Urban Warfare Personalized With Individuals And Their Families Targeted

Gestapo Surveillance was invented during America's Conquest of the Philippines...,

Counterpunch |  Entitled Future Strategic Issues/Future Warfare [Circa 2025], the PowerPoint presentation anticipates: a) scenarios created by U.S. forces and agencies and b) scenarios to which they might have to respond. The projection is contingent on the use of hi-technology. According to the report there are/will be six Technological Ages of Humankind: “Hunter/killer groups (sic) [million BC-10K BC]; Agriculture [10K BC-1800 AD]; Industrial [1800-1950]; IT [1950-2020]; Bio/Nano [2020-?]; Virtual.”

In the past, “Hunter/gatherer” groups fought over “hunting grounds” against other “tribal bands” and used “handheld/thrown” weapons. In the agricultural era, “professional armies” also used “handheld/thrown” weapons to fight over “farm lands.” In the industrial era, conscripted armies fought over “natural resources,” using “mechanical and chemical” weapons. In our time, “IT/Bio/Bots” (robots) are used to prevent “societal disruption.” The new enemy is “everyone.” “Everyone.”

Similarly, a British Ministry of Defence projection to the year 2050 states: “Warfare could become ever more personalised with individuals and their families being targeted in novel ways.”

“KNOWLEDGE DOMINANCE”

The war on you is the militarization of everyday life with the express goal of controlling society, including your thoughts and actions.

A U.S. Army document on information operations from 2003 specifically cites activists as potential threats to elite interests. “Nonstate actors, ranging from drug cartels to social activists, are taking advantage of the possibilities the information environment offers,” particularly with the commercialization of the internet. “Info dominance” as the Space Command calls it can counter these threats: “these actors use the international news media to attempt to influence global public opinion and shape decision-maker perceptions.” Founded in 1977, the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command featured an Information Dominance Center, itself founded in 1999 by the private, veteran-owned company, IIT.

“Information Operations in support of civil-military interactions is becoming increasingly more important as non-kinetic courses-of-action are required,” wrote two researchers for the military in 1999. They also said that information operations, as defined by the Joint Chiefs of Staff JP 3-13 (1998) publication, “are aimed at influencing the information and information systems of an adversary.” They also confirm that “[s]uch operations require the continuous and close integration of offensive and defensive activities … and may involve public and civil affairs-related actions.” They conclude: “This capability begins the transition from Information Dominance to Knowledge Dominance.”

“ATTUNED TO DISPARITIES”

The lines between law enforcement and militarism are blurred, as are the lines between military technology and civilian technology. Some police forces carry military-grade weapons. The same satellites that enable us to use smartphones enable the armed forces to operate.

In a projection out to the year 2036, the British Ministry of Defence says that “[t]he clear distinction between combatants and non-combatants will be increasingly difficult to discern,” as “the urban poor will be employed in the informal sector and will be highly vulnerable to externally-derived economic shocks and illicit exploitation” (emphasize in original). This comes as Boris Johnson threatens to criminalize Extinction Rebellion and Donald Trump labels Black Lives Matter domestic terrorists.

In 2017, the U.S. Army published The Operational Environment and the Changing Character of Future Warfare. The report reads: “The convergence of more information and more people with fewer state resources will constrain governments’ efforts to address rampant poverty, violence, and pollution, and create a breeding ground for dissatisfaction among increasingly aware, yet still disempowered populations.”

The Future Is Here Already, It's Just Not Evenly Distributed

Forbes  |  Mexican drug cartels are using weaponized consumer drones in their latest gang war, according to reports in El Universal and other local news media. 

A citizens’ militia group in Tepalcatepec, Michoacán, formed to protect farmers from the cartel, found two drones in a car used by gunmen belonging to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), a group estimated to control a third of the drugs consumed in the U.S. The drones had plastic containers taped to them filled with C4 explosive and ball bearing shrapnel. The militias say that they have heard explosions, and believe that the drones are the latest weapons an ongoing gang war. 

“The CJNG has been involved with such devices since late 2017 in various regions of Mexico,” says analyst Dr. Robert J. Bunker, Director of Research and Analysis at C/O Futures, LLC. “This cartel is well on its way to institutionalizing the use of weaponized drones. None of the other cartels appear to presently even be experimenting with the weaponization of these devices.”

In 2017, Bunker reported on the arrest of four CJNG members with a drone carrying a ‘papa bomba’ (potato bomb) , an improvised hand grenade. In 2018 an armed drone attacked the residence of a senior official in Baja, California. The official was not at home, and the attack seems to have been intended as a warning. Three CNJG drones with explosive were recovered this year , part of an arsenal for use against the rival Rosa de Lima cartel.

Bunker says that suitable consumer drones are now easy to acquire and use, but that the challenge is weaponizing them.

“The limiting factor is not so much the availability of military grade explosives—commercial or homemade explosives can be substituted—but the basic technical knowledge necessary to create improvised explosive devices or IEDs,” says Bunker.

“It’s almost like someone thinks there’s a benefit to keeping people divided.”

nakedcapitalism |  The racial categories of white and black were developed around 1600. Probably a little after by wealthy Americans who used it to keep divided Black slaves, poor often indentured Whites, and the often enslaved Indians. These people were not disposable because they were useful as workers, but who often worked and even socialized frequently. As a group they had potentially considerable political power during the 1600s. This was deliberately dealt with. The Blacks were brutally suppress with (the category of Black indentured was eliminated. There was no Southern style chattel slavery for Blacks at first). The Whites were placated with some very modest reforms. The Indians (labeled as savages) were just driven off at gunpoint. This is also where the Southern Slave Patrols started to terrorize and keep down the slave population as well as keep down any poor whites. Where they started asking for people’s papers.

When my Irish great whatever grandfather stepped off the Coffin Ship around 1850, he was barely considered human, never mind white, and about on par with the black community. This was true for decades as were the “Irish need not apply signs” and the creation of the Paddy Wagons. Would you consider him having White Privilege?

It was only after the development of political power over multiple generations that the Irish-Americans were given the status of being both human and white, which only really happened during the early 20th century. Similarly with the Italians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Italians, Greeks, and so on. 

Then there are the Jews. The Italians only finally became real whites after the Second World War although I do not think that they were quite as abused as the Irish. Going up to an individual in these groups at anytime before the 1960s and saying that they have White Privilege would have had them laugh at you in your very face. Today, they have been giving the category of White with its very real privilege of being treated like a human being, so long as you are not poor. But in the past?

