Happy holidaze

Geplaatst op door Bas Vossen

And yet again, a year went by. Bye bye! Most folks around me say, one of the worst years they had to endure. I must confess, for me that indeed was the case, as my younger brother called me this January, urging me to quickly get a ticket to say goodbye and farewell to my dying father. He was having strokes for quite a long time, making life harder for my mother who took care of him until his last day.

Currently I’m sitting in our boat that we are trying to keep warm with a bunch of electric heaters, wishing previous generations had done a little more concerning cheap energy. Now we have to deal with a dictator who went nuts. Like most dictators do: just think of someone who clearly is an asshole, ready to kill to further his (or her, miss Thatcher!) career, and the ability to get drunk legally. Of course the brain capacities from these people will not grow during their ‘leadership’ years. They almost (give me an example of a positive!) always start with some good ideas, making them popular enough to survive those pioneering years, during which they will always create a small circle of loyal followers, that do the dirty work for them. From within that circle you will not get any critique. Especially if peeps who did that are now really, really hard to reach.

So while in this year dictator trump finally seems to have received an Official Congressional Buttock, oil prices went crazy. It all seems that Putin had promised trump that he would do this right before the mid term elections so that Biden would suffer. We can say that fortunately, that power game didn’t work. We may hope that most people can and will see through the bullshit of trump and his cronies, like Alec ‘infowars’ Jones who claimed the Sandy Hook shooting was ‘fake news’ and now will have to pay nearly a billion (!) dollar fine, to understand the nuances between reality and fantasy.

I’m writing this during Christmas, being too sick to attend the party at my wife’s son’s husbands’ (follow me?) party. Packed into layers of warm clothing I do hope to get better. My throat hurts, as does my belly. The cat chose to stay in bed today. Natura Artis Magistra! See you in 2023 dear reader!

2014-goed nieuwjaar

Geplaatst op door Bas Vossen

De reacties op 2013 waren vrij negatief, iedereen is blij dat dat jaar over is, hoewel er toch ook positieve geluiden waren: de nieuwe paus brengt het christendom terug naar de oorspronkelijke betekenis van elkaar helpen. En we hebben een nieuwe held, Snowdon, die openbaar maakte wat iedereen eigenlijk allang wist, hoe overheden elkaar en alle burgers bespioneren en de verkregen informatie op allerlei gebieden (denk aan voorkennis op aandelenmarkten!) gebruiken. Laten we hopen dat ze dit jaar ook eens het belang van de kiezer gaan dienen.

bevolkingsgroei en wapenhandel

Geplaatst op door Bas Vossen

het lijkt alsof de twee met elkaar te maken hebben….ik wil niemand aanzetten tot iets…maar blijkbaar wordt een deel van de lieve babietjes geboren om als kanonnenvoer te dienen en vinden wij dit normaal. Overheden, PR-mensen en wapenhandelaren blijken elkaar altijd weer bijzonder goed te kunnen vinden, net zoals in de onderwereld.

Putin’s plan for world domination

Geplaatst op door Bas Vossen

Which countries acknowledged the Taliban in the 90’s? Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan, where Ghandi’s murderer was born. Not Russia, since that country had just lost from the Taliban. KGB man Putin, who via his job learned how the world’s power lines work, did have a plan, though. He wants to make Russia the dominant country in the world, even if it’s population is alcoholic in majority.

For this goal he had found the perfect puppet: Trump, who after all kinds of affairs had to go to Slowakia to find a woman he could buy. Melania, who speaks a little Russian, and Putin, who speaks a little English, liked each other from the beginning. She’s the one behind the Moscow Trump tower. Which Putin used to make a deal with Trump: if he would be able to make Donald Trump president, would Trump let Putin’s hackers access ‘Hillary’s email server’ AKA the Pentagon, NSA and other important institutes? We know that at the end of his term there was a giant break in to their computer networks, one that was taken out of the media very quickly, signaling this was indeed quite a breach. All of America’s digital secrets are now out in the open. Of course hackers like Snowdon helped via the wikifiles, possibly causing the death of many secret service members.

Putin had the world at his feet, when the Electoral College, a GOP related institute, declared Trump the 45th president. He stuck all kinds of deals with Putin, and did basically what the Russian judoka told him to do. Like signing an agreement with the Taliban, so that they could take over the country as soon as the US army and Nato members had left the place. Of course it’s complete nonsense to tell your battlefield enemy which day your army will leave. They have the time, while ‘we’ (the Western armies) have watches to see what time it is. This is typical for any guerilla war: as long as the soldiers are able to mingle with the population there isn’t much the official government can do to stop the violence. And this was exactly what happened in Afghanistan: people acted like they were supporting the Western democracy, but in their secret tea houses, the men complained about their wives being ‘modernized’, indoctrinated with weird Western ideas about ‘gender’ and ‘rights’.

Wether Afghan president Ghani knew this, or that his generals had made agreements with Taliban leaders, is unknown, yet typical for the built-in corruption of these people, he left with ‘cars stashed full of money’. But I do believe that Putin -the spindoctor of the century- knew about it. And anticipated on it, by organizing military trials together with China (!!!) at the Afghan border. So that the mujahedeen wouldn’t try to come into Russian territory.

Russia together with China could overpower the United States army, especially now that the population has split in two camps. The break lines of what once was a great nation are visible, and ugly. If wildfires don’t already bring down the land, if the lack of fresh water won’t do it, then the combined armies of the People’s Republic China and the former Union of Socialist Soviet Republics will break America, once the Great. ‘Realpolitik’ wins over human rights pipe dreams.

The SHOCK Doctrine

Geplaatst op door Bas Vossen

More then a decade after this book came out, I discovered not many people know about it. It almost seems forgotten. Of course that would be nice and handy for the ultra right wing conservatives who seem to be central in our current political climate. Therefor, I will comprehend what’s in the book -which we can find online as a free download, or order at Amazon or Naomi’s own website https://tsd.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine.html

What makes this book stand out, is the systematic approach in which Klein has researched how free markets have been implemented. Everywhere, from Indonesia to Chile to the former USSR to the US itself, companies have been able to pressure governments to privatize, deregulate and dismantle governments and social security systems. It almost seems that the richest people on earth, owners or stakeholders in companies, are pushing poor people over the edge, trying to stop poverty by way of killing the poor. The middle classes also are vulnerable to these global free markets. Never before could money get in and out of countries so easy.

Quotes from this book:

“Much of U.S. foreign policy, in other words, is an exercise in mass projection, in which a tiny self-interested elite conflates its needs and desires with those of the entire world. (..)

That is pretty much the philosophy: stay in government just long enough to get an impressive ti­ tle in a department handing out big contracts and to collect inside informa­ tion on what will sell, then quit and sell access to your former colleagues. Public service is reduced to little more than a reconnaissance mission for fu­ ture work in the disaster capitalism complex. 

In some ways, however, the stories about corruption and revolving doors leave a false impression. They imply that there is still a clear line between the state and the complex, when in fact that line disappeared long ago. The innovation of the Bush years lies not in how quickly politicians move from one world to the other but in how many feel entitled to occupy both worlds simultaneously. People like Richard Perle and James Baker make policy, of­ fer top-level advice and speak in the press as disinterested experts and states­ men when they are at the same time utterly embedded in the business of privatized war and reconstruction. They embody the ultimate fulfillment of the corporatist mission: a total merger of political and corporate elites in the name of security, with the state playing the role of chair of the business guild—as well as the largest source of business opportunities, thanks to the contract economy.”