Easter arrived this year coinciding with the beginning of April, which, of course, brings us the traditional April Fool’s Day. Personally, I have never been very fond of the April Fool’s Day idea. It’s a joke that wears thin very fast, every year, as assorted, well, fools, think it’s fun to just pass along whatever bits of nonsense might amuse them, just simply lying as a “joke”. It occurs to me that some unpleasant characters could use this stupid yearly event as an opportunity to cause even more trouble than they otherwise might by pulling some ugly stunt on April 1st, knowing that massive confusion could be induced by news of whatever mayhem they trigger being dismissed as a joke.
The “joke” wears especially thin these days, considering that, these days, in America 2018, it’s like every day is April Fool’s Day.
My recent notes here have been talking in themes of large items as metaphorical elephants in the room being ignored, and endless flash and dazzle distractions presented as “news” along with all sorts of propagation of noise in electronic media and communications. It’s everywhere, nonstop.
As we are in that time of the year when people deal with income tax returns, it should be worth noting that even for people with the simplest tax return situations, things are unnecessarily complicated by one aspect of the “Affordable Care Act”, the federal law with a typical name of surrealist absurdity that most people just keep calling “Obamacare”. That, of course, would be the element wherein people who do not have some wretchedly useless and obscenely expensive medical insurance policy because they simply cannot afford that expense on top of everything else are run through the bureaucratic forms wringer of spelling out their “coverage” month by month for the tax year and an extended labyrinth of working out what sort of tax penalty they are demanded to pay as punishment for not being able to pay for the expensive and essentially useless “coverage”.
One of the absurdities that continue to bewilder me is the way so many people, locked into the ongoing political foolishness, seriously buy into the notions of the ACA farce being President Barack Obama’s “crowning achievement” of “healthcare reform”, just because they really want to believe it, because they really want to think that the kind of plan that Candidate Senator Obama was talking about as he sought the presidency in 2008 is what we have, willfully ignoring the reality. The reality, of course, is that what we actually got was pretty much simply the mess proposed by Republican party politicians a long time ago, with the simplest essential description being that idea was that if people did not have medical insurance because it was so obscenely costly, and still did not help much if they had a medical problem, that we should simply make it the law of the land that they will be required by law to have medical insurance.
Just the subject of the coverage itself is an obscene sadistic practical joke for many people. For many people, with “employer coverage”, they not only find an appalling amount of their pay diverted from them to pay their “contribution” to the supposed “employer-provided coverage”, but they find themselves facing endless pages of droning gibberish, possibly accompanied by the narcolepsy inducing presentation of some “benefits administrator” to explain endless gruesome details about what the “coverage” will actually pay, partially, sometimes, in particular conditions, and how much, depending, sometimes, under what conditions.
That is only talking about the situation where somebody is “lucky” enough to have a simple situation of having “suitable coverage” the entire year, regarding their tax return paperwork. For a great many people, their situation is not one of being employed by the same employer all 12 months of a year. Some are self-employed, with their own nightmare of trying to deal with medical insurance coverage and costs, many have to deal with the problem of unemployment, with no medical insurance from “employer coverage”, and these days people are often dealing with all the problems and difficulties of what some people like to talk about in fashionable lingo terminology as “the gig economy”, either as self employed people, who are officially working as a contractor of some sort, for some entity, even as they are treated like employees in terms of commitment and responsibility, or working as some sort of contract labor for some agency.
That leads right into one of the large running bad jokes making every day Fools Day in America, the ongoing assertions coming from all sorts of places, about how, supposedly, here in the United States of America, we are in the midst of a booming economy.
Seriously.
This comes from all sorts of sources that have all appearances of not kidding. You have all the usual noise, like, look at the Dow Jones Industrial Average number, that’s a really big number! Another one is nonsense about wonderfully low unemployment, which is a delusion fed by the official numbers about unemployment with the same ongoing games of simply ceasing to count the unemployed as unemployed.
Then there is the matter of how much of the American “economic boom” is actually all about the areas of healthcare and finance. Covering all that would be many long books. Many very long books, probably.
