Snowden: What are they so scared of?

Something has Obama and the cabal that he's fronting for powerfully spooked by Edward Snowden's actions.

The campaign to capture and make an example of Snowden has led to an unprecedented demonstration of the sheer raw power of the US over nearly every country on Earth, even including China and Russia.  This campaign has not been cost-free. For example, the leaders of France, Spain, Italy and Portugal have been exposed as Washington's flunkeys in the eyes of their own people.  Thus the US response must have been strongly motivated.

Now they're moving to sanctions against any country that doesn't cooperate in capturing and rendering Snowden.

This is way out of proportion to Snowden's revelations about the NSA so far, much of which was already known or suspected. This US reaction looks like a fear reaction, even a survival response of a cornered beast.

So what are they so afraid of? Something more Snowden hasn't shared? Or something someone else must be deterred from sharing? If so, it must be some secret so catastrophic it could torpedo their empire. But what could that be?

Maybe it's just about Snowden revealing more names, more details about how, that will cause uproars in more countries like what happened in Brazil and Germany.  But maybe it's something more.  

Is it fear of someone leaking proof of the big lies they've been telling, about bin Laden and the War on Terror?  Details of their plans for taking full power over the world, or for a managed collapse of the world economy? Details of their plans for starting and winning World War III?  Or of horrible new weapons systems they've been developing in secret, to use against ... who?

All possibilities.  But here's another possibility:

Suppose some CIA agent - or some employee of a private contractor with access to CIA files - were thinking about blowing the whistle on the political leaders, politicians, military officers, journalists, religious and labor leaders around the globe who are on the CIA payroll?  The ones many people had always suspected but no one could prove it?  

Like maybe the ones who jumped to cooperate in turning back, grounding and searching the Bolivian Presidential Airplane, an utterly unprecedented act of international lawlessness? 

Obama and crew would no doubt consider that a threat to the Empire of the first order, a threat to their survival. That could detonate a popular rebellion in many of those countries, maybe a global popular rebellion.

That would b a threat to be deterred at any cost.

Education as just indoctrination - including Math!

Comment in response to article in Truthout:

What Passes for Education In America Is Often Just Indoctrination

http://www.alternet.org/education/educating-idiots

The photo on the link to this article is of someone, perhaps a teacher, standing in front of a blackboard full of "heavy math". Is that an image of good education? Or of education as just indoctrination?

Actually, math at its root is the poster child, the hard kernel, of an education that makes no sense! Which is what my 9th grade students kept telling me: "Mister, this doesn't make any sense!"

Math, in our mixed-population public schools like the ones where I taught, is the ultimate separator of the winners - the kids that have been bullied and conned into swallowing anything to preserve or advance their future income and socioeconomic status - from the losers.

As Calvin put it to Hobbs in 1991:

"You know, I don't think math is a science. I think it's a religion."

"A religion"?

"Yeah. All these equations are like miracles. You take two numbers and when you add them, they magically become one NEW number! No one can say how it happens. You either believe it or you don't. This whole book is full of things that have to be accepted on faith! It's a religion!"

"And in the public schools no less. Call a lawyer."

"As a math atheist, I should be excused from this."

Often the most disruptive "losers" in my classes were the smart angry working-class kids who were tired of all the BS, who demanded that I show them how what I was teaching them make sense. I tried, but I couldn't.  At the time I had nothing else to offer them, and I was left feeling like a failure, like I had failed them. But I owe them all a debt of gratitude. They put me on the path of searching for a math that makes sense, and finally of helping invent one, CIMM, a math as it turns out that also helps develop critical thinking skills.

But so far, despite a few promising starts - fabulous results for failing students and hapless teachers as a matter of fact - it's a math that has been unable to survive in our schools.

Iron in the oceans: why should we care?

To a poster to TruthDig article

Ocean Iron Study Means Climate Rethink

  http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/ocean_iron_study_means_climate_rethink_20130720/?ln

who complained that we have more urgent problems to worry about than how iron gets into the ocean and its effect on CO2 levels in the atmosphere:
...................

Purple Crab, there's no sense arguing do this first or do that first.  We're fighting back on all fronts.  We - the people - don't really have the power to win pretty much any of these battles now, but our day will come if we keep on fighting.  

