Unspinning2011

Unspinning Official Stories 2011

Hope for change drowned out by pro-democracy propaganda

7 February 2011: On January 30, a real news item, though deeply buried, actually barely appeared in Al Jazeera's otherwise useless story of the hollow Tunisian revolt. It was probably accidentally unintentionally revealed that there may be people in the Middle East who aren't stupid, when a group of "about a dozen secularists" were reported holding up banners reading: No Islamism, no theocracy, no Sharia and no stupidity!
     Of course in the Middle East (or in California, either) they wouldn't have banners saying: Democracy is not the point, either, dammit! Nor is how long a president stays in office! The point is that a civilized state's function is to provide a good life for every human, including social and economic equality (and to stop the destruction of the eco-system! - excuse me, I'm dreaming) Not to hold elections, spread religion and keep the insiders rich!
     Good luck! Loose talk about things like social and economic equality is a threat to profit. Democracy, which can always be manipulated and has never been a threat to profit is a much safer talking point. And a week later, I hope you noticed that the rich insiders (who occupy all governments and the UN), all their office holding puppets, their media, even their lumpen masses (who've been suckered all their lives), and even their silly pseudo-progressive opposition (who surrendered in 1989), spent the whole week singing the pro-democracy hymn TOGETHER, thus smothering any faint hope of any movement away from the Islamic philosophical jungle toward civilization somewhere at last - if there ever was any. Now watch the lumpen in the streets of Tunisia accept the new demagogue they're handed, kidding themselves that THEY selected and elected the ass, while everything goes back to normal.
     If you clip every article in the papers about foreign turmoil, or rumored turmoil, or turmoil the media want you to think exists, about Suu Kyi, Tibet, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba or any of the Arab countries involved in the current street show epidemic, and then circle the word democracy every time it appears, you'll see that the word is being beaten at you like a drum. Then see if there's anything else to circle. There's not much. You'd think democracy was the only issue. Why? If you're one of the quislings who call themselves progressives and think being pro-democracy allies you with "THE" people against entrenched power, don't you ever wonder why the mouthpieces of the rich never stop beating the pro-democracy drum for you - louder than you could ever beat it for yourself?
     The answer is that it's THEIR drum. The US State Department invented it before you thought of it. They were already exchanging puppet dictators like Marcos and Duvalier for puppet democracies before Tiananmen Square, because the Latin American revolutions calling for unthinkable social and economic equality were gaining too much credibility. They needed a better game - a game you and the masses would fall for. So, because it sounds so nice - because it's so flattering to the suckers, implying they're running things - THEY invented the pro-democracy movement, and you fell for it. How does it work? Great! Everybody's minds are occupied with democracy, which is easy to manipulate and doesn't threaten profit flow, and everybody forgets equality, which does, and the demagogues go on replacing each other, one after another, black or white, it doesn't matter, and nothing changes, and the profits keep flowing. It's sustainable.
     Don't go into a denial mode and deliberately blur what I just told you. However pretty the concept, in context, democracy has to be and is a scam. Political leaders use the democracy scam to keep people in line and voting for them. Media use the scam to distract readers from the things they should be thinking about. See Civil State and Democracy.
-Glen Roberts.

All the usual lies by omission remain "sustainable" in 2011
Biggest story cover-up ever - world population now 7 billion

19 February 2011: A month and a half ago, on January 1 of this year, world population reached 7,074,193,720. This story is late, because New Year's day I couldn't find the University of North Carolina's World Population Clock. On 1 January 2010, the year before, I'd predicted correctly that humanity's nose count would pass 7 billion that year and that this would be covered up. This happened, but you probably missed it since cover-ups are, by their nature, covered up. The pending disaster wasn't mentioned by growth loving media in January 2010, And a year later, January 2011, an amazing lie was substituted - that the world faces a critical population deficit. Really!
     Way, way down in that stupid story, it was claimed that the incredible human hulk would reach 7 billion in July of 2012, as if THAT, had it been true, were a mere foot note (!!!!!!). But it wasn't true. It was a misstatement based on the growth loving US Census Bureau's slow count showing a January 1 world population of only (only is reverse hyperbole) 6,890,646,738.
     A whole year earlier, on January 1 2010, I'd found several population clocks, including one (the most reliable), the UNC clock, showing 6,973,027,500 THEN. That clock had gone under "Java" cover by this year and, because I'm not a nerd with "an updated Java IM" (I still don't know why such things exist), I only learned today that the UNC clock was still ticking and showed 7,074,193,720 as this year tick-tocked in, indicating (by my pocket calculator) that the 7 billion mark had been passed about 9 months earlier - just about a year AGO come this April Fool's Day.
     Note, first, the overtly business and growth loving US government has long coveted and nursed the myth that overpopulation stopped being important in 1990, and the media that belong to the same people the government belongs to have promoted that myth energetically. Second, the US Census Bureau, the primary mission of which is to assist and promote business, is a department of the US government. Third, the appearance on the first day of the second decade of the 21st century of the news (had it appeared that day, which it didn't) that human population had passed 7 billion DURING THE FIRST DECADE OF THE 21ST CENTURY, would have been so dramatic that even some US type lumpen might have gasped and said, "Wow! How can you be telling us that we're in danger of depopulation when a world population that grew only 4.5 billion in the whole 20th century has grown another billion in only one decade of the 21st century?"
     Fourth, note two things, (1) that judging population growth by percentage growth rate, which is what all the usual sources do, obscures the fact that a lower percentage of a higher number can be a higher number than a higher percentage of a lower number - and so far always has been in reference to monster population growth, AND (2) that world human population has been so far beyond the catastrophe level for so long, that to pretend that, since a billion is a smaller percentage of 6 billion than it was of 5 billion, growth may be about to stop - is raving lunacy (or an insidiously convenient lie). Also note that the highest population count is only the closest to high enough, since, obviously, population (except by regions trying to obtain head-count money) is always under-counted because nobody really counts the poor.

