Dissident Veteran For Peace

False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils, except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important of the code, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity, and which, if strictly obeyed, would put an end to personal liberty—so dear to men, so dear to the enlightened legislator—and subject innocent persons to all the vexations that the guilty alone ought to suffer? Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man. [Cramer's emphasis omitted].

Source: Clayton E. Cramer, Concealed Weapon Laws of the Early Republic: Dueling, Southern Violence, and Moral Reform (Greenwood, 1999) pp. 5-6 quoting Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes And Punishments, trans. by Henry Palolucci (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1963), 87-88.

Labels: civil liberties, crime, critical thinking, freedom, guns, quotations

# posted by VFPDissident @ 7/17/2022 07:28:00 PM 0 comments

In "Indians at home – Indians in Cornwall, Indians in Wales, Indians in Ireland" I wrote about how European settler-colonialism, particularly by the English, was first inflicted upon other European peoples in Europe well before it was exported to other continents. This should be obvious to anyone with more than a passing knowledge of European history. Alas, it appears this is not the case.

Below is an interesting quote that speaks once more to this subject. Of course, I do not endorse Leyburn's lessons allegedly "learned from hard experience".

This use of the Scots-Irish as shock troops in the New World was quite similar to how the English government had used Scots settlers in Ulster against the Irish:

They lived on land in both regions that had often been forcibly taken from the natives. ... When the natives, whether Irish or Indian, refused to accept either the legality or the settlement, preferring rather to fight back by whatever means they could devise, the settlers fought equally hard to retain the homes and farms they had made by their own labor. They learned from hard experience that one must fight for what one has; that turning the other cheek does not guarantee property rights; in short, that might makes right, at least in the matter of life and land ownership.

Source: Clayton E. Cramer, Concealed Weapon Laws of the Early Republic: Dueling, Southern Violence, and Moral Reform (Greenwood, 1999) pp. 30-31 quoting James G. Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish, 147-148.

Labels: Empire, history, identity, Indians, Ireland, quotations, United States, White folks

# posted by VFPDissident @ 7/17/2022 06:45:00 PM 0 comments

If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important—if you want to operate on your default setting—then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying.

But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options.

It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.

Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. 

This, I submit, is the freedom of real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted: You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.

You get to decide what to worship ...

Because here's something else that's true.

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism.

There is no such thing as not worshipping.

Everybody worships.

The only choice we get is what to worship.

And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough.

Never feel you have enough.

It's the truth.

Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.

On one level, we all know this stuff already—it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story.

The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness.

Worship power—you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.

Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious.

They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called "real world" will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called "real world" of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self.

Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom.

The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.

This kind of freedom has much to recommend it.

But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

That is real freedom.

Source: David Foster Wallace, This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion about Living a Compassionate Life (Little, Brown and Co.: 2009) pp. 91-121.

Labels: art and literature, philosophy, quotations

# posted by VFPDissident @ 6/12/2022 07:05:00 PM 0 comments

The most natural constituency of this "multireligious America" perspective is the "spiritual but not religious" demographic, whose first principle seems to be disdain for so-called organized religion ... twenty-first-century spiritual folk believe that authentic piety is fundamentally a matter of practice, not belief. To them, dogma is always stolid and ritual always empty. Real religion—which is to say spirituality—happens not when some authority tells you what to think but when you discover in your own experience some sliver of the ineffable Something. Spirituality, in short, is religion stripped down to its experiential dimension. More than do-it-yourself-religion, spirituality is do-without-religion, a form of faith that denies its connections to the institutions, stories, and doctrines that gave it birth—religion without memory.

Source: Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy (Harperluxe, 2007) pp. 223-224. 

See also: "Quotable: Religious but not Spiritual"

Labels: quotations, religion

# posted by VFPDissident @ 12/01/2021 09:55:00 PM 0 comments

If Black lives really mattered to BLM, the media, and academia then they would tell the truth about the Black homicide rate instead of promoting specious, unfounded narratives about racism and police brutality. I was reminded of this once more while listening to an almost hour-long program on National Prevarication Radio (NPR) yesterday.

The show was Freakonomics Radio and the episode was "What Are the Police for, Anyway?" I actually agree that the US has a murder and incarceration problem. I also support an end to the War on Drugs and evidence-based police reforms that are effective at increasing the safety of both officers and the communities they serve. 

Unfortunately, BLM, most of the media, and most academics don't care about facts. They are driven by false narratives that sow division and enhance their careers and the power of politicians and business elites.

Here's an illustrative excerpt from the radio show transcript:

Black Americans are five times more likely to be arrested than white Americans. On a per-capita basis, Blacks are also much more likely to be fatally shot by the police. There has of course been a racial reckoning around policing lately

    PROTESTORS: Hey, hey! Ho, ho!  These racist cops have got to go!

Highlighted by the police murder [sic] of George Floyd. According to a recent Gallup poll, just 51 percent of U.S. adults have either 'a great deal' or 'quite a lot' of confidence in the police.

According to the Washington Post 2015-2021 police shootings database, 95.5% of the people shot and killed by police in the US are males and yet they make up slightly less than half of the US population. Thus, on a per capita basis, men are far more likely to be shot and killed by police but no one screams about systemic police misandry. An honest, sensible person looks at that discrepancy and say, yes, but males commit proportionality far more violent crimes than females.

In fact, year after year, Blacks commit around 50% of the murders in the US and most of their victims are Black. Anyone who thinks this fact bears no relation to outcomes of police encounters with Black people is profoundly stupid, profoundly dishonest, or both. Cops of all colors may not be able to cite the precise statistics but they know by experience that, ceteris paribus, Black people they encounter are far more likely to be a threat to police and others than people of any other race. (That doesn't mean police should not regard everyone as putatively law-abiding individuals, most Black people are not violent criminals and they deserve to be treated respectfully unless objective circumstances dictate otherwise.)

