Unspinning Official Stories 2014

Still crediting all of it to a 1945-50 "baby boom,"
media now admit but stupidly CELEBRATE population explosion

  1 January 2014: FIRST THING TODAY, before and after the first minute of 2014 saw the world human count tick past 7,387,626,113, still heading ever more rapidly for 8 billion by 2020 (not 9 billion by 2050, the ongoing uncorrected media lie, but 8 billion by 2020 and 9 billion before 2030), the stupidest embedded media (meaning damned near all of them) played it as a CONTEST, hailing those communities and regions with the biggest population gains as the WINNERS.
    "Texas," they told us, in a self-important reporter's tone that implied THIS is the kind of thing smart reporters report and smart readers want to know, "could gain three more congressional seats in 2020," as "southern and western states, LED by Texas, California and Florida, SURPASSED the northeast and midwest in the demographic CONTEST (sic) that plays a key role in determining states' political clout." Sic(k) means I got the word contest from them, though I DID all-cap it.
    If your skull - or, let's say, the skulls of some other people you know - are philosophically empty enough that their (those other people's) preferred followership policy is to always go with the flow, saving brain work for themselves by always letting the embedded media tell them what they think, so they're happy to declare to the other suckers in the barbershop, "Well, by golly, ain't that something!" before going on to the sports page - it's really no wonder. The embedded media HAVE BEEN working on their, your and my brains forever, relentlessly telling us every day of our lives what we're supposed to think the news is.
    For instance, treating you as the kind of good students they want you to be, they've always TAUGHT you to consider the environmentalists whom they're occasionally forced to mention (but in a tone reserved for weirdos) as a "special interest group!!" A SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP??? ENVIRONMENTALISTS??? DON'T WE ALL LIVE IN THE ENVIRONMENT??? OF COURSE WE DO!!! SO WE'RE ALL, IF WE KNOW WHAT'S GOOD FOR US, ENVIRONMENTALISTS!!! AREN'T WE? OF COURSE WE ARE!!! Good grief! And, now that I mention it, don't YOU know and haven't you always, at least subconsciously, known that?
    Just to keep resisting the over-obvious truth you're reading here, you're not going to go on thinking that things not "reported" aren't true, are you? You're not going to return to habitual sleep, are you, just because your officiously official teachers (except for a brief Paul Ehrlich dismissal in the late, lost 60s and the undeniably happening but, thankfully brief World Population Summit of 1992) have never "reported" (in fact, they've very carefully NOT reported) the existence of any such concept as OVERPOPULATION since 1992, when, after THAT blip of unavoidable acknowledgement, they immediately declared the phenomenon they'd never seriously reported and certainly never understood or seriously acknowledged, to be finished - over and done with, as supposedly shown by a slight temporary downturn (in 1991) NOT in population NUMBERS but only in the RATE of increase of the still definitely increasing NUMBERS of humans. The media did NOT mention that obvious inconsistency - between percentage growth rates and numbers - which, to consider yourself conscious, you need to grab hold of (keep reading and you'll get to it a little further down).
    Oh, somebody says, but, surely the media often DO mention population. Hey, don't go to sleep. There's a difference between the word population or even the phrase population growth and the word OVERpopulation, which has just about always been 99% and still is 99% TABOO in the embedded media owned by the growth-loving rich. When, slapped in the face by the surprise (theoretical of course) arrival of the world's seven billionth human, the LA Times ran population stories for a week (so they could be the ones defining the concept), but, unless I missed it (and I looked carefully), they apparently carefully excluded ANY reference during the whole week to OVERpopulation.

    PAY ATTENTION TO THE FOLLOWING, because you won't learn this from TV news or your daily paper or even from any common news source put right up close to your face by the increasingly embedded internet! THIS is the way the media have been playing their human population lie for the last 23-24 years. Before that, except for some VERY brief nods once in a VERY long while, they didn't play it at all. Overpopulation? Hell! The WORD was taboo. Even the word population, in even slightly negative reference to people counts has rarely EVER been published. Even in stories about excess traffic, diminishing fish, sprawling suburbs, shortage of classroom space, and over-consumption of everything, etc. which you'd think would demand some reference to the involvement of too many drivers, too many fish eaters, too many suburbanites, too many children, and too many consumers of everything, etc., the connection has just about 100% never been made. It's apparently taboo. Not just recently. It's been that way all my life (and yours).
    But then, IN 1992, conveniently simultaneously with the editorially unwelcome World Population Summit in Rio, which forced the media to pay some grudging attention to the most important problem in the world, a few suddenly celebrated embedded mathematicians (yes there ARE embedded scientists, folks) were suddenly reported to have announced that THEIR computers had found world population growth to be diminishing - all on its own - apparently by God's will - or maybe because the famous "baby boom" was over.
    And that's the way the embedded media, after burning their files on the quickly forgotten World Population Summit and the long forgotten Paul Ehrlich affair, left it, and left it, and left it, so that any time any one or ones like me and (I don't know) maybe you brought it up in any unreported gathering, piously embedded smart-alecs were able to knowingly point out to you, them or me that everyone in the know knew that that subject (though it had never been opened) was closed.
    AND THEN (after the previous then mentioned two inches above), either wanting more attention or pointedly asked to by the media, the embedded mathematicians mentioned above came up with a much reported newer and BETTER myth - that human population, due (you may have missed this absurd metaphysical concept when I mentioned it before) to a diminishing PERCENTAGE growth RATE they'd just detected (in 1991-92), was beginning to shrink - alarmingly. Italy (though no census would ever show it) was running out of people! Now, according to the media, there was (this was the NEW MYTH) a dangerous population deficit coming.
   Wow!

THE FANTASY OF PERCENTAGE GROWTH RATES
Adam & Eve + Cain & Abel (+2)(a small number) = +100% (A BIG %)
6 billion in 2000 + another billion by 2010 (A LARGE NUMBER) = only +16%(a smaller %)
Get it? NO?
Then read slower and pay attention, DAMMIT!

Fidel's getting old but he's still Fidel,
But Cuba may be (I said MAY be) getting ambiguous

  11 January 2014: I'm worried about Cuba, not about Fidel, though I can't be about to be disillusioned about either subject, because I was never illusioned. I'm not alarmed by recent photos showing Fidel looking much older than in the last photos published, or by the absence of any of his posts in Granma for months, or by, as far as I know, his public nonparticipation in the commemoration of Nelson Mandela. His world of admirers should not be alarmed, either, because, after all, people do get old and tired as they approach 90. Only ten years younger than Fidel and seriously slowed by a 6-month still persisting bout with shingles, I'm posting less and finding it harder to work, too.
    What Fidel's been he's been, and what he's done he's done. What his successors do or don't do takes nothing away from that. To those who recognize his stature as the 20th Century's most highly respected Chief of State and its single greatest political figure, the continued failure of western media to appropriately mark his passage will only underscore the failure of western media. And the willing surrender of possibly most westerners to the distorted official story they'll go on being fed will underscore THEIR failure (the failure of the western masses) not Fidel's, even if only a few of us know it.
    I was INSIDE Nicaragua when the Sandinista Revolution WAS the Sandinista Revolution. I saw it subverted, distorted, and forgotten even by short-term progressives I'd mistaken for somebody else. Still, I was there and I know what it WAS. I don't and didn't know everything, but I knew and still know enough not to be foolishly hypnotized and thrown off track by the rise of the truly foolish pro-democracy movement. In fact I soberly agreed with the much crippled Contra-war vet who told me in 1990, "If the revolution returns, let's don't have any more elections; you can't trust the people."
    And, though I'd only been to Cuba once by then, I sympathized with another seasoned Nicaraguan militant who, having been to Cuba for some kind of schooling, told me, "If that's communism, what I saw in Cuba, I'm a communist, and if Fidel is a dictator, let's have more dictators like Fidel."
    I SAW Cuba, too, when it WAS what I saw that it was - the most civilized country I've ever seen (which it may still be - don't believe everything you read). I saw it seven times with my own very good eyes wide open, between 1989 and 2007 and, as a thorough traveler and thinker, was able to carefully and realistically compare Cuba with 15 other Latin American countries (plus East L.A. and several other American and European down-sides), and to be sure enough, regardless of any problems I overlooked (and I DIDN'T overlook much), that the Cuba I saw up to 2007 was uniquely civilized. Not a perfect communist state yet, but slowly getting there and - civilized - something that may be being ridiculously overlooked by the same still religiously hypnotized pro-democracy pseudo progressives who helped the US State Department and the CIA torpedo Nicaragua and are now, from under the cover of their democratic piety, sniping at Fidel and the Cuban revolution - sometimes for slightly good reasons but usually for shamefully wrong reasons.
    I don't know about now. I haven't seen Cuba in 6, going on 7 years. And I am worried - not about Fidel. Though I've been spotting signs of senility for awhile, what matters to me about Fidel is still what he WAS - a flawed but 99% legitimate giant.
    I'm worried about the Cuban Revolution. I'm NOT worried by the incoherent blather of know-nothing blog-board ninnies unleashed on the world by the internet (though I'm worried about the effect they may have). I'm NOT worried by the empty-headed propaganda that keeps coming from Miamistas, rogue US presidents, hopelessly stupid US Congressmen, CIA spooks, and embedded western media (except for the influence these asses and asinine institutions have on themselves and on U.S. and European voters). But I AM a little worried by SOME of the recent substance, undoubtedly distorted but possibly reality-based, of recently internet-empowered pro-democracy poison pens inside (or purportedly inside) Cuba. And I AM very worried by recurring Granma bulletins that contradict Raul's speeches (promising to stay the communist course) - which contradictions must be officially sanctioned or they wouldn't appear in Granma. For instance, a currently running, very incoherent but ominously fork-tongued essay titled "The realization of a strategy," by-lined by Oscar Sanchez Serra, appears (very vaguely - as if to hide what the author is saying even from himself) to rewrite Cuba's own official story to allow and whitewash a shift toward (or a sneaky dribbling in of) expedient capitalism.
    Thanks to my lingering shingles affliction and my slowness to complete my book on Cuba (thanks to my old age), I can't go immediately to Cuba to discredit or verify anything, which I'll have to do because, confronted with this particular human race, I don't trust anyone but myself.
    What Fidel's old age and, of course, his approaching death will mean, or already means, to the future of the Cuban Revolution and to all the poor Latin Americans still hoping that his EXAMPLE will still inspire all their newly awakened presidents to lead them, too, to a Cuban level of civilization, I don't know. I don't tell fortunes. The definitions of a Civil State and of Communism on this website are on different pages from the chronicles of my travels in and observations of any country. The bottom line of my philosophy remains that what IS IS and what IS NOT IS NOT, and, therefore, what WILL BE WILL BE. But I can tell you that I'm significantly more worried about Cuba now than I was when Fidel retired.