You could spend a lot of time and attention on just the subject of how medical affairs in the US somehow became “the healthcare industry” as a massive profit making enterprise. At this point, you must be into the middle-aged range or older to even remember that once upon a time, it was a much different kind of thing. What somehow became “the financial industry” is another realm of strange changes, and above it all as an overriding subject, you could get into a long philosophical discussion about the use of the word “industry” these days.
Thinking about any of all that takes me right back to the phenomenon of people asking the question “how is the economy doing?” and addressing it by just saying “let’s look at the markets”, when they are not really using “markets” in its general meaning of any sort of trade, exchange, commerce, but, rather, a specific set of the financial trading markets where people are playing increasingly mystical and puzzling games of pretending to magically turn money into more money by shuffling things around and playing convoluted accounting games.
We have a long running strange set of circumstances of people regarding a broad range of complex, messy, and confused matters by being ridiculously simplistic, which just makes matters much more confused. That certainly includes economic matters, as people somehow manage to keep themselves in a mindset of simplistically thinking of “The Economy” as some monolithic singular thing. Obviously, as I have said, a feature of that is the almost idiotic fixation on the magic number of summary of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, even though I suspect that 9 out of 10 people could not explain what that number is; not what the numeric value of the trading day is (that number bombards people constantly in anything presented as news), but what that number actually is, what does it mean?
I will not be trying to do some extensive analysis of the state of the American economy here. For one thing, this is a massive subject, one that cannot seriously be addressed in some neat succinct little blurb, despite all the “expert analysis” clogging people’s heads in all sorts of entertainment noise presented as news. There would be plenty of people, anyway, who would think me silly for even trying, with a sort of “sure, what do you know, Mr. Smart Guy?” dismissal.
A simple approach to the subject might be to wonder why so many people seem to carry around ideas in their head about “The Economy” that somehow manage to avoid any consideration of the matter based on their own observations and experiences of their own lives. Skipping all sorts of topics about the real state of “The Economy” for now, just that simple idea would be helpful.
Yes, there are loads of metaphorical elephants in the room in the American public psyche today, with all sorts of problems involving people “thinking” what they are told to think, by various parties with their own reasons for promoting one narrative or another.
One of the shocking absurdities of the present is the idea that the subject of a mass school shooting episode has somehow become a regular news story item.
Time for the news! The weather report is coming up, we’ll have our economic news with the big stock market magic number, but, first, our top story is today’s mass school shooting!
Turn on a television for any sort of news, especially the 24/7 cable news variety, or peruse the WWW anywhere people are banging away typing comments on “social media” or any sort of “reader comments” sections of web pages, and people are squawking away about this subject with all the endless regurgitations of what they are told to think and say according to their particular selection of bipolar political disorder package.
To save time, I will not be restating all the usual standard arguments people are belching back and forth at each other from “their side” directed at “the other side”. You have probably been hearing and reading those, ad nauseum, for a long time.
One thought seems to be missing. For as long as the United States of America has existed, it has been a place full of firearms. So, now, maybe a good question would be to ask why, more recently, do we have this horrendous situation where it becomes regular, frequent, to find a news report of some new mystifying character has gone somewhere and just started shooting people?
One of the standard, almost scripted “talking points” (that I probably should not call “almost” scripted) is to talk about this as “a mental health issue”. The idea there, that we get among all the standard arguments, is that somehow this “mental health issue” is the key, somehow fairly suddenly, in the long term view, appearing in recent years, and then following on from that you find arguments about how psychological screenings for gun licensing is a solution, and lots of noise about the degradation of “mental health care”. That cracks open more cans of worms. One larger thought is generally missing, which is that it might be reasonable and realistic to assert that, yes, this might be a “mental health issue”, in that masses of people here in the United States have, to put it in blunt and crude form, just gone completely fucking nuts.