During the Antebellum South and after Reconstruction when a poor white farmer or laborer even got friendly with a black person, the local wealthy white landowner and his hired goons would often beat up the offending white man. After Reconstruction, the allied white and black reformists in the South were literally extirpated via guns and the rope. If they were lucky and in the government, they were merely deposed, and run out of town by armed white supremacists during actual coups. Much like the American led coups in the Americas and elsewhere.

When a leader, especially a black one, becomes successful in his leadership and starts to bring up class and poverty, to suggest crossing class and race as well as mentioning our common humanity they often wind up dead like MLK and Fred Hampton. Working just on racism is much less dangerous.

Actually in the South and Southwest during the 19th century Blacks, Hispanics, and the very, very occasional White who were too successful as business owners were sometimes lynched for just that reason. To destroy the opposition.

There are a number of ways to destroy reformists movements besides murder especially those that threaten the power and money of the elites. Hell, you can find elite co-option, police and goon squad assassinations in the labor movement, equal rights movement, even in feminism (no murders, but plenty of false arrests and beatings). All of these movements were captured by elitists who expunged first the non-whites, then the socialists, then the working class from what became their movement. Any economic benefits from these “reforms” only accrued to the Upper Class Whites.

Why do cries of racism become so strident and the very real problem of racism become something that must be solves right now, today when cries of poverty and want are also raised. Every single time? Do you think that the current debates about racism just happened right after Bernie Sanders near success and the rise of an actual American Left fifty years after it was destroyed is a coincidence? Really?

If this was really and truly about racism or even poverty, why are the Native Americans, trapped on their Reservations with the highest poverty, drug use, rape and murder statistics of any group of Americans, bar none, not mentioned. They have the most police brutality as well and some of the reservations, due to legal loopholes, are happy hunting grounds for rapists coming from outside of some of the reservations. Their leaders usually do not have political power and wealth and they are isolated and beaten down at least compared to the national political leadership. So just under three million people are ignored and targeted.]

People are finally taking some notice of the shrinking middle class and of the increasing homeless population. If you wanted, I can take to some of the skosh less then fifteen thousand homeless in San Francisco. Or the over one hundred thousand throughout the state. At least half of whom are White. Are there any real protest over them? We can look at the millions wasted every year by San Francisco with cushy jobs being created, but not much progress. However, there are fine demonstrations on racism, which is good because racism and also police brutality with no mention of the increasing poverty in this country. Even now large sums of cash are used to “deal” with the problems, nationally. Problems that always get worse.

So cui bono? At least half of any negative statistic one could name, with the possible exception of prison, which IIRC only one-third are White. Unemployment, poverty, drug use, police brutality and police murders. Poor and struggling people are much easier to manipulate, aren’t they?

However, when there are protests about those issues it very often morphs into one about just racism. Let’s tear down some statues. Yah! When ever there is smart, hardworking, talented, and dedicated reformist or a successful non-profit making progress dealing with those issues, including racism, money from somewhere drops from the sky like manna. So long as small concessions are made. Or a slick person applies for a job there. Always has money somehow and eventually takes over or at least co-opts the organization. Or cushy jobs are offered elsewhere to certain people. In the old days like the 1960s and before, if that didn’t work s*** would happen, sometimes fatally. Sometimes nothing needs be done because often college educated are already brainwashed into uselessness by Neoliberal propaganda. The wealth and power of the Haves remain protected.

As an aside, Social Darwinism and Eugenics were created and spread by very wealthy people and foundations in the United States. Much like racism. If one doubts this, I can recommend some books I have. A good start would be War Against the Weak by Edwin Black.

So, in two part harmony, the Black Misleadership Class starts it latest performance along with the Backup of the White Misleadership Class (what else should I label Pelosi, Schumer, and McConnell? Or the leaders of the entire state of California?). Racism, the horror! And the police, oh my! Screaming, shouting (a whisper about poverty, homelessness, hunger, unemployment.) Perhaps Obama pops out and says some soaring nonsense or some very poor white fool is interviewed. A fantastic tempest in a teapot with nothing every actually getting done.

Then some Alt-Right creeps pop out and start saying you are White or not, and that’s all that matters! There is no American nationalism, only White Nationalism. White Power! Join us! (and don’t forget the Jews!) Finally, lies like the 1619 Project or propaganda like White Fragility are published.

Yes, racism does exist, and as a percentage of all the ills of our American nation, Blacks get it the worse excepting the Native Americans, of course. White Privilege is a real thing. But just as the categories of White and Black, of racism were deliberately created in the 17th century, for benefiting the powers that be, I wonder about Identity Politics and Cancelling. That blend of Nazi racialism and Maoist thought control. I wonder how racism and its pernicious child Identity Politics has been created, nurtured, fed a steady diet of hate, and then used as a weapon upon those who would care about everyone regardless of there supposed identity. I also wonder what would happen if I approached the man sleeping on cardboard, perhaps in the usually three month rainy season, or that family living in their car/van/RV on some out of the way road, that the do have White Privilege, which the do and usually means being treated as a human being. I also wonder about my nose.

Imagine if These Dirty MF's Had Had Today's Surveillance Technology at Their Disposal

commondreams |  After the FBI took to Twitter Monday with a message that allegedly aimed to honor "the life and work" of Martin Luther King Jr., a chorus of critics promptly urged the bureau to "sit this one out," pointing to its history of spying on King and trying to convince the civil rights leader to kill himself.

Each year on the national holiday dedicated to King, progressives criticize and work to counter the whitewashed public narrative of a man who, particularly in the years leading up to his April 1968 assassination, passionately condemned the "evils" of capitalism, militarism, and racism.

The FBI, during both the Obama and Trump administrations, has provoked a wave of criticism for posting shoutouts to King on social media, given the bureau's past treatment of him. Monday was no different.

Some critics expressed anger and disbelief. Rewire.News senior legal analyst Imani Gandy wrote in response to the FBI, "You've got to be fucking kidding me."

Journalist David Corn posed "a sincere question," asking: "Has the FBI ever apologized to King's family for wiretapping King, blackmailing him, and trying to get him to commit suicide?"

Crawford also noted that "the FBI's surveillance of black Americans isn't just history. [In 2018], we learned the FBI has been spying on black activists, labeling them 'Black Identity Extremists.' The feds also use powers obtained through national security laws like the Patriot Act to target people in the racially biased drug war."