-Glen Roberts

Media-approved abortion/pregnancy rate stats are propaganda

  3 February 2014: After reading any day's "news" over coffee and eggs, my marginal scribbles usually reveal too much dumb or cunning distortion for a tired old man to face, so I admit I usually give up and eventually just help pollute the dump with piles of scribbled-over lies I haven't courageously dealt with.
   But on today's local front page (in a news-jammed world) only one wired tale, clearly NY Times propaganda, pretends to be news, its big and violently tilted head loudly proclaiming a Study that "shows" (the gratified local editor) that abortion is declining in the U.S, while a subhead promises "complicated reasons" coming up, in case the tale's mere presence in print doesn't satisfy me.
   Above the headline I scribbled my usual bet against ANY reference in the story to overpopulation (a bet I ALWAYS win and did again). Then I scribbled, to myself but also for you, the question, 'Did they (the "scientists" who conducted the study) study the real world or a computer model?' In fact, it turns out that they contacted (CONTACTED) other sources a lot like themselves (maybe by telephone from lab to lab) but that, though the front page part of the story doesn't get to it, OTHER researchers (somehow unlike them) that they perhaps didn't contact HAVE ALREADY QUESTIONED their facts. On the jump-page margin, I scribbled, 'Who cares?', which you may or may not think cynical, but, I scribbled in the open space in a big adjacent ad that I didn't read, 'My own eyeball study (and yours, too, I'm certain) of the real world continually shows more cars, more houses, more shopping malls, more tots in tow and (recently) more and more baby carriages still and always proliferating at an always alarming pace,' something a researcher would have to come out of his lab to see, confront, and honestly think about.
    As the story (the tale) wound on, I, as a seasoned reader of such stuff, noted that most of its stats are not real counted numbers but rates, an always misleading concept in connection with a constantly growing real world numerical base, growing so big so fast that smaller percentage rates, even if they're diminishing rates, always represent bigger numbers. Back to the story, either the researchers OR the reporter OR maybe even a boldly interpolating editor (sequence and syntax blur this point) notes a surprising corollary decline in pregnancy (rates again), but the reporter (at least) sloppily fails to cite any source for that information OR explain, if it comes from the researchers, how it fits into a study of abortion arithmetic.
    Metaphysics then kicks in as, with no arithmetic involved, as often happens once you've been convinced that you're reading "scientific" stuff, it appears to be the reporter himself (the NY Times reporter) who credits these supposed trends to either the improvement of contraceptives or "the recession and economic uncertainty," a good, safe NY Times business-conscious concept (even if totally unlikely), and I quite justifiably print over the copy in red, 'I suppose it would be unAmerican and definitely a violation of Times policy to mention the faint possibility of any connection to a growing ecological awareness on the part of the potential moms.' In fact, I, myself, not thinking of it as more than casual research, talk to fewer and fewer non-reporters these days as unconscious as the media want them to be about overpopulation. So, it is possible that SOME women decide not to contribute more kids to the already OVERbooming population, and that SOME women decide not to abort from fear of anti-abortion terrorists, and that some women somehow unmonitored by the NSA decide to abort with clandestinely obtained morning-after pills.
    In the last paragraph of the story, though, it's implied that the researchers themselves equated use of the morning after pill with abortion, a revelation which, if valid, in spite of the clear ineptitude of the "study," anyway, does suggest that the researchers aren't exactly geniuses and that the Times has no business presenting them as reliable authorities.
    But, you see or don't see, the newspaper is slightly subtly setting itself up as an authority, qualified to assure you that, whatever any "special-interest" environmentalist claims, all alarming things are actually cyclical and there are no cataclysmic ends pending due to human (especially business and motherhood) blundering, because God's still in his heaven and all's still right with the world.

-Glen Roberts

U.S. meddling stymies Syria progress

  16 February 2014: Syria's charge today that US intrusion is undermining talks with rebels is on target but not strong enough. US meddling makes the Geneva talks pointless, because the UN negotiation chair's adoption of John Kerry's "goals" amounts to Syria surrendering to the opposition before negotiation.
   Why would Syria agree to that? Kerry's (and thus the UN's) insistence on Bashar Assad stepping down and an interim government being set up FIRST just won't work.
   The FIRST agreement and step has to be for a fully armed truce. Nobody gives up their guns or admits anything but they all stop fighting. THEN a UN committee, headed by Kofi Annan, should, at a deliberate pace, while the truce goes onand on, set up, supervise, and observe a two-round election for all top Syrian governmental offices, with all refugees painstakingly included among the voters.
   It should also be initially agreed that any candidate can run in the first round who can get a significant number of voters (say 10,000) to endorse his nomination, and that, in the second round, the top two vote-getters for each elective office will compete - even if one candidate gets a majority in the first round. That provision so that, just in case Assad gets a majority of the votes and another secular (non-Jihadist) candidate comes in second (which seems probable to me), the voters will then have the chance to vote Assad back in or out without any risk of letting an Islamic fanatic in.
   The reason Assad should agree to this is that he's sure he'll be voted back in and will, thus, not have stepped down. The reason the opposition SHOULD agree to this is that, unless they are lying hypocrites, they're sure he'll be voted out and, thus, will have been forced to step down. THAT - though the champions of democracy are prone to forget it when it's expedient to forget it - is what's called democracy.
   I don't ordinarily advocate democracy. Anybody who thinks all adversaries are generic until a majority anoints one of them the right one is - uh - stupid. It's not true. Even in the Middle East, where almost all sitting potentates seem almost equally bad, there is a qualitative difference between a nominally secular leader and any advocate of a religious government, which the majority of a mainly Islamic population probably won't realize. Look what happened in Egypt - a definitive example of the failure of the concept of democracy.
   But I think Syria is a little different, and, unlike Obama and Kerry and probably the editor of whatever media you read or watch, I studied the Syrian situation thoroughly from the beginning and, besides knowing certainly that the CIA's side and the deal it will hold them to is wrong, I'm close to positive that, given a peaceful breathing space in which to think before voting, having already experienced a nominally secular and relatively civilized life, most Syrians will vote to return to what they had before the CIA and Facebook stirred things up, if only to have a more rational starting point for change than they'd have under the Jihadists. So, yes, my proposal is a trick to bring one horribly regressive religious uprising to a halt. Good for me!
   And also, yes, I agree with you that the "opposition" can be counted on to break any such truce, because what they really want is an unprovoked all-out air-attack by NATO, which, after bombing the country to Afghanistanian rubble, will turn the ruins over to them - as was done in Libya. And, whether or not that's the CIA/White House/NATO exact plan now (it WAS their plan not long ago when NATO's top general said it was), it's a better than even probability that, once an election threatens US/NATO dreams of world conquest, the CIA will prompt the rebels to break the truce and immediately telephone AP that Assad did it, with all the usual results. It's also probable - no, CERTAIN, that Assad will expect the rebels to break any such truce and that he'll be more than ready to respond by going on crushing them.
   Meanwhile, though, while (or if) such a truce goes on and on and on, humanitarian assistance for refugees, treatment of the wounded, and even the cleaning up of Syria can begin, and this activity could enhance the truce and, by taking momentum away from the Middle Eastern lust for bloodletting, it might even exert a civilizing influence on all the fighters.
   And if, in addition, John Kerry could be kicked out of the Middle East, out of office, and off the front pages, I'm sure Obama would replace him with another ignorant photo-op-seeking presidential candidate, but it would at least temporarily improve my own disposition as a news reader.

-Glen Roberts

Local capitalists' squint-eyed view of and crooked response to
inconvenient realities like dwindling water resources

  16 March 2014: A local headline, Water Basin Alternatives Considered, moves me to scribble in the margin, "I bet population reduction isn't one of the alternatives considered" - and it's clear to any fast reader that the front page copy won't contradict me. The reporter does adventurously assert of locals worth surveying that "most believe (the region) is facing a crisis of falling aquifers," but the only expansion of that point is my scribbled question in the margin: "...and who, exactly, doesn't believe that?"
    Of course I know that, while one answer is: lots of lumpen, the important answer is: enough local politicians and their rich land-owner patrons to keep the growth ball rolling and prevent any rational real-world-based progress. Then, not in such plain words, I'm told on the jump page (which, sure enough, confirms my bet with myself that there would be no connection made to overpopulation) that the state assemblyman responsible for waking up the local big shots:

    "came to Sacramento to empower local governments to make the decisions that are best for their residents, not tell them what to do."

    So I scribble in all caps: "THAT'S STUPID."
    And no, I'm not being subjective or extreme. What's needed is a civilized actually intelligent response to a real, literally catastrophic ecological threat to everyone and every species - and it's REALLY BADLY NEEDED - NOW - IMMEDIATELY - YESTERDAY! So to forfeit the good of local (and really all) humanity and all animal, vegetable and mineral reality, too, to the growth mania of whatever idiots have managed to get themselves into local power (including control of the local media) and to the lumpen majority who go along with them is criminal.
    Intelligent, civilized mass behavior is apparently NOT a NATURAL majority human characteristic. It's not. I'm not raving. It's not. I'm both intelligent and civilized and I know some others who are, but most contemporary war and on-going ecological destruction and resistance to intelligent change result from the base competitive instincts of a rich, greedy, power-mad minority who are a minority, of course, but who are also almost always IN power, not just coincidentally but because they are IN TUNE with an (also vainly wishfully greedy) majority that can NOT be counted on to vote them out (in case you're one of those blurry-eyed optimists who think the solution to all problems is for everyone to vote).
    I want to live in a civilized state regardless of the instincts of the majority, and the only way to even begin transforming the majority into a civilized, realistically thinking people is by the rare coincidental success of an intellectual elite who DO sometimes manage to take enough occasional, partial, temporary political control to vertically impose a little bit more and a little bit more of their civilized agenda on the majority. That's how every instance you can think of of civilized progress and suppression of barbarism EVER takes place on planet Earth. And it's the only way unintelligent, uncivilized greedy human behavior disrupting and destroying the eco-system and sustaining the dog-eat-dog capitalist system will ever be brought to an end.
    In fact, water aquifers are being consumed all over the world by TOO MANY WATER CONSUMERS. That part's simple to logical thinkers. No uppity overly obscure science is needed. That the answer is to reduce human population and the size of the human encampment is simple, too - TO THOSE WHO CAN ACHIEVE SIMPLE LOGIC. But few things are clearer than that the motivation to achieve political power is seldom ecologically logical. And the majority of "the" people whom pro-democracy enthusiasts pretend to imagine are controlling the power-nuts (by dutifully voting for them), but who are, in fact, just habitually going with the flow, aren't paragons of logic either. The ONLY hope for humanity (if there is any hope) is for a SMART minority to take enough charge of a relatively high level of government (and of the media, too) and tell local government (AND the majority) what to do.
    And if you don't like my saying that, HEY! I DON'T CARE! I'm not trying here to avoid offending anyone. I'm telling the truth. For an explanation of that point, I refer you again to my essay,"Diplomatic Grey".

