The Fourth of July- Quashing The Independence of Other Countries Day!- What We Now Celebrate: Enough Said?

 

Attaining A New Level of Global Nuclear Weapons Security, Weapons Will Be Purchased For Transfer Away From Belligerent Countries To New Private Peace Keeping Consortium

The Four Bien Guys Peace Project: Bezos, Zukerberg, Gates and Musk

“Blessed are the peacemakers” is what the Bible’s New Testament tells us Jesus told his assembled flock in his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:9): “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”  Blessed once were also the “Peacekeepers,” missiles made by Martin Marietta, the LGM-118 being the most modern ICBM in the United States Air Force  inventory (designed primarily for nuclear weapons delivery- one or more thermonuclear warheads, third-generation) for almost 20 years before it was retired in 2005 as a result of arms reduction treaties.

Once we had nuclear weapons called “Peacekeepers”; Now its time for all the nuclear weapons on our earth to all to be called the “Peacemakers,” because that’s what their new owners have decided they will all be renamed upon transfer of title.  And this will signify the purpose of a new plan being executed to attain a new maximum level of procured global nuclear weapons security.  Heretofore, nuclear weapons have all been very undependably held by various belligerent countries, holding those devices out of fear and hostility towards one another.  But this is an inherently dangerous situation and, as recent years have made clear, few things are as unstable as the governments of all the countries across the world, basically each and every one of them: Any madman can be elected to head almost any one of them.  (Let’s leave out the word “almost.”)

Moreover, there is another problem: Nuclear weapons like ICBMs fly through outer space.  As everyone knows, the space race and space exploration has been taken over by the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, and their private companies who, for their purposes of being in outer space in the first place, want serenity and order in our starry skies.  Who wants a belligerent nation’s ICBM whizzing past their telecommunications satellite?  Or zooming within impact zones of their lower altitude hovering (LEO- “Low Earth Orbit”) “internet of all things” 5G tracking monitors?  

And things have gotten dangerously worse: The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 set outer space aside for peaceful purposes. For decades, it precluded any nation from deploying weapons in space or waging war there.  But, much to the consternation of other nations, including China and Russia, the United States walked away from the treaty even as Trump launched Space Force, a new branch of the U.S. military specifically to fight in outer space.

To people like Bezos and Musk, and to their friends who think like them, Bill Gates and Mark Zukerberg most specifically, the answer for the world was simple, basically more of the same that came with privatizing space flight: “Why share?”  If the heavens are to be privately theirs for all other purposes of regular space frontier dominance, why share any last lick of the heavens for the potential destructive interference of weapons flying through the stratosphere and beyond, maybe catastrophically even leaving behind the clutter of exploded debris that would be impossible to deal with?  “If the orbit of our planet is filled with a debris field,” says Musk, “it will be impenetrable and we will never be able to leave earth to go elsewhere as should be humanity’s destiny.”

The answer was not to put the nuclear arms industry out of business (potentially unending the world’s economies), but to expand and bring the weapons under private ownership.  For this purpose a new peace keeping or peace making consortium has been formed by a small group of four Big tech colossuses, Musk, Bezos, Gates and Zuckerberg. Into this private consortium will be conveyed all the world’s nuclear weapons.  These four men are four of the ten wealthiest men who just doubled their wealth during Covids’ two years.  As these four are taking the lead for the public’s benefit here, they are naming the consortium the Four-Bien Guys Project.  (“Bien” is French, a not too foreign word for “good.”)

“It’s a natural next step for private ownership,” says Bill Gates who has been privatizing the worldwide health delivery schema along with worldwide thought patterns about it, while buying up farmland to become the biggest owner of it in the United States.  Gates amplified:

Since governments are  increasingly less dependable, corporations are increasingly taking things into their own hands in other areas, privatization of intelligence agency work, private military forces, schools, etc.