"More disturbing: The FBI that spied on King and today classifies Black civil rights activists as 'extremists,'" Crockford continued, "is now partnering with Big Tech to amass unprecedented surveillance powers that history has taught us will be used to target communities of color, religious minorities, dissidents, and immigrants."

FBI director Christopher Wray testified before Congress in July 2019 that the bureau has stopped using the term "black identity extremism." However, some groups and individuals on Monday shared critiques of the FBI's current practices alongside denunciations of the bureau's past behavior.

The London-based advocacy group CAGE, which works to empower communities impacted by the War on Terror, tweeted Monday that the FBI still tries "to suppress dissent" and uses "dirty tactics that would make Edgar Hoover proud. But [is] happy now to co-opt MLK to try to cover up the above."

Regime Change in Mexico - Conspicuously Obvious to the Casual Observer...,

thegrayzone |  AMLO’s left-wing policies have caused shockwaves in Washington, which has long relied on neoliberal Mexican leaders ensuring a steady cheap exploitable labor base and maintaining a reliable market for US goods and open borders for US capital and corporations.

On November 27 — a day after declaring Nicaragua a “national security threat” — Trump announced that the US government will be designating Mexican drug cartels as “terrorist organizations.”

Such a designation could pave the way for direct US military intervention in Mexico.

The designation was particularly ironic considering some top drug cartel leaders in Mexico have long-standing ties to the US government. The leaders of the notoriously brutal cartel the Zetas, for instance, were originally trained in counter-insurgency tactics by the US military.

Throughout the Cold War, the US government armed, trained, and funded right-wing death squads throughout Latin America, many of which were involved in drug trafficking. The CIA also used drug money to fund far-right counter-insurgency paramilitary groups in Central America.

These tactics were also employed in the Middle East and South Asia. The United States armed, trained, and funded far-right Islamist extremists in Afghanistan in the 1980s in order to fight the Soviet Union. These same US-backed Salafi-jihadists then founded al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

This strategy was later repeated in the US wars on Libya and Syria. ISIS commander Omar al-Shishani, to take one example, had been trained by the US military and enjoyed direct support from Washington when he was fighting against Russia.

The Barack Obama administration also oversaw a campaign called Project Gunrunner and Operation Fast and Furious, in which the US government helped send thousands of guns to cartels in Mexico.

Mexican journalist Alina Duarte explained that, with the Trump administration’s designation of cartels as terrorists, “They are creating the idea that Mexico represents a threat to their national security.”

“Should we start talking about the possibility of a coup against Lopez Obrador in Mexico?” Duarte asked.

What Would War on the Drug Cartels Look Like?

townhall |  Donald Trump is talking about labeling the Mexican drug cartels that own our failed state neighbor as “terrorist groups,” and this is yet another step toward what is increasingly looking to be an inevitable confrontation. They just butchered several American citizens, including kids, which cannot go unanswered. They murder thousands of Americans a year here with their poison, which cannot go unanswered. But are we Americans even able to answer a bunch of pipsqueak thugs anymore? Let’s put aside the question of if we should use our military against Mexico (I discussed it here in 2018, to the consternation of liberals and Fredocon sissies) and look at what might happen if we did escalate.

None of it is good.

It’s not a matter of the prowess of our warriors. Our warriors, unleashed, would lay waste to anything we point them at. But the question is, “Would we ever unleash them? Would we let them do what it takes to achieve the goal of eliminating the cartels?"

Of course not. We haven’t decisively won a real war since World War II (except the Gulf War, unless you accept the arguable premise that it was an early campaign in a still-continuing Iraq conflict). And there’s a reason we don’t win. We don’t truly want to, as demonstrated by our unwillingness to do the hard things required to win. Could you imagine the Democrats siding with America in a war on Mexican drug cartels? If you can, you’re higher than Hoover Biden at a strip club on a Saturday night.

Again, this is not to say whether a war on the Mexican drug cartels is a good or bad idea. Nor is it to say we do not have the combat power to do it – we do. It’s just to say that America is culturally and politically unwilling to do what it takes to win, or to accept the losses that would come with a military campaign against the drug cartels.

Let's Invade Mexico!

unz |  I suppose that by now everyone has heard of Trump’s offer to send the American military to “wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth,” which he asserts can be done “quickly and effectively. “

Trump phrased this as an offer to help, not a threat to invade, which is reassuring. AMLO, Mexico’s president, wisely declined the offer.

While the President seems to have made the offer in good faith, he has little idea of Mexico, the military, or the cartels. The American military could not come close to wiping them off the face of the earth, much less effectively and quickly. Such an incursion would be a political and military disaster. The President needs to do some reading.

If AMLO were to invite the Americans into Mexico, he would be lynched. Few Americans are aware of how much the United States is hated in Latin America, and for that matter in most of the world. They don’t know of the long series of military interventions, brutal dictators imposed and supported, and economic rapine. Somoza, Pinochet, the Mexican-American War, detachment of Panama from Colombia, bombardment of Veracruz, Patton’s incursion–the list could go on for pages. The Mexican public would look upon American troops not as saviors but as invaders. Which they would be.

The incursion would not defeat the cartels, for several reasons that trump would do well to ponder. To begin with, America starts its wars by overestimating its own powers, underestimating the enemy, and misunderstanding the kind of war on which it is embarking. The is exactly what Trump seems to be doing.

He probably thinks of Mexicans as just gardeners and rapists and we have all these beautiful advanced weapons and beautiful drones and things with blinking lights. A pack of rapists armed with garden trowels couldn’t possibly be difficult to defeat by the US. I mean, get serious: Dope dealers against the Marines? A cakewalk.

You know, like Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. That sort of cakewalk. Let’s think what an expedition against the narcos would entail, what it would face.

To begin with, Mexico is a huge country of 127 million souls with the narcos spread unevenly across it. You can’t police a nation that size with a small force, or even with a large force. A (preposterous) million soldiers would be well under one percent of the population. Success would be impossible even if that population helped you. Which it wouldn’t.

Other problems exist. Many, many of them.

Mexico's Five Year Plan to Decriminalize All Drugs

ronpaulinstitute |  Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump, who has the unilateral power to send the United States military to bomb and invade other countries, as several of his predecessors have done, stated at Twitter that he is ready to send the US military to Mexico to defeat drug cartels.

Trump wrote:

This is the time for Mexico, with the help of the United States, to wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth. We merely await a call from your great new president!

Making clear he is talking about a US military action, Trump declared in another Tuesday morning tweet that “the cartels have become so large and powerful that you sometimes need an army to defeat an army!”.

