Open Thread - 06-21-24 - Why Politics?
I think it's safe to say that we all here at c99 are political junkies. Have you ever wondered why?
I, like many others, became politically active when I was young because certain policies affected my life. I became politically aware in the late sixties. Ever more so as I approached age 18.
The Vietnam War had that affect on me.
So, my question is twofold:
What was the catalyst that got you involved in politics?
Why do we torture ourselves with politics when blissful ignorance is more soothing.
Take this for what it's worth:
West has plan to replace Zelensky – Russian intelligence
The Ukrainian leader will be scapegoated for the country’s inevitable military defeat, the SVR agency predicts.
The US and its allies will sacrifice Vladimir Zelensky, who is entirely dependent on their support, without any qualms, the Russian foreign intelligence service (SVR) has claimed in a statement, according to TASS.
Moscow considers Zelensky to be a usurper, since his five-year presidential term expired in May. President Vladimir Putin has argued that, under the Ukrainian constitution, the parliament remains legitimate, and presidential authority should have passed to its speaker when Zelensky’s term ended. However, officials in Kiev have conspired to keep Zelensky in place.
“It is becoming increasingly evident that the White House will soon shut down ‘Project Zelensky’,” the SVR stated on Thursday.
It believes Zelensky will be used as a scapegoat “once Russia solidifies its successes on the battlefield, and exhausted and demoralized Ukrainian troops find themselves with no way out.”
Once Zelensky is of no use, “the White House will throw him on the trash heap of history with no second thought, and replace him with another Ukrainian politician whom it considers suitable to negotiate a peaceful resolution of the conflict with Russia.” Retired General Valery Zaluzhny, the former top commander of the armed forces, is a likely candidate, according to the SVR.
Snip...
This is quite interesting. Most, if not all, of us here have heard about the gold in Fort Knox, or the lack of it. What is different in this piece is it names names.
It's long so I'll cut to the chase and quote enough of the article to give the gist of its message.
Fort Knox Scandal
by Bill Still posted on Aug 30, 2009
The Golden Cover-Up Begins
How was the Fort Knox gold drain first discovered? Although the London Gold Pool and gold sales were by no means a secret, the full implication of the gold drain from America was understood by very few people until it hit one of the early tabloids in 1974. What followed was a typical scenario of government stonewalling, half-truths and lies that eventually backed the bureaucrats into a corner, but not without some dedicated work by one determined individual, Ed Durell.
Snip...
International Monetary Expert Sounds Alarm:
NO GOLD LEFT IN FORT KNOX!
Federal Reserve System Charged With Secret Sale of U.S. Gold Supplies Overseas to Super-Rich David Rockefeller.
The story charged that the Rockefeller family was manipulating the Federal Reserve to sell off Fort Knox gold at low prices to anonymous European speculators who were really fronting for them. Mrs. Boyer was the executive assistant to former Gov. Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller (remember where that name, Aldrich, came from? Nelson's grandfather, Senator Aldrich, one of the founders of the Fed), and had served him in one capacity or another since 1944, just as her husband had served Laurence S. Rockefeller for many years before his death two years earlier.
Snip...
So Much Gold, So Little Accounting
It is incredible that the world's greatest treasure has had little accounting or auditing. This gold belongs to the American people, not the Federal Reserve and their foreign friends and owners. Unfortunately, if one accepts the worst-case scenario that centralization of world gold reserves in Fort Knox was merely a ploy to eventually transfer this gold into private hands in Europe, then shoddy accounting practices and government cover-ups would be a necessity.
One thing is certain; the government could blow all this speculation away in a matter of days with a well-publicized audit under the searing lights of media cameras. It has chosen not to do so. One must conclude that it is afraid of the truth such an audit would reveal.
Bold text by JtC
Gold in them hills, and it's waiting for me there.
Comments
Good morning Free Rangers...
I'm going to leave this here just because I love this song:
Bon dia
.
Your lead-in story has an odd line in it.
That does not sound quite right. Peace is anathema to forever wars.
That is the whole purpose of Uncle Sam and the nato machine.
To generate upheaval and war. They somehow have got it figured out
it is the only way to maintain their imagined empire.
Thanks for the OT and covering for my absence.
Cogent point, QMS. Thanks for pointing it out.
be well and have a good one.
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
It's not surprising...
in a world turned upside down with contradictory gaslighting that's rife with counterfactual lying eyed evidentiary naked truth.
How dare those Russkies speak of a peaceful resolution.
You're welcome and you're welcome:
I also got involved
because of the draft for Vietnam, as well as my early studies of the nuclear threat.
To me, politics is primarily about not getting dead. Anything else that happens is just gravy... And, I suppose, that answers the second question.
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
There very well may be...
a new generation slapped across the face with the same reality we faced. Let's hope just the idea of a draft revitalizes the anti-war movement.