     And, excuse me, note this, too, that just in case you think the government and its side-kick media wouldn't try to fool you, they do it all the time. Read on.

     During much of 2010, the same media I've been talking about, the media you shouldn't trust, willing to scapegoat one British business to keep the smoke screen billowing, labored almost daily to convince you that a giant oil blow-out (which they constantly coyly called a spill) was a one-time incident affecting only one coastline, caused only by a mechanical mistake that only one business made, which can be prevented in the future, so business can go on doing what business does. Bull shit! The problem that surfaced in Louisiana was NOT and isn't one company and one coastline and one mistake. The problem was and still is more and more people everywhere needing more and more resources and a greedy careless uncontrolled growth and profit driven monster system of capitalism that keeps growing and stays profitable only by more and more carelessly destroying the eco-world to keep filling its market's ever-growing belly. That's why there will be more disasters coming. See if you can find that explained in the New York or LA Times.
     For almost 10 years, that same media has maintained an almost perfect silence about why it was the WTC and the Pentagon which were attacked on September 11, 2001. Many, probably most Americans still believe the Twin Towers were attacked because they were tall American buildings and Americans are hated because they're good guys. This delusion has fueled a near-religious revival of "homeland" defense in America designed to keep Americans feeling together in their fortress against the world, to discourage domestic rebellion, to make "homeland" defense related industries (including the arms industry) even richer, and to justify the growth of an often worse-than-third-world security system in America more closely watching Americans. Clip and send me the NY Times article explaining that the WTC is world headquarters for the capitalist monster that sucks the world dry so less than 20 per cent of humanity living in a handful of countries can consume almost all the world's product; and that the Pentagon is world headquarters for the military now based everywhere on Earth that protects the insiders from the outsiders. If you understood that, would you so willingly take seriously homeland defense evacuation drills in the generic public buildings of places like Vista, California?
     For 20 years, media have been publicly spinning the fairy tale that, since (according to them) all communist revolution vanished in 1990, the only cause espoused by rebellious poor people anywhere and everywhere now has to be Democracy - because they all want to be like us. THEREFORE, a more than continent-wide movement all over Latin America to follow the example of Cuba has been disappeared from the news for years now, while Americans have been kidded that Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales are just nut-cases misleading poor people who only yearn for democracy and freedom and that Cubans are starving to death (see Misconceptions about Cuba). And for weeks, now, hoping they can get it to spread to Cuba, US media have been trying to turn a chaotic, directionless epidemic of street scenes in the Middle East, some not even related to the others, some mindless copycat circuses, all badly warped by religious band-wagon jumpers, some even hopelessly attended (maybe even started and then lost) by never mentioned communist groups, into a simplistic protest against long-time leaders (like Fidel, of course) and a replay of the 1989 CIA inspired pro-democracy movement in China.
     For the last three years, that same media have deliberately confused you every single day for the benefit of relevant companies owned by THEIR owners, that a health insurance industry subsidy is, somehow, health CARE. Pick up any newspaper. They call Obama's health insurance industry subsidization plan a health care plan in headlines and leads and presidential quotes several times a day every single day. It's not. It's a way of forcing you to buy insurance and making the insurance and pharmaceutical companies richer. And in keeping with the spirit of that glorious campaign, (don't forget) they go on defying logic and even a lot of doctors by keeping you convinced that you must never commit suicide and cease being a profitable customer of the "health" industry.
     Meanwhile, actually all your life, that same supposedly objective media have encouraged you to believe in a god who believes in capitalism and (in spite of being a long term dictator himself) democracy, assuring you that you care that each of your presidents is a Christian, and you're currently being conned that the only thing wrong with dumb, barbaric (but religious) Republicans, who only want their turn, although what they really want is to repeal every step toward civilization taken in the last 150 years and to restore medieval feudalism and superstition and 20th century fascism, is that they say some funny things sometimes.
     Do you remember what they feed mushrooms? Your mass media, from which many of you never take your eyes and ears, think you are mushrooms. And maybe they're right.
-Glen Roberts

