Month: August 2016

by William Skink

I had a chance to sample some cable news today, and I have to say I was most impressed with Fox. I don’t know the name of the smarmy guy that runs The Five, but he essentially pointed out that the presidential health question script had flipped from liberal media blasting any question of Hillary’s health as a rabid, right-wing conspiracy theory, to Mika Brzezinski imploring mental health professionals to assess Trump while David Plouffe tried diagnosing Trump as a psychopath on Meet the Press. What impressed me is the Fox pundit clearly stated they (both brands of media) were all hypocrites.

One of the differences between the two brands, though, is how far the pro-Hillary media is willing to go to squash the health issue for Hillary. Dr. Drew had his CNN show canceled a week after going on record with his concerns regarding Hillary’s health, and now a long-time Huffington Post contributor has apparently had two articles removed and his publishing privileges revoked:

On Sunday night, an obviously shaken Huffington Post contributor, David Seaman, posted a video to YouTube after the HuffPo had taken measures to revoke his publishing access and delete two articles he had previously published on Hillary’s health…a move that left him “a little scared” and “spooked out”.

According to Seaman, he has a long standing relationship with the Huffington Post which has included “100’s of successful articles” that have been published under the banner.

The most chilling part of this most recent attempt by certain media outlets to insulate Hillary Clinton from legitimate concerns regarding her health is the part of the Youtube clip where David Seaman feels like he needs to clearly state he is not accident prone or currently experiencing depression:

“I’ve honestly never seen anything like this. This is happening in the United States in 2016. It’s frankly chilling. I’m a little scared. I’m doing this video also to say, I’m not suicidal right now; I am not a particularly clumsy person; I don’t own a car at the moment. So if I’m to slip in the shower over the next couple of days or something silly like that you have to really employ probability and statistics here because I’m not a clumsy person, right, and I’m also not a depressed person right now. I’m a person who is spooked out though.”

“For Huffington Post to delete those posts without any notice, that is Orwellian. That is something I’ve read about happening in mainland China.”

I can understand why David Seaman feels spooked. With the latest merchant of death, Paul Wolfowitz, signaling he might have to vote for Hillary (Huffington Post), taking precautions as a marked traitor to the Clinton crusade makes sense.

The Hillary protectorate within the media should be careful, though. The quickness in flipping from freak-out over questioning Hillary’s health to attacking Trump could give Trump the victim card, and right when he’s obviously lagging behind in the polls and the first debate approaches.

As for David Seaman, if I were him I would avoid cars with computer chips, small planes, solitary walks up mountains, and really any situation where a “mugging” or other unfortunate accident, like death by workout, could take place.

Best of luck, David.

by William Skink

Are we living in a “post-fact” world? Over at Logicosity, that claim is given attention thanks to an article by Peter Pomerantsev. But there are problems from the opening paragraph that hint at an ideology at work:

As his army blatantly annexed Crimea, Vladimir Putin went on TV and, with a smirk, told the world there were no Russian soldiers in Ukraine. He wasn’t lying so much as saying the truth doesn’t matter. And when Donald Trump makes up facts on a whim, claims that he saw thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheering the Twin Towers coming down, or that the Mexican government purposefully sends ‘bad’ immigrants to the US, when fact-checking agencies rate 78% of his statements untrue but he still becomes a US Presidential candidate – then it appears that facts no longer matter much in the land of the free. When the Brexit campaign announces ‘Let’s give our NHS the £350 million the EU takes every week’ and, on winning the referendum, the claim is shrugged off as a ‘mistake’ by one Brexit leader while another explains it as ‘an aspiration’, then it’s clear we are living in a ‘post-fact’ or ‘post-truth’ world. Not merely a world where politicians and media lie – they have always lied – but one where they don’t care whether they tell the truth or not.

With all the potential post-fact examples out there, the author’s selection of Putin/Trump/Brexit exposes an ideology at work behind the veneer of objective lamenting the author is trying to peddle.