Moreover, FBI data (Zip file) reveals that Black criminals upped their game in 2020.^* In 56.6% of cases where the race of the "murder offender" is known that offender is Black; the comparable figure for Whites is 40.6%.^† Academics have long known that Black Americans have a criminal violence problem that dwarfs that in all other communities but, by and large, they haven't had the courage or integrity to vocalize that and hold the media and activists accountable in discussions of police conduct.

For instance, in 2013, Siegel et al. published an article on the predictors of firearm homicide rates in arguably, the premier US public health journal, but they buried the lede. They claimed "ours is the most up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of the relationship between firearm ownership and gun-related homicide rates among the 50 states."

In their final statistical analysis they found that the strongest predictor of "gun-related homicide" rate was a racial factor. In their tables 2 and 3 they reported: "For each 1 percentage point increase in proportion of Black population, firearm homicide rate increased by 5.2%" and "For each 1-SD [standard deviation] increase in proportion of black population, firearm homicide rate increased by 82.8". The comparable firearm homicide rate increases associated with an "increase in proportion of household gun ownership" were 0.9% and 12.9%.

There is no discussion whatsoever of the relationship between proportion of Black and firearm homicide rate in the body of their paper, which was titled "The Relationship Between Gun Ownership and Firearm Homicide Rates in the United States, 1981–2010". Now, if you really cared about reducing homicides wouldn't you foreground the strongest predictor found in your analysis? Needless to say this finding, as far as I can tell, has never been reported in any mainstream media outlet. In the only coverage I could find of the study anywhere was in Science Daily and they didn't report on any predictor but household gun ownership.

Notes

^* See "Expanded Homicide Data Table 3, Murder Offenders by Age, Sex, Race, and Ethnicity, 2020".

^† 8,142 ÷ (20,982  - 6,592) = 0.5658 = 56.6%; 5,844 ÷ (20,982  - 6,592) = 0.4061 = 40.6%

Labels: Black America, crime, George Floyd, guns, media, National Public Radio, police, race, science

# posted by VFPDissident @ 10/03/2021 10:30:00 PM 0 comments

It will be seen that, as used, the word 'Fascism' is almost entirely meaningless ... 

All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

Source: George Orwell, "What is Fascism?", Tribune, 1944.

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.

~*~*~

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, 'I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so'. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics'. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

~*~*~

But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

    i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

    ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

    iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

    iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

    v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

    vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable.

~*~*~

Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase – some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse – into the dustbin where it belongs.

Source: George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language", Horizon, April 1946.

Labels: Orwell, politics, quotations

# posted by VFPDissident @ 9/23/2021 09:10:00 PM 0 comments

Just over a week ago I decided to see if anyone else had written about a possible Israeli role in the SolarWinds/SUNBURST hack. Unsurprisingly, I could find no evidence of any interest in this subject by the mainstream corporate media since my post last December.

However, about a month after my post Whitney Webb did a much more thorough treatment of the subject on the The Last American Vagabond site. Her article is titled "Another Mega Group Spy Scandal? Samanage, Sabotage, and the SolarWinds Hack".

Readers may recall that I highlighted Samanage in the first numbered paragraph of my post. Webb also discusses Christopher Krebs (my paragraph #2) but does not mention the 2017 putative Israeli cell phone surveillance episode in DC that unfolded on Krebs' watch. Webb links to the same Israeli news source I linked regarding the boost in the stock prices of Israeli cybersecurity firms in the wake of the SolarWinds/SUNBURST hack.

In any case, I think Webb did very good work on this story and I recommend that you read it. Here are a couple of paragraphs from her piece:

... As Russiagate played out, it became apparent that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and a foreign power, but the nation was Israel, not Russia. Indeed, many of the reports that came out of Russiagate revealed collusion with Israel, yet those instances received little coverage and generated little media outrage. This has led some to suggest that Russiagate may have been a cover for what was in fact Israelgate.

Similarly, in the case of the SolarWinds hack, there is the odd case and timing of SolarWinds’ acquisition of a company called Samanage in 2019. As this report will explore, Samanage’s deep ties to Israeli intelligence, venture-capital firms connected to both intelligence and Isabel Maxwell, as well as Samange’s integration with the Orion software at the time of the back door’s insertion warrant investigation every bit as much as SolarWinds’ Czech-based contractor.

Labels: government, Israel, Russia, surveillance, technology, Trump

# posted by VFPDissident @ 9/19/2021 07:52:00 PM 0 comments

According to the CDC:

Nearly 500,000 people died from overdoses involving any opioid, including prescription and illicit opioids, from 1999-2019 ... The first wave began with increased prescribing of opioids in the 1990s, with overdose deaths involving prescription opioids (natural and semi-synthetic opioids and methadone) increasing since at least 1999.

Most states of the United States have some form of the "felony murder rule". This means a perpetrator can be held be criminally liable for murder if s/he caused the death of another person in the course of committing a felony. The perpetrator need not have intended the death of the victim and, in some states, need not have been the proximate cause of the death.

For example, if you merely drove the get away car for an armed robbery where one of your accomplices murdered a bank teller then you may held responsible for the murder. (If narrowly written and applied I think the felony murder rule is perfectly fair and just.)

I bring this up to point out that in America if you kill one person—even if you didn't pull the trigger—you can be punished for the murder. On the other hand, if you are a member of the Sackler family who had a key role in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans by opioid abuse then (so far) you won't be personally charged with any crime.

The Sackler family members who ran Purdue Pharma belong in prison. However, there are plenty of other culprits not directly connected to the Sacklers or Purdue Pharma who also belong in prison for their part in the opioid crisis and, as far as I know, none of them has been criminally charged, either.

To be clear, while the Sacklers et al. helped create the opioid crisis, the crisis itself is a form of collective suicide founded on America's nihilistic consumerism and culture of death. It's worth noting, too, that the death toll is mainly comprised of White Americans who are supposedly so privileged. This is undoubtedly fueled by unconcealed hostility to White people, generally, and White working-class people, in particular.

