Pivot To Asia Ramping Up Ominously

Source of map: researchgate.net

The only nation that has hundreds of military bases outside its own borders is about to open a new one. 

A huge new U.S. Marine Corps base on the island of Guam was paid for, in part, by Japan. Why would Japan do this? I read that it was part of a deal during the Obama administration's "pivot to Asia" to get Marines out of Okinawa. Locals there despise the presence of gaijin (foreigners) who rape and kill girls and women, and Okinawans have been struggling for decades to get rid of them.

Why export the misery to Guam? The indigenous population of Okinawa understands all too well what it's like to live under Japanese imperialism. And taxpayers in Japan are by no means on board with ramping up military spending and abandoning Article 9 as the U.S. is demanding. 

Source: "Japan's rearmament is a worrying sign" by Jamil Ragland, CTNewsJunkie

Demonstrations against Japan's remilitarization are common in Tokyo and other Japanese cities these days -- but don't expect to read about it in the U.S. corporate media.

Instead, those who consume corporate media should expect to read more ranting from psychopaths like U.S. Air Force general Michael Minihan. He was in the news this week due to a memo (that the Pentagon disavowed, for what that's worth) urging preparations for war with China which he predicted will be underway by 2025.

He ordered his underlings to practice shooting targets in the head to prepare.

He's been quoted as believing that,

“[W]hen you can kill your enemy, every part of your life is better. Your food tastes better. Your marriage is stronger."

No comment on what we're all imagining about Minihan's marriage.

Meanwhile another ex-Marine, weapons inspector Scott Ritter, shared his examination of the shift in U.S./NATO policy toward east Asia and also the "war-fighting domain" of outer space.

A recent statement by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) head Bill Nelson that the US was in a space race with China, when combined with recent moves by both the US and China to militarize space, could send the US on a policy trajectory that transforms established policy regarding space-based activities as being exclusively exploration-driven in nature, to one where conquest and domination become the dominating factors. 

Why do I pay attention to these "coulds" when the clear and present danger of Ukraine escalating into a nuclear confrontation grows daily?

Because weakening Russia and overthrowing Putin is the first stage of the neocon plan to take out China as the U.S.'s only feasible economic competitor. 

"Paratroopers take part in a joint military drill among Japan, the US, Britain and Australia at Narashino exercise field in Chiba prefecture on January 8, 2023. Yuichi Yamazaki/AFP/Getty Images"   Source: "'History might repeat itself': Chinese ambassador warns Australia to be wary of Japan", CNN

But the sanctions that were supposed to cripple Russia's economy have instead strengthened it, and boomeranged on the economies of the U.S. and NATO nations.

Early indications are that sanctions on China are having a similar effect: weakening the dollar, and pushing the targeted nation toward more cooperation with others and diversification of its industrial capacity.

Reporting in The Verge:

[Dutch tech manufacturer] ASML CEO Peter Wennink previously told CNBC that China accounted for around 15 percent of the company’s sales in 2022. 

Wennink has said that any restrictions are unlikely to prevent China from building its own versions of the machines eventually. “If they cannot get those machines, they will develop them themselves,” Wennink told Bloomberg. “That will take time, but ultimately they will get there.”

On the Japanese side, the restrictions are expected to impact companies such as Nikon and Tokyo Electron.

As its old ally Germany has suffered under U.S. leadership from helping to conduct war on Russia via Ukraine, I think it's reasonable to expect Japan to suffer from helping its old enemy conduct a proxy war on China via Taiwan.

Certainly Australians as traditional allies of the U.S. military empire are increasingly concerned about being targeted as a consequence of hosting bases and spying outposts on their soil, and of their economy unraveling if their extensive trade with China is disrupted. And some observers have speculated that neighboring New Zealand saw the recent resignation of PM Jacinda Ardern because she had lost the battle for Kiwis to remain neutral and nuclear-free.

In the U.S. we have half a million people unhoused and at risk of freezing to death this winter. We have 1 in 5 children growing up impoverished and hungry, and the federal government tells us there is no money for universal health care, student loan forgiveness, or to house and feed the people. Yet, at $858 billion for 2023, the military budget is at it highest point ever, and ominously increasing every year.

Historically, wars have caused untold suffering for populations who had little to no interest in pursuing them. War profiteers hijacked their governments and raked in profits while their people starved and died. 

Are we doomed to repeat these disasters?

