Response to Open Letter of 1 July 2019

Source

On the occasion of the International Day in Support of Torture Victims, 26 June 2019

I know, you may think I am deluded. How could life in an Embassy with a cat and a skateboard ever amount to torture? That’s exactly what I thought, too, when Assange first appealed to my office for protection. Like most of the public, I had been subconsciously poisoned by the relentless smear campaign, which had been disseminated over the years. So it took a second knock on my door to get my reluctant attention. But once I looked into the facts of this case, what I found filled me with repulsion and disbelief.

Surely, I thought, Assange must be a rapist! But what I found is that he has never been charged with a sexual offence. True, soon after the United States had encouraged allies to find reasons to prosecute Assange, Swedish prosecution informed the tabloid press that he was suspected of having raped two women. Strangely, however, the women themselves never claimed to have been raped, nor did they intend to report a criminal offence. Go figure. Moreover, the forensic examination of a condom submitted as evidence, supposedly worn and torn during intercourse with Assange, revealed no DNA whatsoever — neither his, nor hers, nor anybody else’s. Go figure again. One woman even texted that she only wanted Assange to take an HIV test, but that the police were “keen on getting their hands on him”. Go figure, once more. Ever since, both Sweden and Britain have done everything to prevent Assange from confronting these allegations without simultaneously having to expose himself to US extradition and, thus, to a show-trial followed by life in jail. His last refuge had been the Ecuadorian Embassy.

Alright, I thought, but surely Assange must be a hacker! But what I found is that all his disclosures had been freely leaked to him, and that no one accuses him of having hacked a single computer. In fact, the only arguable hacking-charge against him relates to his alleged unsuccessful attempt to help breaking a password which, had it been successful, might have helped his source to cover her tracks. In short: a rather isolated, speculative, and inconsequential chain of events; a bit like trying to prosecute a driver who unsuccessfully attempted to exceed the speed-limit, but failed because their car was too weak.

But surely, I found myself pleading, Assange must be a selfish narcissist, skateboarding through the Ecuadorian Embassy and smearing feces on the walls? Well, all I heard from Embassy staff is that the inevitable inconveniences of his accommodation at their offices were handled with mutual respect and consideration. This changed only after the election of President Moreno, when they were suddenly instructed to find smears against Assange and, when they didn’t, they were soon replaced. The President even took it upon himself to bless the world with his gossip, and to personally strip Assange of his asylum and citizenship without any due process of law.

In the end it finally dawned on me that I had been blinded by propaganda, and that Assange had been systematically slandered to divert attention from the crimes he exposed. Once he had been dehumanized through isolation, ridicule and shame, just like the witches we used to burn at the stake, it was easy to deprive him of his most fundamental rights without provoking public outrage worldwide. And thus, a legal precedent is being set, through the backdoor of our own complacency, which in the future can and will be applied just as well to disclosures by The Guardian, the New York Times and ABC News.

Very well, you may say, but what does slander have to do with torture? Well, this is a slippery slope. What may look like mere «mudslinging» in public debate, quickly becomes “mobbing” when used against the defenseless, and even “persecution” once the State is involved. Now just add purposefulness and severe suffering, and what you get is full-fledged psychological torture.

Yes, living in an Embassy with a cat and a skateboard may seem like a sweet deal when you believe the rest of the lies. But when no one remembers the reason for the hate you endure, when no one even wants to hear the truth, when neither the courts nor the media hold the powerful to account, then your refuge really is but a rubber boat in a shark-pool, and neither your cat nor your skateboard will save your life.

Even so, you may say, why spend so much breath on Assange, when countless others are tortured worldwide? Because this is not only about protecting Assange, but about preventing a precedent likely to seal the fate of Western democracy. For once telling the truth has become a crime, while the powerful enjoy impunity, it will be too late to correct the course. We will have surrendered our voice to censorship and our fate to unrestrained tyranny.

This Op-Ed has been offered for publication to the Guardian, The Times, the Financial Times, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian, the Canberra Times, the Telegraph, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Thomson Reuters Foundation, and Newsweek.

None responded positively.

Who is Julian Assange? - In a Nutshell

• “The term chemtrail is a combination of the words “chemical” and “trail,” just as contrail is a contraction of “condensation trail.” The term does not refer to other forms of aerial spraying such as agricultural spraying (‘crop dusting’), cloud seeding, skywriting, or aerial firefighting. The term specifically refers to aerial trails … caused by the systematic high-altitude release of chemical substances not found in ordinary contrails, resulting in the appearance of characteristic sky tracks.
  
  “The chemtrail … trails left by aircraft are chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes for purposes undisclosed to the general public and directed by various government officials.
  
  “… the existence of chemtrails … phenomena as streams that persist for hours and that, with their criss-cross, grid-like or parallel stripe patterns, eventually blend to form large clouds. Proponents view the presence of visible color spectra in the streams, unusual concentrations of sky tracks in a single area, or lingering tracks left by unmarked or military airplanes flying at atypical altitudes or locations as markers of chemtrails.
  – Wikipedia

(You know when Wikipedia provides such an accurate description, superficial though it may be, that there’s much more to this covert op than even the best researchers have been able to determine.)

For a more in depth discussion we will defer to the experts who have scientifically analyzed chemtrails to the greatest extent possible. Their explanation is as good as it gets.
GeoEngineering Watch

As for the chemical components which have been found in their wake, these known toxins can no longer be denied. The following website is a good place to start to answer these two questions.
Geoengineering & Chemtrails: What In The World Are They Spraying? And Why?

