34 Comments

Caitlin, one of your best. Until I read it, I thought what was driving all the propaganda about China and Russia was the need to justify constantly increasing military spending. Now I see it's far deeper emotionally for these imperialists.

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As an aside, I found the idea that these defense contractors actually need to justify their budgets to their employees in congress unintenially hilarious.

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Actually, they need to help their employees in Congress convince their employees' true constituents, and they're very successful. I'm amazed at how many Trumpistas actually buy all the propaganda aimed at China, Russia, Iran, Syria.... They constantly attack me, demanding to know "who pays me." They are the mirror image of the TDS crowd. We have our own example here on Caitlin's substack.

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Indeed. It's what keeps me from joining their ranks. They'll correctly condemn the crap the NYT or Pelosi crank out but then turn around and defend outlandish military budgets or Israel or sanctions against Venezuela. Mirror images of interlocking insanity.

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The cult members don't stop me from supporting him, and if I believed in voting for the lesser of evils, I'd have voted for him in 2020, possibly even in 2016.

He crossed my red lines when he said on campaign in 2016 that 1) war is OK if you take their oil, 2) torture is OK and 3) the family members of terrorists can be punished simply for their relationship with the terrorist. I could have voted for him in 2020 if he had not consummated all three positions during his four years in office.

I withheld my full support for Gabbard in 2019 until she clarified a statement she had made implying torture might be justified under some circumstance like the "ticking time bomb" scenario. Her clarification satisfied me at the time, but recently I haven't been happy with her stance on "over the horizon" kinetics and her participation in Africa. I didn't agree with her support for HR6666 (funding for track & trace) either, but chalked that up to ignorance rather than evil

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You make me realize how few politicans we have on the national stage who a truly worth a damn. In a country of this size, I find this derth remarkable. I guess it's my impossible standards: a modicum of honesty combined with a modicum of decency.

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We've got some leaders, like RFK, jr, a few dissident doctors and dissident journalists, but they probably aren't interested in running for office.

We've got some decent folks at the state level, like Kristi Noem in SD and the Doug Peterson, the AG in Nebraska or Dannette Smith, the head of Nebraska's Department of Health and Human Services, who asked him for an opinion on off-label prescriptions.

The national stage? The Democrats have purged anyone willing to buck the corporatist line. Thomas Massie is good, and I liked Justin Amash. Not sure why he retired.

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There's really nothing to add to your observations today, Caitlin, except a wish for a wider audience.

Driving around yesterday seeing all these flags at half mast was depressing as hell. If I murdered someone I could expect to be sent to prison, but if I could up that number to a million, I'd look forward to a similar sendoff. Our national anthem is in desperate need of a laugh track.

It might be benficial to ponder why the Greeks of old created these gods in the first place, or why people continue to worship their gods today? People have a deep-seated need to answer to authority, as the Milgram experiment so aptly demonstrated. The oligarchs pulling the strings are well aware of this, knowing that thanks to evolutionary hardwiring, their job is already halfway done. So pick a team, get in line, and start yelling.

The marginalizations, media smears, police bullets, and phoney prison lockups are enough to handle the deviant questioners among us. At least for now.

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''The drivers of empire can inflict famines upon entire populations by imposing starvation sanctions upon them using their control over international financial systems. They can rain down fire upon any disobedient population using the most powerful military force ever assembled.''

It's quite reminiscent of a Zeusian god. As the world is deemed ''overpopulated,'' threatening the oligarchy's rule since it creates an impulse for change, new discoveries and scientific breakthroughs, so the Zeusians see the necessity of wiping the earth of what they deem ''too many humans.'' Today this takes the form of a Malthusian outlook. Everything in the universe is supposedly governed by entropy, and the universe is essentially just treated as one giant empty box whose energy is wearing down, lurching towards heat death.

It's a totally oligarchical way of viewing the universe, but today it's considered science among the scientific priesthood. All this despite the abounding evidence that the universe is in fact creative, changing, and developing. Of course, from an oligarchical standpoint such a view can never be allowed to become popular, given its implications for how society might behave differently.

Of course, the Western empire is now crumbling, largely thanks to the Malthusian policies and financial behemoths it has created. The whole Trans-Atlantic financial system is essentially now a collection of zombie banks who are only managing to lurch a few more steps forward thanks to the Fed's endless repo-loans and other bailout mechanisms.

This is why they’re desperate to impose fascism here and divide the world with these new no go zones and mandates, in my opinion. These attempts should not be seen as signs of strength, but weakness and vulnerability. I think people are starting to catch on.