Obama's worst atrocity yet, unprovoked attack on Libya

21 March 2011: I have nothing I know of against Muammar Al Qathafi (spelling by Tripoli Post). I'm certain that not even one American in 20 can coherently articulate even a wrong reason for having a grudge against Qathafi. How long Qathafi has been in office is not a sensible reason. That some internal Libyan dissidents are copy-catting "face-book revolutions" in neighboring countries isn't a sensible reason, either. And certainly the government's crack-down on those self-appointed heroes isn't a reason - to Americans. So why is Washington invading Libya? It's not on my behalf, for sure, nor is it, in any demonstrable sense, to protect America or even America's mysterious "national security."
     Before the Iraqi invasion, the embedded media spent a lot of time trying to convince us there was a reason for that barbaric adventure, printing days and days of reportedly "compelling" blather by Colin Powell, who pointed at views of rooftops and told us WMD's were being made or stored under those roofs. And after that, when it became clear Powell was lying and the media were aiding and abetting his lies, more than a few Americans realized, maybe at a sub-intellectual level, that the supposed "preemptive" attack was both unethical and illegal and dishonestly foisted on the American public. When the undeclared drone war on parts of Pakistan began, without a word of dismay from US media or their stupid readers, there was at least the excuse that the Taliban we shouldn't have been fighting were jumping back and forth across the border.
     But this time the government and the embedded media, acting in concert as usual, have gone too far. The sudden attack on Libya, without any sensible explanation from Washington, is totally unprovoked. And the media are carefully concealing the only real probable motive for it - that Libya may be guilty of the supposed (US right-wing designated) crime of being a some-what communist country providing most of its people with economic and social equality and the highest standard of living in Africa (quite a few sources on the internet say that).
     Almost all governments are made up of the wrong people, I have no doubt that in Egypt, for example, there is a lot of ugly poverty and unacceptable brutality the government has made no effort to resolve, and it would have made sense if the face-bookers in Egypt had revolted on those grounds. I doubt that they did, though. There is no evidence they have any agenda at all.
     But in Libya, it makes less sense. The only reason for the so-called Arab "Spring" epidemic to have reached Libya that I can think of is that the CIA, pursuing their eternal mission (never never never questioned by them or the media or most Americans), i.e. to "stop communism," instigated it on orders from Washington, while NATO got ready for an immediate attack on whatever day they decided was best.
     I have no reason I know of to respect the Middle-East Arab-Spring face-book revolutionaries, but it would be perfectly respectable if Americans flooded the capitol mall in DC and demanded the immediate resignation of THEIR government, a ban on either Republicans or Democrats ever again running for or holding public office, and a new Constitution defining the American civil state's purpose as to provide its own people, each and every one of them, a good life, including economic and social equality, freedom from being ripped off by oil companies, banks and insurance companies (and other apparently officially blessed usurers), and freedom from foreign wars and from any war except to defend actual US soil from attack.
     But that's not going to happen because of the amazing passivity of the hopelessly lumpen American electorate. So what's to stop Obama now, a man who ran for office claiming he'd end his predecessor's two wars and who now has FOUR wars going on (Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Libya), from invading North Korea or Iran or Syria and then Venezuela and then Cuba? Not the stupid American voters, that's for sure, and certainly not the complicit American media.
     What's happening in Libya is a crime, and it seems to be the American way of the future, or at least the Obama/Clinton way of today. The new president of Brazil should have distinguished herself when she met Obama yesterday by telling him emphatically that an invasion of Cuba would be regarded as an invasion of Brazil and all of Latin America. Unless the media decided not to report it, which is possible, she didn't, though. Too bad.
-Glen Roberts