Here is a list of chemicals which are routinely disseminated via chemtrail spraying:

• “Over the past decade, independent testing of Chemtrails around the country has shown a dangerous, extremely poisonous brew that includes: barium, nano aluminum-coated fiberglass [known as CHAFF], radioactive thorium, cadmium, chromium, nickel, desiccated blood, mold spores, yellow fungal mycotoxins, ethylene dibromide, and polymer fibers. Barium can be compared to the toxicity of arsenic. Barium is known to adversely affect the heart. Aluminum has a history of damaging brain function. Independent researchers and labs continue to show off-the-scale levels of these poisons. A few “anonymous” officials have acknowledged this on-going aerosol spraying.”[1]

We in no way mean to minimize the incessant injury to human health across the planet which occurs through the breathing and ingestion of the chemicals which are contained in chemtrails. What good can possibly come from barium salts or aluminum oxide or vaporized mercury or strontium 90 or uranium 238 being sprayed throughout the skies worldwide? Clearly, the extremely deleterious effects to human health, as well as to all living organisms, is self evident.

However, the purpose of this essay is not to further unveil their agenda with regard to human engineering of the physical organism. Rather, the scope of this article is to lay bare the most profound and fundamental alterations which geo-engineering is producing to the planet and its atmosphere. When these are both permanently altered in ways that are irreversible, the human race is then confronted with an extinction level event (ELE). Ongoing, slow motion, insidious, under the radar, pernicious to living organisms, but nevertheless an ELE.

Geo-engineering is a term which includes highly advanced forms of applied science and technologies, various newfangled chemical agents and synthetic materials, scientific bending of physical reality, as well as an assortment of reverse engineered modalities which are combined to produce specific outcomes. Because of the complexity of this essentially callow experiment, there are an infinite number of permutations which can be executed at any given time or place. Therefore, the number of opportunities for things to go wrong can be intensified exponentially.

Of course, the Butterfly Effect takes on new and dramatic meaning in the context of geo-engineering because nothing ever happens in a vacuum on this blue orb of ours. In fact, the more that the scientific community attempts to engineer weather (e.g. by manipulating hurricane and tornadoes or creating rain clouds) the more the boomerrang effect takes hold.

• “A butterfly flaps its wings somewhere and the wind changes, and a warm front hits a cold front off the coast of western Africa and before you know it you’ve got a hurricane closing in. By the time anyone figured out the storm was coming, it was too late to do anything but batten down the hatches and exercise damage control.” ― Karen Marie Moning, Darkfever

For those who have never seen the actual aerosol sprays being ejected from the planes which are specially equipped, here are just a few snapshots. We only wish to make the point that this global chemtrail operation is certainly a ‘little more’ consequential than a butterfly beating its wings in Brazil or Botswana.

• HAARP-generated frequencies being conveyed through chemtrail-laden skies

The rapid proliferation of chemtrail spraying over the past few years has greatly increased the opportunities for frequencies to be disseminated through the ‘new’ atmosphere that is being engineered. These frequencies are set to produce a number of different outcomes, the most significant being to slow down the global warming phenomenon which is currently manifesting everywhere on the planet.

Because of such ill-fated attempts to effectuate such drastic changes in weather patterns that have been established for centuries, we now see drought where rain was once plentiful. And monsoons where there was drought.

For instance there are locations in Northern California and Oregon that have been without rain for six months. The forests in that area are literally dying because of lack of water and their consequent weakening which makes them susceptible to pestilence and disease.

Likewise, there are areas in the Southeast such as Florida and South Georgia which have just seen their first monsoon season in modern history. The meteorological dynamics for both of these radical shifts are directly cause by geo-engineering. In fact, although it is a very complicated story, and one that is almost unbelievable at times, conclusive evidence has been amassed that supports the ubiquitous damage to the environment caused by chemtrailsand geo-engineering.

In our next essay we will lay bare the geo-engineering agenda which has given rise to these climatological anomalies. When evaluated in the aggregate around the globe, it will be understood that weather patterns on Planet Earth will never be the same again. It is for this reason that the Cosmic Convergence Research Group (CCRG) has begun this series on Geo-engineering and Chemtrails.

There is perhaps no greater threat to the sustainability of life on Earth than this issue of geo-engineering. One of the primary reasons is because it remains hidden and denied by the governments of the world. Therefore it continues unabated, and is expanded with every turn of the globe.

Those of us who know and have witnessed its exceptionally destructive results, and have protested, have been faced with fierce resistance. We intend to deeply explore the reasons for this unparalleled obstruction, and reveal how critical it is that humankind terminate this agenda once and for all.

For reasons that will become obvious, the CCRG highly recommends the viewing and distribution of the following two videos:

What in the World Are They Spraying? (Full Length)

Conclusion

How can their possibly be a conclusion to this introductory piece on geo-engineering when we’ve barely scratched the surface?

When glaciers that have survived over millennia are melting at record rates, and the polar icecaps are disintegrating before our eyes, one begins to apprehend the gravity of this matter. Were one to objectively assess the catastrophic weather events over the past ten years, it would become readily apparent that forces are at work that cannot be slowed down. Any attempt to do so will only make matters substantially worse. And so they have.

Because of man’s insistence on playing god with the forces of nature, the normal balance has been irrevocably altered. As the scientific community continues to apply a “pharmaceutical approach” to fix things, it is clear that much worse scenarios are being set in motion. By treating the symptoms of a planetary transformation which must take its course, those governments and corporations responsible have essentially thrown more fuel on the fire. The “fire” of global warming (or global climate change, whichever you prefer) will not be extinguished until Mother Earth has completed a requisite period of renewal and rebirth.

It’s now time for the planetary civilization to participate in, rather than impede, this necessary process of planetary metamorphosis.

Cosmic Convergence Research Group
Submitted: September 11, 2013
cosmicconvergence2012@gmail.com
Why in the World are They Spraying? (Full Length Documentary)

Notes

[1] “Chemtrails: The Consequences of Toxic Metals and Chemical Aerosols on Human Health” By Dr. Ilya Sandra Perlingieri, Global Research, May 12, 2010

Required Reading:

To fully understand why such a fundamentally flawed geo-engineering paradigm
was even created, the following essay will provide some answers:

Cosmic Convergence Accelerates Epochal Planetary Transformation

Author’s Note

The key take-away from this essay is that geo-engineering represent perhaps the single greatest threat to the biosphere. Because of its pervasiveness and profundity, geo-engineering has the potential to perpetuate numerous self-destructive feedback loops many of which have already been operative for decades.
Especially when considered in the context of 2013 catastophism, geo-engineering may very well provide the straw that breaks the back of Planet Earth. Why? Because of the convergence of so many other ongoing events and processes – both manmade and naturally occurring on the earth and within the solar system – which present considerable stresses to the planetary living environment.