If you doubt this then try carrying a sign saying "It's Okay to be White" in public in any town or city in America and see what happens. Also, consider the remarks of Duquesne University Psychology professor Derek Hook who opined that “White people should commit suicide as an ethical act.” Hook says that he was speaking about suicide as the destruction of "Whiteness" but try publicly advocating that for any other racial, ethnic, or religious group.

Labels: crime, culture, government, health, medicine, race, White folks

# posted by VFPDissident @ 9/18/2021 10:53:00 PM 0 comments

What follows are a few thoughts on God, faith, and Christianity from mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). The text is taken from A. J. Krailsheimer's translation of Pascal's Pensées (Penguin, 1995). Specifically, they are derived from sections 418 - 424, according to Louis Lafuma's numbering scheme.

The first two excerpts are from a larger text commonly known as "Pascal's wager". I am not so interested here in Pascal's actual argument, almost all of which I have omitted, as I am in what Pascal concedes and what he believes about faith, unbelief, and Christianity.

If there is a God, he is infinitely beyond our comprehension, since, being indivisible and without limits, he bears no relation to us. We are therefore incapable of knowing either what he is or whether he is ...

Who then will blame Christians for being unable to give rational grounds for their belief, professing as they do a religion for which they cannot give rational grounds? They declare that it is a folly, stultitiam, in expounding it to the world, and then you complain that they do not prove it! ... Let us then examine this point, and say, "God is, or He is not." But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. [418]

Pascal's position is that reason cannot prove or disprove the existence of God. However, Pascal argues, reason can and does prove that one should choose to believe and/or act as if God does exist.

The idea is that the cost of the erroneous belief in a non-existent deity is low compared to the high cost of erroneous disbelief in a God who does exist. Conversely, as Pascal would have it, becoming a Christian is a win whether God exists or not.

Having assumed that his imagined interlocutor accepts his reasoning, Pascal concedes that faith in God cannot necessarily be turned on or off like a switch.

... at least get it into your head that, if you are unable to believe [in God], it is because of your passions since reason impels you to believe and yet you cannot do so. Concentrate then not on convincing yourself by multiplying proofs of God's existence but by diminishing your passions. You want to find faith and you do not know the road. You want to be cured of unbelief and you ask for the remedy: learn from those who were once bound like you ... They behaved just as if they did believe, taking the holy water, having masses said, and so on. That will make you believe quite naturally ... — 'But this is what I am afraid of.' — 'But why? What have you to lose? But to show you that this is the way, the fact is that this diminishes the passions which are your great obstacles ...' [418]

Pascal's point, then, is that disbelief in God is not grounded in reason but in an emotionally or psychologically-based resistance he calls "passions". Here are few more excerpts that are not generally considered part of Pascal's wager.

No sect and no religion has always existed on earth except Christianity. [421]

***

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

I say that it is natural for the heart to love the universal being or itself, according to its allegiance, and it hardens itself against either as it chooses. You have rejected one and kept the other. Is it reason that makes you love yourself? [423]

***

It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason. [424]

Labels: Christianity, philosophy, quotations, religion and science

# posted by VFPDissident @ 9/05/2021 10:20:00 PM 0 comments

For Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays:

Determinist forces are wrong,

And irresistibly strong;

While of God there's a dearth

For He visits the Earth,

But not for sufficiently long.

For Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays:

Determinist forces are wrong,

And irresistibly strong;

But of God there's no dearth

For He visits the Earth,

Source: Philip K. Dick as quoted by Tim Powers in Bryce Carlson, ed., Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, vol. 4, (BOOM! Studios, 2011).

Labels: art and literature, Philip K Dick, quotations, religion

# posted by VFPDissident @ 8/03/2021 11:44:00 PM 0 comments

    Among the prohibitions of international humanitarian law relevant to this case are the prohibitions against weapons which cause superfluous injury, weapons which do not differentiate between combatants and civilians, and weapons which do not respect the rights of neutral states.

***

    It is not to the point that such results are not directly intended, but are "by-products" or "collateral damage" caused by nuclear weapons. Such results are known to be the necessary consequences of the use of the weapon. The author of the act causing these consequences cannot in any coherent legal system avoid legal responsibility for causing them, any less than a man careering in a motor vehicle at 150 kilometres per hour through a crowded market street can avoid responsibility for the resulting deaths on the ground that he did not intend to kill the particular persons who died.

   The plethora of literature on the consequences of the nuclear weapon is so much part of common universal knowledge today that no disclaimer of such knowledge would be credible.

***

    An argument that has been advanced in regard to the principle regarding "unnecessary suffering" is that, under Article 23 ( e ) of the 1907 Hague Regulations, it is forbidden, "To employ arms, projectiles, or material calculated to cause unnecessary suffering" (emphasis added). The nuclear weapon, it is said, is not calculated to cause suffering, but suffering is rather a part of the "incidental side effects" of nuclear weapons explosions. This argument is met by the well-known legal principle that the doer of an act must be taken to have intended its natural and foreseeable consequences ... It is, moreover, a literal interpretation which does not take into account the spirit and under lying rationale of the provision — a method of interpretation particularly inappropriate to the construction of a humanitarian instrument. It may also be said that nuclear weapons are indeed deployed "in part with a view to utilising the destructive effects of radiation and fall-out".

Source: International Court of Justice, Advisory Opinion, On the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons (8 July 1996), "Dissenting Opinion of Judge Weeramantry", pp. 255, 269-270, 276-277 (477, 491-492, 498-499).

Labels: law, nuclear weapons, quotations, War

# posted by VFPDissident @ 8/03/2021 11:21:00 PM 0 comments

Here are few excerpts from Katie Halper's and Matt Taibbi's recent interview with Adolph Reed, Jr.:

Reed: Combating racism becomes a convenient alternative to attacking inequality ... even those inequalities that appear or ... manifest themselves as racial disparities. Because the struggle against racism is exactly parallel to the struggle against terrorism … It can go on forever, because the enemy is an abstraction that you can define however you want to define it, at the moment that you wanted to find it.