    Nuclear weapons are just another subset of science, which, as you see with medicine, pharma, the private ownership of the internet and most of the electronic technology that serves us, plus all the patent joint-venturing investments of our universities, has all been privatized already.– The arc of history is long, but it bends toward privatization.  It bends toward neoliberalism.  It bends toward `liberalism’ actually-- I don’t know why we have to put that “neo” in before the word, except to assure conservatives that what we are talking about is actually compatible with, and essentially what they also believe in.  

The four guys said that they will be calling in their chits with other oligarches around the world to make sure the plan happens with the necessary responsiveness from– not naming any names-  all their respective countries.  

Bezos and Zukerberg both say that they feel at ease with their assumption, via the consortium, of responsibilities that, before transfer, once had a military flavor.  Bezos pointed out that he built up the gigantism of his entire Amazon empire based on skillful and knowledgeable use of the internet and that his maternal grandfather and mentor, Lawrence Preston Gise was one of those who, at DARPA launched and set the internet in motion, plus, he said, he was now doing a lot of work with the CIA and also acquired and owns a newspaper that is one of the most important in the country for telling American what to think about USA’s military conflicts. Zukerberg noted that the nuclear weapons sharing under NATO was certainly a foremost means by which such weapons were deployed throughout the world and that he had a lot of experience and was very comfortable working with NATO’s Atlantic Council think tank to regulate Facebook sharing and news popularity and permissions on the platform.

The weapons will be paid for.  Title to the weapons will transfer to the consortium at the very outset, whereupon their renaming as “Peacemakers” will take place, but payments will be made over an extended period, which may or may not be keyed to the time frame during which the weapon’s incorporated isotopes are expected to remain radioactive.  A loan will be provided to the Four-Bien Project Consortium by the Fed.

The U.S. Space Force and all its employees will also be simultaneously transferred to the consortium.  Gates said, “we need them to feel secure in space and these days we can only depend on ourselves to make sure they get paid.”  Commanding the Space Force after transfer will be Comdr. Newt Rippley who has expressed assurance that experiences resulting from the privatizations will be good.

The various governments of the world have agreed to pay (or as the case may be, will be required to pay) to the consortium a caretaking fee. But, while the agreed upon and the to-be-specified amounts are more than enough to pay the loan, Gates is not sure that payments can always be expected to come in on time: “If governments were that dependable, we wouldn’t have to step into so many situations continually to take over.”  He says that taking care of nuclear materials is also very expensive and could take thousands of years.

Because humans lack longevity and are not exactly so perfect for the job, keeping the weapons will be turned over to robots and there is fanfare about this as an opportunity to unroll the most start-of-the-art AI, that will also apply to clear algorithms about how and when and what would apply if there is ever a question of whether any weapons needed to be used.  This is one reason Gates was solicited as a principal to participated in the consortium.  “This is really most desirable” says Bezos of the robots, “because, after all, who would want just a few oligarchs deciding what is best when it comes to matters that concern the fate of the entire world.– No, says Gates, we will be keeping ourselves out of these decisions.”

So “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they are the divine children of our gods.”  A memorandum of understanding to effect the plan is being signed today, April 1st, with a consummation date for full transfer specified as one year from today, also April 1st.

Government Covid Policies Are Doing A Great Job of Dividing The “Progressive” Left, Making It The “Anti-vaxers” vs. The “Faithful Pfizerite Fauci Followers.”

Maybe you’ve been noticing this too?: How vaccination mandates and government Covid policy, accompanied by barbs all over the place about “misinformation,” is doing a great job of dividing what we’ve considered the progressive left.  Now what we get is the so-called “Anti-vaxers” vs. the “Faithful Pfizerite Fauci Followers,” even though most who are “anti-mandate” or even who have questions about these particular (EUA- “Emergency Use Authorization”) vaccines aren’t exactly always 100% “anti-vax,” and even though the “Fauci Followers” of the left, however faithful they are at the moment, usually distrust Big Pharma and official government information.  Whew!

Why is the left always so good at getting divided and conquered?  Or maybe it’s just that there are people out there who are more intent on seeing that kind of division get done to the left than to any other group!  Basically, if you’re paying attention, dividing and conquering the public is a long-standing tradition in this country.  Those who have an interest in doing so can best be described as the power elite.  Oh yes, and if you want to know where the power is, money is pretty measure of where it resides.