Democracy Then! Propaganda Now

Democracy Now!, legacy alternative media for the latte left, has been repeatedly exposed as biased in favor of the U.S./NATO empire. But most who watch DN! cannot tolerate the cognitive dissonance to acknowledge this shift.

Credit for the title of my post -- Democracy Then! Propaganda Now --  goes to "Diogenes" who posted a version of it commenting on this discussion between Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate and Randy Credico on The Grayzone's YouTube channel. 

A shorter version of the video can be found attached to this Grayzone tweet, but the longer version (11 or so minutes) is worth watching if only to see Julian Assange lied about to his face as he repeatedly denies the false charge that wikileaks said Donald Trump would be less dangerous as president than Hillary Clinton. 

Count how many times Assange says "No, we didn't" while DN!'s guest talks over him.

Summary of The Grayzone's charges against Democracy Now!:

• John Pilger told Blumenthal he was banned from DN! because their funder the Lannan Foundation did not like Pilger's views
• DN! was wrong on wikileaks & Julian Assange, and has never apologized
• DN! was wrong on the Syrian war & the White Helmets
• DN! was wrong on Russiagate, which it heavily promoted
• DN! was wrong on alleged Uyghur genocide
• DN! is wrong on the Ukraine war origins & goals, and clearly biased against Russia

The propaganda of the U.S. empire is, as many have observed, outstandingly effective. 

It has split the antiwar movement in the U.S. by capturing many of their sources of information.

I once worked in marketing (for cars) and learned of the strong spending to build brand loyalty among college students. Because research shows that brand loyalties are formed when we are quite young and these loyalties are extremely resistant to change for most people. 

This is why it's effective to lure people into trusting a news outlet like Democracy Now! (or Common Dreams, or NPR, etc. -- those are posts for another day). Once trust has been established, the slow drift toward supporting the imperial narrative can begin. Much like the frog in that pot of slowly warming water, most won't notice and many will employ strong denial tactics to maintain  that they're not being boiled to death.

Some have identified the first sign of Democracy Now!'s rightward drift in their coverage of the unfortunate events of 9/11/01. Since the current nonstop warmongering of the U.S. kicked off using 9/11 as a pretext, that makes a lot of sense. But substantiating that claim would take more research than I have time for at the moment. 

Just something to think about.

Normalizing Nukes

In the video you see a simulation of how the pressure wave from a nuclear explosion affects people in a building. Photo: Storyblocks

New computer simulation shows: How to hit the blow from an atomic bomb

UPDATED IDAG 03:47

PUBLISHED IDAG 00:49

Those who are many kilometers from a nuclear explosion can manage indoors if they do right, a new study shows.
- Take cover far into the building and stay away from windows, researchers say.

 

What is this bullshit?

Swedish television is presenting nuclear war as if it were winnable, limited, and survivable. Just stay away from the windows exactly like they told me in the 1960's when I was climbing under my desk at school. It was a big fat lie then, and it's exponentially more of a big fat lie now.

Translation source: https://twitter.com/CamiloGuezRodri/status/1617186097217388546/photo/1

This spin is built on the central lie that "since the start of the Ukraine war, Russia has rattled its nuclear weapons." In fact, the opposite is true. The Biden administration moved from following Trump in not signing the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons to actually signaling from both government and corporate media channels that "limited" use of "tactical" nuclear weapons was indeed on the table.

Even more alarming than the posturing words of politicians, U.S. nuclear weapons and their delivery systems have been moving steadily into place in Eurasia and the Pacific, including Australia. Then there is the increasingly pro-nuke bellicose rhetoric of key U.S./NATO collaborators like Sweden, South Korea, and Japan. That is ominous. 

Normalizing nukes is in no one's best interest, including the uber wealthy that want to become the super uber wealthy by selling nuclear weapons. 

Because they will die and suffer, too, even though they think they won't.

Ukraine Narrative Fraying, But Weapons Will Continue To Flow

My photo of our vigil in Portland, Maine January 19, 2022

Some truth from official sources has begun leaking out: Ukraine is losing in the NATO proxy war against Russia. Two Polish officials said so, Condoleeza Rice in the Washington Post said so, and the mainstream/lamestream press began admitting it as well. The wrong conclusion is that more weapons will ensure Ukrainian victory, but that did not stop the U.S. and NATO from pledging more weapons.

Ukraine's government has come a bit unraveled this week with key advisor Oleksiy Arestovych resigning and then being arrested and put on the Mirotvorets kill list for (accidentally?) admitting that Ukraine caused a Russian missile to go off course and fall on an apartment building killing 44 civilians in Dnipro. 