Matt Taibbi: There's a line in her [i.e. Robin DiAngelo's] book that I missed originally: "I believe that white progressives caused the most daily damage to people of color." ...

Reed: ... the other thing I thought was just in listening to her was that an image that came to my mind was Viola Liuzzo, right? The wife of a postal worker, from Detroit, who went down to Selma in 1965 to participate in the voting rights March and to participate in organizing the voting rights March. And she got herself killed by the Klan. In the context of that, with DiAngelo, I thought, "Oh, so that's what she was doing, she was just trying to out-woke the black people." I don't even know what to say to shit like that, I really don't. It's pretty repugnant.

... I've been puzzling with addressing the question of why so much anti-racist discourse now depends on analogy with slavery and Jim Crow. And that's ultimately because ... Well, to be honest, because the political as well as the intellectual concern of the people making these arguments is exactly the same as the political and intellectual concerns of the defeated Confederates who established and propagated lost-cause ideology, the myth of the Solid South, and put all those Confederate monuments up because they were committed to a racialist understanding of the world for the purpose of undermining any possibility of a political-economic challenge coming from the lower class, basically.

That's the same reason that people making the race-reductionist arguments today can't really move without drawing links between this moment and slavery and Jim Crow. Just as the 19th century former Confederates were committed to a white supremacist narrative, these people are also committed to a white supremacist/anti-white-supremacist narrative for the same reasons: to keep political economy off the table, and to advance their particular class program, just as the planter class was in the 19th century.

... so my tank is basically full now from white people in particular telling me that I don't understand the depth and intensity of racism, and its effects and this and the other, not because they're violating a normative or an epistemic principle of mine, but because they're violating theirs, by the shit that they argue. They technically don't have the right to say shit to me. So why is it I'm the only POC that you can tell that he's got it wrong?

Labels: Adolph Reed Jr., class, history, politics, quotations, race

# posted by VFPDissident @ 7/25/2021 11:08:00 PM 0 comments

In late March of 2020 I wrote:

A 2016 report published by the National Academies repeatedly raised concerns about the SNS inventory and the logistics of distributing it in an emergency. The chair of the committee that prepared that report, Dr. Tara O'Toole, presciently told NPR in 2016:

"We have drastically decreased the level of state public health resources in the last decade. We've lost 50,000 state and local health officials. That's a huge hit," says O'Toole, who wishes local officials would get more money for things like emergency drills. "The notion that this is all going to be top down, that the feds are in charge and the feds will deliver, is wrong."

My point is that the inability and failure in the US to implement the successful model of South Korea to tamp down COVID-19 via widespread testing, contact tracing, and isolation of the exposed or infected was born of a longstanding failure of the values and priorities of the bipartisan political establishment and by the servile dependency and doltish complacency of the American people who keep electing them.

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted concern about the integrity of the US public health infrastructure. Federal, state, and local governments spend $93 billion annually on public health in the US, but most of this spending is at the state level ... Although overall national health expenditures grew by 4.3 percent in this period, state governmental public health spending saw no statistically significant growth between 2008 and 2018 except in injury prevention. Moreover, state spending levels on public health were not restored after cuts experienced during the Great Recession ...

Axios reports: "The study found that public health spending dropped from $80.40 per capita in 2008 to $75.83 in 2018." It's worth pointing out that these figures understate the drop in public health spending. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI Inflation Calculator that $75.83 in June 2018 "has the same buying power as $65.85 in June 2008". Due to inflation, to maintain roughly the same per capita level as the 2008 public health spending would have required spending $92.59 per person in 2018.

###

Last month I wrote: 

... I consider it grotesquely unethical for government officials, vaccine manufacturers, and public health and medical professionals to conduct what is essentially a massive experiment* on hundreds of millions of people using relatively new vaccine technologies—mRNA and adenovirus vector vaccines—especially during a global pandemic. I am aware of no reason why Congress and health professionals couldn't and shouldn't have insisted that Operation Warp Speed funds be spent on conventional attenuated virus or viral protein vaccines.

... the hype around the early-bird vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna has distorted perception. Their rapid arrival has been described in this magazine as "the triumph of mRNA"—a brand-new vaccine technology whose "potential stretches far beyond this pandemic."... It was easy to assume, based on all this reporting, that mRNA vaccines had already proved to be the most effective ones you could get—that they were better, sleeker, even cooler than any other vaccines could ever be.

But the fascination with the newest, shiniest options obscured some basic facts. These two particular mRNA vaccines may have been the first to get results from Phase 3 clinical trials, but that's because of superior trial management, not secret vaccine sauce. For now, they are harder and more expensive to manufacture and distribute than traditional types of vaccines, and their side effects are more common and more severe. The latest Novavax data confirm that it's possible to achieve the same efficacy against COVID-19 with a more familiar technology that more people may be inclined to trust.

Bastian continues:

... the success of the Novavax vaccine should be A1 news. The recent results confirm that it has roughly the same efficacy as the two authorized mRNA vaccines, with the added benefit of being based on an older, more familiar science ... Some of those people who have been wary of getting the mRNA vaccines may find Novavax more appealing.

The Novavax vaccine also has a substantially lower rate of side effects than the authorized mRNA vaccines ... Based on the results of Novavax's first efficacy trial in the U.K., side effects (including but not limited to fatigue) aren't just less frequent; they're milder too ... Side effects are a big barrier for COVID-vaccine acceptance.

Bastian concludes:

But here's what we know today, based on information that we have right now:  Among several wonderful options, the more old-school vaccine from Novavax combines ease of manufacture with high efficacy and lower side effects. For the moment, it's the best COVID-19 vaccine we have.

Unfortunately, we don't have the Novavax vaccine yet and, as far as I know, Novavax hasn't applied to the FDA for emergency use authorization yet.