By simply stating that “his army blatantly annexed Crimea”, the factual context of the western-backed coup in Ukraine and the subsequent vote in Crimea to be annexed by Russia is purposely ignored. Likewise, the factual effort by the US government to cover-up the Saudi role in the 9/11 attack is also ignored in order to mock the “inside job” meme. Here’s more from the article:

The flight into techno-fantasies is intertwined with economic and social uncertainty. If all the facts say you have no economic future then why would you want to hear facts? If you live in a world where a small event in China leads to livelihoods lost in Lyon, where your government seems to have no control over what is going on, then trust in the old institutions of authority – politicians, academics, the media – buckles. Which has led to Brexit leader Michael Gove’s claim that British people ‘have had enough of experts’, Trump’s rants at the ‘lamestream’ media and the online flowering of ‘alternative news’ sites. Paradoxically, people who don’t trust ‘the mainstream’ media are, a study from Northeastern University showed, more likely to swallow disinformation. ‘Surprisingly, consumers of alternative news, which are the users trying to avoid the mainstream media “mass-manipulation”, are the most responsive to the injection of false claims.’[1] Healthy scepticism ends in a search for wild conspiracies. Putin’s Kremlin-controlled television finds US conspiracies behind everything, Trump speculates that 9/11 was an inside job, and parts of the Brexit campaign saw Britain under attack from a Germano-Franco-European plot.

There are very good reasons people have grown to distrust experts and institutions. It should come as no surprise that the corporate media that lied us into war with Iraq isn’t trusted when they dismiss concern over Hillary’s health, portraying any concern as paranoid right-wing conspiracy theories. And while our media peddles propaganda, those experts peddling their expertise have to be closely examined for funding corruption.

Ultimately the author lays the blame of this predicament at the doorstep of post-modernism, the theory that uses a flattening form of relativism to put Bugs Bunny on the same plane of existence as Albert Einstein. Of course! We’re living in a post-fact world because those damn academics with their theories have squished the hierarchy of knowledge into a pancake where crazy coexists with truth:

This equaling out of truth and falsehood is both informed by and takes advantage of an all-permeating late post-modernism and relativism, which has trickled down over the past thirty years from academia to the media and then everywhere else. This school of thought has taken Nietzsche’s maxim, there are no facts, only interpretations, to mean that every version of events is just another narrative, where lies can be excused as ‘an alternative point of view’ or ‘an opinion’, because ‘it’s all relative’ and ‘everyone has their own truth’ (and on the internet they really do).

Maurizio Ferraris, one of the founders of the New Realism movement and one of postmodernism’s most persuasive critics, argues that we are seeing the culmination of over two centuries of thinking. The Enlightenment’s original motive was to make analysis of the world possible by tearing the right to define reality away from divine authority to individual reason. Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ moved the seat of knowledge into the human mind. But if the only thing you can know is your mind, then, as Schopenhauer put it, ‘the world is my representation’. In the late twentieth century postmodernists went further, claiming that there is ‘nothing outside the text’, and that all our ideas about the world are inferred from the power models enforced upon us. This has led to a syllogism which Ferraris sums up as: ‘all reality is constructed by knowledge, knowledge is constructed by power, and ergo all reality is constructed by power. Thus . . . reality turns out to be a construction of power, which makes it both detestable (if by “power” we mean the Power that dominates us) and malleable (if by “power” we mean “in our power”).’

The final separation of fact from politics, according to the author, happened during the 90’s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Unmoored from the need to factually prove the west’s capitalist ideology was superior to Russia’s communist ideology, more non-factual liberties were undertaken by a new cabal of spin doctors. Here is the concluding two paragraphs:

But for all their cynicism, the spin doctors and political technologists were, at this point, still trying to pull off an illusion of the truth. Their stories were meant to be coherent, even if they were low on facts. When reality caught up – the audience caught on to the illusion in Moscow and the stories about Iraq broke down and the stock market crashed – one reaction has been to double down, to deny that facts matter at all, to make a fetish out of not caring about them. This has many benefits for rulers – and is a relief for voters. Putin doesn’t need to have a more convincing story, he just has to make it clear that everybody lies, undermine the moral superiority of his enemies and convince his people there is no alternative to him. ‘When Putin lies brazenly he wants the West to point out that he lies’ says the Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev, ‘so he can point back and say, “but you lie too”’. And if everyone is lying then anything goes, whether it’s in your personal life or in invading foreign countries.