Very telling is the recent unveiling of China's new hyper-sonic missile technology. The media reports that the US military and others said they’re surprised that China developed these weapons, but they shouldn’t be. Both Russia and China have leapfrogged. Meanwhile NATO and the US have been stuck just building old fashion ABMs and military bases everywhere, and deploying ships thinking they can maintain a nuclear first strike capability.

It’s all blown up in their face.

All this basically means the oligarchy has been strategically routed by these other nations who despite their differences or problems, will not allow themselves to be enslaved by the ''new world order,'' or whatever one wishes to call it.

These changes should be welcomed, and seen as a sign that we too may still be able to cast off the chains and cut this oligarchical cancer from the earth. It's either that, or we go down with it.

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I side with Christopher Hitchens on this one, as far as population control goes, and that is that personal freedom and quality of life only are only enhanced to the degree that women control their reproductive choices.

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Power is to sociopaths what catnip is to cats.

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I tried to understand the workings of power from a classical music point of view: I wanted a democratic orchestra. In a conventional orchestra the chain of command is a vector from the composer to the conductor to the ensemble. Trying to distribute the role of the composer to everybody, I found that my small baroque ensemble was unwilling to be creative. Improvisation scared them. The conductor however, was willing to improvise, using the minimal notation I had composed. As a composer, I tried to exert as little power as possible. The improvising conductor did very well, inventing gestures to raise and lower pitches, and even establishing polyrhythms by dividing the ensemble into groups. The music was structured and sounded a bit like Bach. However, as soon as something unpredictable happened, the group stopped playing.

I have often played in groups without a conductor, such as Scottish traditional groups. Here, the best musician usually takes the lead. Again, there was no room for a democratic musical discourse. I haven't tried free jazz yet, but I don't think that throwing traditional culture over board is the answer to establishing a conscious discourse. I think the role of conductor is essential.

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For me, a lot hangs on your phrase "traditional culture", which could mean so many things. Also, your orchestra analogy may not be entirely apt. I'd suggest you explore the perfect blending of the group with the individual that is the give-and-take of Jazz -- the one musical form you admitted you have not entertained.

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Thanks, I will! And do you think that this is pertinent to politics at all?

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Analogies are only as good as they are. What you are expressing is a very tight hierarchy (from Greek: ἱεραρχία, hierarkhia, 'rule of a high priest'), which is the last fucking thing I want. This setup may be preferred when realizing the music of a long-dead composer, but for an open and democratic political model I find it sorely lacking.

Jazz too has a structure set out by a composer -- often merely a progression of chords -- but within that structure there exists limitless possibilities for expression and improvisation. How closely this relates to politics I couldn't really say, but it would seem to beat the hell out of a maestro telling everybody what to do and when to do it.

You said your ensemble was unwilling to be creative, and so the freedom you gave them was refused. The same happens to a people when they refuse to use their skepticism or exert the effort necessary to dig at the truth. And so you get what so much of our politics is cluttered with: blinkered followers who spend all their time defending their "leaders" instead of holding them to account. This is why I believe the Founders put the freedom of speech and of the press as the first of the amendments -- it's that important for a democracy to work.

Again, I'm puzzled by your use of "traditional culture" in the context of politics. At one time, following some king and his holy man constituted the whole of traditional culture. And slavery was long traditional too. Tradition, to me, does not carry much weight.

You said your musicians stopped playing once something unpredictable happened; but that's when they all should have started playing something new.

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I am in the Scottish Highlands. Here, tradition has much value. It means identity, referring to language, music and dances. The Scottish/Gaelic musical tradition opposes the English/European, because it is pentatonic, not diatonic, and the tuning system is different. Even in music, they speak a different language or are bilingual. The 'king and the holy man' would have been the clan chief and his bard, but they were extinguished in 1745 by the English. In Scotland this is political, because of the independence referendum. Like in bagpipe tuning, you have a set of rules and a system in the collective understanding, which is traditional. However, I am originally German, trying to understand how 'power' has influenced Germany's musical tradition.

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Thanks for sharing that. I admire the Scots greatly; I believe the Scots are imbued with what is generally termed class. Being musical is doubly impressive.

We have very different histories and the Scots have no globe-spanning, soul-sucking empire to contend with. Perhaps the British are the closest thing you've got to America, and we all know how that bit of history went.

I'm not really opposed to tradition; I enjoy Halloween, for example. Not being part of a clan, for me tradition conjures up behaviors that cannot be challenged simply because they represent prejudices with a pedigree. I'm in a country that started out with legalized slavery, after all, and a certain hidebound Christianity/nationalism abounds.

I hope you achieve independence one day; I hope the same for us over here.