Yes, that is very broad statement, yes, that is a very unspecific statement, and, no, I am not a mental health professional. That does get us right back into all the noise about psychological screenings, and mental health treatment systems and all that, which, as I just said, gets into all kinds of problems, and in all the detailed minutiae that can get into, we might be missing a more simple and basic problem. How much of a problem do we have now, here in the US, of a broad phenomenon of, to put it simply, glorifying heavily armed people committing violence? Sometimes they are officially sanctioned and wearing uniforms, and are even called “Our Heroes!” in all kinds of rhetorical noise.
Part of this is the disturbing trend for years now of turning local police departments into heavily armed and armored semi-military strike forces of some kind, bashing their way into people’s homes, maybe even the wrong home (oopsie!), maybe because you had some unpaid parking tickets, or perhaps you chose to indulge in use of some natural herb, or God knows what, and maybe if you have a dog living with you, they will be shot to death immediately because some armed and armored “hero” character was “in fear for their life”. Broader views include armed forces said to be “defending our freedom” or “protecting the world from Terror” are spread all around the planet and attacking, killing, and destroying, somebody, someplace, virtually every day.
Good luck with even trying to sort that out, as, in all the rhetorical noise, people make it extremely difficult, bordering on being an impossible challenge to sort out people in police uniforms or the military doing extremely difficult and dangerous jobs, trying to protect good people, and generally do the honorable right thing, from people just bringing death and mayhem, and sometimes even enjoying it. Not the least of the problems comes in sorting out the people on the scene somewhere carrying the weapons from the people commanding them on what to do.
Oh, you’re against Our Heroes, the police who protect us, Our Troops who give us our freedom!
… and so on… and on…
There is a really broad, essential, and very ugly subject to tackle in all that, and many people just evade any honest objective grasp of it all.
Now, of course, we have a particularly urgent and dangerous and just plain ugly and wrong situation, with more warmongering fun. The appalling thing is that it has become completely normal. People have somehow accepted as completely normal, ongoing matters where masses of people cease to even question situations where “we” might possibly, or even just are, going to bring war to someplace in the world and launch a military attack on some land, some country that is not attacking us, just business as usual.
Consider this for a minute. A few years ago, there was a popular movie called American Sniper, glorifying a real world character who was a military sniper in Iraq (you know, “defending our freedom”). A few years before that, there was another popular movie, Inglourious Basterds <sic>, a fictional story set in World War II in Europe, that included as part of the story the making and showing of a film made by the propaganda operations of Nazi Germany, that, while this was all fictional, of course, was a documentary made to glorify a German Army sniper (as “a hero of The Fatherland” or whatever it was).
It seems that many people presumably watched, a few years apart, both of these movies, and never noticed any irony at all.
I am going out on a limb of speculation here, but I suspect you could find maybe a few million people who, first, watched Inglourious Basterds, and thought “right… part of the story is about the showing of a propaganda film about a Bad Guy Villain who’s a sniper in the Nazi German army”. Then, a few years later, they watched American Sniper, and thought “what a great story about a Real American Hero fighting to Defend Our Freedom!”, and never had so much as a glimmer of a thought like “wait a minute… am I watching a propaganda film here?”.
And that, boys and girls, is how propaganda works. It works on people who never even consider the thought, cannot even consider the thought, that they are the target audience of propaganda.
Oh, we don’t have propaganda here! That’s something from the bad people somewhere else! We would never have that here from our fine patriotic leaders protecting us and furthering the glorious righteousness of our fine nation!
In our case, here in the US, a lot accompanies this, you know, we have the freedom and democracy and Free Press and Freedom of Speech, the Good Guys defending freedom and democracy in the world and enforcing world peace!
No propaganda here! No sir!
Of course, adding to the mess is the whole massive clusterfuck of confusion of the bipolar political disorder, you know, the goodness, truth, and righteous virtue of My Side, opposing the evil, lies, and Fake News propaganda of The Other Side.
That mess continues, including the farce of the most recent presidential election.
A few days ago somebody in the social media world posted a link to an article about Hillary Clinton, speaking somewhere, and saying something to the effect that people are saying she should shut up and go away, after losing the election, because, according to Hillary, she’s a woman! Part of this was some comment about how her people researched (she still has people?) and, why, they did not find any case of any man being told to shut up and go away after losing an election!
