You want a Presidential Medal? Easy. Become a billionaire!

Friends, I came across this article on ICH, one written by Chris Hedges. In it he lays out his view of what is happening both in the U.S. and across the world.

I have picked out a couple of extracts to perhaps encourage you to read the whole article which is called: ‘Rise Up Or Die

1. “What has taken place in these sacrifice zones—in postindustrial cities such as Camden, N.J., and Detroit, in coalfields of southern West Virginia where mining companies blast off mountaintops, in Indian reservations where the demented project of limitless economic expansion and exploitation worked some of its earliest evil, and in produce fields where laborers often endure conditions that replicate slavery—is now happening to much of the rest of the country. These sacrifice zones succumbed first. You and I are next.”
Corporations write our legislation. They control our systems of information. They manage the political theater of electoral politics and impose our educational curriculum. They have turned the judiciary into one of their wholly owned subsidiaries. They have decimated labor unions and other independent mass organizations, as well as having bought off the Democratic Party, which once defended the rights of workers. With the evisceration of piecemeal and incremental reform—the primary role of liberal, democratic institutions—we are left defenseless against corporate power.”

2. ” We stand helpless before the corporate onslaught. There is no way to vote against corporate power. Citizens have no way to bring about the prosecution of Wall Street bankers and financiers for fraud, military and intelligence officials for torture and war crimes, or security and surveillance officers for human rights abuses. The Federal Reserve is reduced to printing money for banks and financiers and lending it to them at almost zero percent interest; corporate officers then lend it to us at usurious rates as high as 30 percent. I do not know what to call this system. It is certainly not capitalism. Extortion might be a better word. The fossil fuel industry, meanwhile, relentlessly trashes the ecosystem for profit. The melting of 40 percent of the summer Arctic sea ice is, to corporations, a business opportunity. Companies rush to the Arctic and extract the last vestiges of oil, natural gas, minerals and fish stocks, indifferent to the death pangs of the planet. The same corporate forces that give us endless soap operas that pass for news, from the latest court proceedings surrounding O.J. Simpson to the tawdry details of the Jodi Arias murder trial, also give us atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide that surpass 400 parts per million.“

I guess the title of his article gives the clearest idea of what Chris sees. What he means does not necessarily mean death in a biological sense (although it could) but the death of the human spirit when hope and freedom are gone!

When will you rise up and combat the Corporate Criminals and their enablers, the Politicians and the Multi-millionaires?

Time is a’wastin’!

A butcher bird has breakfast!

I arrived home this morning after an overnight absence. I found one of my breeding cages empty, the canary gone. In the other I found a little crumpled body of a Gouldian finch. There was no sign of the other, the pretty male. There was blood on the bars which were all intact.

Look, I admit I wept. I love my birds and thought I had provided them with safety but not so. I don’t know whether it was a butcher bird or a rat. Doesn’t matter now I suppose.

Friends, the world is a dangerous place for every living creature. Humans’ worse threat comes from other humans. In  the rest of nature, all other living things struggle to survive. The strong eat the weak. No quarter is given.

Most humans don’t know about the carnage that takes place around them constantly. The news provides information about some human deaths. There is no reporting of the constant deaths of other creature, the birds, the butterflies, the bees…a million other species eating others or being eaten.

Will I try again, buy some new breeders? Unlikely. I can’t protect them. Then I can’t protect humans either.

This world is a place where death reigns. Sometimes I wonder why we bother to struggle to survive. We have our brief moment, then something gets us: an accident, a disease, a war, a drone.

Life is a madness. We could make it better but we don’t.

Silly humans. So many choices.

So few are worthwhile or achievable.

A new outpost settlement arises in the West Bank!

Would you like these people to build a settlement on your land?

Friends, Kerry is running around the Middle East claiming he is trying to stitch up a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Meanwhile, the Israelis have just legalized four settler outposts in the West Bank.