The truth, however, is that the drug war waged by the Mexico government, with the help of the US government, ensures the continued existence of powerful and dangerous drug cartels in Mexico. Similarly, when the US had alcohol prohibition, there were dangerous criminal enterprises that thrived from satisfying people’s demand for prohibited products.

Eliminating drug cartels can best be accomplished by ending, not growing, the drug war. Indeed, this is the course of action the Mexico government seems poised to pursue. Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who Trump referenced at Twitter, released this year a plan for Mexico to end its drug war. And the Mexico legislature appears to be preparing to take a major step toward ending the drug war — approving legislation to legalize marijuana countrywide.

I am guessing Obrador will not make the phone call Trump suggests. Obrador has available another, better avenue for dealing with drug cartels.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, Dying Time's Here....,

courier-journal |   Somewhere deep in Mexico's remote wilderness, the world’s most dangerous and wanted drug lord is hiding. If someone you love dies from an overdose tonight, he may very well be to blame.

He's called "El Mencho."

And though few Americans know his name, authorities promise they soon will.

Rubén "Nemesio" Oseguera Cervantes is the leader of Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación, better known as CJNG. With a $10 million reward on his head, he’s on the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s Most Wanted list.

El Mencho’s powerful international syndicate is flooding the U.S. with thousands of kilos of methamphetamines, heroin, cocaine and fentanyl every year — despite being targeted repeatedly by undercover stings, busts and lengthy investigations.

The unending stream of narcotics has contributed to this country’s unprecedented addiction crisis, devastating families and killing more than 300,000 people since 2013.

CJNG’s rapid rise heralds the latest chapter in a generations-old drug war in which Mexican cartels are battling to supply Americans’ insatiable demand for narcotics.

A nine-month Courier Journal investigation reveals how CJNG's reach has spread across the U.S. in the past five years, overwhelming cities and small towns with massive amounts of drugs.

kctv5 |   As the officer in charge of COMBAT, Jackson County’s Drug Trafficking Task Force Dan Cumming deals with a lot of dangerous people.

“About 100% of what we recover, if you follow it back far enough up the drug train so to speak, comes from Mexico and is cartel related,” Cummings said.

Just last week, COMBAT worked a case at the request of Independence police.

A tip led them to a Kansas City, Missouri street where a search warrant led to the seizure of tires filled with meth.

“My guess is that’s the way it was shipped from Mexico to Kansas City,” Cummings said.

Cartels get creative when smuggling drugs in customs and border protection has a few recent examples.

Fentanyl in a vehicle transmission, heroine in a gas tank, marijuana inside a car door and cocaine in clay figurines.

Cummings says he’s seeing more cartel related drug busts in Kansas City now than he has in his 35 plus years in law enforcement.

“We switched from meth labs to Mexican cartels,” Cummings said.

kmbc |   Two Mexican nationals have been sentenced in federal court for their roles in a conspiracy that distributed more than 14 kilograms of heroin in the Kansas City metropolitan area, some of which is believed to have resulted in overdoses and deaths.

Julian Felix-Aguirre, 46, and Martin Missael Puerta-Navarro, 38, were sentenced in separate hearings before U.S. District Judge Gary A. Fenner on Wednesday. Felix-Aguirre was sentenced to 24 years and seven months in federal prison without parole. Pueta-Navarro was sentenced to 14 years and eight months in federal prison without parole.

fox4kc |  "No where is immune," said Erik Smith with the Drug Enforcement Administration. "There are people who become dependent on controlled substances and have need to satisfy that addiction, and any place there is a consumer, an addict or user, somebody will supply that drug for that."

The DEA special agent in charge said feeding the demand for drugs in Johnson County goes well beyond teenage drug dealers.

Smith said Mexican cartels really are living here in Johnson County.

"Historically, a decade ago, two decades ago, a lot of cartels would limit themselves to the inner city," he said. "But as they become more established and they become more wealthy, it's quite common to see them branching out into suburban areas including Johnson County."

How the DEA Invented NarcoTerrorism...,

propublica  |  On Sept. 11, 2001, when
 American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, DEA agents were among the first to respond, racing from their headquarters, less than half a mile away. A former special agent named Edward Follis, in his memoir, “The Dark Art,” recalls how he and dozens of his colleagues “rushed over … to pull out bodies, but there were no bodies to pull out.” The agency had outposts in more than 60 countries around the world, the most of any federal law-enforcement agency. And it had some 5,000 informants and confidential sources. Michael Vigil, who was the DEA’s head of international operations at the time, told me, “We called in every source we could find, looking for information about what had happened, who was responsible, and whether there were plans for an imminent attack.” He added, “Since the end of the Cold War, we had seen signs that terrorist groups had started relying on drug trafficking for funding. After 9/11, we were sure that trend was going to spread.”

  

But other intelligence agencies saw the DEA’s sources as drug traffickers — and drug traffickers didn’t know anything about terrorism. A former senior money-laundering investigator at the Justice Department told me that there wasn’t any substantive proof to support the DEA’s assertions.

“What is going on after 9/11 is that a lot of resources move out of drug enforcement and into terrorism,” he said. “The DEA doesn’t want to be the stepchild that is last in line.” Narco-terrorism, the former investigator said, became an “expedient way for the agency to justify its existence.”

The White House proved more receptive to the DEA’s claims. Juan Zarate, a former deputy national-security adviser, in his book, “Treasury’s War,” says that President George W. Bush wanted “all elements of national power” to contribute to the effort to “prevent another attack from hitting our shores.” A few months after 9/11, at a gathering of community anti-addiction organizations, Bush said, “It’s so important for Americans to know that the traffic in drugs finances the work of terror. If you quit drugs, you join the fight against terror in America.” In February 2002, the Office of National Drug Control Policy turned Bush’s message into a series of publicservice announcements that were aired during the Super Bowl. Departing from the portrayal of illegal narcotics as dangerous to those who use them — “This is your brain on drugs” — the ads instead warned that getting high helped terrorists “torture someone’s dad” or “murder a family.”

In the next seven years, the DEA’s funding for international activities increased by 75 percent. Until then, the agency’s greatest foreign involvement had been in Mexico and in the Andean region of South America, the world’s largest producer of cocaine and home to violent Marxist guerrilla groups, including the FARC, in Colombia, and the Shining Path, in Peru. Both groups began, in the 1960s and early ‘70s, as peasant rebellions; before long, they started taxing coca growers and smugglers to finance their expansion. The DEA saw the organizations as examples of how criminal motivations can overlap with, and even advance, ideological ones.