The potent presence of this new fracturing force (is there no end to Covid’s ills?) really hit home for me when I heard about how government policy over mandates is probably going to break up New York State’s Green Party this year, perhaps pretty much wipe it out of existence- We’ll see. Will that “third” party fade so entirely in New York so as to become just a ghostly relic of an alternative to the corporate duopoly that people once held significant hope for?  

But then, after thinking about the Green Party, I realized that we are seeing this fracturing in various ways all over what has been traditionally been considered the progressive left.  Did you think that the way that people were holing up and sequestering during Covid was anti-social enough?; well now people are walking away from age-old relationships over this.  In some cases, it’s like they don’t even recognize the very basic principles that once steadfastly connected them.

What, no possibility for a united middle ground here if the two sides were dialoguing?

Maybe not.  If not, the issues of government handling of Covid and the corporate media blasting those polices non-stop into the culture are doing a truly superb job of weakening and annihilating coalitions that were already comparatively weak, poorly populated, and ineffective in trying to deal with the pervasive corporatism dominating society.

I could observe that between these two sides, one side might be a little more open minded and have a better, more tolerant understanding of the other’s point of view and its origins, while saying, conversely, that other side may be more prone to shutting down dialogue and information exchange, and it may be a side much more prone to argue for or to demand censorship and to advocate for a totalitarian treatment of others.  One side in this debate is anti-authoritarian, the other is not. . .  With the split, both sides are going to try to claim the mantel of “true left,” “true progressive” thinking.–

– One of the sides in this split will claim that mantel by saying that it is anti-social for those on the other side to “downplay” the menace of Covid by questioning whether the public’s fear is proportional to the illness's actual threat, and anti-social if those on the other side “gullibly” wonder if, in fact, there might be measures and treatments going unadvertised and unpromoted that could ward off illness, fortify healthy resistance and that could treat Covid in ways that diminish the terribleness of what we've been worrying about 24/7 non-stop– (Shouldn't we rest assured that the health industry has always acted in the best interests of the public?)  That side will think that those who make arguments for personal freedoms or who venture to explore ideas that might diminish the perceived peril of Covid and the prescribed vigilance it certainly requires are selfish violators of the Star Trek principle of needed self-sacrifice we heard enunciated in that once climactic exchange between Kirk and Spock: “It is logical. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, . . . or the one.”

While the left further fractures into the splintered shards of increasingly small, self-contained, self- referential bubbles (as is the problem with the country in general). . .  (Sorry that’s not an internally consistent metaphor) . . . . Something else interesting is happening. . .

Anti-authoritarian sentiment and a belief in personal freedoms is uniting one side of this split left with people on the right, with libertarians, with independents, definitely with lots of varieties of anti-corporatists, even with people across the spectrum who may consider themselves to have no basic political philosophy, only perhaps to have pragmatic instincts about things they feel are askew.  Maybe, like Occupy Wall Street and The Tea Party, who concurred on this, they are against what they view as the corruption and crony capitalism that occurs when corporations capture the government.

Is the broad spectrum uniting of all these elements in what may be termed the “Medical Freedom Movement” frightening to those in power?  It’s suggested that it is and that an example of the growth of these new alliances that could be troubling to them was the recent anti-mandate rally in January in Washington D.C..  The anti-mandate event in D.C. was just days after another rally by the D.C. mall’s monuments.  The earlier event was a “March for Life” anti-abortion rally, greatly diminished in attendance from prior years.  That rally from several days before, made the front page of the New York Times above the fold.  The anti-mandate event at the Lincoln Memorial did not get such conspicuous coverage by the Times.

Time Magazine, not downplaying or disparaging the anti-mandate rally the same way the Times did, choose to admonish and forebodingly scold that this coming together of folk of different political stripes under an anti-mandate banner represented something in the nature of Svengali-like hypnotism.  Their January 26 headline was: “How the Anti-Vax Movement Is Taking Over the Right.”  I don’t know what the photo they used to underscore their headline was actually intended to illustrate: Right-wingers being taken over, or the “anti-vaxxers” who are taking over the right. . .