This is not new, obviously, this idea asserted by Hillary Clinton. Either it genuinely never occurs to her that a great many people had a whole batch of good reasons to not want her as President, or she knows that very well, and claims “sexism and misogyny!” as the only possible reason for any objections and opposition to her. I’m not sure which would be worse, but, aside from the many problems with Hillary Clinton, she is not stupid, so it is almost certainly the latter, which fits with the general mode of operation of Mrs. Clinton, a never ending theatrical performance of self serving manipulation, which, in November 2016, was lined up alongside the never ending theatrical performance of self serving manipulation from Donald Trump, and we were supposed to pick one as President.
Imagine a scene…
Someone comes out of a long coma that has lasted several years…
what’s the date?
April 1st, 2018
wow! I’ve been out of it a long time! I’ve missed a couple Olympics, I missed the whole presidential election! so who’s the President now?
Donald Trump
<pause>
oh… April 1st… right… OK, guys, good one, very funny
alright, seriously, stop goofing around, who is the President now?
um… no, seriously… Donald Trump is the President of the United States
now how in fucking hell could that be possible? who was on the ballot, anyway?
it was Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton
<very long pause>
can I go back in my coma now?
I digress a little, but, not really, as that whole farce is part of all kinds of messes we have.
After that link posting I just mentioned, there was a whole epic barrage of comments with lots of argument. One facet of all that was reading quite a few comments of a kind that have not been unusual, things about people saying how they “held my nose, and voted for Hillary”, the kind of thing I have been talking about for a while; people who voted for Hillary Clinton, apparently knowing how awful she is, with rationalizations about how they must support Hillary Clinton and vote for her, because she was the Not-Trump… we must vote for Hillary, or we’ll get Trump!
People did this despite the obvious, or at least it should be obvious, that Hillary Clinton is a loyal servant and collaborator of the whole neocon cult, among many other severe problems. Many people are still locked into simplistic clichés concerning the baffling mystery of how anybody could possibly even think of choosing Trump as President, usually revolving around any such people being racist fascist morons. One factor that this mindset ignores is the idea that there were probably many people who seriously started to consider Trump because of his vocal criticism of the whole neocon faction in Washington. Of course, that gets into a whole subject of its own, of wondering how anybody could be so naïve or willfully ignorant that they could believe Donald Trump as President would operate with principle and integrity.
That delusion should be well blown into oblivion by the now obvious full takeover by the neocons of the Trump administration and anything concerning “foreign policy”.
Part of the obscene absurdity is the way so many people, including all sorts of people of the “hold your nose and vote for Hillary- she’s Not Trump!” camp, regarding themselves as “Left” and “Liberal” and loyal Democrats, manage to immerse themselves in a twisted sort of cognitive dissonance of, in one moment, proudly declaring their opposition to that whole neocon warmonger contingent, and in another moment, be in complete agreement and alliance with the neocons.
That gets all wound up in all kinds of terrible mental contortions. It generally goes through twists that go something like: “the terrible neocons… they’re Republicans, you know… Hillary’s not a neocon, she’s one of us, she’s a Democrat!… so oppose the neocons (among other R things) and vote for Hillary because she’s D and Not-Trump!”, even as she has clearly been aligned with the neocons pretty much forever, and Trump ran with an idea of opposition to the neocons… which then turned out to be nothing like the reality of Trump as President…
What a hellish circus.
We now have the selection by Trump of John Bolton as National Security Adviser, a hardcore neocon whose record in the past as a theoretical “diplomat”, and life in general, has been a fairly simple attitude of essentially wanting to attack everybody all the time, and an ambassador to the United Nations who, aside from being a continuation of a string of US representatives in the UN who are hardcore neocons, has recently spoken of, in her words, sharing Bolton’s distain for the UN.
Let that one settle in for a while.
Now, we have a pressing and insanely dangerous issue, as the warmongers are continuing to howl for attacking Syria, the latest in the long running chant of the neocons of “Assad must go!”.