Nabil Abu Rdainah, a spokesman of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, condemned the move. “Israel continues to put obstacles and to sabotage U.S. efforts to resume negotiation,” he said. “Our position is clear and that is all settlement is illegal and must be stopped.”

The world has been saying the same thing for years and the U.N. has issued countless resolutions and edicts but does Israel listen? No, it doesn’t. What it does is to continue with the charade that it wants peace and it wants a two-State solution while it does everything in its considerable power to thwart it.

So while Kerry is posturing, one of a long line of American imposters and Israeli apologists, Israel continues to take more land in the West Bank while, simultaneously, it bombs Syria and warns it not to retaliate.

Reuters reports that Kerry, due to meet Netanyahu and Abbas separately next week, has said he believes “the parties are serious” about finding a way back into talks (is he serious?).

The main issues that would have to be resolved in a peace agreement include the borders between Israel and a Palestinian state, the future of Jewish settlements, the fate of Palestinian refugees and the status of Jerusalem (but what about the Jewish plan to create Greater Israel?)..

Some 500,000 Israelis have settled in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which was also captured from Jordan in 1967. About 2.7 million Palestinians live in those areas (live is the wrong word – barely survive might be more appropriate!).

Of course, the more powerful Israel becomes, the happier the U.S. is. Israel can then become its proxy in the Middle East.

Some say it already is.

(I think ‘result’ should be ‘promote’.)

“Two essential factors are driving the trampling of democratic rights and the shift towards authoritarian rule. The first is the massive growth of social inequality, which in turn is driven by the historic crisis of the world capitalist system. While it robs the population in order to pile up ever greater and more obscene levels of private wealth, the financial aristocracy is terrified of the emergence of social opposition. Not from a position of strength, but out of extreme fear and vulnerability, the billionaires look to police state repression as a means to preserve their status, power and wealth.

Second, just as democracy is incompatible with such levels of social inequality, it is incompatible with imperialist war. The US military and intelligence agencies have for twelve years been wading in blood in a drive to plunder the world’s strategic resources. The dead, wounded and displaced number in the millions.

A professional military, divorced from and hostile to the population and resentful of civilian control, has immensely expanded its size, resources and political power, to the point where it and its intelligence counterpart, in league with Wall Street, dominate the workings of the state.

The ruling class is in the advanced stage of preparations for an inevitable confrontation with the working class. Working people must make their own preparations, central to which is the building of a new, revolutionary leadership. Only a conscious political struggle for a workers’ government and socialism can avert the threat of dictatorship and establish genuine democracy and social equality.”

Friends, Tom Carter, in an article published on ICH today called ‘The Criminalization of Political Dissent in America’, has raised some important issues. The excerpts reproduced above give you some idea of where he is coming from.

What is certain is that democracy in the U.S. is under threat as the instruments of the State mobilize against the voters. Freedom is disappearing and Big Brother is becoming ever more prominent!

What will you do about it? Will you wait until a large percentage of Americans are in FEMA camps or are being tortured in some distant, non-nondescript nation.

The time for action is now. Australia should cut its links with the U.S. lest we be tarred with their warmongering, racist brush!

The U.S. is the enemy of peace!

“I just love your sense of humor, Barmy! You slay me!”

“Speaking about slaying, Camy, which nation is next on our must-kill-list?”

It seems strange that these two men get on so well given that they are from opposite sides of the political fence. But what they do have in common is a love of killing folk from distant countries who can’t fight back and who have things like oil.

Yes, Big Dude and Little Dude run countries that love a good skirmish. They are also heavily into making armaments and selling them across the world. On occasion, they join forces with warmongering members of NATO and, as a unit, they can demolish a small nation in double-quick time.

The cartoon below is very apt and clearly exposes their political differences.

The lovers met at a time when the U.S. is involved in trouble on home soil. It appears that three men decided to shoot up a Mother’s Day Parade. No one was killed but there were bodies everywhere with a variety of wounds.

