July 11, 2015

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July 11, 2015

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July 11, 2015

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July 11, 2015

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July 11, 2015

Legendary US Journalist Robert Parry: Media Groupthink on Ukraine Most Extreme I've Ever Seen

Taken from the World Russia forum hosted by Katrina vanden Heuvel in Washington, D.C. in April 2015.

July 11, 2015

MH-17 Case Slips into Propaganda Fog - Consortium News/Robert Parry

https://consortiumnews.com/2015/07/09/mh-17-case-slips-into-propaganda-fog

Throughout the Ukraine crisis, propaganda and “information warfare” have overridden any honest presentation of reality – and the mystery around the MH-17 disaster has now slipped into that haze of charge and counter-charge. Many investigative journalists, including myself, have been rebuffed in repeated efforts to get verifiable proof about the case or even informational briefings.

In that sense, the MH-17 case stands as an outlier to the usual openness that surrounds inquiries into airline disasters. The Obama administration’s behavior has been particularly curious, with its rush to judgment five days after the July 17, 2014 shoot-down, citing sketchy social media posts to implicate the ethnic Russian rebels and indirectly the Russian government but then refusing requests for updates.

But why the later secrecy? If Director of National Intelligence James Clapper decided that unverified information about the shoot-down could be released five days after the event, why would his office then decide to keep the U.S. public in the dark as more definitive data became available? Over the past 11 months, the DNI’s office has offered no updates on the initial assessment, with a DNI spokeswoman even making the absurd claim that U.S. intelligence had made no refinements of its understanding about the tragedy since July 22, 2014.

I’m told that the reason for the DNI’s reversal from openness to secrecy was that U.S. intelligence analysts found no evidence that the Russian government had given the rebels sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles capable of downing an aircraft at 33,000 feet, the altitude of MH-17, and that an examination of U.S. satellite and electronic intelligence instead implicated extremists linked to Ukraine’s U.S.-backed regime, although not to Kiev’s political leadership.

https://consortiumnews.com/2015/07/09/mh-17-case-slips-into-propaganda-fog

July 11, 2015

Anti-intellectualism Is Killing America - Psychology Today

America is killing itself through its embrace and exaltation of ignorance, and the evidence is all around us. Dylann Roof, the Charleston shooter who used race as a basis for hate and mass murder, is just the latest horrific example. Many will correctly blame Roof's actions on America's culture of racism and gun violence, but it's time to realize that such phenomena are directly tied to the nation's culture of ignorance.

In a country where a sitting congressman told a crowd that evolution and the Big Bang are “lies straight from the pit of hell,” (link is external) where the chairman of a Senate environmental panel brought a snowball (link is external) into the chamber as evidence that climate change is a hoax, where almost one in three citizens can’t name the vice president (link is external), it is beyond dispute that critical thinking has been abandoned as a cultural value. Our failure as a society to connect the dots, to see that such anti-intellectualism comes with a huge price, could eventually be our downfall.

In considering the senseless loss of nine lives in Charleston, of course racism jumps out as the main issue. But isn’t ignorance at the root of racism? And it’s true that the bloodshed is a reflection of America's violent, gun-crazed culture, but it is only our aversion to reason as a society that has allowed violence to define the culture. Rational public policy, including policies that allow reasonable restraints on gun access, simply isn't possible without an informed, engaged, and rationally thinking public.

Some will point out, correctly, that even educated people can still be racists, but this shouldn’t remove the spotlight from anti-intellectualism. Yes, even intelligent and educated individuals, often due to cultural and institutional influences, can sometimes carry racist biases. But critically thinking individuals recognize racism as wrong and undesirable, even if they aren’t yet able to eliminate every morsel of bias from their own psyches or from social institutions. An anti-intellectual society, however, will have large swaths of people who are motivated by fear, susceptible to tribalism and simplistic explanations, incapable of emotional maturity, and prone to violent solutions. Sound familiar?


https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/our-humanity-naturally/201506/anti-intellectualism-is-killing-america

July 11, 2015

Guardian comment sections shows that UK citizens do not trust the US anymore.

Check out the oldest comments in this Guardian story and decide for yourself how the UK and EU see us. The thumb up post counts that are anti-US are massive compared to the opposite that are pro-US. Should the US be worried we are losing the propaganda war because Europeans are misguided or are we losing it because Europeans see through our lies and have grown tired of them?

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/09/russia-is-biggest-threat-to-american-national-security-says-us-air-force-chief

July 11, 2015

The Best Enemies Money Can Buy - Dr. Antony Sutton of the Hoover Institute

Interview recorded in the 1960's with Professor Antony Sutton, who taught economics at California State University, and was a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

In this talk, Prof. Sutton goes into his impeccable research on how a close-knit group of Western financiers and industrialists (centered around Morgan and Rockefeller in the US, and around Milner and the City financiers, in the UK) created and sustained Nazi Germany through the German company IG Farben.

Parts 1-6 are also fascinating.

July 11, 2015

Germany won’t spare Greek pain – it has an interest in breaking us- Yanis Varoufakis

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/10/germany-greek-pain-debt-relief-grexit

Greece’s financial drama has dominated the headlines for five years for one reason: the stubborn refusal of our creditors to offer essential debt relief. Why, against common sense, against the IMF’s verdict and against the everyday practices of bankers facing stressed debtors, do they resist a debt restructure? The answer cannot be found in economics because it resides deep in Europe’s labyrinthine politics.

In 2010, the Greek state became insolvent. Two options consistent with continuing membership of the eurozone presented themselves: the sensible one, that any decent banker would recommend – restructuring the debt and reforming the economy; and the toxic option – extending new loans to a bankrupt entity while pretending that it remains solvent.

Official Europe chose the second option, putting the bailing out of French and German banks exposed to Greek public debt above Greece’s socioeconomic viability. A debt restructure would have implied losses for the bankers on their Greek debt holdings.Keen to avoid confessing to parliaments that taxpayers would have to pay again for the banks by means of unsustainable new loans, EU officials presented the Greek state’s insolvency as a problem of illiquidity, and justified the “bailout” as a case of “solidarity” with the Greeks.

To frame the cynical transfer of irretrievable private losses on to the shoulders of taxpayers as an exercise in “tough love”, record austerity was imposed on Greece, whose national income, in turn – from which new and old debts had to be repaid – diminished by more than a quarter. It takes the mathematical expertise of a smart eight-year-old to know that this process could not end well.




Greece has been insolvent for 5 years yet the EU 'leaders' continue to try to draw blood from stone. Why? Is this really about control and subverting democracy? Is the EU a control mechanism rather than a democratic one?