Unspeakable news elements unspoken by embedded media

On Japan and Libya

24 March 2011: There are things people should be thinking of that the rich insiders who run the world don't want them thinking of, because, regardless of ecological and social consequences, they intend to protect the stability of their profit flow from such thoughts. So the media they own, the people's own relentless and apparently irresistible minders, don't talk about such ideas except to scornfully dismiss them.
Consider what's omitted from this month's two biggest stories, the stories of the tragedy in Japan and of Washington's criminally unprovoked attack on Libya.
Their readers aren't supposed to remember, so the media WILL NOT mention that JAPAN IS UNMENTIONABLY OVERPOPULATED, a topic scorned for the last 20 years while readers have been taught to believe overpopulation doesn't exist anymore. But Japan, an ant-heap of people on a scatter of small islands, is 3 or 4 times as densely packed as California, which is now 6 or 7 times more overstuffed than it was in 1950, when the already visibly exploding cancer of its "development" provoked ME to start using my new typewriter (a grammar school graduation gift) to attack the already unforgivable blindness of media and political leaders to - I'm going to say it - overpopulation.
Excess population everywhere, including in Japan and California, is almost always partly housed in substandard buildings on unstable ground and in low-lying areas vulnerable to flooding, and bulging populations these days CAN'T be provided with enough goods and services, including energy, except through the use of dangerous technology. And that's an important lesson people could learn from the Japanese tragedy, if they were allowed to.
Just think! If world population, including Japanese and California population, could be reduced as much as it should be, down to certainly no more than 1/50 of what it is now (i.e. back to about half of what it was when POPULATION PRESSURE pushed Columbus west), it would be like discovering 49 new virgin planets, without the expensive and destructive help of NASA.
That would take a long time, of course (probably too long), but that's not the media's concern. Their problem is that it couldn't be done without killing and burying capitalism, which can't live its ugly lifestyle without constant ugly GROWTH. But if an ecologically sane world population of, say, 125 million could be someday attained and permanently stabilized, the appropriate departments of a civilized, well organized, secular, communist (and therefore benign) one-world state could relatively easily make sure that everyone lived in solid homes on high and solid ground. Resources would be plentiful, and it would take no more than just the right carefully moderate touch of high tech to make everyone's life as near perfect as it needs to be (though probably without things like private jets and Tokyo's artificial indoor ski-slopes).
For those people who shouldn't be reading this website, if, about 50 words ago, you followed your media training and dutifully groaned, "Oh no-o-o! Not communism!" I'm not at all sorry to tell you, since you need to be told (and who else will do it?) that a Civilized State has to be communist, because, besides being by nature benign and well organized, communism doesn't depend on growth. See the correct definition of Communism on this website so you'll have a faint chance of understanding what I'm talking about.

And that's the link and transition to my other subject, the unprovoked US attack on Libya. To avoid really explaining it, the embedded cheer leading media, the LA Times, the NY Times, the Al Jazeera Times, keep up a rhythmic yell of "pro-democracy, pro-democracy, pro-democracy, rah, rah, rah!" and "41 years in office, 41 years in office, 41 years in office, bah, bah, bah!" But that's just noise to cloud people's minds. In fact, the US invasion of Libya was unprovoked - or the provocation was one it was considered better not to mention.
So what was the disgusting reason for the attack? Well the insider media don't care if even Americans think it's about oil. Americans are used to greed and suspecting the oil motive never interferes with their willingness to accept US foreign policy atrocities. The insider media love the suckers thinking it's to help the heroic underdogs in Libya, even though that makes no sense at all, but the lumpen always swallow that kind of mushroom food. Hey! Libya always had oil, and there's always oppression of protesters everywhere, which clearly never upsets Washington, and there's no reason to consider the Libyan rebels, of whom we've never been provided a coherent description, especially heroic or supportable.
So, come on and think. Unlike Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Bahrain and their leaders, the US has been down on Libya and has been demonizing Muammar Qathafi forever (doesn't everyone know that?), because Libya is supposed to be somewhat, quasi-communist or maybe socialist (which it may not be, I don't know), and in any case friendly with communist countries and, like them, unacceptably defiant toward the US. Add that the CIA's eternal mission, which they never never never question (and neither do their fellow Americans) is to "stop communism" or anything like it and, if they get away with stirring up protests there and then attacking Libya, because the lumpen US public doesn't even react, then another precedent will have been set, and the normally anti-communist, power-loving president and his equally awful secretary of state can then attack North Korea, which they've been dying to do ever since they entered office, and after that, Venezuela, and then maybe even Cuba. And what will the US electorate do about that? Hell! Thrilled by their fascist triumphs, they'll be waving their bloody flag like mad.
I think, for excellent and very near conclusive reasons, that the secret truth the media are hiding is that Libya was first set up (by the CIA) and then attacked because it is supposedly a leftist (slightly communist, for sure anti-US) state, and the epidemic of face-book revolutions in the Arab world provided an opportunity. And why can't they admit that? After all, the lumpen would probably go for it. But the current stupid lumpen belief that communism (like overpopulation) ended 20 years ago is critical to preventing their noticing the never reported rise of communist revolution again all over South America, a realization which might even prompt them to wonder why it's happening and what's wrong with it - a thought that must never be allowed to enter their heads, if the ugly system of capitalism is to remain safe and stable. Better to claim Libya was attacked because it's not democratic and Qathafi has been in office for a long time, a pair of stupid reasons (non-reasons) Americans have been well brain-washed to take seriously, which, if they work in Libya's case, can be used again to justify an unprovoked attack on Cuba. You see?
Last night, I watched a 2005 movie ("Good Night, and Good Luck") that won 6 academy awards for pushing over a half-century old push-over paper tiger for the umpteenth harmless time - the McCarthy hearings. Like the 1001 movies demonizing the long dead Hitler and his black uniformed Nazis, this movie was no threat to American philosophical innocence. It did not threaten profits. It had no disturbing substance. It was only about people UNJUSTLY accused of being communists, with a newsman hero who assured the audience that he was NOT a communist. The outcry way back in 1953 that the hearings were a "witch hunt" was more dangerously thought provoking than that. Over 50 years later, Americans could be safely and correctly assumed to have learned nothing and to salivate in the same old 1953 way. When brain washing works that well, why should the media ever stop doing it?
Of course, I wondered if the director (who was definitely NOT Woody Allen) couldn't have found one unknown hero, maybe a blue-collar worker, who told McCarthy, "Hey! There's no point in telling you I'm not a joiner, since facts don't interest you. My answer to your question is that of course I AM a communist, and as soon as I leave this room, I'm going to find a Communist Party office and join, because the important question isn't - am I a communist. The important question is - why shouldn't I be? What's wrong with advocating social and economic equality? Huh?"
I don't know if it's true, but a bunch of sources, including conservative sources like Time Magazine and the CIA Fact Book, indicate that Qathafi has provided Libyans with the highest standard of living in Africa, including good modern housing for everyone, except the continually entering immigrants. Of course, that suggests that there was no reason for an uprising in Libya, but just that the Libyans were given housing and free health care and education instead of being forced to work for it in a US owned oil field would certainly explain American antagonism (and why I think the CIA may have stirred up the revolt). And it also suggests what the lumpen masses must never be allowed to suspect - that whatever system the Lybyans have may be what the Egyptians and Tunisians and Yemenese and the people of East LA need, too.
-Glen Roberts