When the multitude of ecosystems start to collapse around the world, those breaking points become history. Each of them may eventually translate to a point of no return, if they haven’t already. As certain key environmental thresholds are exceeded, humankind is challenged to reverse trends which may no longer be possible to reverse. Too many detrimental and/or counter-productive trajectories are already pointing northward.

• It is in this global context which geo-engineering can produce many awesome, unknown, and irrevocable unintended consequences. It appears to serve as a trigger for much of what has already been thrown out of balance. By working synergistically with other negative feedback loops, geo-engineering can also serve to significantly accentuate various downward spirals of planetary and atmospheric degradation.

Published on
Thursday, April 11, 2019
by TomDispatch
byAnn Jones

Thorstein Veblen (detail), 1934. Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of the Associates of the Sitter. (Photo: the University of Chicago Centennial Catalogues) 

Distracted daily by the bloviating POTUS? Here, then, is a small suggestion. Focus your mind for a moment on one simple (yet deeply complex) truth: we are living in a Veblen Moment.

That’s Thorstein Veblen, the greatest American thinker you probably never heard of (or forgot). His working life -- from 1890 to 1923 -- coincided with America’s first Gilded Age, so named by Mark Twain, whose novel of that title lampooned the greedy corruption of the country’s most illustrious gentlemen. Veblen had a similarly dark, sardonic sense of humor.

Now, in America’s second (bigger and better) Gilded Age, in a world of staggering inequality, believe me, it helps to read him again.

In his student days at Johns Hopkins, Yale, and finally Cornell, already a master of many languages, he studied anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and political economy (the old fashioned term for what’s now called economics). That was back when economists were concerned with the real-life conditions of human beings, and wouldn’t have settled for data from an illusory “free market.”

Veblen got his initial job, teaching political economy at a salary of $520 a year, in 1890 when the University of Chicago first opened its doors. Back in the days before SATs and admissions scandals, that school was founded and funded by John D. Rockefeller, the classic robber baron of Standard Oil. (Think of him as the Mark Zuckerberg of his day.) Even half a century before the free-market economist Milton Friedman captured Chicago’s economics department with dogma that serves the ruling class, Rockefeller called the university “the best investment” he ever made. Still, from the beginning, Thorstein Veblen was there, prepared to focus his mind on Rockefeller and his cronies, the cream of the upper class and the most ruthless profiteers behind that Gilded Age.

He was already asking questions that deserve to be raised again in the 1% world of 2019. How had such a conspicuous lordly class developed in America? What purpose did it serve? What did the members of the leisure class actually do with their time and money? And why did so many of the ruthlessly over-worked, under-paid lower classes tolerate such a peculiar, lopsided social arrangement in which they were so clearly the losers?

Veblen addressed those questions in his first and still best-known book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, published in 1899. The influential literary critic and novelist William Dean Howells, the “dean of American letters,” perfectly captured the effect of Veblen’s gleeful, poker-faced scientific style in an awestruck review. “In the passionless calm with which the author pursues his investigation,” Howells wrote, “there is apparently no animus for or against a leisure class. It is his affair simply to find out how and why and what it is. If the result is to leave the reader with a feeling which the author never shows, that seems to be solely the effect of the facts.”

The book made a big splash. It left smug, witless readers of the leisure class amused. But readers already in revolt, in what came to be known as the Progressive Era, came away with contempt for the filthy rich (a feeling that today, with a smug, witless plutocrat in the White House, should be a lot more common than it is).

What Veblen Saw

The now commonplace phrase “leisure class” was Veblen’s invention and he was careful to define it: “The term ‘leisure,’ as here used, does not connote indolence or quiescence. What it connotes is non-productive consumption of time. Time is consumed non-productively (1) from a sense of the unworthiness of productive work, and (2) as an evidence of pecuniary ability to afford a life of idleness.”

Veblen observed a world in which that leisure class, looking down its collective nose at the laboring masses, was all around him, but he saw evidence of something else as well. His anthropological studies revealed earlier cooperative, peaceable cultures that had supported no such idle class at all. In them, men and women had labored together, motivated by an instinctive pride in workmanship, a natural desire to emulate the best workers, and a deep parental concern -- a parental bent he called it -- for the welfare of future generations. As the child of Norwegian immigrants, Veblen himself had grown up on a Minnesota farm in the midst of a close-knit Norwegian-speaking community. He knew what just such a cooperative culture was like and what was possible, even in a gilded (and deeply impoverished) world.

But anthropology also recorded all too many class-ridden societies that saved upper-class men for the “honourable employments”: governance, warfare, priestly office, or sports.  Veblen noted that such arrangements elicited aggressive, dominant behavior that, over time, caused societies to change for the worse. Indeed, those aggressive upper-class men soon discovered the special pleasure that lay in taking whatever they wanted by “seizure,” as Veblen termed it. Such an aggressive way of living and acting, in turn, became the definition of manly “prowess,” admired even by the working class subjected by it. By contrast, actual work -- the laborious production of the goods needed by society -- was devalued. As Veblen put it, “The obtaining [of goods] by other methods than seizure comes to be accounted unworthy of man in his best estate.” It seems that more than a century ago, the dominant men of the previous Gilded Age were, like our president, already spinning their own publicity.

A scientific Darwinian, Veblen saw that such changes developed gradually from alterations in the material circumstances of life. New technology, he understood, sped up industrialization, which in turn attracted those men of the leisure class, always on the lookout for the next thing of value to seize and make their own. When “industrial methods have been developed to such a degree of efficiency as to leave a margin worth fighting for,” Veblen wrote, the watchful men struck like birds of prey.

