kunstler here in a longer than his usual exploration shows many things of our current 'reality' you may wish to read and consider, perhaps in the process discovering new ideas;
Nobody knows, from sea to shining sea, why we are having all this trouble with our republic. — Tom McGuane
Can a people recover from an excursion
into unreality? The USA’s sojourn into an alternative universe of the
mind accelerated sharply after Wall Street nearly detonated the global
financial system in 2008. That debacle was only one manifestation of an
array of accumulating threats to the postmodern order, which include the
burdens of empire, onerous debt, population overshoot, fracturing
globalism, worries about energy, disruptive technologies, ecological
havoc, and the specter of climate change.
A sense of gathering crisis, which I call the long emergency,
persists. It is systemic and existential. It calls into question our
ability to carry on “normal” life much farther into this century, and
all the anxiety that attends it is hard for the public to process. It
manifested itself first in finance because that was the most abstract
and fragile of all the major activities we depend on for daily life, and
therefore the one most easily tampered with and shoved into criticality
by a cadre of irresponsible opportunists on Wall Street. Indeed, a lot
of households were permanently wrecked after the so-called Great
Financial Crisis of 2008, despite official trumpet blasts heralding
“recovery” and the dishonestly engineered pump-up of capital markets
since then.
With the election of 2016, symptoms of
the long emergency seeped into the political system. Disinformation
rules. There is no coherent consensus about what is happening and no
coherent proposals to do anything about it. The two parties are mired in
paralysis and dysfunction and the public’s trust in them is at epic
lows. Donald Trump is viewed as a sort of pirate president, a
freebooting freak elected by accident, “a disrupter” of the status quo
at best and at worst a dangerous incompetent playing with nuclear fire. A
state of war exists between the White House, the permanent D.C.
bureaucracy, and the traditional news media. Authentic leadership is
otherwise AWOL. Institutions falter. The FBI and the CIA behave like
enemies of the people. ...https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/beyond-cynicism-america-fumbles-towards-kafkas-castle/
Friday, November 9, 2018
this article pasted here in its entirety, explores aspects of the 'mass shootings' you may not have considered;
The suspect in today’s mass shooting (well, the biggest one I’ve heard of thus far this morning; the day is young) is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps.
Another mass shooter in Florida last week just happens to have been in the military.
The man who killed with a van in Toronto this year had been briefly in the Canadian military and promoted his crime on Facebook beforehand as a military operation.
The mass-killing in a Florida High School earlier this year was also promoted by the killer as a military operation, in the sense that he wore his JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps) shirt and killed in the same school where the U.S. Army had trained him to shoot and instructed him in war-supporting views of the world and its history.
Obviously having been a member of the U.S. military can’t have any causal connection to mass shootings, and that’s why it makes the most amazing coincidence over and over again that so many individuals who’ve been trained to kill lots of people bizarrely end up killing lots of people.
Looking at a long list of mass shootings in the United States, almost all of the shooters are men, and almost all of them are between ages 18 and 59. Above age 59, the percentage of men in the general U.S. population who are veterans leaps up dramatically. Between 18 and 59 — by averaging the percentages for each age year — about 14.76 percent of U.S. men are veterans, but at least 35% of these shooters were veterans. I determined that by quickly reading available news reports online about each shooting, so the percentage is likely to be significantly higher. I found no news reports that stated that any of the shooters had not been in the military.
In U.S. mass shootings, military veterans are over twice as likely to be mass shooters, and probably more likely than that. Needless to say, this is a statistic about a large population, not information about any particular individual. Needless to say, profiling and discrimination are counterproductive. But here’s what else might be counterproductive: Training people in the arts of mass murder, launching wars, and dropping people trained for wars and having suffered through wars into a heavily armed society taught by schools and entertainment systems that mass-killing is the way to solve problems. Mass killing in the United States gets you on the news, and if you happen to be a president bombing a distant land it gets you widely praised and labeled as “finally presidential.”
Of course it’s possible that people inclined toward mass shootings are also inclined to join the military, that the relationship is a correlation and not a cause. In fact, I would be shocked if there wasn’t some truth to that. But it’s also possible that being trained and conditioned and given a familiarity with mass shootings — and in some cases no doubt an experience of engaging in mass shooting and having it deemed acceptable — makes one more likely to mass shoot. I cannot imagine there isn’t truth in that.
The most killing Western societies do is done abroad by their militaries. In the United States, hundreds of deadly shootings every year are committed by police officers — disproportionately military veterans. Suicides, as well, are disproportionately committed by veterans. And not because we are untactful in pointing to problems, but because we generally fail to admit to and deal with problems. Veteran suicides are driven by guilt over having participated in killing. That guilt is the top factor in predicting suicide, according to the U.S. Veterans Administration, and the very least likely piece of information in the entire world to be mentioned in a celebration of Veterans Day.
Consider this. If over 35% of U.S. mass shooters were Muslim or foreign or black or gay or socialist or red-haired or any of millions of other things likely actually coincidental, it would be a Big Freaking Deal. But the fact that over 35% of them have been trained by the world’s biggest mass-killing institution is simply not of any interest.........https://washingtonsblog.com/2018/11/another-amazing-coincidence-man-trained-to-mass-murder-commits-mass-murder.html
Another mass shooter in Florida last week just happens to have been in the military.
The man who killed with a van in Toronto this year had been briefly in the Canadian military and promoted his crime on Facebook beforehand as a military operation.
The mass-killing in a Florida High School earlier this year was also promoted by the killer as a military operation, in the sense that he wore his JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps) shirt and killed in the same school where the U.S. Army had trained him to shoot and instructed him in war-supporting views of the world and its history.