.. .  I feel that it is usually destructive to pigeonhole people, but, for the sake of de-pigeonholing those featured in the photo Time chose, I can assure you that the group depicted, including the woman putting her hands together in a prayer clasp, were a group of non-corporatist, left-of-democratic-party-mainstream Democrats (or at least recent Democrats), including, if you look, one who wore a big “Black Lives Matters” button.  If you know what I look like, you’ll know why I can speak with authority on that subject.

This coming together of people from different walks of political life could have long-range significance; not just on this single issue, but only multiple issues of utmost concern.  As I have written about before, there is a long list issues of foremost concern to Americans that supermajorities merging both left and right agree on, more than a score.  While those are things the vast majority of Americans want and that we, as a country, could easily have, the political establishment is not willing to provide them. Collusively, the corporate media downplays them all and does its best to instead divide us with Red Team/Blue Team squabbles about things that are generally far less important.

I’ve also written about how we have to get away from the “Red Team/Blue Team” divisions, since both the Republican and the Democrat parties are controlled by corporatist money and interests; viewed with the slightest bit of perspective, the two parties can be seen to work more like a tag team pursuing the same goals than anything else. 

I wrote about how we need a new political “color.”  Unfortunately, “purple” has already been grabbed by the “Purple Project,” which while purporting to be a populist styled erasure of Red/Blue differences, is actually just more top-down corporatism for those realizing that the “Red Team/Blue Team” stuff is total mishegoss.  I wrote then that “green” with its connotations of environmentalism wasn’t the best choice because it was already taken by the Green Party. Now if the Green Party is one more of those groups going to further fracture its pursuit of principles in the face of the Covid policies coming from government and Big Pharma, that just confirms the need for a new color for new emerging alliances.

PS: Here is the Monday, December 13, 2021 statement of the National Black Caucus of the Green Party, “We Say No To Mandates,” that explains the political stance and direction they are taking.  I am unaware that the Greens in New York State on the other side of this split have articulated their position or the ways in which they disagree and can’t go along with what the Black Caucus expressed here.

Upward Transfer of Wealth Alert! Upward Transfer of Power Alert! Look What Just Doubled! Enough To Make Everyone Sick!

Stories from The Guardian and Grayzone

There are different variations to the story, but almost everyone has heard one version of it or another.  A king or raja offers a reward to someone who has done him a favor, or won a bet, or game of chess.  Maybe the king offers anything that they might ask, even up to half his realm.  The offer is declined, seemingly modestly, with a request for just a grain of rice (or a grain of wheat) placed on the square of a chess board, two grains on the next, four on the next, etc.  Or the doubling of the amount is to occur daily for 30 days.  The point is the same: With a simple doubling the promise of the doubled grains far exceeds everything the king of raja has to give.

Look what just doubled!– The wealth of the world’s richest 10 men doubled since the start of the 2-year pandemic (as 160 million more people were pushed into poverty). That’s according to Oxfam in a just released report “Inequality Kills.”

The ten wealthiest men in the world have collectively singed a letter of thanks to the Corona Covid-19 virus— Just kidding, but I leave it to others to figure out exactly how the response to the pandemic around the world has helped bulk up the wealth of the wealthiest. One of the men, heavily invested in pharmaceuticals, is a poster boy for recommended virus response: Bill Gates.  It’s also obvious why Jeff Bezos made money on the pandemic.  And Mark Zuckerberg’s role in what information flows about our tactics responding to the virus is obvious.

The ten wealthiest men in the world are:

    1.    Elon Musk
    2.    Jeff Bezos
    3.    Bernard Arnault & family
    4.    Bill Gates
    5.    Larry Ellison
    6.    Larry Page
    7.    Sergey Brin
    8.    Mark Zuckerberg
    9.    Steve Ballmer
    10.    Warren Buffett

Use the link if you want to get specifics about their windfalls.