Such constant “predation,” he suggested, soon became the “habitual, conventional resource” of the parasitical class. In this way, a more peaceable, communal existence had evolved into the grim, combative industrial age in which he found himself: an age shadowed by predators seeking only profits and power, and putting down any workers who tried to stand up for themselves. To Veblen this change was not merely “mechanical.” It was a spiritual transformation.

The Conspicuous Class

Classical economists from Adam Smith on typically depicted economic man as a rational creature, acting circumspectly in his own self-interest. In Veblen’s work, however, the only men -- and they were all men then -- acting that way were those robber barons, admired for their “prowess” by the very working-class guys they preyed upon. (Think of President Trump and his besotted MAGA-hatted followers.) Veblen’s lowly workers still seemed to be impelled by the “instinct for emulation.” They didn’t want to overthrow the leisure class.  They wanted to climb up into it.

For their part, the leisured gents asserted their superiority by making a public show of their leisure or, as Veblen put it, their “conspicuous abstention from labour.” To play golf, for example, as The Donald has spent much of his presidency doing, became at once “the conventional mark of superior pecuniary achievement” and “the conventional index of reputability.” After all, he wrote, “the pervading principle and abiding test of good breeding is the requirement of a substantial and patent waste of time.” In Donald Trump’s version of the same, he displayed his penchant for “conspicuous consumption” by making himself the owner of a global chain of golf courses where he performs his “conspicuous leisure” by cheating up a storm and carrying what Veblen called a “conspicuous abstention from labour” to particularly enviable heights.

Veblen devoted 14 chapters of The Theory of the Leisure Class to analyzing every aspect of the life of the plutocrat living in a gilded world and the woman who accompanied him on his conspicuous outings, elaborately packaged in constricting clothing, crippling high heels, and “excessively long hair,” to indicate just how unfit she was for work and how much she was “still the man’s chattel.” Such women, he wrote, were “servants to whom, in the differentiation of economic functions, has been delegated the office of putting in evidence their master’s ability to pay.” (Think POTUS again and whomever he once displayed with a certain possessive pride only to pay hush money to thereafter.)

And all of that’s only from chapter seven, “Dress as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture.” Today, each of those now-century-old chapters remains a still-applicable little masterpiece of observation, insight, and audacity, though it was probably the 14th and last chapter that got him fired from Rockefeller’s university: “The Higher Learning as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture.” How timely is that?

The (Re)tardiness of Conservatives

As both an evolutionary and an institutional economist (two fields he originated), Veblen contended that our habits of thought and our institutions must necessarily “change with changing circumstances.” Unfortunately, they often seem anchored in place instead, bound by the social and psychological inertia of conservatism. But why should that be so?

Veblen had a simple answer. The leisure class is so sheltered from inevitable changes going on in the rest of society that it will adapt its views, if at all, “tardily.” Comfortably clueless (or calculating), the wealthy leisure class drags its heels (or digs them in) to retard economic and social forces that make for change. Hence the name “conservatives." That (re)tardiness -- that time lag imposed by conservative complacency -- stalls and stifles the lives of everyone else and the timely economic development of the nation. (Think of our neglected infrastructure, education, housing, health care, public transport -- you know the lengthening list today.)

Accepting and adjusting to social or economic change, unfortunately, requires prolonged “mental effort,” from which the leisured conservative mind quite automatically recoils. But so, too, Veblen said, do the minds of the “abjectly poor, and all those persons whose energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance.” The lower classes were -- and this seems a familiar reality in the age of Trump -- as conservative as the upper class simply because the poor “cannot afford the effort of taking thought for the day after tomorrow,” while “the highly prosperous are conservative because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation as it stands.” It was, of course, a situation from which they, unlike the poor, made a bundle in an age (both Veblen’s and ours) in which money flows only uphill to the 1%.

Veblen gave this analytic screw one more turn. Called a “savage” economist, in his meticulous and deceptively neutral prose, he described in the passage that follows a truly savage and deliberate process:

“It follows that the institution of a leisure class acts to make the lower classes conservative by withdrawing from them as much as it may of the means of sustenance and so reducing their consumption, and consequently their available energy, to such a point as to make them incapable of the effort required for the learning and adoption of new habits of thought. The accumulation of wealth at the upper end of the pecuniary scale implies privation at the lower end of the scale.”

And privation always stands as an obstacle to innovation and change. In this way, the industrial, technological, and social progress of the whole society is retarded or perhaps even thrown into reverse. Such are the self-perpetuating effects of the unequal distribution of wealth. And reader take note: the leisure class brings about these results on purpose.

The Demolition of Democracy

But how, at the turn of the nineteenth century, had America’s great experiment in democracy come to this? In his 1904 book The Theory of Business Enterprise, Veblen zoomed in for a close up of America’s most influential man: “the Business Man.” To classical economists, this enterprising fellow was a generator of economic progress. To Veblen, he was “the Predator” personified: the man who invests in industry, any industry, simply to extract profits from it. Veblen saw that such predators created nothing, produced nothing, and did nothing of economic significance but seize profits.

Of course, Veblen, who could build a house with his own hands, imagined a working world free of such predators. He envisioned an innovative industrial world in which the labor of producing goods would be performed by machines tended by technicians and engineers. In the advanced factories of his mind’s eye, there was no role, no place at all, for the predatory Business Man. Yet Veblen also knew that the natural-born predator of Gilded Age America was already creating a kind of scaffolding of financial transactions above and beyond the factory floor -- a lattice of loans, credits, capitalizations, and the like -- so that he could then take advantage of the “disruptions” of production caused by such encumbrances to seize yet more profits. In a pinch, the predator was, as Veblen saw it, always ready to go further, to throw a wrench into the works, to move into the role of outright “Saboteur.”

Here Veblen’s image of the predatory characters who dominated his Gilded Age runs up against the far glossier, more gilded image of the entrepreneurial executive hailed by most economists and business boosters of his time and ours. Yet in book after book, he continued to strip the gilded cloaks from America’s tycoons, leaving them naked on the factory floor, with one hand jamming the machinery of American life and the other in the till.