Labels: COVID-19, government, health, medicine, science, technology

# posted by VFPDissident @ 6/28/2021 12:24:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: Christian music, Lauren Daigle, music, video

# posted by VFPDissident @ 6/16/2021 01:42:00 AM 0 comments

U.S. support for partition of Palestine ... can be justified only on the basis of Arab and Jewish consent. Otherwise we should violate the principle of self-determination which has been written into the Atlantic Charter, the Declaration of the United Nations, and the United Nations Charter – a principle that is deeply embedded in our foreign policy. Even a United Nations determination in favor of partition would be, in the absence of such consent, a stultification and violation of UN's own charter.

Source: A "top-secret memorandum under date of October 15" [1947], by Gordon Merriam, Chief of the US State Department's Division of Near Eastern Affairs, as quoted in Evan M. Wilson, Decision on Palestine: How the U.S. Came to Recognize Israel (Hoover Inst. Pr. 1979), p. 99.

Labels: history, Israel, law, Palestine, quotations

# posted by VFPDissident @ 6/15/2021 01:35:00 AM 0 comments

When it comes to Palestine-Israel, Daniel Larison is better than most on the American Right. For instance, in 2019, he astutely observed, "Israel is not America's Ally". This may help explain why he is no longer a senior editor at The American Conservative, which, as of today, has said nothing about Israel's latest criminal "mowing the grass" in Gaza.

On May 12, 2021, Larison wrote:

Every time that the Israeli military carries out indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas in the occupied territories and kills Palestinian civilians, there is inevitably the rote response from American politicians and pundits that Israel has the “right to defend itself.” In almost all cases, this invocation of the right of self-defense is an all-purpose permission slip that gives any Israeli military action a stamp of approval ... What makes this all the more tedious is that no one actually disputes that Israel is permitted to defend itself. [emphasis added]

Objectively, in the case of Palestine, Israel is the aggressor, not the defender. Criminals have no right of self-defense in furtherance of their crimes or in securing the fruits of their crimes. Furthermore, occupying powers, such as Israel, have no legal right of self-defense against people resisting occupation. Moreover, even if Israel did have a right of self-defense that would not permit them, as they have repeatedly done, to violate the principles of distinction and proportionality.

Labels: apartheid, Carlos Latuff, Israel, law, Palestine, War

# posted by VFPDissident @ 5/16/2021 09:09:00 PM 0 comments

After I finished my "The Safety of US COVID-19 Vaccines" post I learned that last week Tucker Carlson had done an episode on the same subject, including the use of VAERS data.

I don't typically agree with everything Carlson says and he is sometimes less careful than I think he should be. However, his segment on "How many Americans have died after taking the COVID vaccine?" is almost perfect. Don't trust me, watch it yourself.

What I want to focus on in this post is the outpouring of dishonest criticism from the rest of the mainstream media in the wake of Carlson's piece. In an all too typical example, rather than refute Carlson with relevant facts, National Review contributor Pradheep J. Shanker tweeted: 

Tucker, being an idiot, took that number of deaths, and says they are related to the vaccine.

This, of course, is nonsense. But again, gullible people will believe these things, because the math and science isn’t exactly crystal clear.

In fact, Carlson simply and accurately reported what is in the VAERS data. Here's a representative passage:

... So the question is how do those numbers compare to the death rate from the coronavirus vaccines now being distributed across the country? That’s worth knowing. 

We checked today. Here’s the answer, which comes from the same set of government numbers that we just listed: Between late December of 2020, and last month, a total of 3,362 people apparently died after getting the COVID vaccines in the United States. Three thousand, three hundred and sixty-two — that’s an average of 30 people every day. So, what does that add up to? By the way, that reporting period ended on April 23. We don’t have numbers past that, we’re not quite up to date. But we can assume that another 360 people have died in the 12 days since. That is a total of 3,722 deaths. Almost four thousand people died after getting the COVID vaccines. The actual number is almost certainly much higher than that — perhaps vastly higher. 

The data we just cited come from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System — VAERS — which is managed by the CDC and the FDA. [VAERS] has received a lot of criticism over the years, some of it founded. Some critics have argued for a long time that [VAERS] undercounts vaccine injuries. A report submitted to the Department of Health and Human Services in 2010 concluded that "fewer than one percent of vaccine adverse events are reported"* by the [VAERS] system. Fewer than one percent. So what is the real number of people who apparently have been killed or injured by the vaccine? Well, we don’t know that number. Nobody does, and we’re not going to speculate about it ... 

The faux "fact checkers" at Politifact gave Carlson a rating of "false" on their "Truth-o-Meter". How did they justify their rating? Here a sample: "... VAERS data is considered unreliable for drawing causal conclusions. And dying after a vaccine is not the same thing as dying because of the vaccine."

I listened to the segment twice, Carlson did not draw a causal connection and never implied or claimed dying after a vaccine is the same thing as dying because of the vaccine. In short, Politifact's case against Carlson is a classic straw man argument—they thrash away at things Carlson didn't say.

Near the close of their article, Politifact says: "The CDC analyzed the VAERS death reports and concluded that there's no 'causal link to COVID-19 vaccines.' " I rate this claim mostly false. What the CDC actually says is: "A review of available clinical information, including death certificates, autopsy, and medical records has not established a causal link to COVID-19 vaccines" (emphasis in original).

The CDC did NOT say "there's no 'causal link to COVID-19 vaccines' ", as Politifact claims. They said a causal link had not been established but they also did not rule out a causal link. It's also worth noting that the CDC provides no further information about who conducted their "review" or how it was conducted. There's no link to any documentation of the review.

* The report Carlson reference is from 2011, here's more context from it:

Adverse events from drugs and vaccines are common, but underreported. Although 25% of ambulatory patients experience an adverse drug event, less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Likewise, fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported. Low reporting rates preclude or slow the identification of “problem” drugs and vaccines that endanger public health. New surveillance methods for drug and vaccine adverse effects are needed.