-Glen Roberts

US effort to regain in Ukraine status lost in Syria
is embarrassing but also ominous for Latin America

  10 April 2014 : Unlike my fading expertise on Cuba and Latin America, which I'll get back to in a minute, my knowledge of Ukraine is slight, But I think I know enough more than Obama or Kerry (two know-nothings who should definitely shut up and back off) to write one credible paragraph on the subject.
    I know for sure that the US and NATO rogue idiots won't attack Russia; they're mainly just slapping back at Vladimir Putin for diplomatically outclassing them last September when he stepped in and stopped them from outright invading Syria. I also know (and I'm being careful about how I use the word know) that, besides the fact that Crimea and Ukraine are in his neighborhood and are arguably his business, Putin's recent involvement in his neighbors' affairs have not been and don't promise to be even a tiny fraction as bloody, destructive, or disruptive of social order as the clumsy meddling of Obama, his two stupid Secretaries of State, NATO, the CIA, Facebook and Twitter in the affairs of places that are absolutely none of their respectable business (if they have any respectable business) in the middle East and (now again) in Latin America.
    Apparently, it will be (or already is) Twitter in Latin America - working for the CIA as they did in Iran and as Facebook did in Libya, stirring up dissidents and trying to keep them stirred up and in the streets if possible until they draw fire, so Kerry can again jump in with his stupid, stupid, stupid (meaning: without any knowledge of what he's talking about) threatening blabber in preparation for sending NATO bombers into Venezuela and then the ultimate target - Cuba.
    Recent exposure by AP, by the way, of the Cuban Twitter movement (which I've been predicting for years) and of its supposedly judicious cancellation by the State Department could be part of a strategy to keep YOU asleep for a little while longer. Why would they start it and then stop it? Obama certainly didn't come to his senses. He's not the type.
    As an exposé, the story's suspicious, because the Associated Press have always acted as if they were working for the CIA, and AP insiders have certainly known of the Obama Cuban invasion plan for a long time. Maybe one of their always unreliable sources told them to wait and Cuba will self-destruct for sure this time.
    Recent hints (once again) that Cuba is ready for good-ol'-aMUHRacun "change" may have motivated the maybe (and maybe not) premature kick-off of the plan, before they again ran into the (semi-secret-from-Americans) majority loyalty of Cubans to their revolution and decided to go back into sleep mode - maybe. But you should never believe AP and you should never believe that the CIA or the always philosophically comotose Obama have stopped dreaming of overturning the world's most civilized (and therefore most threatening) example of anti-capitalism going well.
    I mean going well so far. Or so far up to the last time I was there. Every time I've visited Cuba, the at-the-time rumblings that Cuba was about to "reform" proved false. But I haven't been there since 2007 - in fact, exactly since Fidel retired and before the internet arrived - and those rumblings from inside Cuba this time (not just from stupid U.S. media) have been ominously growing. They're probably false again, but not certainly. As I promised at the top, I'll discuss this very carefully in an old man's minute. Stay tuned.

-Glen Roberts

Obama hawks same "hope" for peace he started with 5 years ago;
this time to West Point cadets, and he's still lying

  31 May 2014: Most political misleaders waste, if not all their time, at least too much of it thrashing around aimlessly. So I won't accuse Barack Obama of being exceptional. But US presidents, when they're thrashing around aimlessly, can be exceptionally destructive, so, except when he sets my teeth too much on edge, I keep my eye on him.
    In fact, I was paying nervous attention in late '08, when he was elected largely for claiming a foreign policy attitude exactly like the supposedly new one unveiled the other day at West Point.
    He told us then that the Bush days of chesty bullying of other countries were over and that he and Hillary were going to start "listening" to Washington's and the New York Times' designated enemies and more softly and rationally explaining America's (Washington's and the New York Times') viewpoint.
    But that never happened. Snarling with a smile didn't fool everybody. Not me, for sure. And he soon unintentionally made it clear to Russian and European leaders and to most Latin Americans that he didn't understand any more than George Bush about the world at large and was NOT going to start listening to anyone besides his own spooks. Since then, he's started several wars of his own and his military stooges participated in the lynching of the president of Libya. He and Hillary all but lynched the president of Honduras, and he has continued the mindless anti-communist antagonism of Reagan and Bush against Cuba and all other progressive movements in Latin America.
    The only thing he told the West Pointers that you can believe is that he is still asininely and arrogantly convinced (like all ordinary US presidents) that the important things in foreign policy are American "power" and American "leadership," a 19th century fantasy nobody but Americans and there sycophantic foreign puppets are ever going to buy - though I might, if America itself had leaders with a completely credible compass - which it doesn't.

-Glen Roberts

Egypt again proves democracy doesn't work

  5 June 2014: Again, and again, and day before yesterday again AGAIN, Egypt has proven that democracy does not work, leaving as plain as ever to the smart minority the same 7-thousand year old social and political Egyptian disaster scene, new proof that what Egypt needs now are not more democratic elections.
    What Egypt needs are 1/80th as many people jamming that one narrow river valley and a team of secular (atheist would be better) managers committed finally to the founding of a Civil State designed to provide all Egyptians equally good lives including social and economic equality.
    Impossible? Well, not really for another intellectually worthier human race, but I'm not lobbying here. As always on this site, I'm telling the truth - to demonstrate how very far away the truth is from the official story and, also, how deep a hole a human race in eternal denial has dug itself.
-Glen Roberts

A D-Day movie review

  8 June 2014: Since my birthday, which shares June 6 with D-Day, was rudely misused to RE-drill patriotic Americans on how WE saved the world from the bad guys in 1945, I'm going to review a 1998 British movie I happened to watch that very night and its blog-board reviews.
    "The boy in the striped pajamas" is only typical of a genre of contrived and sappy movies that have helped preserve westerners' denial about their own fascist tendencies, by rehearsing them over and over again ever since 1945 (all their lives) on the simplistic tale of a transparently evil people called nazis who lived long ago in Germany.
    Some sad sidelights: (1) The blog-boards attached to all the internet showings or discussions of the movie are just about 100% full of dutiful recitations by appallingly naive lumpen assuring each other that THE supposedly unique and only nazis were indeed awful (before we good guys stamped out THAT evil forever) and that everyone should see the movie to remind them of THAT again, while only one of the 100 or so comments I skimmed frankly deplored the endless use of only the German nazis as a scapegoat to shore up human denial about the rest of the multi-thousand year history of fascism, including numerous episodes since 1945 (and currently), many directed and staged by US and European (and Arab) spooks and State Departments to facilitate profit flow into the pockets of the rich insiders who sponsor and own most of the world's constantly recurring fascists.
    (2) A particularly ugly (unconscious I guess) irony of the film was the writer's and director's apparently felt need to convince their American and British audience that gassing Jews was bad by trapping a little German boy in the crowd in the gas chamber scene (who was clean and looked like an American or British little boy and was, in fact, played by a British little boy), thus (unconsciously I assume) confirming an earlier remark by the movie German boy's mother that the Jews weren't people, something American and British movie audiences could still be counted on to (at least subconsciously) believe about everybody (not just Jews, everybody) outside their own borders or even neighborhood boundaries. Indeed, the effectiveness of the final chase scene depended on the fear of the 1998 British and American audience that the (nazi) cavalry, having just realized the little German boy was in there, would not arrive in time to save HIM (the little German boy).
    This reminded me of another much better contemporary (1997) film, "A Time To Kill," which assumed (correctly) that a jury and, by extension, the American audience, could only realize the full horror of the rape and brutalizing of a little black girl by imagining she was white. The embarrassing implications of this about the movie jury AND the contemporary movie audience may have been clear without being stated, for unusually conscious movie-goers (who could also note for themselves the movie's demonstration of the insanity of the insanity plea and of the lameness of psychiatrists as a breed - it WAS a good movie), but, OVERTLY, the screen writer and director did not help them see this. In fact, they deliberately protected audience denial about American fascism by having the movie jury tearfully come to their senses when the heroic young lawyer, after describing the little black girl's ordeal, supposedly awakened their supposedly basically good American hearts with the very cheap dramatic statement, "Now imagine she's white!" The otherwise good actor didn't say that line well, probably because, as a good actor, he knew how cheap it was.
    The screen writer and director had apparently decided to spare their audience the pain of any real awakening by censoring John Grisham's novel in which, after the young lawyer's LOGICAL philosophical summation failed (as logic almost always does in America), a woman on the jury so intelligent she was like a mutant in the otherwise normal American community took advantage of the jury's normality, left the little black girl out of it, convinced them THEY'D have shot any pair of BLACK men who'd brutalized and raped a blonde blue-eyed little girl they all knew, pointed out that the 50,000 blacks surrounding the courthouse were about to burn the place down with them in it, and therefore (logic even Americans could grasp), since she wasn't going to agree with THEM, to escape in time, they'd HAVE TO unanimously agree with HER instead and quickly deliver a possibly extra-legal but civilized (rather than fascist) verdict.
    (3) This comment is on my own website, because I could NOT post it anywhere else, including the Wikipedia page on the film, without joining a politically correct club and submitting to one of the full-body-address-bio-etc. fascist checkpoint search procedures pervading the internet and the world from horizon to horizon these days, through which we are all being tagged, catalogued, and followed - something I refuse to do.
-Glen Roberts

Are newly reported Jihadists in Iraq & Syria using US arms?