That has been going for some time, and when you look into it, it turns out that there is a long running squabble because the Syrian government, under Assad, refuses to allow a natural gas pipeline to run through Syria, that, surprise, is wanted by Washington, to carry natural gas from Qatar, if I remember right, through to places north and west, including supplying Europe, which currently gets most of its natural gas from Russia, a Syrian ally. A clear picture of what’s happening there should be obvious, and you can argue about what you might think about all that one way or another, but it should be apparent. It is not about “the brutal dictator Assad” and humanitarian concern for the poor innocents of Syria and freedom and democracy.
Remember the brutal dictator Saddam Hussein and his dreaded weapons of mass destruction, and the ensuing “liberation of Iraq”? How about Libya? What happened to those places, and how are they doing now?
I find it interesting to think back about the matter of asking, when did Russia suddenly become some great menacing threat, with Vladimir Putin personally being promoted as some sort of Bond movie villain? I quickly noticed that all this suddenly started swirling around right around a period when noises started coming from Washington about “Assad must go!”, and the Russians quickly made it clear that they were an ally of Syria, and they were not about to sit quietly and allow the US government to attack Syria and overthrow Assad and meet a fate like the leaders in Iraq and Libya who became obstacles in the view of the Washington neocons. (It was some time later before I found out about the whole matter of the gas line, and things became a little more clear.)
What a coincidence.
It still amazes and worries me that so many people have no idea what happened in Ukraine, another neocon epic of trouble, something I have been over countless times. An elected president announces that he decided not to sign some economic agreement with the European Union, that Washington wanted, because it would be bad for his country, and, suddenly, hey, what do you know? A sudden “people’s revolution” happens in the Ukrainian capital that overthrows that guy in coup d’etat and replaces him with a cast of characters who just happen to be people wanted by the neocons, via neocon queen Victoria Nuland.
I still, regularly, see or hear some squawking from some neocon warmonger megalomaniacs, making sure they keep planting the ideas in people’s heads, of “Putin the Crimea invader” and “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine” and all that complete unadulterated bullshit, and people keep swallowing it and regurgitating. You don’t hear about the coup of early 2014 and the driving forces, the neo-Nazis getting themselves into things, the vote of over 90% of the voters in Crimea wanting nothing to do with the gang taking over Kiev, separating from Ukraine and asking to rejoin Russia.
(I keep telling people about these things, just because the nonsensical propaganda from the neocons keeps getting blasted out at people, endlessly, continuously, as these people adopt the Goebbels Nazi propaganda Big Lie method.)
One less frequent item that sometimes pops up in that kind of, shall we say, “messaging”, is someone in Washington proudly talking about giving Ukraine (that is, the new regime under their control, replacing the previously elected government) “defensive weapons”. If you come across this, notice that they always make sure they emphasize “defensive weapons”, as if to imply that the weapons could not be used to attack anyone, and always describe it in one way or another as poor little underdog Ukraine to stand up to the assault of Russia and the constantly reiterated narrative of Russian invasion.
The problem is that this regularly repeated message of “Russian invasion” is obvious nonsense, but the neocons just keep hammering on that simple idea planted in people’s heads, and, somehow, people buy it. It takes no military expertise or special knowledge or access to secret intelligence briefings or something to realize something obvious. Looking at Ukraine, and looking at Russia, next door to Ukraine, if the Russian military really invaded Ukraine with notions of taking over, that would probably have been over and the Russian army controlling the Ukrainian capital of Kiev in about a week or something.
What was apparent in the period after the 2014 Ukrainian coup, reported in a variety of reports from different sources that managed to be avoided by the popular news media outlets, in some detail (unlike the vague but adamant declarations that formed the usual news reports most Americans sucked in), was that after the coup, people in eastern Ukraine, like the people in Crimea and southern regions of Ukraine, were outraged by the overthrow of the President they elected, and refused to accept the bunch who took control, the new regime immediately began ordering the Ukrainian military to start attacking the people in those regions and stomp them into submission, destroy them, or drive people to flee for their lives into Russia to the east.