After NATO, Obama, and the CIA conquer Libya,
how will the rebels fit into the picture?

3 April 2011:  The trouble with Obama's plea that he sent US shooting jets and bombers into Libya to stop Qathafi from "killing his people" is that the US was already meddling in Libya before his supposed motive materialized, and it was very probably US meddling and encouragement that kept the protest movement going and escalating until it drew fire.
     I told you weeks ago that I thought the CIA started or helped start the protests in Libya. I guessed that, because I knew Libya was supposedly a quasi-socialist country with a high standard of living and little reason for revolt compared to Egypt, and because I noticed that almost all the Libyan "news" was based on phone calls from reporters somewhere else TO dissidents in Libya. I wondered where they got the phone numbers, and I guessed the CIA had probably supplied them.
     An obscure news item, that quickly came and went a few days ago, both verifying my guess and exposing Obama's lie, said the CIA had been sent to Libya to "help" as soon as the protest there surfaced - but that was a lie, too.
     How do I know? Because the CIA fact book says the CIA has had a long standing presence in Libya, because I know (and you should know) that the CIA is always inside leftist countries keeping the dissidents stirred up and helping them commit sabotage, while always also infiltrating ALL organizations they think they might be able to use.
     It's been happening forever. All I had to do was open Philip Agee's long ago published (1975) "CIA Diary," which is jam packed with examples, to a random page to find an account of CIA "exhilaration" in 1964 over their successful meddling in Brazil...

    ...two and a half years of (CIA) operations to prevent Brazil's slide to the left under (President Jose) Goulart have suddenly bloomed. Our campaign against him took much the same line as the ones against communist infiltration in the Velasco and Arosemena governments of two and three years ago in Ecuador. According to Holman, the Rio (CIA) station and its larger bases were financing the mass urban demonstrations against the Goulart government, proving the themes of God, country, family and liberty to be effective as ever. Goulart's fall is without doubt largely due to the careful planning and consistent (CIA) propaganda campaigns dating at least back to the 1962 election operation."

     I don't suppose you remember when a series of US presidents and the CIA were, without a qualm, helping Latin American governments kill their own people wholesale - to "stop communism" at any cost.
     In the 80's, the mantra of "God, country, family and liberty" was replaced by the "pro-democracy movement," to sucker naive pseudo-progressives (which worked), and an artificial anguish was trumped up about how long some demonized presidents or "regimes" stayed in "power" to prepare Americans for whatever strategy might be gotten up against Cuba, "the only country in the western hemisphere still not free." Though Cuba went on surviving and inspiring the thinking poor everywhere, this strategy got the CIA, VOA, and the rest of their undercover apparatus (whatever it was) enough turnovers in power in Eastern Europe, anyway, to characterize what happened as the end of communism, even though several communist states remained and they needed a lot of embedded media help to keep it quiet that new ones were rising.
     So, when the epidemic of protests recently began in the Middle East (probably with VOA and CIA help), embedded media quickly bestowed the mantras of pro-democracy and term limits on every one of them, covering up the more likely issues of poverty and religious zealotry and the fact that most of the face-book revolutionaries had no agenda of their own at all, thus preparing you for the CIA (and Obama/Clinton) plan to take advantage of the situation to stir up look-alike uprisings in leftist Libya and Syria that could be used as an excuse for the ouster of Qathafi, anyway, and then maybe Syrian President Assad.
     And then, if Americans remain glassy-eyed, which they mostly have so far, maybe North Korea can be attacked (maybe not, since it has few resources to steal and may have the bomb), and then Venezuela (which has oil), and maybe, finally, Cuba (which now has oil, too).
     Please note that, in this series of articles, there's not a word of criticism or support for Muammar Qathafi as a man or as a president. What Libya is charged with (even if the charges are valid, which you should make sure YOU know before reacting) is common, redundant, not specifically threatening to the world or to me, and not the kind of thing that should be dealt with separately or through military force. WHAT I'M CONCERNED ABOUT are the US government and their NATO allies, the insidious propaganda of all embedded western media, and the danger THEIR regressive agenda poses for the eco-system and for the few clearly progressive (mostly Latin American) countries in this barbaric and chaotic world.
-Glen Roberts