  23 June 2014: Are the newly reported ISIS jihadists now seriously threatening US-backed Iraq using arms they got from their brethren in Syria who got the arms from Obama? It's a question US embedded media whom you may think know what's what but who didn't know about the ISIS until a few days ago aren't publicly asking.
    Why not? NOT asking that question PLUS recent strenuous daily lying about Obama's "reluctant" foreign intervention policy amounts to a cover-up of Bloody Obama's all-along arming of the Syrian jihadists with guns from Libya and Iraq and directly, I'm sure, but anyway through Turkey, where the booming new arms industry is, in fact, a US/Turkish business partnership, something I told you about a long time ago.
    And why would US media cover up such shameful stuff? Come on! Most media are owned by insiders fully invested in the business jungle and therefore religiously committed to the number one law of that jungle that "the" economy (their part of it) HAS TO grow and grow and keep growing.
    That's why they cover up the dangers of overpopulation and the collapse of the eco-system, and it's why they promote war and color it glorious. And now, while the resources necessary for all other businesses are dying out with the eco-system, war is the biggest and most stable business left in the world, and the US is not just the biggest arms (and war) maker; it's almost the whole show. All US presidents sell arms and war to US tax payers for trillions of dollars, and the spread and distribution of war as a product now dwarfs oil, bananas, and even drugs.
    And why would the supposedly "reluctant" warrior, Barack Obama, be neck-deep in all this shameful stuff and its cover-up? Come on, again!!! Did you really think black skin covering a president's head would provide a filter the passing through of which would transform his view of the world into a progressive view? Obama is no different from his predecessors and, if you campaigned for him and voted for him, you made a mistake now long over-due for correction. I have a 5-6-year-old theory that the Republicans originally found him and sold him to the Democrats.
    Obama grew up in white neighborhoods and schools and learned to tap dance so well that it took him all the way to the White House, where, needing to know something about issues, he filled his head up from the filing cabinets and became one more Bush. He personally wanted power and, as a thoroughly establishment politician, he wanted continued financial success for himself and his fellow insiders. His PR crew kept him blabbering about "hope" and "change" to fool you, and you bought it, even though he went right on with business as usual, starting one more war after another WITHOUT PROVOCATON, right in front of your face.
-Glen Roberts

Media cover up new Russia, Cuba, Latin America bank deal

  11 July 2014: The NY Times can NOT tell you that Vladimir Putin was in Havana yesterday and today, just as they can't tell you that the constant growth they sell is killing our entire eco-world or that a Muslim gang worse than Al Qaida are reconquering old Mesopotamia (the Tigris/Eurphrates watershed) for Islam using U.S. arms, because then they'd have to tell you more stuff they don't want you to know, such as that Putin, acting for several new trading blocs and a new world bank (BRICS) is seeking alliances with CELAC, ALBA and other Latin American coalitions who've been uniting against Washington for years, something else the Times hasn't told you.
    The Cuban newspaper Granma cites Putin's wish to reverse Russia's ill advised weakening of ties with Cuba in the 90's now that Cuba has become the mainstay of a "united, strong, economically sustainable and independent" Southwestern quarter-globe movement away from US domination and toward global unity.
    Putin's reference to global unity partly relates to the contrast between the courteously respectful tone of Latin America toward the world and the ugly arrogance of the U.S. and partly to an actually already forming new world alliance between BRICS (in part a new world bank backed by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa - half the world's population) and what may soon become regional BRICS client-coalitions in Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe and the Far East - most certainly in Latin America.
    But also, maybe most importantly to Putin, he's campaigning for HIMSELF as the chief rival of Barack Obama for the title of REAL "leader of the free world" (now that Hugo Chavez is gone), and he surely wants Washington to get the message (even if the Times doesn't share it with you) that he is allying HIMSELF and Russia with Latin America, emphatically including Cuba, both politically and economically.
    I'm assuming his praise of Latin America's "economic sustainability" and growing "independence," whether sincere or not, is an urgent assurance TO Cuba and Latin America that, as a bloc AND as part of BRICS, they are already self sufficient enough to get away with taking a tougher autonomous stance, virtually liberating most of the Western Hemisphere from US control, and that Russia will stand by them and help them - if they need help, thus making himself (in the eyes of most of the world, whether you get it or not) the good guy and Obama the clear bad guy. Watch, while he keeps ostentatiously playing that role.
    As an undiplomatic truth teller myself, not necessarily on any president's wave length, I'm interpreting, of course. But I'm hoping not only that this IS Putin's message and that Obama, who was recently put firmly in his place in Syria by Putin, understands it, but also that Raul Castro, another president who has been speaking recently in ambiguous terms WAY off my wave length, gets it and is encouraged to toughen his own stance as a militant revolutionary - if he needs to.
    Raul keeps insisting that Cuba IS staying on course, still transitioning THROUGH socialism still TOWARD communism, as its Constitution says it must do, but in reference to Cuba's new foreign investment law, he keeps using what sound to me like capitalist terms, and I wish he wouldn't. Cuba doesn't need growth, development, and investment in the sense I understand those terms. It needs self sufficiency, at least within the purely Latin American bloc Putin was talking about, and continual progress toward the time when all Cubans have equally good homes and an equally good life, and all able-bodied Cuban adults are participating as equally as is practically possible in the production of goods and services.
    That progress, already so far along that Cuba was already the most civilized country I'd ever seen, though still far from complete, was still happening, at least poco-a-poco, when I was there last. I wish Raul and Granma would keep assuring me in plain words that it still is. And I hope that the small web pub (not a NY Times clone) that reported Raul's apology to Putin today for the island's population decline got it wrong and that he was, instead, boasting of a very intelligent drop toward the level of population stability critical to the planning and progress of a finite civilized state that I thought he and Fidel understood and I wish I thought all the progressive new Latin American leaders understood.
    That last paragraph, by the way, is not the analysis of Cuba's current revolutionary status that I've been promising for some time to get to "in a minute." It's been 7 years since I last saw Cuba. I don't want to jump to any conclusions and, frankly, I don't trust anyone else's account. I keep hoping to get back there for an 8th visit soon to again see how things are going for myself, accompanied, I hope, by a completely objective progressive Mexican friend who can plug the holes in my Spanish, but I've been trying for a year to recover from an illness that precludes my boarding a tightly packed plane to anywhere. And that's the way it is.
-Glen Roberts

Obama bombs away again, again with no provocation

   8 Aug 2014: Julius Caesar Obama is at it again in Iraq. This time he's simultaneously saying he won't do it AND doing it, which is a quicker variation of his normal habit of making a promise today and breaking it tomorrow. But it's the same thing. The "reluctant" but trigger happy cowboy has started another bomb-droppping war.
   And why? Well (I go on next day, Aug 9), the story changes every hour - and that's seriously disgusting -BECAUSE - he's been saying and taking bows for saying and being celebrated by the media for saying, that he, regardless of pressure, will NOT go to war again without a GOOD reason. And a reason that changes every hour JUST WON'T DO. Right?
   Ever since Valadimir Putin embarrassingly STOPPED Obama and Kerry from immediately attacking Syria last September 11, by making an all-changing deal between Syria and (not Obama but) the UN, and Obama had to change to his NUMBER TWO FACE, he's been strenuously (with a lot of reminders from the media) pretending this famous reluctance that we've been reading about every every every day, while (as I've kept telling you) secretly yearning to drop some more bombs. So now, at last, he's dropping bombs again, killing people again, attacking another country again, and, just as in Libya, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen, the attack (as far as the US is concerned) is without provocation. And what's his goal? To kill every last ISIS member (the only likely way to stop any Middle Eastern Jihadist movement)?

    Back up a couple of words. I, personally, am often provoked, by the human race, all or most of which I often feel inclined (in some painless way) to annihilate. As far as I am honestly, unhypocritically concerned, the complete annihilation of religious hordes seeking religious government with barbaric religious laws in the Middle East would be welcome news. I'd also welcome an American judicial awakening leading to the erasure from every national, state, and local law book in America of all religion-based laws and I wouldn't weep over the (somehow painless) disappearance of all the American fundamentalist (near Jihadist) hordes so eager to inflict such laws on me. I'm against all religious barbarism, by Christians, Jews, Muslims or anybody, but (admittedly based on only almost certainly reliable hearsay - since I've never been there) I rank Middle Eastern Jihadists as the ugliest barbarians of all, and reading about the rising barbarism of ISIS, including their revival of stoning of women to death in Syria, their lopping off of crowds of reluctant converts' heads, and their attempted massacre of thousands of Zoroastrian civilians huddled fearfully on an Iraqi mountain top, I emotionally itch (I mean me alone, not allied with NATO or the marines) to strike ISIS, too - in fact, to annhilate THEM - just for starters. Luckily for all religious creeps, though, I don't even own a slingshot.

    But, Barack Obama, who is well armed, is neither legitimately licensed, i.e. elected (that is, he was unfortunately elected US president but NOT "leader of the free world"), nor is he intellectually any more qualified than George Bush to have control over so many bombs or to decide what to do with them, and it's frightening to think where he might drop them next. There ARE a few political leaders in the world who are more and maybe completely qualified, but so few that THAT is one of the often forgotten reasons we have the UN, and the unilateral decision awhile back of US, British, and French war chiefs to change that and make NATO a substitute for the UN has never been ratified by the world at large, and that's why, before going to war, US presidents are still (vainly, naively) expected to pretend the US has been provoked, which, except for George Bush I, they have all lamely done UNTIL Obama.
    THIS is the fourth new war of his own Obama has chalked up - all without provocation.
    The first news reports a few days ago, from outside the US, had US bombers ready to strike or already striking ISIS forces near Erbil (or Arbil or Irbil) in Kurdish Iraq, because US troops and a US embassy there were "endangered." But that excuse was not destined to hold up. I'd already read about the thousands of Zoroastrians cornered on Mount Sinjar (or Zinjar), by other ISIS forces reportedly aiming to wipe out the entire sect. But that was a different story.

    Of the pending or happening US incursion, since my taxes were involved, I asked myself,'WHY are there either US troops or an embassy in Erbil?' Did you ask yourself that? By surfing some cyber-space (on Aug 8), I learned there might be (unexplainably) some 800 newly arrived US troops in Iraq and that some of them might be in Erbil, connected, some sources said, to an international military "command" - maybe NATO. I also learned that, while Erbil, not being a national capital, has no US embassy, since it is A Kurdish regional capital, there could reasonably be a US consulate there.

    Then, US media reported US bombing or threats to bomb near Erbil AND, without any recognizable grammatical connection, the plight of the the Zoroastrians was described, something some Americans had slightly heard of and felt provoked by and could be trusted to connect to the bombing on their own (I assumed the editors assumed). But the US news made no clear connection between the situations, geographically or otherwise, and they continued not to mention or explain the supposedly endangered US troops.