This is a (dark) joy. All the madness you feel, you can now let it out and it’s okay. The very point of Trump is to validate the pleasure of spouting shit, the joy of pure emotion, often anger, without any sense. And an audience which has already spent a decade living without facts can now indulge in a full, anarchic liberation from coherence.

One of the problems with how this manifests in the US is the belief by Democrats that they aren’t susceptible to the vagaries of this brave new fact-free world. But the fantasy of “humanitarian interventions” and the success of identity politics superseding the factual substance of corruption regarding their presidential candidate proves that belief to be false.

Democrats may claim that facts matter to them, and that institutions and experts still maintain a useful authority to direct the progress of our country and our people, but I’m afraid the corruption has become too pervasive at this point to counter. Thanks to technology, most people will remain firmly encapsulated within the scope of their selected biases.

As coherence disintegrates, facts disappear, and emotional appeals replace critical thinking, the leaders of tomorrow will rise by manipulating the levers of fear, playing off insecurities on cultural scapegoats. It won’t matter if it’s a Democrat doing this, or a Republican. They will use the same script because they are protecting the same forces that benefit from this fact-free world.

Clinton and Trump are just the beginning.

by William Skink

In a guest post at Moogirl by Justin Robbins, titled The Moral Cowardice of Reactionary Politics, we get another heap of moral righteousness from Democrats about America’s obligation to assist refugees.

Oddly there is never any discussion about America’s obligation to not make refugees in the first place by seeking global dominance by any means necessary.

Robbins provides a link about this legal obligation that goes to this piece by Freedom House, an organization that claims to have been “championing democracy” for 75 years.

The problem with “championing democracy” is that the term is a euphemism for war, and if one takes a few minutes to examine the wikipedia entry regarding the forming of Freedom House, one would find that the organization was created to support America’s entry into WWII:

Freedom House was incorporated October 31, 1941.[6]:293 Among its founders were Eleanor Roosevelt, Wendell Willkie, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Elizabeth Cutter Morrow, Dorothy Thompson,[7] George Field, Herbert Agar, Herbert Bayard Swope, Ralph Bunche, Father George B. Ford, Roscoe Drummond and Rex Stout. George Field (1904–2006) was executive director of the organisation until his retirement in 1967.[8]

According to its website, Freedom House “emerged from an amalgamation of two groups that had been formed, with the quiet encouragement of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to encourage popular support for American involvement in World War II at a time when isolationist sentiments were running high in the United States.”

The moral cowardice of Democrat warmongers is evident by the deceptive euphemisms that must be used to manipulate voters into supporting America’s psychotic attempt to dominate global resources. Democrats delude themselves that they are supporting the spreading of democracy, when in reality they are supporting the madness of the neoconservative/neoliberal wet dream of full spectrum dominance across the global theater.

But this psychotic American project has just lost the support of one of its original architects in a monumental shift that should be front-page news. At Counterpunch today, Michael Whitney reports that Z-Big Brzezinski has made a 180 degree turn by acknowledging that America should now take the lead in “realigning the global power architecture”. Here’s more from the link:

“As its era of global dominance ends, the United States needs to take the lead in realigning the global power architecture.

Five basic verities regarding the emerging redistribution of global political power and the violent political awakening in the Middle East are signaling the coming of a new global realignment.

The first of these verities is that the United States is still the world’s politically, economically, and militarily most powerful entity but, given complex geopolitical shifts in regional balances, it is no longer the globally imperial power.”

That is Z-big in his own words. You can read the whole article at The American Interest here.

The refugee debate needs to be broadened to include a total reassessment of American foreign policy. As it stands now, the refugee controversy is just a wedge issue for morally righteous Democrats to bludgeon Republicans with, like Robbins does at Moogirl to damage the Gianforte campaign.