Your Views On Marijuana Legalization?

WaPo |  Jeff Sessions hates marijuana. Hates it, with a passion that has animated almost nothing else in his career. “Good people don’t smoke marijuana,” he has said. He even once said about the Ku Klux Klan, “I thought those guys were okay until I learned they smoked pot.”

He says that was a joke, but even so, it still says something about where he’s coming from.

So if you’re wondering why Sessions has endured the humiliation of being demeaned and abused by President Trump and stayed on as attorney general, one big answer is the policy change he announced this week, that he is rescinding an Obama-era directive that instructed federal prosecutors not to prioritize prosecuting businesses like dispensaries in states that had legalized cannabis. Sessions is finally getting the chance to lock up all those hippies, with their pot-smoking and their free love and their wah-wah pedals and everything immoral they represent. He’ll show them.

WaPo |  Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Thursday that he will rescind a Justice Department memorandum — known as the Cole Memo — that granted protection to state-legal and regulated marijuana companies. In doing so, Sessions has not only brushed aside science, logic and the prevailing public opinion, but he has also contradicted the opinion of the president he serves and his own party’s governing values.

Sessions’s decision empowers U.S. attorneys to begin prosecuting an industry that has complied with state laws and regulations and has, since 2013, been granted an effective waiver from federal intervention. During this time, the legal marijuana industry has become a multibillion-dollar venture, employing tens of thousands of Americans from coast to coast.

This decision to reignite the drug war comes as little surprise. Sessions once said that “good people don’t smoke marijuana.” He has shown a deep ignorance of the realities of the drug war, which has been ineffective and costly and has disproportionately affected minority communities. And he has committed to numerous claims that have been dispelled by science, such as cannabis’s gateway effect and the idea that marijuana is “only slightly less awful” than heroin.

The Rape of RAP - Don't Say ISHT To Me About Harvey Weinstein...,

yournewswire |  John Homeston, a retired CIA agent, has admitted this week on National Russian Television (NTV) that the CIA was behind the creation of the 1980s hip hop scene and financed major hip hop acts including NWA, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five.

The government at the time spent “big money, serious money” on this covert operation destined to “further division” and “corrupt the American youth to nihilist, anti-establishment and anti-American ideologies”, he explained in a half hour interview broadcast on national television.

Famous hip hop songs of the legendary hip hop outfit NWA were even scripted by a team of psychologists and war propagandists of the CIA. “F#ck the police,” and “When I’m called off, I got a sawed off / Squeeze the trigger, and bodies are hauled off,” and other nihilist and anti-establishment lyrics were intended to unleash a wave of cynicism towards authorities, promote the use of heavy drugs, and entice the youth with revolutionary, counter-establishment ideas.

The retired CIA agent claims the social engineering maneuver was “extremely successful.“

“We understood at the time that music was a powerful means of propaganda to reach the youth,” explained the 77-year-old man.

“Our mission was to use teenage angst to our advantage and turn Generation X into a decadent, pro-drug and anti-establishment culture that would create uprisings and further division within society. We even infiltrated mainstream radio to promote their music and reach millions of people everyday,” he admitted, visibly proud of the accomplishment.

“For many of us in the CIA, infiltrating the 1980s hip hop scene was one of the CIA’s most successful experiments of propaganda to date,” he acknowledged during the interview.

“You could say Frankenstein’s monster got up off the table and started goose-stepping.”

Government Treats Citizens The Exact Same Way Sexual Predators Treat Victims

counterpunch |  The New York Times recently published a list of 25 men “accused of sexual misconduct” since the Harvey Weinstein revelations first came out in early October. The list is a who’s-who of “players” in the entertainment, political, media and corporate worlds.  Even scandalous stories about Bush-the-elder are finally coming out after decades of suppression.  In being outed, many of the male predators have lost their jobs or contracts, some of their marriages ended, high-priced defense lawyers have been retained and a few say they are seeking professional counseling.

Many of those identified as being or having been a sexual aggressor are being subject to public shaming.  For a while, their lives might be miserable, under a public magnifying glass as to how he could have done what he is “accused” of doing and, therefore, who really is this man?  However, for some, the price to be paid may be far harsher, including an arrest, trial and (if found guilty) jail as a sex offender.  Prosecutors in New York, Los Angeles and London are sharpening their legalistic claws as they seek criminal indictments against Weinstein.  Who will be the next player to fall?

Since the Reagan-era of the 1980s, the U.S. has engaged in two domestic wars – a war on drugs and a war on sex.  Both have roots dating from the 1920s Prohibition campaign; both rejected the 1960s-70s countercultural insurgency. Both have been played out at federal and local levels — and both are failures!

The country’s drug-addiction “epidemic” has shifted from black to while, from the inner-city or urban ghettos to the suburbs and rural heartland.  Throughout the country, low-level drug offenses are being decriminalized, criminal penalties are being lessened and the traditional ethos of harsh punishment is being undercut by calls for restorative justice.

When launched, the war on sex drew politicians, law enforcement and people of good intentions, conservative and liberal (including anti-porn feminist and gay-rights advocates), into alignment with the religious right.  They joined forces in a campaign to forcefully suppress what was broadly conceived as a domestic security threat, violation of the sexually acceptable.

The sex offender was – and remains — a perfect target for moral outrage.  He (mostly) is someone who crossed a moral line and committed an unpardonable offense.  If he cannot be executed for his affront to civil and religious decency than, at least, he can be shamed or stigmatized, imprisoned, placed in indefinite detention and listed on a sex-offender’s registry.

The 25 men identified by the Times are “players” in the entertainment, political, media and corporate worlds.  Others will surely be added to the list.  Their outing is a friction point in the seismic shift in American social values now underway.  Those so far identified come from the celebrate sector, not most people everyday life. Unfortunately, misogyny is endemic to American life, but gets little local media or public attention until it becomes a media spectacle like what’s happening today.  Its all-to-often considered a private matter, rather than a social practice.

Drug Industry's Control of Congress Makes the NRA Look Like a Piker...,

WaPo |  In April 2016, at the height of the deadliest drug epidemic in U.S. history, Congress effectively stripped the Drug Enforcement Administration of its most potent weapon against large drug companies suspected of spilling prescription narcotics onto the nation’s streets. 

By then, the opioid war had claimed 200,000 lives, more than three times the number of U.S. military deaths in the Vietnam War. Overdose deaths continue to rise. There is no end in sight.