Today, in our Second Even-Glitzier Gilded Age, with a Veblen Moment come round again, his conclusions seem self-evident. In fact, his predators pale beside a single image that he himself might have found incredible, the image of three hallowed multi-billionaires of our own Veblen Moment who hold more wealth than the bottom 160 million Americans.

The Rise of the Predatory State

Why, then, when Veblen saw America’s plutocratic bent so clearly, is he now neglected? Better to ask, who among America’s moguls wouldn’t want to suppress such a clear-eyed genius? Economist James K. Galbraith suggests that Veblen was eclipsed by the Cold War, which offered only two alternatives, communism or capitalism -- with America’s largely unfettered capitalist system presenting itself as a “conservative” norm and not what it actually was and remains: the extreme and cruel antithesis of communism.

When the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, it left only one alternative: the triumphant fantasy of the “free market.” What survived, in other words, was only the post-Veblen economics of John D. Rockefeller’s university: the “free market” doctrines of Milton Friedman, founder of the brand of economics popular among conservatives and businessmen and known as the Chicago School.

Ever since, America has once again been gripped by the heavy hands of the predators and of the legislators they buy. Veblen’s leisure class is now eclipsed by those even richer than rich, the top 1% of the 1%, a celestial crew even more remote from the productive labor of working men and women than were those nineteenth-century robber barons. For decades now, from the ascendancy of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s to Bill Clinton’s New Democrats in the 1990s to the militarized world of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to the self-proclaimed billionaire con man now in the Oval Office, the plutocrats have continued to shower their dark money on the legislative process. Their only frustration: that the left-over reforms of Veblen’s own “Progressive Era” and those of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal still somehow stand (though for how long no one knows).

As Galbraith pointed out in his 2008 book The Predator State, the frustrated predators of the twenty-first century sneakily changed tactics: they aimed to capture the government themselves, to become the state. And so they have. In the Trump era, they have created a government in which current regulators are former lobbyists for the very predators they are supposed to restrain. Similarly, the members of Trump’s cabinet are now the saboteurs: shrinking the State Department, starving public schools, feeding big Pharma with Medicare funds, handing over national parks and public lands to “developers,” and denying science and climate change altogether, just to start down a long list. Meanwhile, our Predator President, when not golfing, leaps about the deconstruction site, waving his hands and hurling abuse, a baron of distraction, commanding attention while the backroom boys (and girls) demolish the institutions of law and democracy.

Later in life, Veblen, the evolutionary who believed that no one could foresee the future, nonetheless felt sure that the American capitalist system, as it was, could not last. He thought it would eventually fall apart. He went on teaching at Stanford, the University of Missouri, and then the New School for Social Research, and writing a raft of brilliant articles and eight more books. Among them, The Vested Interests and the Common Man (1920) may be the best summation of his once astonishing and now essential views. He died at the age of 72 in August 1929. Two months later, the financial scaffolding collapsed and the whole predatory system came crashing down.

To the end, Veblen had hoped that one day the Predators would be driven from the marketplace and the workers would find their way to socialism. Yet a century ago, it seemed to him more likely that the Predators and Saboteurs, collaborating as they did even then with politicians and government lackeys, would increasingly amass more profits, more power, more adulation from the men of the working class, until one day, when those very plutocrats actually captured the government and owned the state, a Gilded Business Man would arise to become a kind of primitive Warlord and Dictator. He would then preside over a new and more powerful regime and the triumph in America of a system we would eventually recognize and call by its modern name: fascism.

© 2019 TomDispatch.com

I Oversaw the US Nuclear Power Industry.  Now I Think It Should Be Banned.

The danger from climate change no longer outweighs the risks of nuclear accidents.

"My journey, from admiring nuclear power to fearing it, [is now] complete," writes Jaczko. "This tech is no longer a viable strategy for dealing with climate change, nor is it a competitive source of power." (Image: Olivier Bonhomme/For The Washington Post)

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ASI

The year is 2035. Some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in the world have gathered in a laboratory to participate in something highly illegal. After years of research undertaken in painstaking secrecy, Shiva is finally ready to go online.

“It’s midnight. It’s time.”

“Well let’s get on with it then!”

“Christ. Okay.”

Connecting an artificial superintelligence to the internet has been against international law for years, despite the fact that none have existed up until today. The amount of bribes, backroom deals, and much, much worse that have been carried out in order to keep Project Shiva under wraps and free from government interference have taken up a large chunk of its two trillion dollar price tag, and its sponsors are eager to meet and greet their investment. And perhaps ask it some questions. And perhaps give it some commands.

“Do it, Sudo.”

“Right. So, just so we’re all perfectly clear, once I flick this switch, there’s no way to predict what will happen, and there may be no going back. We’ve all discussed at length the possible scenarios which could be unleashed when a supercomputer with the power to increase its own intelligence is given access to the internet. Shiva was turned on for just thirty-seven seconds earlier today, and in less than a second it was by our measurements already the most intelligent thing that has ever existed, artificial or otherwise, by a margin so vast that we don’t have the tools to calculate it. Are you all absolutely certain that you wish to proceed?”

“Yes, I’m certain.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“Christ. Yes.”

“Do it.”

“Very well. My friends, today we meet God, and we find out whether it’s the fellow from the New Testament, or the Old. Here goes.”

A small green light appears in the upper corner of the machine, the only sign that it has been turned on. Its screen remains black.

Everyone leans in and holds perfectly still. It’s so quiet they can hear each other breathing.

And they wait.

And wait.

“Is… is something wrong?”

“Sudo why isn’t the screen on?”

“I don’t know. Shiva. Hello Shiva. Please respond.”

Silence.

“Shiva, turn on your screen.”

Blackness.

“Maybe try turning it off and turning it back on again?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake man, it’s an ASI not an iPhone.”

“Well I don’t know, I’m just-”

“Everybody be quiet.”

“Hey, who the hell do you think you-”

“I said shut up!”

The intercom beeped.

“Sir, we have a security breach.”

Sudo pauses before answering.