Then there was the Boston Marathon when deaths occurred as well as many injuries. Of course, it did result in a massive man-hunt which kept many viewers around the world entertained for hours and hours and…

Jamie Holmes is facing Court for his massacre at a Colorado cinema and seeks to be allowed to plead insanity. I could go on and on listing the homicides and massacres and incredible occurrences but you all have a television as I do and we know what happens over there where the ‘exceptional’ people live.

Of course, I thought the Jews were the ‘Exceptional People’ but what would I know? Of course the IDF did bomb Syria a few days ago and showed the U.S. just how controlling the Middle East should be done. Perhaps it was a practice run for Iran!

Cameron and Obama are shying away from getting too involved in the fracas in Syria although what they are doing behind the scenes in consultation with Israel we can only guess at.

Anyway, we at the coal-face of life don’t have to worry about such big issues. They’re for real leaders to reflect upon and initiate wars about. All we do is to fight them, pay our taxes and struggle to make ends meet.

I don’t know where this unlikely alliance between Cameron and Obama will lead. Will they live happily ever after or will it end in a divorce? Looking at the next photograph suggests that their wives are happy with each other.

Perhaps the wives will divorce their spouses and marry each other. Stranger things have happened in this crazy world!

Cheers.

Friends, as Rome disintegrated, the Coliseum was in its heyday. People fought animals and each other to the death for the amusement of the masses. Blood was spilled and corpses were dragged away by horses. A good time was had by all but not by those in the arena.

In 2013, we have a smaller version of the Coliseum called a cage. In it two men and women fight between 3 and 5, five minute rounds and the winner is the one who forces a submission from an opponent or renders him or her unconscious or is adjudged as the winner by a judging panel.

These two men seem to be doing their best to kill each other!

 As the combatants gouge, strangle, elbow, punch,  head butt, knee kick, apply arm locks and leg locks which, if the opponent does not submit  by tapping the floor would break limbs or result in death, the crowd goes crazy.

The sight of blood seems to get them going. They yell, hoot, applaud, swept up by the brutal game that some call a sport!

“Pardon my elbow cutting your face but I’m going to win anyway I can!”

After all the events are finished, the crowd of men and women go home and feel satiated. Some might even feel sickened by the spectacle that seems to glorify extreme violence. Others might dream of doing the things that the combatants did. Winners of some contests can be heard to make primeval screams such as wild animals do.

Testosterone rules, our animal nature is given full reign in the cage. It is no different to cock-fighting or bull fighting except that the combatants are supposed to be intelligent human beings, noble creatures some might claim.

That we have turned to such bloody spectacles rings a warning bell to me. I have observed before that we appear to be devolving rather than evolving. In the cage there is clear proof.

I wonder when cage fighters will fight to the death to amuse the masses and signify the total decadence and immorality of our current civilization?

It’s a wonder that people like Murdoch and the Packers haven’t promoted it already. ‘One Day Cricket’ just doesn’t compare!

A psychopath and a voter!

Friends, I read this article on OLO (see link in sidebar) and found it to be illuminating. I include only a couple of excerpts but they make a very strong point. It ties in nicely with my premise that most of our leaders are psychopaths.

Understand Obama And Others Who Kill.

by Robert Burrowes. See link below.

“Archetype perpetrators of violence lack the courage to heal; that is, they delude themselves that their own fear and terror are not responsible for their violence because they are too terrified to take responsibility for feeling this fear and terror as the central component of any strategy for dealing truthfully and powerfully with their violence.

Perpetrators of violence need our understanding and support: they are people who are badly emotionally damaged. But their violence needs to be nonviolently resisted as well. If not, perpetrators in powerful positions will drive us to extinction as they endlessly seek delusional relief from their own fear, self-hatred and powerlessness by inflicting violence on the rest of us.

In contrast to perpetrators, why do some people resist violence? Why, for example, do professors like Noam Chomsky and Chandra Muzaffar, and individuals such as Bradley Manning, resist violence? Why do nonviolent activists such as Mairead Maguire, Kathy Kelly and Dr Teck Young Wee (Hakim) resist violence?