A handful of members of Congress, allied with the nation’s major drug distributors, prevailed upon the DEA and the Justice Department to agree to a more industry-friendly law, undermining efforts to stanch the flow of pain pills, according to an investigation by The Washington Post and “60 Minutes.” The DEA had opposed the effort for years.

The law was the crowning achievement of a multifaceted campaign by the drug industry to weaken aggressive DEA enforcement efforts against drug distribution companies that were supplying corrupt doctors and pharmacists who peddled narcotics to the black market. The industry worked behind the scenes with lobbyists and key members of Congress, pouring more than a million dollars into their election campaigns.

The chief advocate of the law that hobbled the DEA was Rep. Tom Marino,a Pennsylvania Republican who is now President Trump’s nominee to become the nation’s next drug czar. Marino spent years trying to move the law through Congress. It passed after Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) negotiated a final version with the DEA.

For years, some drug distributors were fined for repeatedly ignoring warnings from the DEA to shut down suspicious sales of hundreds of millions of pills, while they racked up billions of dollars in sales.

The new law makes it virtually impossible for the DEA to freeze suspicious narcotic shipments from the companies, according to internal agency and Justice Department documents and an independent assessment by the DEA’s chief administrative law judge in a soon-to-be-published law review article. That powerful tool had allowed the agency to immediately prevent drugs from reaching the street.

The Opioid Crisis in America...,

newyorker |  When we talk about drug abuse in America, our leaders use the language not just of war but of invasion. It is true, of course, that many illegal drugs are produced in other countries and imported into the United States. But our tendency to focus, relentlessly, on the supply side of the drug problem obscures the more intractable problem of the demand side—and of our complicity, as voracious consumers. “An astonishing ninety per cent of the heroin in America comes from south of the border,” President Trump said on Thursday, in his remarks on the opioid epidemic. And this is true. But, in focussing on this particular statistic, and promising that “building a wall” along the Mexican border “will greatly help this problem,” President Trump indulged the old nativist myth of drug prohibition.

This week, in the magazine, I wrote a piece about the origins of the current epidemic—a story that unfolded not in Mexico but in Stamford, Connecticut, where Purdue Pharma, a privately held company that is owned by the Sackler family, developed a powerful opioid painkiller, OxyContin, and set out to persuade the American medical establishment that it was not addictive. As my piece relates, Purdue succeeded beyond its wildest imaginings. OxyContin became a blockbuster drug, generating billions of dollars for the Sacklers. Meanwhile, a generation of Americans grew addicted to opioid painkillers. Four out of five people who try heroin today first abused prescription painkillers. In light of such a statistic, it would be folly to focus on Mexico and not look very hard at the F.D.A.-approved drug pushers closer to home.

Trump may not be particularly focussed on pharmaceutical companies, but there are promising signs that others are. On Thursday morning, federal agents arrested the founder of Insys, a drug company that produces a powerful opioid, and charged him with racketeering and fraud. And on Wednesday it was revealed that federal prosecutors in Connecticut have opened a new criminal investigation of Purdue Pharma—focussed on the marketing of OxyContin.

You Holding Up the Mirror The Only Thing Worse Than Babylon Seeing Itself...,

TomDispatch |  As in Baghdad, so in Baltimore. It’s connected, you see. Scholars, pundits, politicians, most of us in fact like our worlds to remain discretely and comfortably separated. That’s why so few articles, reports, or op-ed columns even think to link police violence at home to our imperial pursuits abroad or the militarization of the policing of urban America to our wars across the Greater Middle East and Africa. I mean, how many profiles of the Black Lives Matter movement even mention America’s 16-year war on terror across huge swaths of the planet? Conversely, can you remember a foreign policy piece that cited Ferguson? I doubt it.

Nonetheless, take a moment to consider the ways in which counterinsurgency abroad and urban policing at home might, in these years, have come to resemble each other and might actually be connected phenomena:

*The degradations involved: So often, both counterinsurgency and urban policing involve countless routine humiliations of a mostly innocent populace.  No matter how we’ve cloaked the terms -- “partnering,” “advising,” “assisting,” and so on -- the American military has acted like an occupier of Iraq and Afghanistan in these years.  Those thousands of ubiquitous post-invasion U.S. Army foot and vehicle patrols in both countries tended to highlight the lack of sovereignty of their peoples.  Similarly, as long ago as 1966, author James Baldwin recognized that New York City’s ghettoes resembled, in his phrase, “occupied territory.”  In that regard, matters have only worsened since.  Just ask the black community in Baltimore or for that matter Ferguson, Missouri.  It’s hard to deny America’s police are becoming progressively more defiant; just last month St. Louis cops taunted protestors by chanting “whose streets? Our streets,” at a gathering crowd.  Pardon me, but since when has it been okay for police to rule America’s streets?  Aren’t they there to protect and serve us?  Something tells me the exceedingly libertarian Founding Fathers would be appalled by such arrogance.

*The racial and ethnic stereotyping.  In Baghdad, many U.S. troops called the locals hajis, ragheads, or worse still, sandniggers.  There should be no surprise in that.  The frustrations involved in occupation duty and the fear of death inherent in counterinsurgency campaigns lead soldiers to stereotype, and sometimes even hate, the populations they’re (doctrinally) supposed to protect.  Ordinary Iraqis or Afghans became the enemy, an “other,” worthy only of racial pejoratives and (sometimes) petty cruelties.  Sound familiar?  Listen to the private conversations of America’s exasperated urban police, or the occasionally public insults they throw at the population they’re paid to “protect.”  I, for one, can’t forget the video of an infuriated white officer taunting Ferguson protestors: “Bring it on, you f**king animals!”  Or how about a white Staten Island cop caught on the phone bragging to his girlfriend about how he’d framed a young black man or, in his words, “fried another nigger.”  Dehumanization of the enemy, either at home or abroad, is as old as empire itself.

*The searches: Searches, searches, and yet more searches. Back in the day in Iraq -- I’m speaking of 2006 and 2007 -- we didn’t exactly need a search warrant to look anywhere we pleased. The Iraqi courts, police, and judicial system were then barely operational.  We searched houses, shacks, apartments, and high rises for weapons, explosives, or other “contraband.”  No family -- guilty or innocent (and they were nearly all innocent) -- was safe from the small, daily indignities of a military search.  Back here in the U.S., a similar phenomenon rules, as it has since the “war on drugs” era of the 1980s.  It’s now routine for police SWAT teams to execute rubber-stamped or “no knock” search warrants on suspected drug dealers’ homes (often only for marijuana stashes) with an aggressiveness most soldiers from our distant wars would applaud.  Then there are the millions of random, warrantless, body searches on America’s urban, often minority-laden streets.  Take New York, for example, where a discriminatory regime of “stop-and-frisk” tactics terrorized blacks and Hispanics for decades.  Millions of (mostly) minority youths were halted and searched by New York police officers who had to cite only such opaque explanations as “furtive movements,” or “fits relevant description” -- hardly explicit probable cause -- to execute such daily indignities.  As numerous studies have shown (and a judicial ruling found), such “stop-and-frisk” procedures were discriminatory and likely unconstitutional.