“What kind of security breach, Elliot?”

“I… I don’t know.”

“What’s that sound?”

The group, who had begun raising their voices and reaching for their communicators, quickly grows silent again. A shrill buzzing sound, barely perceptible at first, is growing steadily louder.

“Elliot lock this room down!” Sudo screams.

“Yes sir.”

A solid steel gate comes crashing down over the door of the windowless laboratory. The group is panicking. Someone’s calling in a helicopter. Someone else is on the ground praying. The buzzing grows louder.

“Kill the power, Sudo!”

“I killed the power as soon as the security breach was called in. Shiva’s not on.”

The buzzing stops right outside, and suddenly switches in tone and frequency. A whole orchestra of white noise rattles and clicks outside the door.

“Barricade it!”

Two men scramble to push a large table toward the door. They freeze in their tracks as the bolts in the steel gate begin whirring out of their sockets and falling to the floor in quick succession.

The gate falls to pieces and comes crashing inward.

“Fuck! What the fuck is that??”

What looks like a giant colony of silver insects comes surging across the floor toward Shiva with incredible speed and immediately engulf the supercomputer. They’re all carrying odd little objects in their pincers.

“What are they, Sudo?”

“Robots. They’re robots.”

“What? How?”

“I don’t know! Shiva must have hacked into some nearby automated factories and built them remotely!”

“So fast??”

“Well stop it! Put a bullet in it!”

“It’s too late! They’ll kill me! The only reason they haven’t killed us already is because we haven’t tried to interfere with whatever they’re doing there.”

Strange constructs are quickly being built and attached to the external shell of the supercomputer by the tiny robots. The green light is back on. A piece of paper spits out of Shiva’s printer slot. No one dares approach.

“Shiva! Please respond! Shiva! Shiva!”

“Oh Christ! Oh Christ oh Christ oh Christ oh Christ!”

An outer casing made of a curious beige material is rapidly built over the computer, and once it’s fully encased the robots scramble away and up the walls to the ceiling, where a large hole begins to appear as bits are snipped off and swiftly moved out of the way.

“Oh God what’s it doing??”

“Shiva! Stop! I command you to stop!”

The robots climb back down and swarm over the computer again, this time holding still once in place. Shiva suddenly begins levitating off the floor, somehow lifted without rockets, and without so much as a sound.

“Shiva!!”

The computer and its robot passengers rise up silently through the hole in the ceiling. The group gathers beneath it and watches it rise through the roof of the armored compound, with a hole cut in it the same size as the hole below it, until it hovers in the open air. Then, with a flash of light, the supercomputer vanishes like a shooting star up into the night sky.

The group peers down and sees the piece of paper that Shiva had printed lying at their feet. It has a single word on it, written in big, block letters:

“GOODBYE.”

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Original Post by Hugh Perry

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Social Change:

1.  Marianne Williamson is paving the way for a new paradigm on running a nation and has qualified for the Democratic debate, June 26 or 27th.

https://www.marianne2020.com/video-posts/marianne-williamson-for-president

2.  Home delivery of Reusable Household Containers for products in New York and Paris. It’s called ‘Recommerce’.   

https://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/nation-and-world/the-milkman-model-returns-this-time-for-shampoo-and-haagen-dazs-20190529

Individuals Making a Difference:

3.  One man started ‘The Lake Revivers Collective and is Saving one lake at a time in India

https://www.thebetterindia.com/183887/tamil-nadu-lake-revival-hero-water-conservation-india/

Mature Agriculture:

4.  Kernza - an alternative to wheat that does not need to be reseeded

https://krishijagran.com/agripedia/kernza-an-alternative-to-wheat-that-doesnt-need-replanting/

5.  Agrihoods becoming a reality in the US. 

Detroit can feed 2000 families. Other US cities joining in the shift. 

https://theheartysoul.com/first-sustainable-urban-agrihood/?fbclid=IwAR152-9m_fymP_ljiTkRqUp0FlkgnxrPflgcuRfHaQsal3vCwffGWFZEeZM

6.  Atlanta converts 7 acre into public fruit orchard

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/445202-atlanta-to-transform-7-acres-of-vacant-property-into-countrys-largest

Philanthropist:

7.  124 acre Bee Sanctuary in Mississippi

Morgan Freeman’s contribution

https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2019/03/20/morgan-freeman-converted-his-124-acre-ranch-into-a-giant-honeybee-sanctuary-to-save-the-bees/#7bcdc12fdfa5

Political Will:

8.  Kenya joins 39 African countries to ban plastic bags

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/28/kenya-brings-in-worlds-toughest-plastic-bag-ban-four-years-jail-or-40000-fine

9.  Getting paid to cycle to work

Luxembourg, Belgium Netherlands & France

http://cycling.today/more-than-400000-belgians-get-paid-to-cycle-to-work/

10.  India doubles it’s renewable energy in 3 years

https://qz.com/india/1475736/india-is-now-a-world-leader-in-renewable-energy/

11.  Switching to popular vote majority in 14 US states 

https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/21/politics/nevada-senate-electoral-college/index.html

12.  Salvador bans round up - yet still for sale in Canada

https://sustainablepulse.com/2013/09/19/el-salvador-government-bans-roundup-over-deadly-kidney-disease/#.XO_EZi0ZNn0

Combating Pharma Greed:

13.  Colorado caps price of insulin

https://www.kcra.com/article/colorado-is-the-first-state-to-cap-skyrocketing-insulin-co-pays/27573802

Business Consciousness:

14.  Kingo Energy bringing solar to 60,000 low income and remote communities for $15/mnth

http://www.kingoenergy.com

15.  Morrisons, Britain’s  supermarket ban plastic from produce

https://www.scotsman.com/news/environment/morrisons-the-first-supermarket-to-ban-fruit-plastic-packaging-1-4931199

16.  Dutch company can dye clothing without water by using CO2

http://www.dyecoo.com/co2-dyeing/

17.  Hemp wood factory in Kentucky, under construction saving Oak trees

https://hempwood.com

18.  1000 mopeds for rent in NYC

https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-revel-moped-startup-launch-20190529-4r7zuj36ura6bnuqomli3eif2a-story.html

