Struggling to Decide,
Dan sends this Counterpunch article on the origins and uses of the Zombie archetype.
Zombies used to be human, but now they shuffle your way, slow and hungry. If you don't kill them quickly and ruthlessly and pervasively, you will become one.
It's kinda' like starving refugees from a war zone, isn't it?
If police and National Guard units had gone through Zombie Training before Hurricane Katrina, imagine how much more smoothly things could have been managed!
"The DOD’s strategy for dealing with a zombie uprising, outlined in “CONOP 8888,” is for all intents and purposes a training manual for the government in how to put down a citizen uprising or at least an uprising of individuals “infected” with dangerous ideas about freedom. Rest assured that the tactics and difficulties outlined in the “fictional training scenario” are all too real, beginning with martial law."
George Monbiot: To read Nancy MacLean’s new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, is to see what was previously invisible... The history professor’s work on the subject began by accident. In 2013 she stumbled across a deserted clapboard house on the campus of George Mason University in Virginia. It was stuffed with the unsorted archives of a man who had died that year whose name is probably unfamiliar to you: James McGill Buchanan. She says the first thing she picked up was a stack of confidential letters concerning millions of dollars transferred to the university by the billionaire Charles Koch... James Buchanan brought these influences together to create what he called public choice theory. He argued that a society could not be considered free unless every citizen has the right to veto its decisions. What he meant by this was that no one should be taxed against their will. But the rich were being exploited by people who use their votes to demand money... Any clash between “freedom” (allowing the rich to do as they wish) and democracy should be resolved in favour of freedom. In his book The Limits of Liberty, he noted that “despotism may be the only organisational alternative to the political structure that we observe.”... In 1980, he was able to put the programme into action. He was invited to Chile, where he helped the Pinochet dictatorship write a new constitution, which, partly through the clever devices Buchanan proposed, has proved impossible to reverse entirely. Amid the torture and killings, he advised the government to extend programmes of privatisation, austerity, monetary restraint, deregulation and the destruction of trade unions: a package that helped trigger economic collapse in 1982... None of this troubled the Swedish Academy, which through his devotee at Stockholm University Assar Lindbeck in 1986 awarded James Buchanan the Nobel memorial prize for economics... But his power really began to be felt when Koch, currently the seventh richest man in the US, decided that Buchanan held the key to the transformation he sought... He employed the economist to select the revolutionary “cadre” that would implement his programme (Murray Rothbard, at the Cato Institute that Koch founded, had urged the billionaire to study Lenin’s techniques and apply them to the libertarian cause)... Buchanan saw stealth as crucial. He told his collaborators that “conspiratorial secrecy is at all times essential”. Instead of revealing their ultimate destination, they would proceed by incremental steps. For example, in seeking to destroy the social security system, they would claim to be saving it, arguing that it would fail without a series of radical “reforms”. Gradually they would build a “counter-intelligentsia”, allied to a “vast network of political power” that would become the new establishment... Buchanan was right: there is an inherent conflict between what he called “economic freedom” and political liberty. Complete freedom for billionaires means poverty, insecurity, pollution and collapsing public services for everyone else. Because we will not vote for this, it can be delivered only through deception and authoritarian control... Buchanan’s programme is a prescription for totalitarian capitalism...
The US Military did not "lose" $6.5 trillion dollars, 40% of real US GDP, they just won't talk about the projects they have been spending this money on for the last four decades. (About the income these projects generated themselves, there is no need to comment at all. It never was on the books, except maybe at the banks, but they keep secrets.) Thanks Eleni.
Charles Hugh Smith comments on the inevitable consequences of a system based upon lies, which the military and bankers know well enough... Collapse.
You know the one essential guideline to "leadership" in a doomed dysfunctional system: when it gets serious, you have to lie. In other words, the status quo's secular goddess is TINA--there is no alternative to lying, because the truth will bring the whole corrupt structure tumbling down.
Back in the 1980s, before the price of oil dropped so hard, I guess, the Soviet Union began work on a Doomsday Device. This durable system had one job, to fire every ICBM if a nuke went off in Russia. The targets were all set. They couldn't be quickly reset. It would assure the mutuality of destruction. Who would ever be safe? It's a good thing that sort of plan died out with the old USSR, isn't it?
Huh? They finished it and turned it on? Sez who?
The President of Chechnya.... What a flake; a Muslim flake. Forget it. He's just talking trash, trying to scare you...
Super rich go bunker-building-crazy. Do they know something we don't? Giant Meteor? Yellowstone? Nuclear Armageddon? Melted icecaps? Union unrest?
What is a Glioblastoma? John McCain fans want to understand the brain cancer their hero is "battling", as he vows to "keep serving" from bed (with printed statements, I presume.)
In his first published statement since having some of the part of his brain with cancer removed, John McCain says Trump is "playing right into Vladimir Putin's hands", by cutting funding to all the alphabet-soup, organization-jumping, weapon-selling, entrepreneur-Jihadis the US has been plying with cash, training, and sophisticated weapons, to overthrow the Syrian government. (Yeah, I believe he said it, or it's the kind of thing he usually has said...)
How many wars has John McCain openly pushed for? (Vietnam is not on list. That was his dad's job.)
"Good", opines Caitlin Johnstone, about McCain's glioblastoma.
Yemen's cholera epidemic is the worst on record, with 360,000 cases in 3 months in the war devastated and sewer-bombed country. (You think it's hot where you live?)
McCain gets no credit for his role in this war, but I'd give him his share...
The most effective individual actions against climate change in this analysis are :
1) Don't reproduce
2) Don't drive
3) Don't fly
4) "Buy green energy" (Complex issue, actually.)
5) Eat vegetables
(This does not speak to climate effect mitigation. Grow vegetables is a mitigating step. All steps to local food, water, energy, social, housing, work, etc. security are mitigating factors for what is already "baked-in". If you think our species will survive, do you think you could raise children that would help, or just suffer?)
Citizen Zombie