    I asked myself, 'How far is Mount Sinjar from Erbil?' I looked it up, because, no matter how little company I have realizing it, I realize the importance of geography. I found that the mountain is about 150 miles and 4 hours on wheels away from the ISIS hordes fighting the Kurds near Erbil, and that neither US troops inside Erbil nor the possible consulate were endangered YET (yet is an important word) by the fighting nearby between ISIS and the Kurds, since many thousand refugees were finding Erbil a safe haven where life was going on normally. I acknowledge that One hundred fifty miles is not incredibly far from an air war campaign, but no other media, foreign or US, that I have looked at has said anything about the related geography.

    Then, US media changed the embassy to a consulate, to which they connected some US troops, leaving out any mention of any international "command," and revealed, without explaining it, Obama's intention to "strike" the ISIS hordes near Erbil (something foreign media said he'd already done), apparently to help the Kurds defeat them, apparently because we like the Kurds better and, incidentally (though not mentioned by any embedded media), we more easily see the ugliness of ISIS religious barbarians than we see the ugliness of the equally ugly religious barbarians we've been supporting and arming in Syria.

    Still surfing, I learned that an airlift was dropping food and other supplies to the surrounded top of Mount Sinjar, some of which were effectively received but that no US assault on the hordes surrounding the mountain was taking place. I also learned that, though there were a tragically large number of defenseless Zoroastrians on the mountain, most had gone elsewhere, so the Mount Sinjar affair was bad enough but not a totally genocidal threat, as it had been billed.

    Then, finally, Obama spoke, admitted he was going to "strike" the ISIS hordes because they are one of those oft mentioned, seldom explained, "threats to US national security," but spoke as if he hadn't done it yet, though foreign news continued to report that he had. He also acknowledged having sent, on his own hook, 800 troops to Iraq, as "advisors" of all things, but that he would not put any "boots on the ground," which confused my pocket calculator, because it (my calculator) said that unless they were barefoot, his 800 troops already there were wearing 1600 boots.
    By talking almost tearfully, though not relevantly, about the Zoroastrian fix, he seemed to make a case for UN (not US) intervention. But, jumping from source to source, I picked it up that he may have sent 100 of his 800 troops AND some embassy personnel from endangered Baghdad to more endangered Erbil, supposedly to get them out of "danger." WHAT?    Did you exclaim, 'WHAT?' So did I.

   In fact (still polishing this story on early a.m.Aug 10), I asked myself, 'Why did Obama send embassy personnel and 100 troops (if he did) to Erbil, for their safety, when Erbil was no safer than Baghdad?'
    I asked myself, 'Was it to put them in danger and create a supposed provocation to justify US involvement in a war no more important to the US than hundreds of other wars going on in the world?'
    I asked myself, 'Why isn't the Zoroastrian ordeal a UN, rather than a US concern?'
    And I asked myself, as I've already been asking on this site (scroll just a little way down to June 23) 'Why isn't it obvious and worth discussing in the news, anyway, that the ISIS hordes, who are fighting us with our arms, got some of their US arms from their brother goons in Syria, with whom they have been associating there - that is, their brother goons who WERE armed by Obama to help them overthrow Bashar Assad?
    And, not finally, I assure you, I asked myself if it is not just a little embarrassing to embedded media who've been supporting the Syrian rebel-goons and to Obama who DID ARM THEM, that Obama's now angry demonization of the ISIS goons sounds exactly and very appropriately like what Bashar Assad has been saying all along about Obama's own duplicate goons in Syria?
    I'm sure we'll hear some different not-very-good answers by tomorrow.
-Glen Roberts

Some postscripts to Obama's new Iraq (maybe Syria) war

  17 Aug 2014: Several post scripts to Aug 8, in reference to Obama's unmentionable reasons for his latest bombing escapade (besides wanting to be a great war lord), IF the Kurds, with US help, take control of all northern Iraq, they will also control half of Iraq's oil.
  As for Hillary (who longs to be the most famous woman warlord since Cleopatra) and HER complaint that Obama hasn't armed the Syrian rebels enough already, IF she had her retroactive way, the ISIS would now be even better equipped with US arms than they are.
   More on that: IF it's true, and I think it is, that most of any rational fraction of Obama's proxy Syrian army have long since abandoned their too-barbaric fellows and either left the country or joined Bashar Assad's army, while half or more of the remaining Syrian rebels have either gone over to ISIS already or are thinking of it, then, to please his X Secretary and Congressional Republicans who agree with her, it would be simpler for Obama to just call a cease fire, while he sends fresh arms over to his ISIS opposition now on the field against him in Iraq.
   Meanwhile, the ugliest related news rumor is that the rebels IN Syria currently being (thankfully) trampled by Assad have asked Obama to send his bombers over the line to help THEM conquer the ISIS. If the bloodthirsty ass does that, he just might spark a MIDDLE-EAST-wide World War, pitting everybody against him (and us), while all his own stirred up rebels keep biting his ankles.
   In response to US super-stupid pseudo progressives, still stubbornly pro-Obama and therefore no longer pacifists, who have now started dutifully cheering on their face-book and twitter boards for Obama's and the Kurds' WAR against the justifiably demonized ISIS, please wake up and notice that the Kurds are Muslims, too, who, aside from their tolerance for an array of religions, are just as backward and brutal as all other Jihadists in most of the ugly regular ways, including (this'll surely make you think - maybe) in their treatment of women; and that all that keeps Hamas from equalling Israeli brutality is their sub-par technology; and that all that keeps you from demonizing all the Muslims in the world (not to mention all the OTHER religious barbarians) is the silly pro-democracy and pro-THE-people fixationss that you wear like rings in your noses, your failure to do enough research, your inadequately suppressed normal American intellectual cowardice, and that you're letting the philosophically retarded nerds who run the social media dictate your slogan choices.
-Glen Roberts

Is Obama trying to start a war with Russia?

  3 Sep 2014: After clumsily trying to impress the world by wagging his finger at Vladimir Putin for weeks and failing to draw even a wink, let alone a blink from the Russian, who seems, unlike Obama, to know what he's doing, Obama and (he hopes) his fellow UK and French would-be war lords will now try to save the US president's face by exactly duplicating the stupidity of 1962 that led to the Cuban missile crisis.
   Obama wants war. And maybe any war will do. Anyway, make no mistake about it. Obama (YES, DAMMIT, OBAMA) and maybe his fellow NATO idiots, at one of NATO's regular self-deception meetings in Wales, England, this week, HOPE to get a vote tomorrow to semi-surround Russia with an Eastern European arc of poised attack positions, manned by 4,000 troops (WHOSE troops the NY Times keeps a secret), ready to jump within hours if Russia doesn't stop supposedly invading Ukraine (though there is no evidence that Russia is invading Ukraine). Excuse me, but that's insane.
   Typically, the Times story omits the ethically required second paragraph in which Vladimir Putin should be quoted pointing out that no such thing is happening, accompanied by a report from Al Jazeera today that THEIR reporter on the spot can't see any sign of Russian soldiers in a Ukrainian town YOU were told was full of Russian invaders.
   I expect this story (of the NATO idiocy) to die quickly, but I don't know what will happen. What should happen, though, is that NATO should be disbanded as a military force. NATO isn't a country, it's not under even the illusional control or even influence of any civil population, and it should not have troops to deploy or bombs to drop. It is a political perversion which is on the wrong side of what should be history but which, thanks to misleaders like Barack Obama and misinformation specialists with ugly agendas of their own, has become a dangerously out-of-control acronym standing in the way of world progress toward civilization.
   NATO is an entirely visible yet under-the-table venue through which an American president, while smiling at his constituency on one side of his mouth, can ignore his responsibilities to anyone and start one war after another until he kicks off an unprecedented disaster.

-Glen Roberts

Obama totally at war again in Iraq - with Syria next
IF his bombers aren't already there.

   11 Sep 2014: 9-11, i.e. the date, 13 years ago, of an attack supposedly on America by somebody who, supposedly, didn't like Americans,now marks the month-old growth of what was first called a "strike" and then an "attack" and has become, without even ceremonial approval by the UN, the US Congress, or the American people, another full-blown, not-at-all-credibly-provoked WAR, supposedly by America but really by Barack Obama and NATO, aimed, judging by the rapidly changing verbs Obama uses (mostly probably unconscious synonyms for anihilate, the recent favorite being destroy), at KILLING a lot more than 3,000 of somebody else's people in a couple of buildings, since the "barbarians" (his description) Obama declares he's after, even as initially perceived, must, if that means (and it must mean) all barbarians hot for sawing off heads with serrated kitchen knives, stoning women to death, blowing up busloads of strangers, etc., and if barbarism is to be accepted as a legitimate justification for a president to quick-draw a war and IS the justification this time, that MUST MEAN that Obama's target for destruction will have to ultimately include a major brimless, bottomless sector of the entire Middle East, where murderous gangs (from his own Syrian proxies to the Muslim Brotherhood to Al Qaida to the goons he gave Libya) are indistinguishable and often enough interchangeable to the point of intermingling.
   Do you think the beheading of US reporters makes that OK? Lots and lots (and that's an understatement) of reporters are brutally killed every year in the world's many war zones. In times when the US was not even officially involved, US reporters have become famous while being held captive for years under duress in the Middle East and sometimes executed, without tripping any White House war switch. The US has even taken advantage of Middle Eastern brutality by sending people there to be tortured.
   But do you think public displays of brutality make it OK for a cowboy president to quick-draw a war? Brutality is the norm in war on this planet, including by fascists sponsored by US capitalists, and sometimes even by US troops and by good old Israel, whose 5 bombs dropped into one house to kill one person MUST have blown some innocent heads off. And in the last few years, rebels in Libya and Syria, armed and cheered on by America, have been major perpetrators of brutality. For instance, there's been a video you could have watched on the net (without any commercials) for about a year showing Al Nusra Front Syrian rebels armed by Obama pushing catholic priests down on their knees in a weedy lot, hands behind their backs, a knee pushing their faces into the dirt, and sawing their heads off from the side with a kitchen knife.
   That just about brought up my breakfast, but it makes me sick, too, that the American media spend so much effort convincing their readers to buy one ugly war after another from the arms industry; and it makes me even sicker that the public is so easily suckered; and it makes me a bit sick, too, to see NO peace marches in America to protest a war if it's started by a politically correct black president and to anticipate the same level of unconcern when the proliferation of wars by that same president gets to Latin America and countries now sincerely trying to achieve a civilized future are bombed to rubble - AND it makes me sick to KNOW, whether you do or not, that all this misdirection of the world's attention for the sake of profits and presidential and secretary-of-state places in history ABSOLUTELY ensures that nothing will ever be done to sensibly CHANGE focus and start ending the brutality of capitalism and poverty and religion that causes most war - or to start at least talking honestly about all the serious ongoing environmental catastrophes now beheading the eco-system we all live in.
-Glen Roberts