Media remind us daily NATO's might makes it right

11 June 2011: It's par for the course that, in spite of never headlining the frustration of possibly millions of people who, at least a little like me, are telling each other daily that THEY are fed up with NATO's arrogant unprovoked attack on Libya and all the hints that NATO may decide any day now, just as independently and arrogantly and without provocation, to attack Syria, the Times' front page today (I'd say stupidly) shouts at us that "Gates Faults NATO Allies' Resolve."
     The story pretends to be news, though we've been constantly told for days, and days, weeks even, how frustrated the big three rogue heads of state, Obama, Sarkozy and Cameron, are that, never mind most of the world including most Americans, Frenchmen, and Brits, there are members of NATO (or rather NATO heads of state) not willing to participate in their unjustifiable adventure. Actually, the story cites Gates that "less than half (my emphasis) the 28 members of NATO (over 20 of which I doubt you can name) are engaged in the Libyan conflict, and that less than a third are conducting air strikes," because, he says with contempt, they "don't want to share the risks and the costs," and he goes on to "warn" us, says the Times, of the "blunt reality" that "Congress and the American public have dwindling appetite and patience" with those slackers.
     WHAT SHIT! Mr. editor, you probably are successfully kidding most of your lumpen readers, but the "less than half" mentioned above are no more than about six heads of state, and the "less than a third" are Obama, Sarkozy, and Cameron and, maybe, to some slight indefinable extent, the disreputable Italian, Berlusconi (without any significant support from the Italian people). Other heads of state rolling over and letting air bases be used to launch the rogue three's planes or giving lip service approval from their safely distant pulpits can't seriously be counted. And, as for the "American public," even the lumpen majority know they have no say about NATO's activities. That is, they know it, they accept it stupidly. and they DON'T THINK ABOUT IT (your bulletins to them about what they supposedly think notwithstanding). If they DID think about it without your help, like their countrymen who do think, they'd quickly lose their "appetite and patience" for the UNELECTED rogue acronym's use of their US tax dollars to usurp the UN and run the world with bombing planes.
     To anybody with no vested interest, the plainest truth about Libya is that the bloodshed and destruction would have ended long ago if NATO hadn't butted in; yet NOBODY, including any honest representative of the rogue-state trio, has ever coherently explained why they ARE in it; the UN is just looking on stupidly and speechlessly; and the apparently drunken media are cheering for no apparent reason for the totally undefined rebels.
     Just a few days ago, a US general was carelessly quoted as admitting "we" (not me, by the way) don't really know who "we" are supporting. Hey! Why the hell not? US tax dollars are also paying for the CIA's unmonitored activities inside Libya where they've been for years. What good is the supposed "intelligence" agency if they don't know who the rebels that the Times calls "the guys" are? And what good is the Times, if they can't find out what the CIA knows? Why, when NATO introduced some of the rebels on the floor of the UN, did they make sure the "guys" didn't say anything? Why is there information all over the internet indicating the "guys" are muslim extremists, even including Al Qaida and Taliban delegates, who, once "we" have given them Libya (if that's in the rogue big three's secret plans at all), may turn out to be the Mujahideen all over again?
     I don't think the Times has ever acknowledged that there are those, undoubtedly smarter than Gates, who wonder why NATO is going after Qathafi. But it's not true that nobody is wondering that. I am, for one. In spite of implications by the Times, it's NOT obvious that any leader in office for 4l years should be overthrown, or that some vague desire for democracy justifies any rebellion sanctified by NATO against any leader demonized by NATO, or that rebels killed in a rebellion they (with CIA help I'm sure) started deserve protection from a mysteriously demonized government that they're trying for unknown reasons (mysteriously sanctioned by NATO) to overthrow.
     I have no delusions that the Times will suddenly start doing what they claim they do, but they should be trying, for once, to honestly explain to their glassy-eyed readers what the hell NATO is and why the hell it has so much power and so many arms at its disposal.

