The Modus Operandi of the U.S. War Machine

In 2022, as the U.S. was ramping up its support for war in Ukraine and interfering with settlement efforts, there was a coordinated effort to keep you in the dark on this history of U.S. interference in Ukrainian politics, every bit of it true and well-documented. Now 450,000 Russian and Ukrainian soldiers are dead. None of this carnage was necessary. More than $100B of U.S. tax $ spent, much of it to line the pockets of U.S. weapons manufacturers. Joe Biden and his Iraq-failure architects, neocon advisors Victoria Nuland and Antony Blinken, have this blood on their hands, as do the U.S. corporate media on the left and right. The following video is short (less than 5 minutes) and it should be required viewing most Americans.

[Added Jan 6, 2024]

Biden's simplistic story about the Ukraine war is "Bad Putin." Now compare that fairy tale with the sprawling nefarious corrupt involvement of Blackrock, as discussed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  Corporate greed is also working non-stop to keep Blackrock completely out of the corporate media headlines so you can continue to believe the story about "Bad Putin."

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17 Life-Learnings to Celebrate the 17th Birthday of Maria Popova’s “The Marginalian”

This morning I received 17 wonderful gifts. Maria Popova’s website has been one of my places of respite for many years. In her most recent article, she celebrates her 17 years of online writing at “The Marginalian” by crystallizing 17 lessons she has learned along the way. Here is Maria’s introduction to her 17 lessons:

The Marginalian was born on October 23, 2006, under an outgrown name, to an outgrown self that feels to me now almost like a different species of consciousness. (It can only be so — if we don’t continually outgrow ourselves, if we don’t wince a little at our former ideas, ideals, and beliefs, we ossify and perish.)

What follows are merely the titles to Popova's 17 lessons. She discusses each of these more fully at her website. Everything she writes is, somehow, both analytically precise and poetic. I've printed this list and it has gone up on my wall so that I have daily reminders:

1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind.

2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone

3. Be generous.

4. Build pockets of stillness into your life.

5. You are the only custodian of your own integrity.

6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity.

7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.”

8. Seek out what magnifies your spirit.

9. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist.

10. Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively.

11. Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality.

12 There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.

13. In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again.

14. Choose joy.

15. Outgrow yourself.

16. Unself.

17.Everything is eventually recompensed, every effort of the heart eventually requited, though not always in the form you imagined or hoped for.

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Joe Biden Continues to Refuse Secret Service Protection to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

I posted on this topic about a week ago but I'm posting again because the behavior of the Biden White House is despicable. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s father and uncle were assassinated. RFK, Jr. was almost murdered last week. Presidents have always granted Secret service protection to opposing candidate, who requested it, until now. I'm to the point where there is no innocent explanation for the behavior of the White House. Please watch this short video. Don't skip over the beginning where Gavin de Becker describes his noteworthy credentials.

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Ressentiment Redux

Nietzsche, painted a vivid image of ressentiment that is applicable in modern times:

They monopolize virtue, these weak, hopelessly sick people, there is no doubt of it: "We alone are the good and just," they say, "we alone are homines bonae voluntatis.*" They walk among us as embodied reproaches, as warnings to us--as if health, well-constitutedness, strength, pride, and the sense of power were in themselves necessarily vicious things for which one must pay some day, and pay bitterly: how ready they themselves are at bottom to make one pay; how they crave to be hangmen. There is among them an abundance of the vengeful disguised as judges, who constantly bear the word "justice" in their mouths like poisonous spittle, always with pursed lips, always ready to spit upon all who are not discontented but go their way in good spirits. Nor is there lacking among them that most disgusting species of the vain, the mendacious failures whose aim is to appear as " beautiful souls" and who bring to market their deformed sensuality, wrapped up in verses and other swaddling clothes, as "purity of heart": the species of moral masturbators and "self-gratifiers." The will of the weak to represent some form of superiority, their instinct for devious paths to tyranny over the healthy--where can it not be discovered, this will to power of the weakest!

--Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, Section 15 (1887)

Translation by Walter Kaufmann (1967)

*Men of good will

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