Ignored is the immense damage America has done to sovereign nations, to international law, and ultimately to America’s global standing in world affairs. This damage has been self-inflicted by both Democrats and Republicans in the insane, bipartisan effort to maintain global hegemony, risking a military confrontation with Russia and nuclear armageddon if America’s warmongers aren’t stopped.

If Justin Robbins and the rest of Montana’s Democrats can’t see that their moral righteousness quickly evaporates at the slightest examination of the dynamics that created this refugee crisis in the first place, then they will continue blindly lashing out at Republicans while the real threat to global peace–Strangelovian interventionists like Hillary Clinton and her cabal of slobbering sycophants–snatch the centers of American power to continue a hegemonic project that even Z-Big no longer supports.

by William Skink

Is there any hope intelligent progressives will ever be able to wrap their head around foreign policy? Not for Don Pogreba there isn’t, as evidenced by this depiction of a female politician he doesn’t agree with as breathtakingly stupid.

One of the perspectives put forth by this stupid woman is that the image of the wounded boy in the orange ambulance seat is staged.

I was hesitant to wade into this, but a source I’ve followed and trusted for 8 years–Moon of Alabama–has two posts worth reading: this one and this one.

Before the ridicule and name-calling from any intelligent progressives gets directed this way, I would hope they would at least read the posts.

I would also hope they could consider that in a world where children are suffering terribly in places like Yemen and Israeli-occuppied Palestine, it’s worth asking why Syria? And why now?

Regardless of whether or not the image is staged, it doesn’t really matter. Those of us paying attention know how it will be used: to justify the overthrow of the Assad regime.

Another line of attack against stupid Debra Lamm is the notion that Obama wants an Islamic regime to take power. While no one knows what Obama “wants”, who else is going to fill the vacuum of power if Assad falls? All those “moderate” jihadists? Apparently Don Pogreba suffers from the common form of Americanized amnesia that selectively deletes memories, like what happens when one doesn’t plan for the aftermath of violently overthrowing another country (google Libya, Don).

American amnesia is dangerous. Something that shouldn’t be forgotten is the old saying that the first casualty of war is truth. When it comes to the proxy wars flaring up, there is very little truth to be gleaned from western media.

I got to hand it to the Plutocrats, though, running America’s brilliant political duopoly. It’s truly something to behold, watching Presidents do essentially the same thing, but receiving very different reactions depending on what letter is plastered next to their name on cable news.

Because Obama is a Democrat, he was able to solidify and extend Bush’s interventionist foreign policy for 8 disastrous years. And now, as Obama is about to pass the war baton to the Queen of Chaos, this is the situation: the Taliban control more territory than at any time before 2001, Libya has 3 competing governments, Iraq has lost swaths of territory to Saudi-backed jihadists, NATO’s noose is tightening around Russia, mass starvation from the American-enabled war in Yemen is worsening, Turkey is getting cozy with Russia, Ukraine is about to flare up, and Europe is in the midst of a refugees crisis unseen since WWII.

I don’t think Debra Lamm is stupid. I do think one has to be either stupid or willfully ignorant to think an even more hawkish Democratic president like Hillary Clinton is going to do anything other than ratchet up the death and destruction once elected.

by William Skink

Mayor Engen has proclaimed, in a recent op-ed, that Missoula is ready to welcome refugees. In making his argument, our Mayor’s smug liberal righteousness is on full display. Let’s take a look.

The opinion piece opens with a young Engen recalling the relocation of Hmong refugees to Missoula during the 70’s. The problem is it’s 2016, and Missoula is a vastly different place.

It is interesting, though, to think about how similar the dynamics creating those refugees are, all these years later. During Engen’s youth, America was entangled in a proxy war against those evil commies, and now, decades later, refugees continue fleeing proxy wars against America’s perennial adversaries in the East, Russia and China.

