps above all else, straight-up megalomania, which even those who profess affection for the man can see, though it appears to be a problem only for those who believe, as I do, that he’s attempting to insert a lit bomb into the mouth of American democracy.
Beyond the grift, the key to understanding Bannon — and his influence on the MAGA right— is recognizing that he’s a revolutionary, who knows he doesn’t need to persuade, and who doesn’t need a majority. Bannon knows that he just needs a hard-core vanguard willing to do whatever it takes.
And his goal is to burn it all down.
This also explains the fundamental asymmetry of our politics. On today’s podcast we discuss whether Bannon is playing checkers while his opponents are playing chess.
But I suggested a different image: Bannon is bringing an axe to a chess game — and his opponents haven’t figured that out yet, even though he’s told us repeatedly who and what he is.
Last year, historian Ron Radosh recounted this story in the Bulwark:
Bannon spelled out his plans and strategy to me way back on November 12, 2013, at a book party held at his D.C. townhouse (the so-called “Breitbart Embassy”).
“I’m a Leninist,” he told me as he introduced himself. He then went on, as I recounted in a 2016 Daily Beast article, to inform me that “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”…
I ended my article with a prediction that, sadly, has proven correct. I wrote that should Bannon succeed, there would be “a hostile takeover of the GOP.”
Beyond that, he has no coherent agenda for change, because he can’t look past the horizon of destruction.
“There is no plan,” Senior writes. “The plan is to leave a smoldering crater where our institutions once were.”
SGTF update for @UWVirology 12/23
— Pavitra Roychoudhury (@pavitrarc) December 24, 2021
We're now at ~95% likely Omicron for samples collected on 12/21, i.e. just 23 days from the collection date of the first Omicron sample detected in our lab.
The pace of this variant has been staggering. pic.twitter.com/wRPJNn3VhL
July 8th...
Morning reads...
Heather Cox-Richardson on the anniversary, history of the 14th amendment to the Constitution.
Equal Rights & Citizenship
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fourteenth_amendment_0
The Fourteenth Amendment contains a number of important concepts, most famously state action, privileges & immunities, citizenship, due process, and equal protection—all of which are contained in Section One. However, the Fourteenth Amendment contains four other sections. Section Two deals with the apportionment of representatives to Congress. Section Three forbids anyone who participates in “insurrection or rebellion” against the United States from holding federal office. Section Four addresses federal debt and repudiates debts accrued by the Confederacy. Section Five expressly authorizes Congress to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment “by appropriate legislation.” The states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War, along with the other Reconstruction Amendments—the Thirteenth and Fifteenth.
Then over to Jesse's Cafe for a booster shot of anger and dismay over the grift and greed of our oligarchy... "Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction." Erich Fromm
And from there, leaping over to Covid-19 "miracle cures" and conspiracies from Orac at https://respectfulinsolence.com/ As the drip-drip-drip of negative evidence for ivermectin against COVID-19 continues to roll in, conspiracy theorists are doubling down. Why? It’s always about the grift.
The CA heat wave beckons.. so out to water the tiny garden spot and perhaps go down to the boat for a moment....
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