There you have the Ukrainian “need” for “defensive weapons”, including an explanation for why the manipulations of propaganda from the neocon crowd are always careful to never mention sending military war supplies to their puppet government in Ukraine without the word “defensive”… always plant the idea that the poor Ukrainians are fighting for their lives against continuous assault from the evil Russians, carefully steering people here away from getting wind of the military hardware actually being used by the new rulers of Ukraine to attack, kill, and destroy other Ukrainians.
I have not seen much news about what’s happening there for some time, so I suspect that the situation might have stabilized somewhat into a standoff, where the gang ruling now in Kiev have not managed to crush the people in eastern Ukraine who had the nerve to actually fight back. A lot of the propaganda narrative has been to continually insist that the people in the east are all Russian operatives, or even claim that it’s the Russian army fighting Ukraine after invading. I think it would be naïve to think that there is no Russian involvement, but there is a lot conveniently glossed over and ignored.
One is the idea that these people could not fight off the Ukrainian military, that it simply is obvious that it’s invading Russians army. One neglected item, pointed out when all this broke loose by people familiar with the region, is that some of the Ukrainian military was people from those very areas, who unsurprisingly refused to attack and destroy themselves, the places where they lived, and the people around them. Another is the unsurprising news that many Ukrainian soldiers were less than enthusiastic about suddenly receiving orders from a new bunch seizing control of their government to attack and destroy Ukrainians who were rebelling against that coup, and some number of them either deserted (I read stories about masses of military service age Ukrainian young men leaving the country) or even joined what the new regime in Kiev had labeled “terrorists” in the east. All that, obviously, would have included quite a lot of armaments and equipment of the Ukrainian army being appropriated by the people in the east to use for their defense.
I have been hammering away on the fantastically bizarre farce of the Ukrainian mess as not just the mess that it is, and the egregiously wrong example of “foreign policy” under the domination of American government by the neocons that it is, but a towering example of just how badly people here in my country have been manipulated by great steaming piles of propaganda so detached from reality, so outrageously dishonest, that it’s staggering. The Ukraine matter barely makes it into the standard “mainstream” news these days except in one aspect; the regular repetition of the “Russian invasion” fiction that has been so implanted in many people’s minds, all it takes is an occasional repetition of the meme and it’s refreshed. Oh, right, yes, those evil Russians and the menace of The Russian Threat under the evil Putin!
In case it has not become completely obvious by now, it should be clear that with the cult of megalomania and hubris dominating the American government now (as it has for decades), generally described with the term “neocons”, there is a long list of “enemies” that have nothing to do with actually being a threat to the security of the country, and are all about being regarded as some sort of obstacle to the domination of the world by the US as a sole ruling empire as it was laid out openly years ago by the Project for the New American Century and the “Wolfowitz Doctrine”.
Right now, the urgent item that should be seriously concerning everyone is the insanity involving Syria. That, as should be apparent by now, is another insanely complex mess shrouded in confusion and blatant lying, maybe worse in that respect than the Ukraine coup and mess that followed. Trying to pay attention and see what, exactly, has been happening in Syria and the cast of characters is such a tangle of chaotic farce that it could be funny, if it were not all so grim.
About the only part that seems fairly clear is that events in Syria are just another large messy case of “foreign policy” where the neocon cult malevolently meddles in everything everywhere, and makes a horrible mess of everything they touch. What appears, in least mainly, to be a gigantic fit of petulant rage about not allowing a pet project of a natural gas pipeline has given us another ugly episode of attempted “regime change” in the government of another country thousands of miles away in another part of the world. Just one problem with this is the apparent way that so many people have managed to come to accept this kind of thing as normal, even natural, and never even consider that there might be anything wrong with that at all.