     IN A SANE WORLD, there WOULD BE a United Nations organization, of course. And in that imaginary sane world, the purpose of the UN would of course initially be to ensure peaceful co-existence between the nearly 200 now separately barbaric nations all incoherently babbling OVER 200 languages at each other. At the same time, though, if the world were sane and the UN were a sanely formed organization, it's most important purpose would be to CIVILIZE all those barbaric nations and press and motivate them separately and together to start making life not just better but very good, certainly CIVILIZED, comfortable, peaceful, dignified, and (for the sake of that dignity) at least economically and socially equal for every single human. In fact, if it were sane, it's purpose would be to slowly"unite" all those "nations" (get it?) into a one-language actually cooperative one-world, at least socialist (but preferably communist), at least secular (but preferably atheist) state, with an eventual target population of way under 250 million people all living in harmony with the eco-system.
    That would be sane.

But in the clearly insane real world, where, in spite of frequent vague, random, and cynically phony allusions to some of the concepts above, to con the suckers of course, the purpose of the embedded media is to serve the interests of the rich insiders who own them, and the UN was formed mainly to facilitate business, so instead of a useful world organization helping the entire human race achieve a civilized world, we have a deliberately emasculated UN manipulated and bullied by several other more exclusively aligned international powers, each and all militarily and/or financially more powerful than the UN, including NATO, the G8, the WTO, and the World Bank, all working in the interest of a few rich nations (or rather of the insider owners of those few rich nations and of their stooges in other countries) to dominate, subjugate, sabotage, and exploit the rest of humanity, while the one richest nation brazenly deploys its own military and secret agents everywhere to promote an ongoing and permanently profitable state of global war and to force its own self-serving and very unequal economic dictatorship on everyone else.
Of course you will sneer (and so will I, because we SHOULD sneer) that none of this is apparently crazy for the rich insiders who own and run the world, but, in fact, there are very real ecological factors that MAKE it both stupid AND insane EVEN for those rats, and there are multiple factors that make the vast lumpen majority both stupid and insane to put up with all the crap - from their rogue misleaders AND from the Times.
-Glen Roberts

Not only do Libyan rebels enjoy air support from NATO,
it appears they are rebels on a salary - paid by US!

   20 June 2011: Could be! In fact, I think so. I told you 3 months ago (21 and 23 March) that, under cover of a spate of middle-eastern "face-book revolutions" (yeee gods!), the CIA had almost certainly stirred up the revolt in Libya, but it didn't occur to me that the forces they created might be paid mercenaries. Now Al Jazeera reports that the EU is looking for funds to keep paying the rebels' expenses and "salaries."
     Yes it does. It says exactly that. And since this follows a move in the US Congress to cut Obama's war funds, it makes sense that, possibly unable to go on guaranteeing the rebels a US salary to stage a convenient war for American oil and arms companies, Obama has asked his European cohorts to pick up the tab. It's also possible that the word rebels is an example of language abuse.
     Other same-story related language abuses: An incredible sidebar to this story, underscoring the brutal disregard for the English language by US conservative types, is that Republican Congressmen who love the ongoing wars are calling their friends who want to cut the funds "isolationists!" I didn't make that up, either. So the new American right-wing definition of an isolationist must be a politician who wants his country to keeps its bombs to itself.
     Another baffling example is the US claim that the home of a Libyan general that they just bombed, killing several civilians, was a "legitimate military target." A legitimate military target in a humanitarian action, don't forget, undertaken only to protect innocent civilians. Besides being an example of language abuse, this is an admission of guilt, since the UN did not authorize NATO to bomb military targets, but only to protect civilians from stray bullets. And it's also a (probably justified) insult to the intelligence of media readers, since the fact that it is reported with a straight face by embedded media who have been jumping up and down like pom pom girls cheering for the undefined rebels is a revelation that the US and NATO military and the embedded media know damn well they are involved together, pom pom girls and heroes, not in a humanitarian action but in a full scale football game. Oops! I must mean war, huh?
     A good example of an abuse of mathematics is the ongoing pretense that the supposedly gentle new US president is only involved in two wars (2), when, obviously, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Libya add up to four wars (4). Right?
-Glen Roberts

If all news of 'the economy' comes by surprise,
doesn't that mean nobody knows how it works?

10 July 2011: Yesterday's (July 9) main headline groaned, "Dismal job figures jolt confidence." What does that mean besides what it says? It means that nobody's in control. The new numbers are JOLTING, because they are a surprise, because those supposedly in charge of the state, including things like employment and production, aren't keeping track of anything but cash flow, and all they do about that even is perform some traditional money related voodoo ceremony (which doesn't interfere with the fucking freedom of the rich insiders) on the altar of the cash-flow god, hoping he'll be appeased.
This is how capitalism works - or rather doesn't work - or rather just happens. What happens happens, as if some unpredictable force of nature (private greed freedom) were in charge, and not even the government finds out anything has happened at all, until later, when a private survey group or a curious professor takes a survey - or does an analysis - exactly like biologists studying the behavior of fruit flies. And the misleaders of America (the stooges of the rich) at least publicly assume and expect you to assume that that's the way it should be - that there's nothing to do but accommodate whatever happens. Do you really believe that?