Imagine it's 2023.  A massive global uprising of the people of the world has been met by a global wave of repression, which failed when rank and file troops and junior officers in every land refused to fire on the crowds.  Power over the Earth has thus passed decisively into the hands of the common people, and we are faced with all the problems of organizing our self-governance, surviving the coming years, but also salvaging the Earth and redirecting our activities - the activities of maybe 10 billion people - to solving the problems of production and distribution of wealth in a truly sustainable way.

We will have inherited one heck of a mess, and we'll need all the information science can provide, especially stuff like this.  It's not going to be simple, and there will be no magic key.  So thank you Drs. Homsky and Mills and all your colleagues for your work, and thank you TruthDig for sharing it.

Two responses to Zimmerman verdict

From the London Daily Mail, May 11:

"'Abused' Florida wife sentenced to 20 YEARS for firing warning shot at husband after Stand Your Ground defence fails"

 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2143313/Abused-Florida-wife-sentenced-20-YEARS-firing-warning-shot-husband-Stand-Your-Ground-defence-fails.html#ixzz2Z25AMBxX 

So much for the claim that the Zimmerman verdict and the Stand Your Ground law aren't about race!  Or do we really need a case where an armed "black" man stalks, attacks and shoots a "white" teenager to test the theory that this was about race? 

By the way, why was Marissa Alexander's case news in London but (according to Google News Search) nowhere in the US (except the alternative online press?)   Why not in the Telegram?  What's up with that?  Yoo-hoo!  Editors!?  

........................

Truther, is there really something sinister about the reactions to the Zimmerman verdict?


Perhaps the trap in being a "truther" could be in thinking that because the Powers that Be are constantly trying to turn every situation to their advantage, because their hand is often invisible or disguised behind their ubiquitous propaganda, that every response from the people, as seen through the media, is somehow orchestrated by them.

It ain't so.

The reality is that often they are struggling to respond to the people's moves, trying to get out in front of the herd and turn it.

A dramatic example is what happened in Egypt.  Yes, the CIA and the State Department almost certainly were behind the military coup, and had their hand in the people's uprising there too.  Does that make the whole thing a plot?  Is there any way in Heck that they would have wanted 30 million Egyptians in the streets demanding the government resign - and organizing and talking with each other about what kind of Egypt they wanted?   Heck no!  They're just trying to salvage what for them is a nightmare scenario!  The reality is that now the common people are driving the agenda and they're flailing, trying to save their tootsies.

The response of millions of people to Trevon's murder and the Zimmerman verdict is huge, visceral, dangerous to the Powers that Be.  They'll try to spin it, turn it, make it a wedge issue, true.  You're right there.  But they certainly didn't cause it.  More of us should have been at this event yesterday.  I wish someone had called me to say "Hey brother, what you're doing tonight can wait, you got to get down there for this."  Because more of us there would have been a little step toward Worcester slipping beyond their control.

There's the real Truth.  Your 2000 Architects are a part of it.  But it's all around you.  It's all of us.  Well, 99.5% of us. Some get one piece now, some another, but we're all finding our way in, issue by issue, fight by fight, discovering each other, slowly building the will and solidarity to rescue our land from the usurpers.

High unemployment makes no sense - from a distance!

Comment on

Economists: Emphasis on deficit impeding recovery

By Jackie Calmes and Jonathan Weisman THE NEW YORK TIMES

http://www.telegram.com/article/20130509/NEWS/130509683

...............................

Even Krugman isn't admitting how big the problem really is, with huge numbers of unemployed young adults and mid to late career workers, cutbacks in help for the unemployed and an economy that's barely growing fast enough to keep up with population growth.  But he gets it that it makes no sense to us as a nation to allow this to continue.

Unemployment and jobs are a national emergency, and for five years even Obama for all his talk has failed to treat it as such. His original stimulus, at best, was 10% of what we needed, and now it's gone. (Perhaps it's hard to go after trillions for jobs when you've already given away trillions to the criminal bankers who paid for your campaigns?) 

As for the banks, after we'd paid many times their market value to rescue them, Obama should have seized them and run them as a public utility to stop the plunder. (Whoops! He did take over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and now they're the worst of the worst!) 

Whatever, the answer clearly won't come from the top. It will have to come from millions of angry people getting organized and pushing back, demanding that our government do what it takes to prioritize our needs above those of the super rich and the great corporations. 