US loses face again, as Russia's Ukraine goals
turn out reasonable and achievable

   15 Sep 2014: If Ukrainian separatists achieve or are granted by Ukraine (however you want to view it) a "degree" of autonomy this week , due, during their shaky truce, to negotiations and parliamentarian action in Kiev, the result COULD be a finally peaceful resolution leaving everyone's face intact except Barack Obama's and NATO's, while providing Russia a friendly neighbor to assure improved access to the Black Sea.
   The most threatening fly in the ointment today is the reportedly actual (as opposed to "rumored") advent of NATO military into western Ukraine today on a "training" mission. Since Russia has not clearly been guilty of any such incursion, a successful denouement to the Ukrainian crisis will reveal Barack Obama, John Kerry, and NATO as the dangerous anachronisms they are. And the worst of THAT isthat Obama's face will not FEEL saved to him until he charges backward again, as he may have already done in Syria.
-Glen Roberts

Obama finally invades Syria, again without provocation

   23 Sep 2014: Well, Bloody Obama's finally invading Syria, which he's been frantic to do ever since he finished fucking over Libya, he thinks he's finally evened the score against Vladimir Putin for showing him up for the ass he was in Syria a year ago, and who knows what's next?
   There's certainly no clear strategy taking place, and a satellite image of Raqqa shows a place where bombs that explode won't be "smart." Embedded media'll have some collateral casualty stories to cover up or rationalize, and Israel will feel licensed to rack up some more scores of those itself.
   As for Obama's new buzz-idea that "barbarians' are fair game, it's not his. I already said it (and so did Epicurus), but that's not the whole horrible mess that's happening. I'm just here telling you the unutterable truth, wondering out loud wherethe peace marches are in America today, taking ANOTHER opportunity to express my contempt for Obama and for the US pseudo-progressives who, once having elected a politically correctly colored warlord have stopped being pacifists and have become pc-type war-mongers, and telling you, "I told you so."

-Glen Roberts

No Americans marching for peace or protesting
their illogically politically correct president's ongoing wars

   7 Oct 2014: The two top stories not in the news today are still the failure of capitalism, long overdue for appropriate disposition into the waste basket of history, and the extreme overgrowth of humanity and their encampment, obviously causing the daily more obvious collapse of our eco-system.
    Not even third in importance, though VERY important and equally NOT in the news, NO Americans are marching for peace today; NO news-size CROWDS of Americans are protesting their president's ongoing war(s). Why not? My daughter says most Americans who poured into the streets to protest Bill Clinton's possibly morally explainable intrusion into the Balkans probably NOW THINK it's demonstration enough to stay on their couches and tweet their friends.
    Maybe. Maybe that's THE major success of highly embedded, big-time promotion of "social" (pro-democracy) media - keeping all the pseudo-progressive, actually merely liberal tweety birds OFF the streets and harmlessly huddled with their cell phones, through which the social mass masters can feed them the right slogans.
    Obviously, the few true American progressives (in tune with, if not all wearing currently VERY cogent but NOT newsworthy T-shirts proclaiming the T-shirt wearers to be "not anti-social - just anti-stupid) couldn't form a news-size crowd in a narrow alley.
    Neither can I. But being BOTH anti-stupid AND anti-social enough to think it, I think that most of the Americans NOT protesting Barack Obama's war spree at all are NOT in the news or the streets today or yesterday or last week or the week before because they're too defensively stupid to be embarrassed enough YET to regret and repudiate the mistake they made when they thought (with a lot of media help) that they'd reached the ultimate pinnacle in "progressive" achievement - an achievement they thought earned them the right to stay on their couches twiddling with their cell phones from then on - the election of America's first Black president, who THEN...
    ...did NOT close Guantanamo or normalize relations with Cuba and Venezuela, did NOT end the wars in the Middle East, did NOT let the real estate salesmen and bankers and developers and home loans crooks suffer much, and did NOT give Americans socialized medicine, and, after an initial flurry of confusion abroad, also did NOT increase the world's respect for America or even the dollar.
    For a better perspective on your guy Obama, all you confused self-called "progressives," scroll down a couple of inches to the cluster of links going back through this column to January 2009.
    Meanwhile, surf the web to somebody else's newspapers to read that Evo Morales, after nine years in office in a country that had, previous to his 2005 election, been overthrowing its government every other week, having brought, instead of war, a slow improvement of people's lives, is about to be elected for the third time as Bolivia's first Indian president; and also about the hemisphere's most respectable president, Jose Mujica, who gives away 90% of his salary and conducts government from the front porch of his small and shabby farm house, and who, due to Uruguay's term limits, is only about to be replaced by the guy HE replaced, Tabare Vasquez, which is OK because Vasquez is also part of a swarm of socialist presidents moving Latin America past the US into a more humanitarian future, or, as the CIA puts it, "going Castro's way" (though NOT, of course, in the US "news".)

-Glen Roberts

Ebola not a one-time disaster; but,
like oil blow-outs, aquifer depletion, huge population shifts, etc.,
only one symptom of broad ecological collapse,
that can't be resolved by military-minded world misleaders

   20 Oct 2014: IF, starting today, everyone crossing any border were subject to a blood test and immediate quarantine if found to be afflicted with any known catastrophic communicable disease, the checkpoints would still keep routinely letting carriers of OTHER as-yet unknown or unpublicized catastrophic diseases get by and go on freely spreading tomorrow's headlined medical disaster.
    That's certain. But do you get it? Barack Obama and other corporate presidents, who are responding to the suddenly PC subject of Ebola as if it were a military challenge, DON'T. And typical western media chiefs are coupling the Ebola story with the ISIS story, too. Unlike Cuba, which has already sent an undoubtedly competent medical team to Liberia, just as they did ahead of anyone else to Haiti, US presidential War- Chief Obama is sending a military medical contingent.
    Long ago, in the early 50's, when, as a teenager with a typewriter, I very seriously took up my role as alarming message bearer to the world about the impending threat of ecological collapse, though climate change didn't occur to me, I included among the symptoms of disaster that I accurately predicted would be apparent by the end of the century (i.e. just about now) "free running diseases." I got the phrase from another "doomsayer" but it seemed logical to me then that, as people got more and more dangerously crowded together, they'd catch each other's colds more easily.
    I'm only suggesting, of course, that, while NY Times columnists blissfully go on measuring problems like the persistence of poverty with a capitalist yardstick and corporate presidents keep trying to fix political and philosophical disasters with military bandages, the strangely almost appropriately hysterical reaction to the Ebola story may mark the long overdue end of decades of denial (by maybe all lumpen humans even a little smarter than presidents and news editors) about the already ongoing advent of an ecological apocalypse, which it's almost certainly too late to fix - because all you humans have stubbornly kept denying it for too damned long.
    Since I've been right about just about everything else I've bothered with (read this entire website with your brain in gear to check out that claim), it's probably a mistake to assume I'm wrong about this.
    In an interesting footnote, a number of embedded columnists have recently been almost sanctimoniously assuring their readers that - now - previously unthinkable quarantines may be OK to accept, and I wonder if those columnists, back in the late 80's when it was de rigueur to demonize Cubans for quarantining AIDS patients - a logical medical strategy that has brought them (including the gays among them) the lowest incidence of AIDS in the world - ever even tentatively sent - even as far as the copy editors' desks - any such thoughts then.
-Glen Roberts

Precedent set by Obama for armed medical aid
should be seen as a threat to Venezuela and Cuba

   24 Oct 2014: Beware Americans bearing gifts. What did I just say 4 days ago, almost as if I didn't realize I was saying it? A carefully selected Fox News expert recently predicted that Russia would use a humanitarian emergency as an "excuse" to invade Ukraine. And I just pointed out that Obama is sending a military medical contingent to invade West Africa, except I didn't say invade. I probably should have, since, while Russia MAY do such a thing, America already has (an easy-to-remember example being Haiti) - often.
    In fact, unwanted helpful invasions have long been a US specialty. And now, with the strongly pending probability of a series of medical emergencies coming, Obama has set a precedent for responding to such emergencies with "emergency humanitarian" aid accompanied by the Marines. And, HEY, you naiver-than-anyone Obama supporters, don't kid yourselves your precious Black president isn't that insidious. He just invaded two countries (WITHOUT PROVOCATION) to protect their people from their own presidents, who were guilty of nothing unusual except defiance toward the US; and he's now re-invading one of them to protect them from an epidemic of barbarians spreading their religion, who are horrible but not much worse than barbaric American presidents throughout the last century who invaded one Latin American country after another to spread their democracy religion.
    I hope Cuba and any other Latin American countries charitably involved in the Ebola crisis don't need anyone to tell them to take their own portable quarantine facilities to West Africa with them and make 100 percent sure that none of their volunteers return home with Ebola, and that they will jointly resolve to cooperatively bar US aid for any medical problems that may pop up anywhere south of the Rio Grande in the future. I seem to remember Violeta Chamorro once almost agreeing to a supposedly good joint Nicaragua/US troop project and Daniel Ortega stomping his foot down hard, so that Nicaragua has had ever since then a rule against any US uniforms entering Nicaragua for any reason. I'm fairly sure that Bolivia, under Evo Morales, has such a rule, and all CELAC countries (especially Venezuela and Cuba), if they don't, should.
    In fact, all the same countries, again especially Venezuela and Cuba, should be shunning ANY apparently benign interaction with the US, including mutual assistance projects and even trade. Cuba, for instance, needs to stop worrying about the embargo, EMBRACE the embargo instead, and focus on Latin America-wide self sufficiency through CELAC allowing them to quarantine themselves, along with the rest of Latin America (hopefully including Colombia very soon) against any supposedly benign US involvement, including help, of any kind, for the foreseeable future.
-Glen Roberts

Progressives need Philosophical Positioning System
and here it is!

PHILOSOPHICAL TRUE NORTH IS: AN HONEST VIEW OF WHAT IS NOW

A TRUE PROGRESSIVE'S TRUE-NORTH/GOAL HAS TO BE:
► A civilized one world communist/atheist state with less than a quarter of a billion people all speaking the same language and living harmoniously with each other and nature as freely as can be allowed without disrupting either civilization or nature.