Here's what COULD BE DONE about employment in a sane world. First, NATIONALIZE EVERYTHING. Then make a list of all goods and services everyone NEEDS to live an equally good life. Leave out war, insurance, pure money tending services, over-tech toys and other obviously unnecessary shit. Then figure out the work and working hours required to produce the needed goods and services. Distribute that work to all able-bodied working-age men and women. Fix the prices of all goods and services forever. Pay all adult consumers the same salary, i.e. enough to buy the goods and services they need. Then, though nobody would have anything close to a 40-hour work week, everybody would be employed.

Sorry, but this will not work in an insane world full of 7 billion people (which media owned by the rich insiders tell you MUST keep growing so the MARKET will keep growing for whatever the rich insiders sell). It would work perfectly, though, in a sane world the same size as Earth with a human population of, say, 125 million, and a benign, actually intelligently organized and managed system. See "In a sane world" (a boxed red-letter passage like the one above) in the article dated June 11 below.
Do I know what I'm suggesting? Of course I do. There are a number of essays on this site explaining things like this. You should read them all.
-Glen Roberts

Who the hell is the US?

10 July 2011: Besides wondering who the hell NATO is, are you prompted each day to wonder, like me, who the US is? The headline says, "U.S. is open to leaving a force in Iraq," and adds in the subhead, "if Baghdad wants them." One thing you know for sure is that the "U.S." mentioned in this headline isn't you and me. Our grammar school teachers lied to us when they told us that, in a democracy, the country IS the people. You HAVE figured that out by now, right? The noun US in this headline doesn't even mean Washington. It means the White House and the rich insiders who own the White House, the media, and all of Congress they need to own. And the noun Baghdad is a horse of the same color. And neither the White House nor their Iraqi puppets are merely "open to" ongoing war. It's already in the script. THEIR script. Not your or my script.
Lumpen are lumpen everywhere and usually believe what they're told they believe about most things. But, eight years after the unprovoked invasion of Iraq, I bet a lot more Americans AND Iraqis than just the coffee-house intellectuals would be glad to be counted out of those misleading supposedly collective nouns. All told, those two grandiose nouns (NATO and the US) probably refer to no more than a few dozen people. So how do they get away with that? If you aren't asking, maybe you should start asking. Our grammar school teachers did have a point. Didn't they?
-Glen Roberts

The daily lie goes on about Libya

10 July 2011: The headline actually says "NATO Feels Libya Mission Fatigue," but that certainly doesn't mean they're tired of killing people. The truth, which is much further than that from the headline, is that the rogue acronym, NATO ("western allies" the hysterically pro-NATO newspaper calls them, trying to echo WWII rah-rah jargon), is getting more and more heat from the African Union, Russia, China, most of the other NATO members and, finally, even from US, UK, and French citizens about their apparently mindless behavior in Libya
Deep in the story, the deeply embedded reporter admits that "officials and outside observers also acknowledge that pressure is growing for the coalition to deliver a knockout blow." Pressure from whom? You? Not me. Well, of course the same paper has already instructed its readers about a tiny sector - a few hundred people in a big big world, who hate Qathafi for reasons as vague as Obama's - but odds are that a million times that many Earthlings only wish NATO would back off and shut up. I don't think I'm exaggerating.
-Glen Roberts

Nobody elected NATO
to rule the world with bombing airplanes

2 September 2011: Furthermore, nobody elected Barack Obama "leader of the free world." I'm pretty sure that most humans who DIDN'T vote for any such "world leader" think they "believe in" democracy, too. Personally, I never "believe IN" anything, because it's bad grammar, and I'm neither grammatically nor ungrammatically hot for democracy, anyway.
But if you are, then when you read my obviously true assertions that "nobody elected NATO to rule the world with bombing airplanes" and "nobody elected Barack Obama leader of the free world," you should have responded, "Know what? That's true." Did you? And have you e-mailed a protest against this short-circuiting of democracy to everyone you can think of?
NATO isn't just arrogantly assuming rights they don't have. They're killing people, destroying buildings, crippling entire economies, setting a dangerous precedent for a world-wide blitzkrieg, and doing these things with no concern for public reaction or nonreaction. And they're doing this at your expense, using arms you paid for to defend your country, risking or throwing away the lives of your children and neighbors, and ruining your credibility and reputation in the world.
-Glen Roberts

UNSPINNING OFFICIAL STORIES 2010
BACK TO THE FRONT PAGE
TO GO ON TO 2012 OR ANY YEAR UP TO THE PRESENT - PICK A YEAR:
2008; 2009; 2010; 2011; 2012; 2013; 2014; 2015; 2016