Right now things are especially urgent as we have news flying around suggesting rather strongly that we might have, maybe any time now, a US military attack on yet another country, this time Syria. The rationalization is noise about “Assad attacking his people with chemical weapons!”, which is a narrative that is not happening for the first time. This has happened a few times now, always more or less the same theme, about variations of “the brutal dictator Assad attacks his own people, innocent civilians, women and children, with chemical weapons!” (again, much like the chemical weapons “weapons of mass destruction” that “we knew” Saddam Hussein had). The problem, every time, is that this narrative has been, at best, completely suspicious, and almost certainly complete nonsense. These incidents have even been questionable in terms of whether there was even really a chemical weapons attack, and if they were, people researching the matters doing actual objective journalism and reporting have found it all to be not what it has been said to be, actually almost certainly all being “false flag” incidents committed by some faction of people who are striving for the overthrow of Bashir al-Assad and the Syrian government trying to draw an attack on the Syrian military and government (from the US) in righteous outrage for “humanitarian intervention”.
One thing about these “chemical attacks” is that “information” (in quotation marks as euphemism) about them seems to always come from people such as “The White Helmets”, a story of their own, a group that seems to simply be entirely a propaganda operation designed to appear as a “humanitarian” group of almost angelic heroes and Good Guys. Actually, not to digress too far here, even the consistently used nickname of “The White Helmets” seems practically comical in its obvious imagery, you know, the White Hat Good Guys riding in to save the day with their heroic goodness against the Black Hat Bad Guys.
When the first case of “Assad attacks his own people with chemical weapons!” showed up, old investigative journalist Seymour Hersh looked into it and did a long article finding it to be, in short, a heaping load of bullshit. Despite Hersh’s credentials, that only appeared in the London Review of Books, a pretty obscure publication that would not exactly be regarded as a news medium, or important. Why that happened is a good question. The most likely view of many people considering this would probably be something like “well, that’s not real news, it’s just ‘conspiracy theory’ ranting from some crackpot, or it would be in the Real News!”, never considering that this is really an indictment of how much of the supposed “Real News” submissively squashes anything that differs from official narratives. In this case, the official narratives demand that all “news” must conform to the plan of “Assad must go!”.
In the lust for “regime change” everywhere there is a government not going along with the plans of the megalomaniacs, it has become clear to anybody paying attention that the neocon faction has been actually supporting people otherwise known as terrorist groups (who suddenly become some sort of Good Guys when in Washington’s employment) to overthrow the Syrian government, even while we hear constant propaganda about “fighting ISIS and The War On Terror in Syria” to rationalize US military action in Syria, a country that has made it very clear that the US military is not wanted in Syria, for obvious reasons (see “Assad must go!” in case this is confusing).
The general picture coming from Syria seems to indicate that the Syrian military has been making progress in their efforts against the armed factions trying to take over Syria and overthrow the government, and, yet, very strangely, even in situations where the Syrian military appears to have just about defeated those armed factions in some area of Syria, somehow, absurdly, we suddenly have a purported case of the brutal Assad, somehow, deciding that even when success is at hand in fighting off those groups somewhere, he should attack civilians in those very places with chemical weapons, an act that would have absolutely no “military value”, no matter how brutal and inhumane it might be, but be guaranteed to draw universal worldwide outrage and drive people into supporting, even demanding, a “humanitarian war intervention” to attack the Syrian military and Assad and his government.
How about that.
Now, we are right on the verge of that possibly happening, an attack on another country that is not attacking us (again!), with completely contrived justification (again!), even as the country in question is allied with Russia, with their military forces in Syria at the request of the Syrian government to defend Syria.
This is not just insane, it’s completely and obviously wrong, but, what’s all the noise flying around?
We’re going to go teach that brutal dictator Animal Assad (a new evil villain nickname!) a lesson with a little humanitarian intervention bombing to save the innocent women and children of Syria!
If the US military attacks Syria, which seems entirely possible at the moment, as completely fucking insane as that would be, and just plainly and clearly wrong as that would be, and the Russian military fights back to defend their ally, you can guarantee that there would be immediate raging noise about “look at the Russian aggression! see the evil Russian aggression of the evil Putin propping up the regime of the Brutal Animal Assad!”.