ALSO SEE  Pseudo Progressives

   31 Oct 2014: Regressives know what THEY want: MORE! But the world's supposed progressives seem to need a PPS (like a GPS but philosophical instead of geographical), a Philosophical Positioning System. They suffer from compass deficit. What should be their civilization-ward pointing needle always seems maybe intentionally (safely?) bent.
   Maybe they secretly know what they want and are just afraid to say words like communist and atheist and overpopulation out loud or are saving that part for later, but ALL most of them ever DO is recite currently politically correct slogans or equivocate.
   I just coincidentally (though partly because of last Sunday's Uruguayan elections) read a book and watched a movie about two remarkable leftist movements with a lot in common - the Tupamaros (outgoing Uruguayan President Jose Mujica's old gang) of the late 60's and early 70's; and the German RAF (Red Army Faction) of the same time period, both of which, way back then, either suffered from the same compass-deficit-affliction I'm talking about, or were described that way by chroniclers with a worse affliction, i.e. compulsive-political-correctness-display-tendency.
    For sure, both groups won approval and disapproval, often simultaneously from the same critics, because, while their strategy of shooting back at the enemy led them violently astray (the RAF much more violently than the rarely deadly Tupamaros), at least their backward-pointing compass needle was straight enough to always point correctly at the right enemy - the same enemy - the clearly profit/power/business-growth driven enemies of ALL of "us" (though lots of "us" don't get it), who justify their own never ending barbarism as god-approved "freedom" (business freedom, that is) and as a necessary measure (they say) to protect the state (really mostly their own private estates) from "terrorism;" and to protect supposedly "national" (but really only big business) "security," a line of bullshit that somehow works well enough to keep them out of prison and in charge of the stupid world.
    Whoops! I'm digressing. Right wing asininity, which is not my subject in THIS essay, is too easy - for me as well as for the too too inarticulate leftists AND/OR their chroniclers who ARE my subject. Never mind, for the moment, the secrecy of the world's misleaders about THEIR motives. My question right now is: WHY are supposed leftists (or their always more-pc-than-thou chroniclers) so reticent, timid, or just vague about the progressive motives that should make THEM the good guys?
    The otherwise excellent 2008 action-adventure movie, "The Baader Meinhof Faction," while thoroughly explicating many specific violent (exciting?) ACTS of both the post-Nazi German government and of the RAF insurgents, except for a few timid suggestions by a Platonic government character that some unclarified social conditions could be modified to resolve all the strife, completely skips over any reference to anyone's (including the government's) political/social/economic philosophies or goals - and, more importantly, while the young rebels are shown vaguely RELATING to Che Guevara, without apparently understanding his international revolutionary intentions, and they once even mention the Tupamaros, whom they completely misinterpret, and, oddly (in my view), they journey to the Middle East and briefly train together with Palestinian insurgents (with no on-screen philosophical conversation at all except about tactics and sex), the script, at least, while underscoring their extreme dedication, indicates NO awareness on their part of Fidel Castro or the Cuban Revolution or even the FARC - or of what should be a normal preoccupation of ANY real progressive with the need to move humanity OUT OF chronic capitalist-jungle barbarism and on to the path to civilized socialism and eventually communism.
    In fact, in the 60's, 70's, and 80's, I knew too many US "liberals" who were just that blank. Over coffee or beer with nobody else around but me, I met a few individuals who could get heated about real (even realistic) motives, purposes and goals. But most of the enthusiastic NGO members I knew then only recited slogans. The movie tells me that, in spite of their RED Army tag, the RAF kids were similarly limited, except for some angry but incoherent outbursts about Vietnam, to tactical slogans; and they apparently either didn't know, or the film's producer, director, and writers didn't know or didn't want to offend the movie audience by mentioning or explaining - THEIR future agenda for the world - if they had any. This may be because this was an '08 instead of an '88 film. I should read Stefan Aust's book (that the movie was based on). But I've encountered enough philosophical blankness on the left all along to fear that, in this respect, the film may have been fairly accurate. I think it would definitely be accurate now, for instance, if it were about the recent "Occupy" movement or today's "social-media" or "blogosphere" contributors.
    The loosely written or loosely translated 1973 book, "The Tupamaro Guerrillas," by Maria Esther Gilio, is also far more thorough in its treatment of specific government abuses of the poor, of the suffering of Uruguayan old people and mental patients of that time, of over-reactions by the guerrillas, and of the torture of guerrillas who were caught, than it is of anyone's philosophy. The justification for "armed struggle" as a strategy gets some attention. A lot of pages are devoted to street-level public reactions and even to church-level religious reactions. There is a long, somewhat humorous, blow-by-blow description of a bank robbery that ended with all the money being returned to the bank. Some of the relatively few atrocities committed by the guerrillas are detailed, as if the author thought this made the book more even-handedly objective. But, even though the Tupamaros, like the RAF, were credited with some vague sense of relationship with Che Guevara and admiration for but not agreement with Fidel, there is virtually no discussion in the book of their own political/social/economic plans for a better Uruguayan future.
    At the very end of the book, which was written while the Tupamaros were still active, a long declaration that the guerrillas distributed listing government abuses (that is, a declaration about the past and about the OTHER side), obviously formally imitating Thomas Jefferson, ends with one philosophical slogan that at first surprised me: A nation is for everybody or it is for nobody.
    This surprised me, because, at first glance it seemed to parallel a red-letter bottom line in my essay on the form and purpose of an ideal Civil State: I can't live in a civilized state unless everybody lives in a civilized state.
    But there's a difference. My red-letter statement is a perfectly articulate and clearly logical explanation of why I, though I am openly contemptuous of democracy, -   why I,   as an advocate of civilization, which, to be civilized must be fair, -   why I also advocate a communist guarantee of social and economic (though not political) equality for EVERYONE. The Tupamaro slogan, if it's clearly about anything, suggests only a vague but very pc pro-democracy attitude, which I think I've seen reflected in the words and actions of President Jose Mujica.
    Mujica, though often as apparently whimsical as the bank robbery mentioned above, thoroughly deserves his status as the world's currently most respectable chief of state, because besides his famous life-style (as simple as mine or Thoreau's), he HAS kept Uruguay in the forefront of the contemporary Latin American movement to the left. But, while his predecessor (and successor in January if he wins a run-off election this month), Tabare Vasquez, as Uruguay's first new leftist president, boldly took his socialist idealism into office with him in 2005, Mujica has been a milder champion of a "mixed economy," still improving rapidly for the poor, but moderate enough to earn praise even from US "experts." And, as if dutifully joining the modern (extremely unfortunate) "pro-democracy" movement, too, Vasquez hasn't recently been talking the same talk he talked 4 or 5 years ago, either.
    In fact, of course based on what I'm reading (those damned more-pc-than-thou chroniclers again) I don't expect Mujica or Vasquez either (we'll see) to echo Fidel's declaration of a few years ago that, "when there's one communist left in the world, it will be me."

    Why not? I shout in red, because I've arrived at my point. The depth to which humans almost around the world have been dyed with convenient (to their enemies) and apparently indelible taboos against communism, atheism, population reduction and all other social/political/economic/philosophical/ecological realism is, TO ME, amazing - especially since it's both so obviously vitally important to get past those taboos AND so easy to do it - because the path is so compellingly rational and so plainly visible - or SHOULD BE!
    But, somehow, first the priests (since at least the ancient days of Egypt), then the mass media for the last couple of hundred years, and now (since 1990), a total conspiracy of everybody against everybody have convinced everybody (including those who boast of thinking "outside the box") that, while it's wonderful to look and look and look and look and look for "truth" and solutions and inspiring stuff like that, it's ABSOLUTELY unacceptable, maybe megalomaniacal and totalitarian, and certainly anti-social and UNDEMOCRATIC to FIND any (unofficial, REALISTIC, i.e. TRUE) truths or solutions and say so out loud or rudely insist on actually applying them, thus depriving all the other lumpen of their right to go on democratically blabbering and, most importantly, inconveniently interfering with any official stories preferred by the rich.
    Maybe this is truer in America, where I happen to be sitting, but I think it's nearly as bad anywhere where capitalism and the American way are the dominant way.

    It IS amazing that Americans who consider themselves scientifically guided progressives (but can't go an inch past politically correct limits set by insider-approved moles and media who TELL THEM what they are) can almost tearfully, though extremely irrelevantly these days, plead for every naive (often barbaric) person's counter-productive right to his own religion, but CAN'T wake up after 5000 years and at last demand at least world-wide secular government - or much much better, demand, FINALLY, an end to war-promoting, torture-promoting, ignorance-promoting, poverty-promoting, anti-science RELIGION - everywhere - period!!!
    And it's certainly also amazing that American pseudo-progressives who can actually get emotional on cue about health insurance and can sneakily equivocate about the "Canadian plan" or "single-payer" insurance, CAN'T openly demand socialized medicine!!!
    All western pseudo-progressive can whine piteously about women's unequal salaries, or sternly pontificate about equal "opportunity" (just opportunity) for minorities, but they CAN'T demand an end to the brutality of capitalism (which guarantees perpetual poverty) and a sensible move through socialism to communism with the same salary for everybody!!!
    Some, though very few, of them can write letters to the editor defending one woman's or even one teenage girl's right to privately buy morning-after pills, but they CAN'T find out about and boldly tell the world about Cuba's unblushing approach to birth control (which has acually led to a diminishing population), or go out on the street and hold up a poster board that says: ONE CHILD IS ENOUGH, TWO IS MAXIMUM, AND NONE FOR NOW IS BEST!!!
    They can, in plenty of company, continue (after years of apparently safe practice) supporting women's rights to abortion, timidly calling it family planning, but they CAN'T BOLDLY admit what almost everyone I talk to these days secretly admits (with nobody else around but me and him/her to hear): that they know there are TOO MANY PEOPLE and that, to restore the eco-world we live in we have to drastically reduce human population and the human encampment!!!
    They can sustain every inappropriate noun they can think of sustaining (until they finally forget to keep abusing THAT word), and then piously AMEN Al Gore's silly phrase, global warming, exactly UNTIL their minders tell them to AMEN the phrase climate change, instead, and then actually get just as indignant about anyone else who doesn't get that timidly limited "IT" as I'm getting here about their own much more fundamental brain-vision failure, and they can even throw into their eco(NOT)logical chatter mysterious phrases like "before it's too late" and "tipping point." But they CAN'T offend the rich by noticing aloud the obvious comprehensive collapse of the eco-system or get indignant with everyone who keeps insisting on continuous obviously eco-deadly GROWTH!!!
    AND ETC. ETC. ETC.!!!