Labels: COVID-19, government, health, media, medicine, science, technology, Tucker Carlson

# posted by VFPDissident @ 5/11/2021 08:33:00 PM 0 comments

People sometimes ask me if I've gotten a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine yet. My answer is always no. This usually prompts a query as to why I haven't been vaccinated.

My standard answer is that I'm not an anti-vaxxer, I get a flu shot every year. However, I add, I consider it grotesquely unethical for government officials, vaccine manufacturers, and public health and medical professionals to conduct what is essentially a massive experiment* on hundreds of millions of people using relatively new vaccine technologies—mRNA and adenovirus vector vaccines—especially during a global pandemic. I am aware of no reason why Congress and health professionals couldn't and shouldn't have insisted that Operation Warp Speed funds be spent on conventional attenuated virus or viral protein vaccines. That said, until today I usually added that I thought the new technologies would probably prove safe.

* As the FDA notes all of the COVID vaccines in use in the US today have been approved under as investigational drugs under an Emergency Use Authorization. The FDA Letter of Authorization for the Pfizer vaccine says: "Pfizer-BioNTech COVID‐19 Vaccine is for use for active immunization to prevent COVID-19 ... It is an investigational vaccine not licensed for any indication." Its "Investigational New Drug application (IND) number" is 19736. According to the FDA: "Emergency Use IND  allows the FDA to authorize use of an experimental drug in an emergency situation ..."

Today, I actually looked at the CDC's and FDA's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) data for the first time. What I learned was pretty amazing.

As you can see from Table 1 below the number of deaths recorded as adverse events associated with COVID-19 vaccines is almost exactly the same as the number of death associated with all other vaccines since 2006 (all VAERS data reported in this post was selected by vaccination year).

From 2016 through April 30, 2021, there were 4,621 deaths reported as adverse events associated with all vaccines in the US (there's no table in this post for that data).

Table 2 covers 2016-2021 and compares deaths associated with the COVID vaccines and the non-COVID vaccine (Prevnar 13) associated with the most deaths in the same time period. For comparison purposes I also added in the flu vaccine type associated with the most deaths.

As you can see there are far more deaths associated with COVID vaccines even though they have been in use for only a few months. An apples-to-apples comparison would require other data, including the number of doses of each vaccine administered in the selected time period. However, I could not find that data for the non-COVID vaccines although the CDC said that in the 2020-2021 flu season the estimated number of quadrivalent flu vaccines expected to be available was 195 million.

Table 2. (VAERS data as of May 9, 2021; click on images to enlarge)

Table 3 gives the breakdown by COVID vaccine manufacturer of the following combined adverse events: Deaths, Life Threatening, and Permanent Disability. At first glance, it may look like the Janssen (Johnson & Johnson) vaccine is safer but as you can see from Table 4 far fewer doses of that vaccine have been administered.

Table 3. (VAERS data as of May 9, 2021)

Table 4. (CDC data as of May 9, 2021)

Combining the data from Tables 3 and 4 we find that there were 11,209 doses (numbers are rounded) of the Janssen vaccine administered for every associated serious adverse event recorded in Table 3. The corresponding count for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are 33,951 and 28,423, respectively.

It's interesting to me that I have not read or heard any mainstream reporting on the relatively large, as compared to other vaccines, number of deaths associated with COVID vaccines as adverse events. There are four things to bear in mind about the current numbers: First, an adverse event report is not proof that the vaccine caused the adverse event; Second, the number of adverse events associated with COVID vaccines is tiny compared to the number of adverse events caused by the virus itself; Third, many adverse events including deaths go unreported for a variety of reasons**; and, Fourth, the reporting of adverse events associated with COVID vaccines is just getting started. Who knows how things will look in five or ten years? Hopefully, there will be no great increase adverse events associated with COVID vaccines that emerges long term. Time will tell.

** According to the CDC's VAERS summary page: "VAERS data are from a passive surveillance system. Such data are subject to limitations of under-reporting, reporting bias, and lack of incidence rates in unvaccinated comparison groups." This echoes findings in a workshop summary published in 1994 by the National Academies Press: "As a passive surveillance system, VAERS suffers problems of both underreporting and overreporting. Although health care professionals are required to report some adverse events, specifically, those that are covered by the no-fault component of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, there are no provisions for enforcement. It is likely that many events that occur after the receipt of vaccines, like those that occur after the receipt of medications, go unreported."

###

There is a March 31, 2021, letter in the medical journal, Circulation Research, titled "SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein Impairs Endothelial Function via Downregulation of ACE 2" that some COVID and COVID vaccine deniers/skeptics are using innaccurately to scare people about COVID vaccines. For example, HEALTHRANGER says:

The prestigious Salk Institute, founded by vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk, has authored and published a bombshell scientific article revealing that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is what's actually causing vascular damage in covid patients and covid vaccine recipients, promoting the strokes, heart attacks, migraines, blood clots and other harmful reactions that have already killed thousands of Americans ... Critically, all four covid vaccine brands currently in widespread use either inject patients with the spike protein or, via mRNA technology, instruct the patient's own body to manufacture spike proteins and release them into their own blood. This floods the patient's body with the very spike protein that the Salk Institute has now identified as the smoking gun cause of vascular damage and related events (such as blood clots, which are killing many people who take the vaccines).

LA JOLLA—Scientists have known for a while that SARS-CoV-2’s distinctive “spike” proteins help the virus infect its host by latching on to healthy cells. Now, a major new study shows that the virus spike proteins (which behave very differently than those safely encoded by vaccines) also play a key role in the disease itself.

The authors of the letter itself conclude with this: "... our results suggest that the S protein-exerted EC damage overrides the decreased virus infectivity. This conclusion suggests that vaccination-generated antibody and/or exogenous antibody against S protein not only protects the host from SARS-CoV-2 infectivity but also inhibits S protein-imposed endothelial injury" (emphasis added). There is a hyperlink to an article in the paragraph I quoted above from the Salk Institute that goes into greater detail on this subject. I recommend reading it.