Important to recognize that, along with that upward transfer of wealth goes a more or less equivalent upward transfer of power.  Wealth is power.  The question is often asked, beyond a certain point where wealth takes care of your every need, why want or pursue more?  What good does it do you?  One answer is that what is being pursued is really just more power.

It’s a lot of power.  Remember that doubling the grains of rice exercise?

Reuters and AP, Associated Press, Issue Simultaneous Fact Checks: “Mass Formation Psychosis” or “Mass Psychosis” Does Not Exist As a Legitimate, Academically Recognized Theory

Two of these three above caused Reuters and AP to issue fact check articles that there is no such thing as "Mass Formation Psychosis"

More or less simultaneously, a day apart, Reuters and AP, the Associated Press, issued fact check articles announcing that “Mass Formation Psychosis” or “Mass Psychosis” is an “unfounded,” “discredited” theory; that the “concept has no academic credibility,” is “not officially recognized” “is not supported by evidence, and is similar to theories that have long been discredited” and that the term does not appear as a classification in medical reference dictionaries.  See: Fact Check-No evidence of pandemic ‘mass formation psychosis’, say experts speaking to Reuters, By Reuters Fact Check January 7, 2022, and (AP) FACT FOCUS: Unfounded theory used to dismiss COVID measures
By Angelo Fichera and Josh Kelety, January 8, 2022.

According to professor John Drury quoted by both articles the theory is a “notion” that “has been discredited by decades of research.” He says that “no respectable psychologist” now “agrees with these ideas.”

Reporting this delivery of the verdict of “psychology experts,” Reuters and AP both say that they talked with “numerous psychologists” and “multiple experts.”

Both Reuters and AP quote some of those experts, between them a total of six.  Both Reuters and AP quote:

    •    John Drury, Professor of Social Psychology and Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange at the University of Sussex
    •    Jay Van Bavel, Associate Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University, who says “I’ve been studying group identity and collective behavior for nearly two decades
    •    Steven Reicher, Professor of Social Psychology at the University of St Andrews, who has studied crowd psychology for more than 40 years. (and important update 2/14/'22)

In addition, Reuters quotes:

    •    Chris Cocking, Principal Lecturer at the School of Humanities and Applied Social Sciences at the University of Brighton

And AP additionally quotes two other experts:

    •    Steven Jay Lynn, a psychology professor at Binghamton University in New York
    •    Richard McNally, a professor of clinical psychology at Harvard University- He is not quoted as saying the theory does not exist, only as offering the opinion that the way that public is responding to Covid is a rational response “to the arguments and evidence adduced by the relevant scientific experts.”

As one can tell from the above, there are theories of “crowd psychology,” “group identity and collective behavior” that these experts, who were tapped to offer these opinions, believe exist.  But as Professor Drury explains, he distinguishes and dismisses concepts, such as “mob mentality” and “group mind,” where “when people form part of a psychological crowd they lose their identities and their self-control” and where “they become suggestible, and primitive instinctive impulses predominate.”

The fact checks were, of course, picked up and republished elsewhere.   ABC affiliate- FACT FOCUS: Unfounded theory used to dismiss COVID measures, NBC affiliate-  Fact Check: Doctor uses unfounded theory to dismiss COVID measures on Rogan podcast, by Angelo Fichera and Josh Kelety Associated Press, Tuesday, January 11th 2022, CBS affiliate-  FACT FOCUS: Unfounded theory used to dismiss COVID measures, Jan 8, 2022, Yahoo News- ‘No academic credibility’: Experts debunk mass psychosis Covid theory floated by doctor on Joe Rogan podcast, Gino Spocchia, January 9, 2022.

All the other publications don’t matter so much since Google’s algorithms ensure that these fact check articles, and/or the points they make, Google high.