Organized Crime Branch of the U.S. Government: Everything the CIA Does is Illegal

Counterpunch |  LS: Is the war on drugs also a war on blacks? Let me give you some framework for this question, because John Ehrlichman, a former top aide to Richard Nixon, supposedly admitted that: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” (1) And I can quote from H. R. Haldeman’s diaries in this respect, of course. In the early stages of his presidency, more specifically on April 28, 1969, Nixon outlined his basic strategy to his chief of staff: “[President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” (2) So, is the war on drugs that started under Nixon also a war on blacks? And if so, what does this tell us about the United States?

DV: America is a former slave state and a blatantly racist society, so yes, the war on drugs, which is managed by white supremacists, was and is directed against blacks and other despised minorities as a way of keeping them disenfranchised. The old Bureau of Narcotics was blatantly racist: not until 1968 were black FBN agents allowed to become group supervisors (Grade 13) and manage white agents.

I interviewed former FBN Agent William Davis for my book about the FBN, The Strength of the Wolf. Davis articulated the predicament of black agents.  After graduating from Rutgers University in 1950, Davis, while visiting New York City, heard singer Kate Smith praising FBN Agent Bill Jackson on a radio show. “She described him as a black lawyer who was doing a fine job as a federal narcotic agent,” Davis recalled, “and that was my inspiration. I applied to the Narcotics Bureau and was hired right away, but I soon found out there was an unwritten rule that Black agents could not hold positions of respect: they could not become group leaders, or manage or give direction to whites. The few black agents we had at any one time,” he said bitterly, “maybe eight in the whole country, had indignities heaped upon us.”

Davis told how Wade McCree, while working as an FBN agent in the 1930s, created a patent medicine.  But McCree made the mistake of writing to Eleanor Roosevelt to complain that prosecutors in the South were calling black agents “niggers.”  As a result, the FBN’s legal staff charge McCree with using FBN facilities to create his patent medicine. McCree was fired with the intended ripple effect: his dismissal sent a clear message that complaints from black agents would not be tolerated.

In an interview for The Strength of the Wolf, Clarence Giarusso, a veteran New Orleans narcotic agent and its chief of police in the 1970s, explained to me the racial situation from local law enforcement’s perspective. “We made cases in Black neighborhoods because it was easy,” he said. “We didn’t need a search warrant, it allowed us to meet our quotas, and it was ongoing. If we found dope on a Black man we could put him in jail for a few days and no one cared. He has no money for a lawyer, and the courts are ready to convict; there’s no expectation on the jury’s part that we even have to make a case.  So rather than go cold turkey he becomes an informant, which means we can make more cases in his neighborhood, which is all we’re interested in. We don’t care about Carlos Marcello or the Mafia. City cops have no interest in who brings the dope in. That’s the job of federal agents.”

Anyone who thinks it is any different nowadays is living in a fantasy world. Where I live, in Longmeadow, MA, the cops are the first line of defense against the blacks and Puerto Ricans in the nearby city of Springfield. About 15 years ago, there was a Mafia murder in Springfield’s Little Italy section. At the time, blacks and Puerto Ricans ere moving into the neighborhood and there was a lot of racial tension. The local TV station interviewed me about it, and I said the Al Bruno, the murdered Mafia boss, was probably an FBI informant. The next day, people I knew wouldn’t talk to me. Comments were made. Someone told me Bruno’s son went to the same health club as me. In a city like Springfield and its suburban neighborhoods, everyone is related to or friends with someone in the Mafia.

A few years before Bruno’s murder, I had befriended the janitor at the health club I belong to. By chance, the janitor was the son of a Springfield narcotics detective. The janitor and I shot pool and drank beers in local bars. One day he told me a secret his father had told him. His father told him that the Springfield cops let the Mafia bosses bring narcotics into Springfield and in exchange, the hoods named their black and Puerto Ricans customers. That way, like Giarusso said above, the cops keep making cases and the minority communities have a harder time buying houses and encroaching on the established whites in their neighborhoods. This happens everywhere in the US every day.

LS: Is it ironic to you that the whole drug trade wouldn’t exist as it does today if the drugs were not illegal in the first place?

DV: The outlawing of narcotic drugs turned the issue of addiction from a matter of “public health” into a law enforcement issue, and thus a pretext for expanding police forces and reorganizing the criminal justice and social welfare systems to prevent despised minorities from making political and social advances. The health care industry was placed in the hands of businessmen seeking profits at the expense of despised minorities, the poor and working classes. Private businesses established civic institutions to sanctify this repressive policy. Public educators developed curriculums that doubled as political indoctrination promoting the Business Party’s racist line. Bureaucracies were established to promote the expansion of business interests abroad, while suppressing political and social resistance to the medical, pharmaceutical, drug manufacturing and law enforcement industries that benefited from it.

It takes a library full of books to explain the economic foundations of the war on drugs, and the reasons for America’s laissez faire regulation of the industries that profit from it. Briefly stated, they profit from it just like the Mafia profits from it. Suffice it to say that Wall Street investors in the drug industries have used the government to unleash and transform their economic power into political and global military might; never forget, America is not an opium or cocaine producing nation, and narcotic drugs are a strategic resource, upon which all of the above industries – including the military – depend. Controlling the world’s drug supply, both legal and illegal, is a matter of national security. Read my books for examples of how this has played out over the past 70 years.

LS: In what form and fashion is the Phoenix program alive today in America’s homeland?

DV: Karl Marx explained over 150 years ago how and why capitalists treat workers the same, whether at home or abroad. As capitalism evolves and centralizes its power, as the climate degenerates, as the gap between rich and poor widens, and as resources become scarcer, America police forces adopt Phoenix-style “anti-terror” strategies and tactics to use against the civilian population. The government has enacted “administrative detention” laws, which are the legal basis for Phoenix-style operations, so that civilians can be arrested on suspicion of being a threat to national security. Phoenix was a bureaucratic method of coordinating agencies involved in intelligence gathering with those conducting “anti-terror” operations, and the Department of Homeland Security has established “fusion centers” based on this model around the nation. Informant nets and psychological operations against the American people have also proliferated since 9-11. This is all explained in detail in my book, The CIA as Organized Crime.