A continuing problem with addressing any of this, the broader picture not only focusing on Syria, is that anything that even questions the propaganda narratives of Russian aggression led by the evil Putin, and pointing out the obvious picture of all that being a result of Putin and Russia becoming another one of those obstacles the neocons declare as enemies, triggers trained mob responses. You must be one of those Russian agents, one of these Russian propaganda trolls! At the very least, you must be a “Putin apologist” or one of “Putin’s useful idiots”.
We have years of evidence showing us how any kind of obstacle to the neocon world domination plans becomes a menacing threat to America accompanied by mass barrages of propaganda to wind people up, yet people keep falling for every bit of it.
By the way, just to note this, one part of an endless array of chaos and confusion, there was the recent episode of some Russian double agent, a Russian who had worked for British intelligence and ended up living in England, reportedly being poisoned by a “military grade nerve agent”, that was, for one thing, reported to be something so deadly that something like a drop of the stuff would quickly kill anyone near it in gruesome fashion, along with his daughter. Supposedly they were poisoned like so, but then somehow managed to go for a stroll and then be found later in a local park near death. The latest news indicates they are not only not dead, but recovering, with news that the poisoned daughter was released from the hospital and talking to reporters. That, of course, was instantly reported as more evil Russian aggression, and the British Prime Minister immediately called for punishment of Russia, being clearly responsible for this heinous act, and then, after that, a different news item reported that British police were going to open an investigation into the incident.
This episode is an entire large saga of its own. The short version is that it should be obvious that this is still another case of a load of complete bullshit, involving what some call a “false flag operation”.
Throughout all this, we have the extra complications of what I have already talked about. People so appalled by the fact that, somehow, Donald Trump is the President of the United States, and penned in by bipolar political disorder, that they seem to have completely lost their minds, unable to keep anything in objective perspective. In that madness, you are either a “Trump supporter” or “The Resistance”, and with all the confusion and complications that this brings, like, somehow, as I said earlier, managing to let this guide them into complete support for the whole neocon contingent, even as they ironically and absurdly strike all of what they deem to be the proper poses of “virtue signalling” about appearing to oppose the whole neocon faction (e.g., “look at those bad people who brought us the Iraq war!”).
Trying to sort out that mess, some of it is relatively easy. One problem is that people locked into their side of bipolar political disorder are triggered into some apoplectic fit at a hint of a suggestion that anything related to President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (or her successor John Kerry) was related to the neocon domination. The blind spots are vast. Another factor is that people appalled by having Trump as President fall into the gaping chasm of a trap that sort of falls under the heading of the idea of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.
This could go on and on, and this note is already very long, in the view of some people who want everything dumped into their heads in 30 seconds or less (which, ironically, is a major factor in how simplistic propaganda is working so effectively).
Basically, in the United States today, the arrival of the date of April 1st and April Fool’s Day is sort of moot.
Right now, every day is April Fool’s Day.
Update to briefing note ‘Doubts about Novichoks’ | Tim Hayward
Yulia Skripal leaves British hospital five weeks after nerve agent attack
Why the Arabs don’t want us in Syria – POLITICO
Syria Is Another Pipeline War | Washington’s Blog
Mass Deception and the Prelude to World War | Global Research – Centre for Research on Globalization
Lies Are Washington’s Chosen Path To Dominance – PaulCraigRoberts.org
The White Helmets Are A Propaganda Construct – YouTube
John Pilger: The White Helmets Are A “Complete Propaganda Construct”
Russia, Syria Make Powerful Case At United Nations. – THE ONENESS of HUMANITY
Seymour M. Hersh · The Red Line and the Rat Line: Erdoğan and the Syrian rebels · LRB 17 April 2014
Now Mattis Admits There Was No Evidence Assad Used Poison Gas on His People
ClubOrlov: The Importance of Looking Dangerous
Homeland Security will start collecting data on hundreds of thousands of journalists
Part 1: Kevin Shipp, CIA Officer Exposes the Shadow Government – YouTube
Now Here’s Some Real Interference In Election Campaigns by William Blum – Dandelion Salad
Noise 