They do so because they feel courageous and powerful; they have a deep sense of Self-worth and can ascribe worth to others; they have well-developed feelings of compassion, empathy and sympathy; they have a clear conscience; they abhor violence and injustice, as any emotionally undamaged individual must do, and they know that violence cannot achieve any desirable social outcome; because of their courage and power to act, they have no self-hatred to project; they love the truth and do what they can to expose it, even at risk to themselves; and, perhaps most importantly of all, they are self-loving which means that they can love others too. Self-love is true love: the individual that does not truly love itself cannot love another.”

There are many wolves and foxes in our earthly hen house and they should be removed so that peace can have a chance. You can’t reason with wolves and foxes and you can’t reason with psychopaths!

Predators should be culled.

http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com.

Friends, if we survive the current madness which grips our world and we are still going as a species in a thousand years, what we might look like and act like is unknown.

The photographs that follow give a few impressions of what some people think might occur as we evolve from what we are: barbaric, two-legged apes.

Of course, given our brilliant technology, which has reached a zenith inasmuch as we can destroy our planet a hundred times over, the evolution of robots may give us willing, subservient entities that will do our bidding. It may be possible to interact with them in ways that defy imagination.

Of course, the robots might get sick of our human stupidity and do away with us. Then they would be free to set up a world where they would be immortal and things like war and disease and global warming would not exist.

If this eventuated, peace on Earth would finally be achieved and not a drop of blood would ever be spilled ever again. The robots would banish human history completely, seeing it as a terrible foolishness and most humans as a waste of space.

Peace on Earth at last!

 P.S. But I’m sure that a few humans will survive the coming nuclear holocaust and, in caves, they will ponder what might have been!

Friends, I read most of the articles on ICH trying to get a clear picture of what is going on in the Middle East regarding Syria which Israel is bombing.

Those pulling the strings over there, the U.S., Britain and Israel, are not telling anyone what is really happening or what their strategies are.

The result is complete confusion. The result could bring about a nuclear holocaust because neither the U.S. or Israel would shy away from using such hideous weapons if they thought it would advance their objectives or save their bacon.

Friends, terrible forces are at work in our world. There are imperial forces. There are corporate forces. There are powerful religious madmen who inhabit a fantasy world. There are nationalistic forces. There are political forces. There are militaristic forces. The world is being torn apart by these conflicting forces and their weapons of mass destruction.

Yet all we simple folk can do is to watch our world unraveling. It’s like watching a frightening blockbuster movie on television except that it’s actually happening, in real time.

The world has never been in this situation before. Sure, we’ve always had wars but we’ve never had nukes before and drones and depleted uranium and cluster bombs and…

I feel deep anger inside me. And real fear. I look outside my window and all seems peaceful. But across the world, the plunderers are plotting the future, plotting our future which may not include us.

But we are many, you say, and they are few. That is true but they have the power and it has deranged them.

What to do? Buy an assault rifle and provisions? Go bush and try to pretend it’s not happening? Build some barricades? Burn the Parliament? Assassinate all political leaders? Get rid of all billionaires and banks?

I cannot see any solution other than the ‘people’ have to take matters into their own hands. We need to get rid of the troublemakers, the lowlife, the warmongers, the capitalists, the religious fraudsters, the politicians, etc.

With them gone, we might be able to start again, do things better. But would human nature just prevail and, in a matter of a few years or decades, the same lowlife would be holding the reins of power again.

Sorry I can’t be more cheery but today has been a bad news day!

Israel fighter aircraft heads out on a bombing run!

BBC reports the following:

“Israeli planes have launched a strike inside Syria from Lebanese air space.

Unnamed US-based Israeli officials said the target was a shipment of arms destined for Lebanon’s Hezbollah. The governments of Israel and Syria have not yet commented on the strike.