Then there was the mysterious crash of a helicopter carrying all the top officials of the Ministry of the Interior, an accident which killed all aboard plus some children from the kindergarten it fell on.

Next, the president of Ukraine addressed the World Economic Forum at Davos looking pale and strained and claiming to be uncertain whether the president of Russia is actually alive. (Cue the Twitter cocaine addict jokes. Of course substance use disorder is no joke for its sufferers, nor do most of us have any way of knowing if Zelensky is among them.)

But some things remain unchanged. Western cheerleaders of the war effort are falling all over themselves to pledge their support for "democracy" in a country that banned opposition parties and "free speech" in a country that banned the use of Russian, the first language spoken by many of its citizens. Ajamu Baraka's essay in Black Agenda Report, "The Ukrainian Solidarity Network: The Highest Stage of White Western Social Imperialism" is well worth a read for the context to understand why alleged leftists are siding with the fascists at this time.

My photo of our vigil in Portland, Maine January 19, 2022

So, as part of a week of anti-imperialist and anti-war actions organized by members of UNAC for Martin Luther King, Jr. week (see the full list here) a hardy band of the unconfused stood in Portland, Maine yesterday at the evening commute.

We were on the second shift after a mid-day vigil in nearby Brunswick that occurs weekly. At that event a surprising number of passersby had expressed agreement with our anti-NATO stance remarking "Ukraine is the most corrupt country in Europe" or "Ukraine is full of Nazis" before the light changed and they drove away. This felt like a shift in public opinion, barely discernible but distinct from our past experiences with the public around this issue.

My photo of our vigil in Portland, Maine January 19, 2022

A few positive reactions in Portland were offset by a woman who rolled down her window to claim unspecified atrocities were happening at the hands of the Russian military and then shouted, "You should be ashamed!" before zooming off in her Tesla. Note: we were not ashamed to speak up for the truth as we understand it, Western propaganda on Ukraine notwithstanding.

I'm not sure when we'll be back in Portland, but the hour-long vigil at 11:30am in front of the Tontine Mall in Brunswick will continue weekly for now. 

An Empire So Arrogant It Sees No Need To Cover Its Butt

What an apt metaphor was the top heavy, bare-assed national costume for Miss USA prior to her being crowned Miss Universe 2023. Videos of contestant R'Bonney Gabriel barely managing the unstable weight of U.S. imperial hubris amid plans to colonize the moon and achieve "Full Spectrum Dominance" in space did not meet any of my criteria for beauty. But of course that wasn't really the point -- exaltation of the mighty U.S. was.

The irony that a Filipino American woman would help glorify U.S. imperialism despite her ancestors having suffered brutal colonization by the U.S. in the Philippines is indicative of where we're at in 2023; without an understanding of history, it can be difficult to detect irony at all.

Gabriel's costume is a good visual companion to the unsustainable hubris fairly dripping from my last missive from Maine's Senator Angus King.

No relation to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and, as a wealthy white man, seriously lacking MLK's insight into the dangers of U.S. militarism, Senator King establishes the low quality of his response to my concerns about nuclear weapons by starting with a quote from...Ronald Reagan. 

It goes downhill from there.

Notice how his aides have managed to compose an entire letter on the dangers of nuclear war without once mentioning either Ukraine or Russia. (Or, for that matter, China.) We are meant to decode for ourselves threats it does name: "malign actors" and "potential adversaries." Quite a feat of obfuscation, wouldn't you say?

King watchers note, however, that our senator recently traveled to Ukraine and met with the president there, did the obligatory photo op, and made remarks comparing Russian Federation President Putin to Hitler. 

Source: News Center Maine

King is not a stupid person nor an ignorant one, but he is willfully overlooking the strong presence of actual neo-Nazis in Ukraine's government and military. He was also quoted while in Ukraine as saying, "Putin has made it very clear his overall goal is to establish the Soviet Union." That is a bald faced lie, but he's counting on the ignorance of his audience back in the U.S. to accept it without question.

Does King have his own imperial ambitions? Perhaps to run for president of the U.S. after helping to funnel billions into the coffers of weapons corporations? Stay tuned.

Historians among us might also take a look at this 2014 story about riding on a nuclear submarine under Arctic ice as the Arctic is another area of special interest for King. The story is quite revealing about U.S.-NATO intentions (on Russia's border, but for heavens sake don't admit that).