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Oct 20, 2021
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Sorry for fucking pissing you off. I know that I am only talking about music, which is inherently democratic in its harmonic structure. Of course I can't write like Caitlin, I won't even try, but she was writing about power and control. So, how can you get rid of a power/control system, if nobody wants to be creative?

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Oct 20, 2021
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If the harmonic structure falls, you can catch it again. And because it is complex and fractal, you can catch it at every end that's showing. Yes, I am heart broken and scared too of the darkness. But I am German and this darkness is part of my culture, unfortunately. I'd like to get to the root of it. That's why I am here. What do you play?

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Oct 21, 2021
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Yes. Mad Germans. My father volunteered for the Waffen SS at 16 and then (or therefore?) worked for the CIA.

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Well, yes, but claiming that the Chinese government "cannot exert control over how those populations think and behave" is not true, so far as I can tell. The Chinese Communist Party tightly controls the internet and social media, the traditional media, all forms of political opposition and pretty much every part of their people's lives. It is far from a free society by any measure.

"The Chinese authorities have tightened their grip on news and information even more since the emergence of Covid-19. Seven journalists are still being held for their coverage of the pandemic. In 2021, China continues to be the world’s biggest jailer of press freedom defenders, with more than 115 currently detained, often in conditions that pose a threat to their lives. Kunchok Jinpa, a leading media source of information about Tibet, died in February 2021 as a result of mistreatment in prison, just as Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel peace laureate and winner of the RSF Press Freedom Prize, and Yang Tongyan, a dissident blogger, did in 2017.

By relying on the massive use of new technology, President Xi Jinping’s regime has imposed a social model based on control of news and information and online surveillance of its citizens. China’s state and privately-owned media are under the Communist Party’s ever-tighter control, while the administration creates more and more obstacles for foreign reporters."

https://rsf.org/en/china

If the claims made in the statement I quoted are untrue, I'd like to know. But it seems that the USA and UK treatment of Julian Assange, appallingly egregious as it is, pales almost into insignificance compared to the multiple ways the Chinese government abuses its own journalists.

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I believe you misread Caitlin's point. She stated that the same oligarchs who are making our western governments such a mess have yet to find a way to control the populations of Russia and China. Whatever issues those governments have with their populations is a seperate issue.

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You trust Reporters without Border? They have no agenda? Have you personally been to China? I do give them credit for speaking out about Julian Assange, but that doesn't mean they should be trusted about everything. Consider all the other NGOs that have been infiltrated and captured, like the OPCW.

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The ego is trying to replicate what it infers from what consciousness subtly transmits through every form and experience; namely, that we are god itself as the One Life/ primordial Being.

The ego senses this truth and of course misinterprets it, believing it can replicate our god nature for itself and believing it can achieve freedom no matter the cost to everyone else.

It is not aware that it is the impediment to experiencing our transcendent free nature as the All.

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Oct 21, 2021
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Hi falcon, the more time you spend reading Caitlin and her partner’s work you will see the recurring theme of the ego as a major cause of our problems. And without addressing this humanity will likely not survive.

You are not the voice in your head called “me” which is pretending to be you. Most of the planet thinks compulsively and makes an identity out of thought when it was always meant to be a powerful tool and that’s all.

This is in fact the root cause of humanity’s suffering. It is this egoic condition which produces sociopaths and oligarchs, greed and cruelty and injustice.

If we only address the symptoms— oligarchy, empires, capitalism etc.— without dealing with the root cause we will reproduce these systems again and again as we have for thousands of years.

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Oct 21, 2021
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I came here because Caitlin is often referenced by German journalists. So, even if there are few followers here, her impact is much wider.

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Better this @bitch have a wider impact. I've been pushing her ass over every forum posting some paragraphs or the links of this fucking blog.. I cannot be doing this for nothing as many others as well. As soon as she can fly higher altitudes then I'll sit in my chair holding my gun and watching from far away how will she behave over the addictive and toxic environment of fame and misfortune. The gun is not for her of course. It's for the man in black.

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It's almost like we need a whole new o/s. World 5.0. Download the book, no login or email required. The time is always Now. The answer is always Love. https://world5.org/book

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Falcon's acerbic greeting aside, I find it bad form to use Caitlin's post to flog your own book, website, or car for sale. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but it smacks of opportunism. Don't do it.

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Oct 20, 2021
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Move on in decidedly different directions, it should be noted.

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Oct 20, 2021
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Well, that was a well-considered response, detailed and full of evidence. It makes me curious as to what the book is about.

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Oct 20, 2021
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From whom are you protecting the USA?

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