December 1, 2010

Wikileaks as projective test

Dallas Darling writes at World News (click the title of this post to read the entire piece):

A story is told of a psychologist who was administering a projective test. (A projective test presents subjects with ambiguous stimuli and then interprets the meaning of such stimuli. The assumption is that the subject's inner needs, feelings, desires, and perception of the world will be "projected" onto the stimuli.) The man being tested saw every one of the inkblots as either someone engaged in exploiting others, or people committing violent and aggressive acts. After the last inkblot (stimulus) was administered, the psychologist declared, "I've never in my entire career seen anyone so obsessed with exploitation and violence as you seem to be." The man responded indignantly and self-righteously, "What do you mean, I'm obsessed with exploitation and violence? You're the one with all the exploitative and violent pictures!" ...

WikiLeaks' revelations exposes an empire that projects its own concealed and unconscious aggression, violent anxieties, paranoid fears, and anger onto other nations. Unable to cope with its own violent past and its manipulative and hurtful political and economic realities, this empire utilizes projection as a defense mechanism. Unconsciously ashamed and embarrassed, it falsely sees its own depraved traits in other nations. ...

November 30, 2010

Fabricating Terror

Paul Craig Roberts writes in Counterpunch (click the title of this post to read the entire piece):

The [Associated Press] story [about the fake car-bomb plot in Portland, Oregon] arrives at its Kafka-esque highpoint when President Obama thanks the FBI for its diligence in saving us from the fake plot the FBI had fabricated. ...

The FBI did a year’s work in order to convince two people to participate in fake plots. ... When the US government has to go to such lengths to create “terrorists” out of hapless people, an undeclared agenda is being served. What could this agenda be?

The answer is many agendas. One agenda is to justify wars of aggression that are war crimes under the Nuremberg standard created by the US government itself. One way to avoid war crimes charges is to create acts of terrorism that justify the naked aggressions against “terrorist countries.”

Another agenda is to create a police state. A police state can control people who object to their impoverishment for the benefit of the superrich much more easily than can a democracy endowed with constitutional civil liberties.

Another agenda is to get rich. Terror plots, whether real or orchestrated, have created a market for security. Dual Israeli citizen Michael Chertoff, former head of US Homeland Security, is the lobbyist who represents Rapiscan, the company that manufactures the full body porno-scanners that, following the “underwear bomber” event, are now filling up US airports. Homeland Security has announced that they are going to purchase the porno-scanners for trains, buses, subways, court houses, and sports events. How can shopping malls and roads escape? ...

What is it really all about? Could it be that the US government needs terrorist events in order to completely destroy the US Constitution? On November 24, National Public Radio broadcast a report by Dina Temple-Raston: “Administration officials are looking at the possibility of codifying detention without trial and are awaiting legislation that is supposed to come out of Congress early next year.” Of course, the legislation will not come out of Congress. It will be written by Homeland Security and the Justice [sic] Department. The impotent Congress will merely rubber-stamp it.

The obliteration of habeas corpus, the most necessary and important protection of liberty ever institutionalized in law and governing constitution, has become necessary for the US government, because a jury might acquit an alleged or mock “terrorist” or framed person whom the US government has declared prior to the trial will be held forever in indefinite detention even if acquitted in a US court of law. The attorney general of the United States has declared that any “terrorist” that he puts on trial who is acquitted by a jury will remain in detention regardless of the verdict. Such an event would reveal the total lawlessness of American “justice.”

November 29, 2010

News Quiz

The U. S. now has the most unequal distribution of income and wealth of any major country on earth because:
A )The top 1 percent of income earners make more than the bottom 50 percent.
B )80 percent of all new income earned from 1980 to 2005 has gone to the top 1 percent.
C )The top 1 percent now owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent.
D )The top 1 percent now owns more members of congress, supreme court justices, judges, governors, state legislators, tv networks and newspapers than the bottom 99 percent.
Hint: everyone passes this quiz.

November 12, 2010

Realism v. Idealism

There is truth in the one-liner that Democrats bandy: Anyone from the working or middle class who votes Republican is suffering from Battered Wife Syndrome. Although, one is tempted to retort, anyone who votes for either one of the corporate/National Security State parties is closer to a half-senile spinster who still believes her prince will come.

—Phil Rockstroh, "Public Like a Frog", Counterpunch, Nov. 12, 2010

November 5, 2010

Antisemitism

“Formerly an anti-Semite was somebody who hated Jews because they were Jews and had a Jewish soul. But nowadays an anti-Semite is somebody who is hated by Jews.”

—Hajo Meyer

November 3, 2010

Correction

Last week we reported that in a speech in Lebanon, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said, "Jews were born only to serve us — without that, they have no place in the world; only to serve the people of Islam".

In fact, it was Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, former Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel and the founder and spiritual leader of the Shas Party, who said in a sermon on October 16, "Goyim were born only to serve us — without that, they have no place in the world; only to serve the people of Israel,"