Why Care About The Twitter Files As We Rush Toward WW3?

Source: "Twitter to Begin Using 'Blue Check' Status as a 'Big Brother' Weapon?" Tom Blumer, November 19, 2017

As a high school teacher 15 years ago, I showed students the Laura Poitras documentary on Edward Snowden's NSA whistleblowing and subsequent hair raising escape. They enjoyed the film but were mystified at the excitement. What was the big deal about Snowden's revelations? they asked me. 

It was a big deal because he revealed that the telecom corporations were spying on everybody, I told them.

The reaction of teenagers the second decade of the 21st century? Duh, which is Homer Simpson-speak for only a complete idiot didn't know that already.

Now I feel like the Twitter files are at least as significant but much of my generation views this as another giant Duh. 

Social media platforms are censoring our speech quietly behind the scenes, so what?

In fact it is a huge revelation that numerous government employees (including the delightfully named Elvis Chan of the FBI's Las Vegas office) spent untold hours of their taxpayer-funded time insisting that Twitter silence dissent. Elvis and the others did this rather than engaging in the law enforcement we're told the FBI exists to do.

Liberals have gotten quickly caught up in the personalities around the Twitter files dump of internal data -- and it's easy to do. It would appear that billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter for the purpose of revealing the private messages of work colleagues discussing how to handle the U.S. government's increasing demands for 1) intervention in the debate about the pandemic and how best to respond and 2) intervention in the 2020 presidential election. The sequence of those two interventions is not without significance. 

Also, some of the journalists Musk selected to work with are conservative. One exception is investigative reporter Matt Taibbi (who used to publish in Rolling Stone before it was captured by the security state now infiltrating most legacy media). Since Musk is himself a wealthy conservative who thinks it's okay to overthrow governments of nations with large reserves of the elements needed to make his electric cars, no surprises there. But let's not fail to understand that Twitter has been systematically silencing not only far-right voices but politically left voices as well. (Silencing both is probably fine with liberals who have monumentally failed to stick up for speech that doesn't align with their views.)

According to the journalists, they received a large dump of internal communications from Twitter and the only constraints they agreed to on their reporting  was the requirement that they "break" their stories on Twitter before publishing elsewhere.

So far this reporting has brought us news of how Twitter worked to suppress the entirely true story of Hunter Biden's laptop and its contents implicating Senator Joe Biden in corrupt business deals in Ukraine prior to his election as president; how Twitter silenced numerous medical researchers and clinical practitioners debating as scientists do about a novel virus; and how Twitter began designating accounts as "_______ state-affiliated media" where you fill in the blank of the enemy du jour of the U.S. empire.

From the Twitter Files as published by Matt Taibbi January 3, 2023

Some have downplayed the significance of this quiet censorship for years saying, Twitter (or Facebook) is a company not the government so it cannot by definition be in violation of the 1st amendment right to freedom of speech. But what if government was actually pulling the levers of speech repression from behind the scenes? 

What if the FBI paid Twitter $3.41 million to censor speech?

Link to the thread containing this tweet. 

Others have made the argument: so what, Facebook is much worse. And indeed Twitter users for a long time cherished the mistaken belief that their favorite platform, the digital town square where ideas were supposedly shared and debated openly (as the founder of Twitter claims was the goal), was in fact free and open. Twitter was the respectable social media platform, the intelligent choice, where policy makers and journalists and the public who were paying attention gathered. 

Not everyone believes as I do that information control is the ball to keep your eyes on.

But as warmongering members of Congress slip seamlessly into new roles as CNN talking heads, I think I'm right to be alarmed at how insidious censorship in our day has become.

Just look at the war in Ukraine. Information management has all corporate media cheering for our proxy war against Russia, and those of us who dare to dissent find our accounts canceled, with the videos on our YouTube and Vimeo channels disappeared. Despite having tens of thousands of followers; or, perhaps, precisely because the canceled accounts had built up a large number of followers.

Did I mention that the corporate media have pretty much ignored the Twitter Files? 

Interest on Twitter itself is strong, however, and likely to remain so as we anticipate the next reveal. 

If you're still not sure that ideas are as powerful as facts on the ground, consider the current campaign to make you believe that a nuclear war is either survivable or winnable. President Biden has said a first-strike with nukes is on the table, a table likely to be reduced to smoldering radioactive ash as WW3 ensues.