    That is, the so-called leftists of the world, the mere liberals who call themselves progressives, can feebly "progress," only exactly as far as the insider-approved moles and media who TELL THEM WHAT THEY THINK allow them to progress, but, like Zenoistic philosophical turtles, they CAN NOT go on and finally cross the line their minders won't allow them to cross and finally SAY any of the really important, really progressive things this stupid world really NEEDS to finally hear.
    Is there any hope for humans? -Even for so-called progressives?
    Well - not much more than hope, but just in case somebody out there thinks he/she dares to come in out of the fog - I've still got a working compass (this entire website), and I'm here to share it with secretly intelligent rebels who are not WITHOUT a cause but are or have been just afraid to remember or think of it.
    Just as a regular compass always points at the North Pole even though the North Pole is a long way off, my very good, working compass, regardless of all the mountains of denial in the way, points straight at this sensible ideal:

A TRUE PROGRESSIVE'S TRUE NORTH HAS TO BE:
► A one world communist/atheist state with less than a quarter of a billion people all speaking the same language and living harmoniously with each other and nature as freely as can be allowed without disrupting the system.

    Too ideal, you say (having been taught by your enemies to say that)?
    Come on! First, a convincing sample of humanity (maybe 5%), including me in my 400-square-foot apartment (though, as an American, I'm still denied free health care, and, as a human who cares, I've been robbed of a lot of environmental beauty and ecological security) - ALREADY live at the civilized level stipulated in my definitive description of civilization. So it's certainly not impossible, and the only factors in the way of sharing that now rare, privileged life style with everyone are the capitalist ethic and the fact that there are way too many everybodies to easily share it with.
    Furthermore, I don't expect to change the world - certainly not against the wall of denial I'm up against. THIS document is only about a correctly functioning compass needle supposed progressives need, which, to work as a compass needle should, should POINT to a TRUE AND REALLY NECESSARY IDEAL, i.e. PAST the dead-end lines in the sand drawn by the world's dominant, and apparently (to most people) overwhelming misleaders, and TOWARD civilization AND (most important) to the prevention of a devastating ecological collapse NOW hanging over our heads.
    TOO ideal? As opposed to what? TOO dutifully hopeless to escape capitalistically convenient stagnation? Alice's pertinent rule was, "Either mean what you say, or say what you mean." Maybe she reversed that. Same point. But I say (for the sake of my own credibility to myself), I WON'T COMPROMISE - and you don't have to, either.

-Glen Roberts

Are China and maybe Cuba (yee gods!) going nuts -
and trying to copy stupidly destructive U.S. growth mania???

   5 Dec 2014: The just completed waste of $330 million to "test" NASA's Orion space craft's ability to go up and come down reminds me of China and maybe (hopefully not) the upcoming new analysis of Cuba I've been promising.
   Talking about China's "modern" space probe and their accumulation of a foreign business empire, a supposed expert's judgement, quoted by BBC, that China's Communist Party "has shown it is able to achieve things that no previous Chinese government has ever done" rates an exasperated, "So What?"
   What's China up to? Space technology is among the biggest wastes of energy, time and resources in history and a distraction to boot. Business empires are competitive circuses that are good for the winners and rotten for the losers, socially regressive for humanity, and death on the ecosystem.
   The main things China has to do to stay honest are to keep radically reducing its mammoth population and to fulfill the aim of Communism, to make life good for ALL its citizens equally. If China has conceded its own failure at those two goals and then abandoned them, then, however it seems to the warped western view, China is a failure.
   So what is China up to and how do I find out? Not from western media, who are preoccupied with the glitzy bubble world of business, which they are a part of, and who have nothing but occasional token interest in the real history of a collapsing eco-world, an already economically lost human majority and, eventually, the eminent (I think already-happening) self murder * of the human race.
   I can't speak Chinese or go to China to see for myself, as I have in Latin America, and I don't necessarily trust others who say they have done that. If my website is ever read by anyone inside or anyone who knows anyone inside the Chinese Embassy, I'd appreciate an answer from there to my question. Of course, as soon as I am physically able again, I intend to return to Cuba and find out what the Cuban newspaper Granma's frequent recent references to "foreign investment" and a "growing economy" portend.
-Glen Roberts

* Self-murder? The word suicide would indicate too much intelligence. So I originally tried to find a verb form of the noun genocide to use here but, as a conscientious expert on at least the ENGLISH language, I gave it up. I don't think the word is as useful as its over-battering implies. But, elsewhere on this website, I have logically proven the possibility of a world's end for humanity - not in a single "Doom's Day" but during a bit longer (but not very much longer and probably already happening) "whimper" time, and China's chance of winning the capitalist championship title away from the US in the remaining "mean" time does not excuse China's participation.
-Glen Roberts

Hey, all you pro-democracy folks!
When is your vaunted democracy going to start working
to throw out the rascals who STILL run the world?

  12 Dec 2014: I told you on 20 Jun 2011, 3 1/2 years ago, that "we" (and I don't mean you and I - not willingly, anyway) PAID Libyan rebels to be rebels; now it seems Syrian rebels are US-salary-paid rebels (i.e. mercenaries), too. A tiny news brief today in my home-town's NY Times clone says Syrian "moderates" are angry that their US-paid fighting-man salaries have been cut to STOP (or obscure, don't you think) the collateral ongoing collection of salaries and arms by the grossly barbarian Al Nusra Syrian Jihadist beheaders.
   As the link above just proved, I have no reason to be surprised, so I don't need to say, "Holy Moly!" BUT YOU DO!   In fact, if you're one of those who always tell me, "Democracy may not be perfect, but it's the best system possible," instead of going on blushing privately (or privately twittering) about the CIA's (to me never surprising) torturing and lying record; the rising cost and failure of Obama-care; the immediate media-promoted rebirth of Republican stupidity that you thought you squelched in the last elections; the eternal official sanitizing and even glorifying of U.S. (not necessarily racist but certainly nazi) cop mentality; the ongoing rise of religious law in America; the embarrassing behavior of "our" birds-of-a-feather allies, like Israel's new burst of foreign bombing sprees; the official Turkish regression to it's Ottoman-Empire-days language and religious philosophy (now backed by a modern, US sponsored arms industry); Pakistan's regression to the level of ISIS barbarism; the unreported hundreds-a-year routine head choppings by ALL our Arab shiekhdom friends; our OWN clandestine military support of fascists in Ukraine (covered up by embedded US-media demonizing of Russia); all that on top of the Obama sponsored Twitter effort to stir up a Cuba uprising to justify a NATO invasion there; and capped by Obama's phony adoption of his new Mr-Climate-Change role to ease the heat he's facing for all his Middle Eastern blunders (a charade that blocks your view of the world's worst but always secret and never addressed problem - the comprehensive collapse of the eco-system); I'm saying, instead of passively blushing about all that (and more), why don't you democratically do something about it?
   The wrong people are running the US and the world, and, if it's democracy that's supposed to change that, it's TIME - way past time (NOW being certainly the same thing as that LATER which is not better than but the same as NEVER) - to prove your supposedly wonderful democracy works. Let's see you do it.
   Ho, ho, ho. In all my 78 years, I've never seen democracy done the way it's supposedly done. Even in small NGO's, of which I've known a bunch, there's always been somebody (including me sometimes) who's always steered the majority's vote, while on the national scene before the majority ever come to the polls, they've always already been steered for years into so completely accepting all the buzz slogans that their crooked leaders want them to accept that any truly worthy candidate or cause that ever got past the media gate keepers and actually audibly contradicted their rigid delusions would be angrily rejected by the majority themselves as spoil-sports, rudely disrupting THEIR OWN and their rich masters' stupid game.
   You may imagine that some "you" or other can now twitter up a new deal, but, in fact, in spite of all the publicity for social media, very few people tweet or twitter, and they wouldn't be properly steered if they did, unless all the hopelessly lumpen tweeters and insiders masquerading as progressives weren't first pruned off the blog boards. Even going back into the streets by the thousands for the first time since Obama was elected won't work - for all the same reasons. In fact, neither democracy nor mass demonstrations ever have worked, OBVIOUSLY, since, even after thousands of demonstrations and centuries of democracy, the same kind of greedy insiders and the priests and bullies who always help them OBVIOUSLY still run the world.
-Glen Roberts

Editorially bent story of Cuba/U.S. prisoner exchange
straightened out and clarified for you

  17 Dec 2014: The NY Times used this morning's news of a surprise Cuba/U.S. prisoner exchange to reinforce its eternal and 90% inaccurate line of BS about U.S./Cuba relations, without coming close to reminding it's presumably always happily ignorant readers WHO the finally un-jailed Cubans are or WHAT the X-Cuban sent back to his Miami masters IS.    The homeward bound Cubans are the last to be released of the world-famous "Cuban Five," who were jailed in Florida 16 years ago for handing US authorities evidence of Miamistas illegally plotting on U.S. soil to sabotage the sovereign nation of Cuba and illegally launching their ongoing plots FROM Florida.
   And Alan Gross, in spite of the Times' boiler-plate claim that he was a USAID do-gooder "promoting democracy in Cuba," is a virtual CIA agent (USAID=CIA) who was caught distributing satellite phones to selected dissidents in Cuba, so that, when the CIA and Twitter could get enough theoretical dissidents into the Cuban streets to draw fire and Obama could then declare a No-Fly zone and NATO could then begin bombing Cuba to rubble, the western media, instead of relying on objective sources, could then telephone the dissidents and pass THEIR reports of what was happening on to the easily fooled U.S. public.
   That is exactly what happened in Libya and Syria, and it was meant to happen in Cuba, too. But in spite of the efforts of the CIA and Twitter, the Cuban citizens who were expected to revolt refused to do so. So, only because his more insidious plan failed, Obama is now trying to salvage his non-existent reputation as "leader of the free world" by transforming himself into Climate-Change Man and by exchanging 3 world-celebrated Cuban heroes unjustly jailed in America for the CIA saboteur and by promising (again) to normalize U.S./Cuba relations (maybe) soon. It is to be hoped that Raul Castro will, for now, give Obama nothing but Alan Gross and, to even the count, a couple more captured Miami worms.
   If the so-far only fantasized talk between Obama and Raul ever takes place, in keeping with Raul's speech published in Granma today, I hope I hope I hope that Raul will begin by informing the U.S. president that Cuba, solidly allied now with ALBA and CELAC, no longer needs ANYTHING from the U.S., and that he will then go on to demand the return of Guantanamo to Cuba.
-Glen Roberts

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