About that second question; I think a lot of folks have dropped the former in lieu of the latter. Which is the intended outcome of of this huge state based psyop foisted upon the potential canon fodder public, in my humble opinion.
Good morning Johnny. Up and doing stuff well before
my designated start time, hence not fully cogent yet. I got a possible jump start on the politics thing thanks to savvy and leftist 4 years older brother. Before I was really fully aware of the Draft I got torqued up about civil rights (equality) and also civil liberties (freedom of & from religion, free speech and all that). I was also gaining an understanding of corporatocracy/corporate evil as reflected in labor laws but mostly foreign policy, like banana republics and US imperialism as reflected in all the dictators we were in bed with which led to awareness of the MIC, foreign bases, the garrison state economy and all that. The draft was late crawling over the horizon because I was a fatalistic little shit and just knew that the government would get us into a hot war that would completely wipe my home off the map because prime target.
By the time I got all that fleshed out I was a committed anti-war person and had pre-emptively decided that the draft wasn't really a personal threat because I would simply go to prison as a refusenik instead. After they killed JFK and upon further education and learning about the way things worked, I realized that the so-called social contract, to the extent that it may have once actually existed, had been broken for some time. Not my government, not no more, I do not consent. Ergo, since qui tacet consentire videtur, I also object, always.
time to go get some more stuff, including errands, done
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
Thanks for another...
excellent response. You've walked the walk, my friend.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't you also grow up in, and went to college in the heart of the movement, i.e. Berkeley, Ca. during much of the 60s? That had to have been some wild times.
Grew up in San Diego through High School,
moved to Berkeley to go to college at Cal in '64, just in time for the Free Speech Movement and all that followed. Very heady times, as they say, interesting, now and then scary, but never dull. Great time and place for music too.
You two have a great weekend.
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
I became a democrat because it was the
.
Party of the People and it helped us ordinary folks. When the Reagan Democrats came along I thought they were temporary. I obviously didn’t pay enough attention to what Clinton democrats were doing or I would have seen how they sold out the poor and the working class. Welfare reform and NAFTA gutted the country, but they got a pass. Along came Obama with Hopes and Change and I fell for it. His FISA vote and his bailing out the banks while letting them steal peoples homes and the blinders finally came off. Now I wonder why I was so gullible?
I’m not surprised that there isn’t any gold in Fort Knox. The parasite class has been stealing from we the people for ages. What can be done about it?
Maybe strip the Rockefeller family of their assets is a good start. They didn’t just steal the gold, but our health too when they bought big medicine.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
Voting is like driving with a toy steering wheel.
Yep...
you've hit upon the political trajectory that went a long way in forming the morass we find ourselves in today. Bubba was a real snake in the grass, and his spouse is waiting in the wings to finish the job. Obama and his spouse are lurking about "in the wings" as well.
To be fair, the investigative analysis by Mr. Ed Durell's reasoned and quite believable exposé is conjecture up until the time we actually get a fair audit of the gold reserves in Fort Knox. That audit should happen, takes a look at the clock, oh, how about never.
Hedges touches on what has happened to us
by consent of the ruling class.
Link
We keep electing people hoping that they will turn this around, but the dumb thing is that we keep re-electing the people who have allowed this to happen. Look at how many members of Congress have been there for decades. And they have gotten obscenely rich from selling us out.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
Voting is like driving with a toy steering wheel.
This is funny….
.
and ridiculously asinine!
Rejected not rejects as in recently.
From Orange State:
So the Slimes uses anonymous sources who were briefed on the subject….wtf? Why can’t they be named? It’s not national security or anything.
The reason why Cannon put a hold on the case is because Smith admitted that he lied to the court. Plus the FBI tampered with evidence when they pulled files out of boxes and slapped Classified Information letters on them and then leaked them to the press. I’d think that was enough to get the case dismissed. With prejudice.
Also Smith wasn’t appointed legally either. And stories like this leave out the fact that Trump had authority to declassify files. Biden took many files and kept them much longer, but there was no armed raid on any of the places he kept them. In his garage and the trunk of his corvette to name 2. Hur said that yes indeed he is guilty, but not coherent enough to stand trial.
What people are really pissed at is this trial won’t happen before the election.
Apparently those 2 unnamed sources had this story for over a year so why is it just coming out now?
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
Voting is like driving with a toy steering wheel.
Invoking anonymous sources...
is equivalent to a smoke filled derriere infusion. BOHICA.
Draft registration, 1980.
There was also a political undercurrent when I was at UCSC. I had a friend who went to Nicaragua in the Eighties, too, and put on a slide show of the trip for all who would attend.
There really isn't a politics for the common folk in the US. Vote for the shadow government of your choice, because the other party is worse. What we ought to be discussing is what Cornelius Castoriadis called the social imaginary. If we changed the social imaginary, that would be a revolution.