The fact check articles both identify themselves as being a quick response to Dr. Robert Malone speaking about the theory on the Joe Rogan Show about a week before:

AP:

The term gained attention after it was floated by Dr. Robert Malone on “The Joe Rogan Experience” Dec. 31 podcast. Malone is a scientist who once researched mRNA technology but is now a vocal skeptic of the COVID-19 vaccines that use it.

Reuters:

Dr Robert Malone . .  told The Joe Rogan Experience that “mass formation psychosis” is a phenomenon that occurred in 1920s and 30s Germany when a highly educated population “went barking mad”.

“And that is what’s happened here,” he said, referring to the COVID-19 pandemic (here).

According to Malone, the condition occurs when a society “becomes decoupled from each other and has a free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don’t make sense… And then their attention gets focused by a leader or series of events on one small point, just like hypnosis.”

. . . . . They will follow that person – it doesn’t matter whether they lie to them or whatever, the data are irrelevant.”

Aside from the fact checks saying that the theory does not exist, Big Tech media responded to Malone’s speaking about this notion by immediately taking down the Joe Rogan YouTube clip of Malone talking to Rogan about this idea.  See:  NY Post- YouTube scraps Joe Rogan podcast episode over Nazi Germany comparison By Ben Cost, January 4, 2022   and NY Daily News-  Joe Rogan video taken down by YouTube for anti-vax content, By Brian Niemietz, January 03, 2022.

The same week Twitter cancelled Dr. Malone’s account banning him from Twitter’s platform, the reasons for which are analyzed here.  Likewise, LinkedIn cancelled Dr. Malone’s LinkedIn account.

Meanwhile, somebody mustered a group that includes professors, some health professionals, some scientists, some doctors, etc. to sign a letter demanding that the top-rated Joe Rogan Show be cancelled from Spotify because Joe Rogan interviewed vaccine expert Dr. Malone about Covid.

The unfounded “Mass Formation Psychosis” theory is more or less a variation, with the overlay of certain extra manifestations that take it in a more extreme direction, of what has been described as “Groupthink.”  “Groupthink” hales back to a seminal article written by William H. (Holly) Whyte published in Fortune magazine in 1952.  The “Groupthink” theory was built upon and further developed, by Irving Janis, a research psychologist from Yale University in ensuing years.  Features of the Groupthink theory involve a dysfunctional deterioration of critical, independent, and quality thinking and decision making as people within an “ingroup” are pressured to think similar things.  There is an intolerance of other ideas and the “ingroup” is likely to get an inflated sense of the correctness of their own decisions that goes along with “illusions of invulnerability.”  This is likely to go along with denigration of anyone in an “outgroup” and that can often cause members of the “outgroup” to be treated in a dehumanized way.  The theory includes the observation that “groupthink” often arises or is more likely in situations where there is a high level of stress or anxiety from external threats.

As for the “Mass Formation Psychosis” theory itself, one good expression of what it is Reuters and AP were able to fact check as being unfounded is this cartoon illustrated After Skool/Academy of Ideas presentation: Mass Psychosis - How an Entire Population Becomes Mentally Ill, August 3, 2021.  Cartooning ideas can be extremely influential: it could easily be argued that Whyte’s Fortune Groupthink article would never have been as influential without the accompanying illustrations by Robert Osborn.  This After Skool/Academy of Ideas presentation is incredibly similar in approach to the recent “Your Debt Is Someone Else’s Asset,” a cancel debt with a jubilee advocacy video up at the Intercept (December 9 2021) by Kim Boekbinder, Jim Batt, illustrations by Molly Crabapple, except that the illustrator is somebody different from Molly Crabapple.

If you want something more talky and academic, less streamlined, to review this (talking, for instance, about breaking down human bonds), there is an interview available here with Professor Matthias Desmet, Professor of Clinical Psychology Ghent University, Belgium, a psychoanalyst and who also has a degree in statistics: Why Do So Many Still Buy into the Narrative?  Professor Matthias Desmet, September 21st, 2021.

Human brains and human thinking are strange.  For instance, there is the famous story of Tolstoy’s challenge (originally from his older brother?) to stand facing a corner and not think of a white bear.  It’s almost impossible.