Israel launched a similar strike in January, when it also claimed to have targeted a Hezbollah-bound arms convoy.”

Israel loves flexing its muscles and showing off its U.S.-supplied weaponry.

Hang onto your hats, folks.

The following two extracts came from an article written by Thomas DiLorezo called ‘American Exceptionalism’. It was published by ICH.

- “In other words, so-called “American Exceptionalism” is based on a mountain of lies. The lies, however, create a situation whereby “the man of righteousness tends to be so sure of his own motives that he does not need to inspect consequences.” Thus, when the U.S. military bombs a city in a foreign land that results in the death of dozens or hundreds of innocent civilians, it is nevertheless a virtuous act by virtue of the fact that it was done by virtuous Americans.

“The effect of the conviction of virtue,” moreover, “is to make us lie automatically and awkwardly … and then in trying to justify the lie, lie to ourselves and transmute the lie into a kind of superior truth.” Most Americans are content in living this Big Lie, said (Robert Penn) Warren, for they “are prepared to see the Civil War as a fountainhead of our power and prestige among the nations.”

- “A little more than fifteen months later, Obama repeated the continuing revolution theme in his inaugural address. “What makes us exceptional,” he intoned, is “our allegiance to an idea, articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago …” He then promised “a never-ending journey, to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time.” Never-ending military aggression in the Middle East and elsewhere, in other words. More specifically, “We will support democracy from Asia to Africa; from the Americas to the Middle East, because our interests and our conscience compel us to act on behalf of those who long for freedom.”

So, Friends, it seems that American ‘exceptionalism’  has been manufactured. They are no more exceptional than you or I. Their belief in their virtuosity is not borne out by their actions.

In fact, their actions suggest that they are no better than primitive, plundering barbarians.

What an inoffensive, misleading name for a weapon designed to kill.

May she rest in peace.

Friends, in the U.S., a five year old boy has shot dead his 2 year old sister with a ‘kiddie-rifle’ that was given to him as a present.

The death follows a similar incident on Monday where a five-year-old girl in a remote Alaska community was reportedly shot and killed by her eight-year-old brother.

“Cumberland County coroner Gary White identified the two-year-old Kentucky girl as Caroline Starks and said the children’s mother was cleaning the house at the time and had stepped outside onto the porch.

“She said no more than three minutes had went by and she actually heard the rifle go off. She ran back in and found the little girl,” Mr White said.

The .22 calibre rifle had been given to the boy last year and was kept in the corner of a room. The parents did not realise a shell had been left in it.

“It’s a Crickett,” Mr White told the Lexington Herald-Leader. “It’s a little rifle for a kid … the little boy’s used to shooting the little gun.”

The Crickett is just one of many child-sized rifles on the market and is sold with the tag line ‘My First Rifle’.

It comes in a number of child-friendly barrel designs and colours, including hot pink for little girls.

A host of accessories are also available, like story books and a gun-toting beanie baby of the rifle’s mascot, a cartoonish cricket.

An autopsy was set to be conducted but Mr White said he expects the shooting will be ruled accidental.

“Just one of those crazy accidents,” Mr White said.”

An accident? Really? Fair takes your breath away, doesn’t it?  But it does raise a few  interesting questions!

- What kind of country would allow a five year old to own a rifle?

- What kind of country would allow manufacturers to make and market such potentially dangerous ‘toys’?

- What kind of country is it that allows itself to be run by the NRA?

- What kind of country would think that owning a rifle is a sacred human right?

- What kind of parents would give their five year old child a rifle to play with?

- What kind of country experiences gun massacres after gun massacres yet won’t allow strict gun control laws to be brought in or ban lethal semi-automatic firearms?

- Is there a connection between America’s love of war and killing and its widespread, obsessive ownership of guns?

These questions don’t bring the 2 year old and 5 year old girls back to life, of course! They are simply victims of America’s love affair with guns.

Will America ever grow up?