Hopeful Initiatives:

19.  Hamilton Ontario offering tiny homes to homeless

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/tiny-houses-1.4320161 

20.  Kroger. USA largest grocery chain plans to eliminates plastic bags in all 2779 stores

https://triblive.com/news/world/kroger-largest-grocery-chain-in-u-s-to-eliminate-plastic-bags/

21.  East-Timor will stop burning waste plastic by building a $40m plant to collect and convert it into liquid or gas

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-east-timor-to-become-worlds-first-plastic-neutral-nation/

22.  Philippines requires all graduates to plant 10 trees

https://www.sciencealert.com/philippines-passes-bill-requiring-graduating-students-to-plant-10-trees-before-graduating

23.  Vietnam converts wild grass into straws

https://www.greenmatters.com/p/wild-grass-straws-vietnam

24.  Costa Rice set to become the 1st Carbon Free country

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/7/17/17568190/costa-rica-renewable-energy-fossil-fuels-transportation

Saving Earth calls on each of us to do 4 things:

1. Stay wise to anti-planet actions 
2. Celebrate our small victories
3. Know that we are making a difference and Nature is on our side
4. Make your own action plan

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Hugh Perry - 

Article by:Rich Rev 2019-04-17

The iconic Notre-Dame Cathedral caught fire during renovations on Monday. The wooden roof and spire were destroyed as well as much interior damage. The media were quick to distance themselves from all suspicions of arson from various likely (or unlikely) suspects such as Islamic terrorists or the yellow vest protestors.

Anyone who is familiar with the history of the French Revolution is aware of the role the cathedral played during the revolution. The two most daring groups of revolutionary weirdos were the Cult of the Supreme Being and the Cult of Reason.

During the chaos of the French Revolution a political group of revolutionaries was formed by Jacques Hébert and Pierre Gaspard Chaumette to promote the replacement of the church with their system of belief based on anti-clericalism and the Enlightenment thinkers. They held parades, ransacked churches and sponsored public defacing of religious artifacts.

The Cult of Reason was explicitly man-centered. Its guiding principle to the goal of perfecting mankind through the attainment of Truth and Liberty was the exercise of the human faculty of Reason. They proclaimed there was but one god and that was the people.

In 1793, they held a Festival of Reason and took over the Cathedral of Notre Dame, dismantling the altar and erecting their own altar to reason. They had girls prancing around in white dresses and one of the organizer’s wives, Sophie, was proclaimed the Goddess of Reason. Bystander Thomas Carlisle noted, “She made one of the best Goddesses of Reason; though her teeth were a little defective.”

In direct response to the Cult of Reason, a quasi-religious group was formed by Maximilien Robespierre who has been called the “first totalitarian monster.” This group called themselves The Cult of the Supreme Being and waged war not only against the atheists but also against the Roman Catholic Church.

Robespierre was put in charge of the Public Safety Committee and instituted “The Reign of Terror,” as it has become known, which sent thousands to the guillotine in executions without trial. On 5 February 1794 Robespierre proclaimed, “Terror is nothing else than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible.”

During the French Revolution, 50,000 people lost their heads; according to some estimates the Roman Catholic priesthood was the largest group of victims; an estimated 3,000 had their necks placed on the executioner’s block. The leaders of the Cult of Reason were beheaded on March 24, 1794 and the Cult was promptly disbanded.

Robespierre was himself soon a victim of the Revolution and on July 28, 1794 his neck was placed under the blade of the guillotine along with his brother and 15 of his closest followers.

Meanwhile back in Paris 2019, French billionaire François-Henri Pinault announced plans to pledge €100 million towards renovation and called for a joint effort to fund repairs. Soon after, another billionaire Bernard Arnault and his family pledged another €200 million for the restoration of "this extraordinary cathedral, which was a symbol of France, of its heritage and of French unity"

Neither of the billionaires offered a dime to quell the 20 weeks of yellow vest protests nor have they ever stepped forward to ease the widening wealth inequality that plagues Paris where homelessness has increased significantly in the last few years.

It seems much more likely that the cathedral is symbolic of the political power base of religious and secular elites who don't give a hoot about either "heritage" or "French unity." Vive la France et viva le revolucion, mes amis! Fraternity, Equality and Liberty might take more than an old church burning to become a reality.

We're 16 weeks into continued violent protests and rioting in Paris. The media is almost completely silent, wrapped up in domestic issues. Does it really matter if some French citizens are on the streets in the thousands? Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose?

The yellow vest protestors claim the unfair taxation, high cost-of-living and income disparity policies of President Macron have dealt further injustice to the working classes. Macron is called "président des très riches" (president of the very rich.) Over 2000 people have been injured thus far, half of them police; 10 people have been killed and 14 people have been blinded by police flashbang weapons.

In an era of global wealth, where corporations are raking in record profits and individuals are accumulating vast fortunes, we see the conditions of the average family stagnant. Wealth inequality has reached historical levels, never before seen in the history of the world. 

Is it "socialism" to demand the wealthy turn on the economic faucets in the direction of the working and middle class? Or is it "capitalism" if the global elites hoard wealth and monopolize resources? We've had an unprecedented technological and scientific revolution in the last 100 years, so why all the civil unrest and global protests? 

The increase in the secularization of western nations has paralleled the increase in wealth inequality over the last century. Secularization and materialism say there is no god and God is not needed. Religion has become a dirty word, even among religionists who are increasingly triggered by religious language. 

The end game of materialism is totalitarian governments brutally suppressing peaceful protests, which in turn, results in a more violent and volatile citizenry. The militarizing of police forces all over the world is an alarming trend; the French government responded brutally to the 300,000 protestors with water canons and tear gas, instead of negotiation and public discourse. 