"But in America particularly, a deep worry is now consciously gnawing the ruling class—they can see it, feel it: that the American Empire is on its last legs, close to collapse."-- Simplicius
The Us and the West...
are headed for collapse. What rises from those ashes are anyone's guess. If capitalism loses its grip and the shadow government fails, a polity for the common folk may rise in the vacuum. One can hope.
But, if the cycles of social history are any barometer, it'll take a constant vigil to keep the power hungry from the levers of control again, for the sake of their own aggrandizement. There's a long history of mankind failing in that respect, and a strong need for a social system reboot.
Outstanding Steve Earle, the man can write a song.
i got politically motivated at a young age.
A few events that influenced me in no particular chronological order.
The assassinations of JFK and RFK. the Cuban missile crisis, the riots in 1968.
As a result I have developed a habit of supporting the underdog without much success unfortunately.
Kudos...
for not giving up. Some day that dog will hunt.
I was born in 1952, have some distinct memories from
1954, so I do remember watching President Eisenhower speeches on black and white TV. I also remember my political activist parents discussing him, how they approved everything he did that conformed to FDR, and how they cursed him from straying off to the evil right side.
So, I have no memories at all of not being engaged in politics.
I remain interested in it nowadays to get prepared for the next awful things the politicians do to us.
I am to the point where my vote choice is between the two candidates, which is less likely to get me killed.
So often, sufficient Ds vote for an Rs favored policy, and vice versa, that to expect me to have party loyalty is too much to ask.
My attitude makes it easy to make friends with more people. They can rave about one party or the other, and I no longer give a shit!
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
That about says it all...
It seems like voting used to be about voting for the best candidate, today it's about voting against the opposition. What was once positive is now negative, in my opinion anyway.
The lesser of two evils is still evil.
Thanks, my dear.
I got hooked on politics
around the age of 9 or 10 due to my wild-eyed fascination with all things involving the space program.
Sputnik was a world shaking event that put the Russians out in front in the space race. I just knew we would vault ahead at any moment, but was consistently disappointed. The Russians continued to be the "first" in every metric that involved space flight.
I would scour the newspapers (my cop Mom brought home 3 newspapers a day) looking for news items reporting how we were close to closing the gap.
It was all lies.
They are still ahead of us in missile technology The only feat we were ahead of them was the moon landings, and even that is being questioned still today.
In perusing those newspapers from front to back (I was a latchkey kid with nothing better to do) I got educated on world events (war in the Congo), human interest stories (Thalidomide babies), all the major league baseball stats (big Dodger fan), and even the stock report tables (big fan of Studebaker, but luckily dodged that bullet).
By high school I was so well read I became the first nerd (look it up, and there is my picture).
Then came Vietnam and I was off to the races.
Have called myself a Democrat all my life, but never answered to leftist. Just recently returned a Democrat Party letter asking for money with a short terse note indicating that after 55 years of support, I will no longer feed their fascism.
I wrote that I wanted my party back.
I know it was a useless endeavor, but I felt relieved of a great burden.
I'm free, free, good God free at last.
Thanks for the OT.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
That's the point...
one reaches upon awakening:
Like you I woke up at a young age in the 60s, of course it was easier then as the propaganda and psyops weren't as prevalent as they are today. Opposing view points were actually allowed in the main stream media in the 60s. Today it's all mind-fuckery.
The controllers learned many valuable lessons from the 60s and 70s that they use against us now. Protest music was a big one. And they're about to re-learn another lesson, the draft. Reinstating the draft will backfire on them. They may be able to keep the flag draped caskets from being seen on TV, but not the internet, unless they lock it down too, which will also work against them.
I have never received support letters from the Democratic Party. Although I used to vote for them, I never gave any of them any money.
the late show
Late here...
I got radicalized by growing up in the 1960's. Started with folk music I think. Then Orange Sunshine may have been an influence. Seeing my grandpa get F'd by Rocketdyne after 19.5 years to not pay his pension. The Mr. Natural and Windowpane. Zap comix. Rock & roll. And yeah, being a teen looking at Viet Nam. Dick Gregory, George Carlin, Mort Sahl, and so on. The nail in the coffin was reading "American Propaganda- a Cynics View by Seymour Lipshitz.
Thanks for the thread!
happy trails!
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
both - Albert Einstein
Hey dysto...
music was a big factor for me. Along with underground newspapers (The Chicago Seed), underground comics, books by Rubin and Hoffman, a large ant-war movement in my high school, friends coming home in caskets, the whole hippie scene, mind altering substances, and of course the big one, the draft.
Stay cool my friend, we're headed to the hill country next weekend to catch The Derailers at Albert Dance Hall, in Albert "Freaking" Texas.