###

In the final analysis one ought always to be skeptical of powerful people and institutions but also of their critics. My read of the data and science is that the new vaccine technology, not the spike protein, is probably more to blame for the comparatively higher rates of adverse events associated with COVID vaccines. I will be cautious going forward but as of now I plan to receive the Novavax vaccine—a more conventional viral protein vaccine type—when it becomes available.

Last revised: 11 May 2021

See also: "The Safety of US COVID-19 Vaccines Revisited"

Labels: COVID-19, government, health, media, medicine, science, technology

# posted by VFPDissident @ 5/09/2021 07:34:00 PM 1 comments

Labels: Christian music, music, video

# posted by VFPDissident @ 5/04/2021 10:44:00 PM 0 comments

American society has never upheld or realized truth and justice in a manner fully consistent with American rhetoric. Yet, for most of my life I thought our society was at least headed in the right direction. No more.

In the flurry of non-stop anti-Trump (someone I never supported) lies I finally realized that somewhere, in my lifetime or before, the country took a wrong turn. It's tempting to say it happened in the last ten years but it may be more accurate that it was during the 1991 Rodney King police brutality/racism hoax and subsequent rioting when politicians and the media openly abandoned truth, justice, and integrity. The American public, in general, then showed itself to be too gullible and lazy to know or care that vital principles were being gutted.

Don't get me wrong, politicians and the media were not paragons of virtue before then but it does seem like we as a society turned the corner down into dangerous alley back then and things have gotten steadily worse ever since. Academia and the clergy have followed suit or, perhaps, helped lead the way.

In any case, I followed the prosecution of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin very closely. Before the verdict I had estimated the outcome in order of probability (most to least) was as follows:

1. Hung jury
2. Full acquittal
3. Partial acquittal
4. Guilty on all charges

It's obvious I couldn't have been more mistaken. My estimation was based on the clearly erroneous assumption that the jury included at least one intelligent, rational, and principled juror. I don't have a lot of hope that Chauvin will get justice in the appellate courts.

I wish I knew what to tell people to do to turn this country away from the abyss but I don't. I can say there's no hope in Biden or Trump or most of the other denizens of the two wings of the political uniparty. What I do know is that defeatism is a faster path to destruction.

Here are a few more perspectives on the Chauvin trial and verdict:

• "It's a lie: 'Systematic police racism' and the Derek Chauvin Trial" on LawOfficer.com
• "The Derek Chauvin Trial: Reasonable doubt exists" on LawOfficer.com
• "Chauvin Guilty Verdict Completes the Total Collapse of Law, Order, and Due Process in Biden’s America" on Revolver.news
• "Candace Owens: 'This was not a fair trial. No person can say this was a fair trial.' " on Tucker Carlson Tonight via Twitter
  
• "After the Derek Chauvin Verdict: Initial Thoughts and What Comes Next" on RedState.com
• "The Chauvin verdict" on AmericanThinker.com
• "The American Crisis" by Ben Domenech via Twitter

If there were any Left-wing writers who care about truth and justice in the matter of George Floyd and Derek Chauvin then I would link to them but I am unaware of any.

21 April 2021 Addendum: In "George Floyd's Death: Test Your Knowledge" I mentioned that "the written report of the unofficial autopsy of George Floyd requested by Floyd's family and performed Michael Baden, MD, and Allecia Wilson, MD" had never been publicly released. They and their findings were much in the news last summer but unless I'm mistaken neither of them testified in the trial of Derek Chauvin nor was their report offered in evidence by the prosecution. If true, then this suggests that the "family autopsy" was primarily a media prop to advance the financial interests of George Floyd's family and lawyers in extracting a sweet financial payout.

Labels: Biden, crime, critical thinking, George Floyd, Justice, media, police, politics, race, Trump

# posted by VFPDissident @ 4/20/2021 08:19:00 PM 0 comments

The prosecution in State v. Chauvin has presented, through its witnesses, an incoherent theory as to how Derek Chauvin allegedly killed George Floyd. Except for an opening statement, the defense has not yet presented it case.

Yet, the prosecution's witnesses have repeatedly given testimony that fundamentally undermines the prosecution's case against Chauvin. For instance, some witnesses testified Floyd died of "positional asphyxia" yet the only witness to perform an autopsy on Floyd testified there was no evidence of asphyxia (see also here). If the state cannot settle on how Chauvin supposedly killed Floyd then how can they honestly argue he is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?

Minneapolis Police Dept. Excited Delirium training slide (cropped)

However, unless there is some smoking gun soon presented by the prosecution Judge Cahill should dismiss the charges "in furtherance of justice" pursuant to Minn. Stat. § 631.21 after the prosecution finishes presenting its case. Since it is extremely unlikely that Cahill, given his past performance, will do this defense counsel Eric Nelson should consider filing a motion for a judgment of acquittal pursuant to Minn. R.Crim. P. 26.03, subd. 18(1)(a).

It's unlikely that Cahill would grant such a motion on any of the three counts but it's not impossible that he might acquit on one or two of the counts against Chauvin and, from my armchair, non-lawyer perch, I don't see that the defense has a lot to lose by filing the motion. The calculus, of course, includes weighing the time and energy involved in preparing the motion and what possible impact a ruling by Cahill might have on the jury. If Cahill acquitted on one of the murder counts would the jury be more inclined to convict on manslaughter?

See also:

• Prosecution Opening Statement
• What was Derek Chauvin Thinking?
• George Floyd's Death: Test Your Knowledge

Labels: George Floyd, Justice, law, media, police, race

# posted by VFPDissident @ 4/11/2021 01:31:00 AM 1 comments

On June 11, 2020, Von Kleim wrote a piece titled "Preparing for Hard Conversations" on the Force Policy Institute web site. One of Kleim's claims in his piece was: "Even now, we cannot make sense of what we saw. Experts, who have learned to be circumspect and wait for facts, are struggling to imagine any fact that could adequately explain the treatment of George Floyd."