But the geopolitics behind this refugee crisis isn’t a big part of the discussion, locally. Maybe that’s because all the liberal do-gooders basking in their righteousness are preparing to vote for death-dealing Queen of Chaos who helped engineer this refugee crisis in the first place with her “humanitarian” destruction of Libya and the up-coming escalation in Syria.

Anyway, after the feel-good personal narrative that has really no bearing on today’s situation, Engen gets into framing those who oppose relocating a hundred refugees a year into Missoula:

There’s been opposition to refugee resettlement in Missoula, but it’s largely been from elsewhere and based on misinformation, fear and outright lies. Most Missoulians, the folks I and Missoula City Council members swore to serve, believe that we’re up to the task of helping our share of refugees, whatever their situation, provided they’ve been thoroughly vetted by our government and the agencies who only continue to exist if they keep communities and refugees safe. And if I’m wrong about this or any of a number of issues, I will learn soon enough at the polls.

Engen’s mentality on the opposition is pretty clear. It can’t be coming from actual Missoulians, because Engen knows all Missoulians are enlightened liberals who think like he does, so if someone is opposing this effort, they are probably from somewhere else, like the ignorant Bitterroot. That, or they are victims of misinformation, fear and outright lies.

This statement ignores the growing body of evidence of increasingly violent cultural clashes happening in Europe between refugees and host countries. While there is no way America will ever be subjected to what Europe is dealing with (because of oceans), to just casually dismiss concerns as fear based on misinformation is wrong.

Next, Engen tries addressing the concerns about resource allocation, which has been part of the concern I’ve articulated on more than a few occasions:

Finally, welcoming refugees to our community doesn’t excuse us from taking care of everyone who is here today. There is poverty, hunger, violence and trouble right here in Missoula. We have folks who live, in some ways, as American refugees by virtue of a national political atmosphere that’s created more “have-nots” than “haves.” Taking care of the suffering here and those from somewhere else is not a mutually exclusive proposition. We’ll take care of our own and a few others, because that’s what this country is about. Sometimes this gets lost in irrational national dialogue.

The fact is that the IRC Missoula has solid funding and these families joining our community will be far less subsidized by taxpayers than the richest Americans. Volunteers and the good folks at our own Soft Landing Missoula will ensure that our adopted families will thrive, assimilate and enrich our place.

What pathetic lip service from a politician. At least Engen can acknowledge that poverty, hunger and violence exists in our liberal utopia, but ascribing that reality to some vague “national political atmosphere” is the kind of misinformation Engen decries. The national political atmosphere is not responsible for the dire situation America faces. It’s the collusion between corrupt politicians and the bottomless greed of the corporate class that has produced great chasms of economic disparity, causing the vast majority of Americans to feel more economically insecure than ever, and afraid of anything that threatens to increase that insecurity, like funding refugee relocation.

The Hmong were displaced by the violent geopolitics of America’s anti-communist obsession, driven by Tricky Dick Nixon and his main merchant of death, Henry Kissinger. I mention this because the thing that demolishes Engen’s credibility for me is his support of the neoliberal reincarnation of Nixon, Hillary Clinton.

When Clinton opened a campaign location in Missoula, this is what Mayor Engen had to say:

The mayor now supports Clinton, saying she’s most qualified to serve as the next U.S. president.

“She’s a brilliant public servant with the kind of experience our country needs, particularly given the nature of the rhetoric at the national level,” Engen said. “She believes that not just the rich, not just the white, not just the male deserve good lives. She believes we’re all first-class citizens, and that’s the kind of president I would support.”

What a load of bullshit. It’s rhetoric like this, from smug liberals, that angers me the most.

While Engen lectures us about misinformation and irrationality, supporting the political duo responsible for selling out the Democratic party and expecting them to do anything other than continuing to enrich themselves and their preferred insiders and sycophants is the epitome of irrationality.

The refugee crisis is a byproduct of American foreign policy. This foreign policy is a bipartisan effort between neoconservatives and neoliberals, Hillary Clinton being one of the worst. Mayor Engen supports this foreign policy by supporting Hillary Clinton.

Now tell me again, Mayor Engen, who is the irrational one here?