We need serious spending on jobs. Major spending. There is plenty to be done in a country whose infrastructure is crumbling. There are plenty of resourses, plenty of people who need the work, even plenty of money (only we don't have it.) It makes no logical sense to say we can't, except from inside the twisted logic of the "dog in the manger". (That however is the logic that is served up to us daily in our media and talk shows, made to look like common sense by highly-paid flacks who make those who disagree with them look like freaks.)

We can borrow the money to put people back to work, in which case the bankers create it by entering some numbers in a computer and charge us interest on it.  (On the bright side, interest rates have never been lower.)  Or the Treasury can print the money and spend it into circulation, interest free.  Or we can cut the hugely wasteful spending on wars and foreign bases and spend it here; or we can tax the speculators, the super-rich and the mega-banks and big corporations, and spend the money to put people to work on the jobs that need doing.  Or some combination of the above. 

Your choice. 

But please don't choose "none of the above", because we've already tried that, and it's not working! 

Lazy workers living off the state?

MC1 wrote: 

"If you have low work skills, why would you work at all? It's all handed to you. You have to be responsible enough to want to be educated and make yourself marketable in this life. " 

This is the common story about people with low work skills, widely believed by those who've never been there or seen it up close, so I don't blame you for repeating it. But it is not only untrue, but cruelly untrue. 

The wrongness of this belief can be seen in the fact that even as the education level of the population keeps growing the median income and percent of the working age population with jobs failed to grow for several decades and now is falling. 

When Saint Gobain can get away with advertising for experienced machine setter-operators able to read blueprints and precision instruments for $10 an hour, we're in trouble. That's a $20 job at least, requiring a high level of attention, skill and reliability, plenty of sleep and a good diet. (Been there, done that.) So if it goes begging, they'll complain of a shortage of qualified workers. If people take it, they'll have to take a second job, come in when they're sick - and maybe apply for food stamps if they're supporting a family. And then St. Gobain will complain of a low quality of worker. 

So we cut off food stamps and school breakfasts, cut off Section 8 vouchers, cut off aid for dependent children and force more people to take jobs they can't afford, force them to take these desperately underpaid jobs. Then we have more children growing up with no adults at home and no food in the house, unable to pay attention in school because they're hungry ... and not equipped to take even that machine setter job, not even having the work skills to hold any job, really. 

Where does that then leave the American Dream? How does it become their dream? 

Who do we blame for Obama?

My comment in the Telegram to:

Woes Create questions about Obama's vision, SECOND-TERM GOALS MIRED IN CONFLICT 

By Peter Baker THE NEW YORK TIMES

http://www.telegram.com/article/20130516/NEWS/105169833

.................................

Praetorian wrote:

"The real people to blame here are the people that voted for him..."

Seriously, what choice were we given?  Mr. "I Don't Care about the 47%," that clueless voice of the exclusive country clubs?

I detest Barack for not holding the bankers accountable for ditching the economy and his ongoing giveaways of trillions to the banks; for his outrageous health care swindle; his failure to acknowledge the massive unemployment problem or push an adequate response; and now his blatant tilt toward private and for-profit charter schools, a betrayal of the many teachers who worked for his election.  

I detest his use of Al Qaida terrorists to destroy Libya and now Syria - the context for Benghazi - and his use of drones to wage wars of terror from the skies; for his many assaults on our constitutional rights, including failure to shut down Guantanamo and claiming and exercising the right to detain indefinitely or even kill Americans anywhere without a trial or public hearing; and his unprecedented war on whistle-blowers - which fits with the AP phone-logs incident!

Most of all I detest his using the language of the left, talking like a cross between King and the Second Coming with a necessary touch of Clint, even as he pursues these awful policies, covered up by a mastery of throwing the game and making it look like the other side's foul.

But seriously, why blame each other? What choice did we really have?

In the 2008 elections the two candidates who clearly, overwhelmingly expressed the views of the people on the deepest issues, left and right, were Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul. Now *that* would have been a race! But despite well-organized campaigns and enthusiastic supporters, their voices were silenced.  The media delivered the verdict of the big donors: they're spoilers, they're kooks, they have no chance. Unworthy of air time.

And so we never got that choice. 

Change, when it comes, will have to come from outside the system.