Less than a week after that piece was published I tried to leave a comment. My comment was never posted although I'm not sure why. In any case, jury selection in the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin started last week.

If you, like Von Kleim, cannot imagine such possible explanations then your 'imaginer' is probably broken or you have been bamboozled by media manipulation. I can imagine several possible facts that, singly or in combination, may explain, but do not necessarily excuse, Chauvin's actions, including his failure to stop and place Floyd in the recovery position in the last 3-4 minutes before EMS arrived.

Below is essentially the list I came up with in the middle of last June. Since then more information has rendered some of them implausible and I've struck them out. I don't claim to know which, if any, of the remainders are true but here they are in no particular order:

1. Chauvin is a racist with a disregard for the lives of Black people.
2. He is a misanthrope who dislikes people in general, regardless of race.
3. He had detained others this way before and/or had witnessed it and didn't think any serious harm would be done.
4. He was showing the crowd who was boss.
5. He was showing the rookies how it's done.
6. He was actually putting very little pressure on Floyd's neck (this seems to be consistent with the final report of the Hennepin County M.E.) and thought Floyd would be fine until EMS arrived.
7. He genuinely thought Floyd was just fine but faking.
8. He was having a bad day and/or angry about George Floyd's behavior or something else and expressed his anger recklessly.
9. He was fatigued or stressed and simply made a poor decision(s).
10. He had a personal grudge against Floyd and wanted him to suffer but not die.
11. He had a personal grudge against Floyd and wanted him to suffer and die.

See also: George Floyd's Death: Test Your Knowledge

Labels: crime, critical thinking, George Floyd, media, police, race

# posted by VFPDissident @ 3/14/2021 12:20:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: culture, music, video

# posted by VFPDissident @ 2/19/2021 02:17:00 AM 0 comments

Dear Google Content Reviewer: This post has been unpublished and approved for publication multiple times since February 2021. Each time I request review and have it approved it is unpublished again within hours. Apparently, something in the post is triggering an algorithm. Can you please tell me why this post keeps getting unpublished?

Below is the trailer from 2015's A Good American featuring William Binney, J. Kirk Wiebe, Edward Loomis, Thomas Drake (a.k.a. the "NSA Four"), and Diane Roark. Below that are several videos featuring Binney.

A Good American—naturally an Austrian, which is to say non-American, film—tells the astounding, largely untold story of pervasive corruption, incompetence, and/or deliberate misconduct by high government officials in utilizing available threat intelligence. One of the most interesting segments was the discussion of how senior commanders ignored intel that predicted the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam and were never held accountable.

The heart of the film, of course, is the story of the deliberate sabotage of ThinThread, an in-house US National Security Agency program that in all likelihood would have provided actionable intel to stop the 9/11 attacks had it not been shutdown just weeks earlier. In the aftermath of 9/11, the NSA opted for a mass surveillance program carried out via lucrative private contracts. The principal developers of ThinThread—which had strong built-in privacy protections—were thwarted in trying to get other government agencies to take up the technology and, eventually, raided by the FBI after they filed a DoD IG whistleblower complaint.

• Whistle-blower: Trump likely surveilled for some time (video)
• Ex-NSA official: Spies don't believe Russia collusion story (video)

Labels: 9/11, civil liberties, Edward Snowden, film & television, government, military, National Security Agency, surveillance, Trump, United States

# posted by VFPDissident @ 2/09/2021 10:09:00 PM 0 comments

Political power in America is media power. It’s the power to shape consciousness ... The protest Wednesday [January 6, 2021] was an example of "hyperreality." There was no attempted coup by President Trump, nor by people wandering around the Capitol. The media created a story about an "armed insurrection," a putsch, and they seem to believe it.

Ashli Babbitt was also caught in a fantasy. The "QAnon" story told her President Trump was fighting a cosmic struggle against evil. She joined in that struggle. Unfortunately, as in The Matrix, if you die in the simulation, you die in real life. In his concession speech last night, President Trump didn't mention her. He wouldn't say her name.

If anything, QAnon is an opiate because it tells Americans the system still somehow works. It tells well-meaning, naïve people that their country still exists, the old values endure, the Founders' vision lives on, and everything will turn out fine. That illusion died with Ashli Babbitt.

Our rulers apparently believe what they are saying. They think they're fighting a dictator, that Ashli Babbitt and people like her deserve to die, and that there must be a cleansing before the egalitarian paradise arrives. We know what happens when fanatics stop at nothing in the name of equality.

People can try to live in a dream, but reality finally breaks in. For decades, President Donald Trump crafted his media image as a businessman, patriot, and strategist. He may believe himself to be a Great Man. Tens of millions of Americans who saw their country being stolen from them put their trust in him. He let them down — not because he is an aspiring dictator, but because he is erratic, self-absorbed, and doesn't truly understand what is happening to the country.

Ashli's surname is the same as Sinclair Lewis's title character in Babbitt, about a middle-class guy who seeks meaning in a conformist world. Babbitt rebels against middle-class values. Today, those values seem idyllic. Today, it is rebellion to uphold natural values of morality, family, and patriotism.

Perhaps Ashli Babbitt died for a false idol, a leader who didn't deserve her loyalty. Perhaps I'm too hard on President Trump, who has been continuously betrayed and sabotaged. Either way, Ashli Babbitt's sacrifice was not pointless. Whatever her mistakes, she was right to believe her country is ruled by a hostile elite. The form her rebellion took was wrong, but she died for her beliefs. Especially in a time when our rulers make saints out of thugs, we should remember Ashli Babbitt, who served a country that killed her.

Source: "Her Name Was Ashli Babbitt" by Gregory Hood on American Renaissance, January 8, 2020. 

Labels: media, politics, quotations, resistance, Trump, voting

# posted by VFPDissident @ 1/25/2021 11:32:00 PM 0 comments