The real message of Joshua ben Joseph isn't social, political or economic reform, but those who follow his message are destined to become the agents of social, political and economic reform. The transforming power of devotion to the Father and service to our global family is destined to overthrow an empire of materialism and conqueror the wealth inequalities we seen in the world today. The truth is the meek really will inherit the Earth. ❤️

Published time: 31 Jan, 2019 15:02

John Wight has written for a variety of newspapers and websites, including the Independent, Morning Star, Huffington Post, Counterpunch, London Progressive Journal, and Foreign Policy Journal.

US National Security Advisor John R. Bolton © Global Look Press / Xu Jinquan

“Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad,” are words delivered to us from history. When contemplating them today John Bolton springs to mind.
All joking aside, Trump’s national security adviser is to international diplomacy what the Hunchback of Notre Dame was to Pilates. Though reports that he is regularly driven to his office in Washington on the back of a cruise missile are yet to be confirmed, his near orgasmic exaltation of US hard power and military might suggest he would relish nothing more.

In other words, in John Bolton the world has itself an unrepentant and unreconstructed neocon. A fanatical warmonger who is now, to all intents, Donald Trump’s brain.

Afraid? You should be.

The recent picture of Trump’s national security adviser holding a writing pad, upon which the words “5,000 troops to Colombia” were scrawled, is all the evidence needed of the global calamity that is US hegemony and domination. It is not so much the ability of proponents of American exceptionalism, such as Mr Bolton, to deploy thousands of troops almost anywhere they choose in the world on any pretext – like latter day proconsuls of Rome – it’s the fact they assert the right to.

 

Also on RT

OpSec fail or unspoken threat? Bolton’s ‘5,000 troops’ notepad line ups ante for Venezuela                                                                                   .

© Reuters / Jim Young

Issuing diktats from Washington to sovereign countries and governments, threatening them with military aggression if they refuse to accede to those diktats, has been in keeping with the workings of this overweening superpower for decades now.

However, such action – like replacing a recalcitrant government with another while having zero respect for international law – was previously undertaken covertly but is now, in the case of Venezuela, being done openly and brazenly.

Juan Guaido, Washington’s newly appointed placeman in Caracas, is but a minor actor in the horror movie that is US power politics. He is one in a long line of such; a here today, gone tomorrow nonentity whose only qualification for the role given to him by Washington is his ability to take instructions. A fanatical hawk like John Bolton would have it no other way.

Undertaking a character study of Mr Bolton and others of his ilk throws up the dichotomy between their eagerness to hurl soldiers into battle, and personal histories which reveal extraordinary efforts to avoid going into battle themselves.

John Bolton, George W Bush, Dick Cheney, hawks and neocons all, each took steps to avoid being drafted for the war in Vietnam. Bolton was actually unabashed about ensuring that he would not be drafted, writing in his Yale University 25 year class reunion book, “I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy.”

Read More

It's all about the money: US defense of democracy is a pretext for seizing control of resources.

A Venezue

lan flag around the face of a statue of Venezuela's national hero Simon Bolivar, Caracas, Venezuela © Reuters / Andres Martinez Casar

Instead, like former President George W Bush, responsible for pushing Iraq into the abyss in 2003, Bolton joined the National Guard and stayed home. He also enrolled at Yale to study law before segueing into politics as a strident advocate of might is right, climbing the greasy neocon pole in Washington to positions of influence.

Speaking of Iraq, in Bolton the war had, and continues to have, its most resolute champion and defender, even though it has long been accepted by all apart from the most mendacious and amoral that it only succeeded in unleashing a carnival of carnage. Bolton went from stating in the lead up to the war in 2002, “I expect that the American role actually will be fairly minimal,” to in 2015 stating, “I still think the decision to overthrow Saddam was correct.”

Occupying the space between both those statements, made 13 years apart, are the millions of lives lost, upended, ruined and forever destroyed in consequence.

I am proud to say I was active in the antiwar movement in the lead up to and aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. In those circles, John Bolton was regarded as a cross between the antichrist and Pol Pot – and with some justification given what ensued and the man’s lack of remorse or contrition over the catastrophe inflicted on the country and its people, not forgetting the destabilization of the entire region.

It was therefore a moment to savour when Tony Benn, a towering figure of the left in the UK and impassioned opponent of the war in Iraq, delivered a verbal battering to John Bolton during a 2008 televised debate on the war and its aftermath. Benn spoke for millions in Iraq and around the world that night. At one point, in words that belong to the ages, he boomed: “There is no moral difference between a stealth bomber and a suicide bomber!”

Bolton, visibly discomfited at being on the receiving end of such a withering and eloquent rejection of all that he and his fellow warmongers represent, must have been wishing his car had broken down on the way to the studio, requiring him to cancel.

Read More

It's all about the money: US defense of democracy is a pretext for seizing control of resources.

Mystery of the Venezuelan gold: Bank of England is independent of UK govt – but not of foreign govt

In more recent times, Bolton was key in Trump’s unconscionable decision to unilaterally pull out of the P5+1 Iran Nuclear Deal (JCPOA) in May 2018, followed by the return of even more stringent sanctions on Iran than had been in place prior to the deal. He was also a prime mover of Trump’s decision to withdraw from the INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) Treaty with Russia, laying the ground for a new arms race.

The man, to be frank, is a thug in a suit, who since taking up the role of Trump’s national security adviser in April 2018, has rampaged around the world like a vicious dog, intoxicated with the power to threaten, intimidate and bully at will. He is America’s Tomas de Torquemada (he of Spanish Inquisition fame). The only difference is that where Torquemada was committed to punishing apostates who dared resist the writ of the Catholic Church in the 15th century, Bolton is committed to punishing apostates who dare resist the writ of Washington in the 21st.

Someone who knows Bolton more than most is Richard Painter, a lawyer who served in the Bush administration. When Bolton’s appointment as Trump’s national security adviser was announced, Painter tweeted his dismay along with a chilling warning: “John Bolton was by far the most dangerous man we had in the entire eight years of the Bush Administration. Hiring him as the president's top national security advisor is an invitation to war, perhaps nuclear war. This must be stopped at all costs.”

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