Obviously having been a member of the U.S. military can’t have any causal connection to mass shootings, and that’s why it makes the most amazing coincidence over and over again that so many individuals who’ve been trained to kill lots of people bizarrely end up killing lots of people.
Looking at a long list of mass shootings in the United States, almost all of the shooters are men, and almost all of them are between ages 18 and 59. Above age 59, the percentage of men in the general U.S. population who are veterans leaps up dramatically. Between 18 and 59 — by averaging the percentages for each age year — about 14.76 percent of U.S. men are veterans, but at least 35% of these shooters were veterans. I determined that by quickly reading available news reports online about each shooting, so the percentage is likely to be significantly higher. I found no news reports that stated that any of the shooters had not been in the military.
In U.S. mass shootings, military veterans are over twice as likely to be mass shooters, and probably more likely than that. Needless to say, this is a statistic about a large population, not information about any particular individual. Needless to say, profiling and discrimination are counterproductive. But here’s what else might be counterproductive: Training people in the arts of mass murder, launching wars, and dropping people trained for wars and having suffered through wars into a heavily armed society taught by schools and entertainment systems that mass-killing is the way to solve problems. Mass killing in the United States gets you on the news, and if you happen to be a president bombing a distant land it gets you widely praised and labeled as “finally presidential.”
Of course it’s possible that people inclined toward mass shootings are also inclined to join the military, that the relationship is a correlation and not a cause. In fact, I would be shocked if there wasn’t some truth to that. But it’s also possible that being trained and conditioned and given a familiarity with mass shootings — and in some cases no doubt an experience of engaging in mass shooting and having it deemed acceptable — makes one more likely to mass shoot. I cannot imagine there isn’t truth in that.
The most killing Western societies do is done abroad by their militaries. In the United States, hundreds of deadly shootings every year are committed by police officers — disproportionately military veterans. Suicides, as well, are disproportionately committed by veterans. And not because we are untactful in pointing to problems, but because we generally fail to admit to and deal with problems. Veteran suicides are driven by guilt over having participated in killing. That guilt is the top factor in predicting suicide, according to the U.S. Veterans Administration, and the very least likely piece of information in the entire world to be mentioned in a celebration of Veterans Day.
Consider this. If over 35% of U.S. mass shooters were Muslim or foreign or black or gay or socialist or red-haired or any of millions of other things likely actually coincidental, it would be a Big Freaking Deal. But the fact that over 35% of them have been trained by the world’s biggest mass-killing institution is simply not of any interest.........https://washingtonsblog.com/2018/11/another-amazing-coincidence-man-trained-to-mass-murder-commits-mass-murder.html
the hate police are coming brother nathanael tells us and is presenting some information about how it is attempting to manifest;
https://youtu.be/8dBN1rmqGNQ
https://youtu.be/8dBN1rmqGNQ
this article will show how the empire is using doublespeak in most all of its 'foreign' affairs, in case you had any doubts;
Earlier parts of this intermittent series discussed NATO's projection and gaslighting.
Psychology Today defines confirmation bias as:
Once we have formed a view, we embrace information that confirms that view while ignoring, or rejecting, information that casts doubt on it. Confirmation bias suggests that we don’t perceive circumstances objectively. We pick out those bits of data that make us feel good because they confirm our prejudices. Thus, we may become prisoners of our assumptions.
Or, closer to the topic of this essay:
This quotation is from an interview of George Kennan by Thomas Friedman published
in the New York Times twenty years ago. He was speaking about what was
then called "NATO expansion" (later changed to the more anodyne – and
deceptive – phrase "NATO enlargement". (I as a civil servant in the
Canadian Department of National Defence used to amuse myself by seeing
if I could sneak the forbidden "expansion" – an altogether more honest
word – into briefing notes for the Higher Ups. As I recall, I got away
with it about half the time. A trivial pleasure in the evolving
disaster.).....https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/11/09/psychoanalysing-nato-confirmation-bias.html
orwell's predictions become more real every day here in the empire, and this short piece will show you more evidence of where we're headed while everyone is watching the tv tell them about distractions that keep them watching the magicians tricks;
Guest Post by Eric Peters
The other day, a Maryland man in his 60s was shot to death by armed
government workers in his own home. The man had not been charged with
any crime. He was not even suspected of having maybe committed one.
So why did the Hut! Hut! Hut! squad show up at this man’s home?
A “Red Flag” order had been issued from a judge, ordering him to hand over his lawfully owned firearms.
And all that is necessary to trigger the write which leads to the Hut! Hut! Hutting! is for “someone” to claim that a person “could be a threat” to himself or others; that they are “concerned.”
Mark that.
It is not necessary that the targeted individual be charged or convicted of any violation of law. The “Red Flag” law effectively convicts – and sentences – people who’ve obeyed the law. The targeted individual is denied due process.....https://www.theburningplatform.com/2018/11/08/red-flag-raids/#more-186574
Raids
So why did the Hut! Hut! Hut! squad show up at this man’s home?
A “Red Flag” order had been issued from a judge, ordering him to hand over his lawfully owned firearms.
And all that is necessary to trigger the write which leads to the Hut! Hut! Hutting! is for “someone” to claim that a person “could be a threat” to himself or others; that they are “concerned.”
Mark that.
It is not necessary that the targeted individual be charged or convicted of any violation of law. The “Red Flag” law effectively convicts – and sentences – people who’ve obeyed the law. The targeted individual is denied due process.....https://www.theburningplatform.com/2018/11/08/red-flag-raids/#more-186574
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