LS: How important is mainstream media for the public perception of the CIA?

DV: It’s the most critical feature. Guy Debord said that secrecy dominates the world, foremost as secret of domination. The media prevents you from knowing how you’re being dominated, by keeping the CIA’s secrets. The media and the CIA are same thing.

What FOX and MSNBC have in common is that, in a free-wheeling capitalist society, news is a commodity. News outlets target demographic audience to sell a product. It’s all fake news, in so far as each media outlet skews its presentation of the news to satisfy its customers. But when it comes to the CIA, it’s not just fake, it’s poison. It subverts democratic institutions.

Any domestic Phoenix-style organization or operation depends on double-speak and deniability, as well as official secrecy and media self-censorship. The CIA’s overarching need for total control of information requires media complicity. This was one of the great lesson defeat in Vietnam taught our leaders. The highly indoctrinated and well rewarded managers who run the government and media will never again allow the public to see the carnage they inflict upon foreign civilians. Americans never will see the mutilated Iraqi, Afghani, Libyan, and Syrian children killed by marauding US mercenary forces and cluster bombs.

On the other hand, falsified portrayals of CIA kidnappings, torture, and assassinations are glorified on TV and in movies. Telling the proper story is the key. Thanks to media complicity, Phoenix has already become the template for providing internal political security for America’s leaders.

LS: Is the CIA an enemy of the American people?

DV: Yes. It’s an instrument of the rich political elite, it does their dirty business.

Moloch and Ishtar

We are waking up as no society that we've ever been taught about, has had to do. No society that we've ever been taught about has been where we are today.  Our current situation is not a pretty thing.  We know about some of the changes, events, and developments that we're allowed to know about. These are the underlying causes for societal dysfunction that are blamed for our current predicament, and even these permitted causes of societal dysfunction cannot be addressed in any agreeable way. Too many needy people appeared as if out of nowhere too fast. All our budgets are strained with expenditures far outpacing revenues. The welfare of those who brought about this predicament will not be sacrificed. It will never be sacrificed for those already stigmatized as society's weakest links, no matter who is really to blame for their condition.

The proprietors cannot proceed into the world of tomorrow dragging a heavy burden of the unproductive and unprofitable forward with them.  They cannot compete with other elite proprietor's in the global 1% and maintain their influence within that global elite if they spend their last borrowed dime on the unproductive and unprofitable. What our elites are faced with today is a perfect storm of aging boomers, unsustainable national debt and continued borrowing, legislative dysfunction, automation, continued job-shedding with 95 million already on the sidelines, apathy, all of which lead to the type of events which unfolded last weekend in Charlottesville. You're kidding yourself if you think this situation is going to get any better. From here forward, it can only get worse.

Only ignorant peasants wonder why the war on drugs has never been won, why the situation worsens by the day, and why those governance pretend at helplessness to do anything about it. That is because the entire human livestock management scheme is designed. Drugs are just one aspect of the human livestock management scheme. The unproductive and unprofitable have overstayed their welcome. 99% of this herd is subject to accelerated cull. The challenge, to the extent there is one, is putting down these two-legged cattle without being too obviously to blame for the cull.  This is the way the corporate neofeudal system works. Top people, thought-leaders are rewarded and accorded status for their cleverness at squeezing out profits under by any means necessary but under cover of law - and doing so in a manner designed to shield them and the proprietors they represent from any liability for any externalities that may be involved in yielding that profit.

The top lives off the yield from the bottom...the roof or top of the structure is supported by the bottom or foundation of the structure.

If the bottom can't support the top...the structure collapses.

Oh I get it you all think you support those below...

You think the top or roof supports the foundation of the structure...well I guess in your mind where LAW that governs the Universe does not apply you could imagine such.

The bottom produces everything and the top monetizes it...They then mark up everything and sell it back to the bottom to get their money back.

The top owns the money system...it and all the money belongs to them...it's their money that monetizes the wholesale production operation...not yours...all the money in circulation does not belong to any of you...You just think it does.

The difference between the wholesale cost and the retail price is the yield the top lives off of...well then how does the bottom make up the difference?

By supplying the top with more than the top gives...forever...Until the bottom can't supply the top with the yield they demand.

Somebody has been glorifying the use of drugs, especially alcohol, for quite some time now. Think, "most interesting man in the world", when was the last time you saw a commercial that showcased the actual results of alcohol indulgence? Colleges are ranked by how hard they "party".  Endless televised coverage of the young and beautiful doing themselves in all the while leaving viewers with the impression they are missing out on something wonderful. The drug and degeneracy problem could not have grown to this extent without the complicity of those in power or connected, whether locally or nationally, running things behind the scenes. Most do it for the profit while others for more sinister reasons. Like so many cattle, Americans don't really have to be forced any more to go to their own slaughter. The pied-piper of our celebrity addiction has made it so that Americans seemingly can't get enough.

Self-pity, fringe sexual acts, drugs and alcohol, excessive eating, conspicuous consumption, these humans have become so lacking in meaning and purpose that they destroy themselves (and everything around them) in pursuit of fashionable degeneracy. All this degeneracy has  turned us against and blinded us to the fundamental necessity of WORK. WORK is the only thing that rewards and fulfills our being. Not the money we receive from the fruits of our work, not the luxury this money may afford, but the sense of accomplishment and mastery that one discovers within himself. In comparison with this fundamental being-duty, everything else is merely conversation....,

Degeneracy is a deceiver. It lies, telling you how smart, how deserving, how rewarding, how fulfilling it is.  Even those who try to WORK can be turned from the truth within, misdirected toward getting money instead of life. These misdirected souls seek money and spend money on the empty things and degeneracy they've been conditioned to believe that others value. This is what hypnotic marketing does to our "monkey-see monkey-do" species ethology. Marketing doesn't tell you humans what you want or need, rather, it convinces you to want what everyone else has been or is being convinced to want. Marketing has built this false consensus, making you believe what the proprietors want you to believe and do what is profitable for them to have you do. Foolish humans, addicted to an unsatisfiable set of urges that cannot be explained by simple biological necessity.

This is our world now, and we're not at the beginning of this process, we are in fact fast approaching its culmination. The contagion of degeneracy and aversion to WORK has become apocalyptic.