Life is much too short

Life is much too short to take all opening chances, pursue all promising projects, engage in all useful and splendid pastimes, and reach all desirable goals. A day has only 24 hours, a week only seven days, a year only 52 weeks.

In my case one life alone wouldn’t do it, I would need at least three lives to realize my plans and pursue my dreams. One life for researching, writing, teaching, engaging in social and environmental politics, a second life for making music, a third life for gardening, meditating, wandering in the forest and watching nature.

In lack of two extra lives I had to set priorities and to scale back certain activities, among them even activities, that are dear to me and that I consider as important. With a heavy heart….

In other words: Facing the choice, either to write about change and transformation, or actualizing it in my own life, I choose the later. This is my explanation and excuse for the nearly three month long hiatus of this blog.

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Most of the garden is now converted to permaculture areas a la Sepp Holzer. As I told already in earlier posts, I have built a second greenhouse and a second toolshed (assembled from kits), I also made a new garden fence and exchanged a thuja hedge against hornbeam shrubs.

I replaced the wooden pavement between the old greenhouse and the old toolshed with paving slabs. The planks and an associated fence were both completely rotten but they nevertheless served somehow as a barrier to a massive deposit of gravel which constitutes the foundation of the greenhouse and a terrace between the greenhouse and the toolshed (this part of the garden is on a slope).

When I removed the planks plus the fence the gravel started sliding downwards and there was the risk that the foundation of the greenhouse would become unstable. Meter by meter I had to fill the gravel into buckets, build a new barrier out of retaining wall blocks and straight kerbs glued together with cement, and then pour the gravel back into its old place. After that I could pave the area with patio stones but I needed to install and cement another row of kerbs because the stone pavement also started sliding downwards. It took me one week and 12 hours a day back breaking work to rebuild this area.

It was not the only unexpected complication. While planting bushes in the newly cultivated area between the old toolshed and the thuja (now hornbeam) hedge I unearthed the manhole of the cesspool which had been used before the area was connected to the municipal water and sewer system. When the cesspool became obsolete, the former owner of the property simply covered the manhole with a few wooden boards and poured a load of gravel onto it.

The wooden boards were completely rotten and two strokes with a hammer made them fall apart and disappear into the manhole. If a heavier person than I would have stepped onto this hole, he/she would have fallen into the cesspool.

The manhole is now secured with some stainless steel bars (cemented into the concrete frame) and it gets a costly stainless steel cover in form of a shallow basin, which will be filled with a bit of sand and small stones to become the third garden pond. A very small pond (one by one meter), but hopefully nevertheless appreciated by some of my fellow animals (especially the toads).

Keep your nose to the grindstone, so they say.

I never ever in my whole life worked that hard. I felt like a humanoid vole with the name Sisyphus. I was digging and digging, carrying stones back and forth, stirring and pouring cement, mixing concrete. 

I made a few mistake, but nothing essential. Some of the cement connections will possibly be damaged by frost and I will have to renew them in spring. We will see.

I have now a little “hall of fame,” because my feline friends didn’t miss the chance to immortalize themselves and leave their pawprints on the cement and concrete while it still was soft.

Beside the already mentioned second greenhouse and second toolshed I also made two small but solid concrete foundations for the rainwater barrels. The old toolshed got a new roof.

One area of the garden is littered with pavers and step stones. The pavers form small narrow paths and are arranged like a labyrinth. The whole area can be accessed without stepping onto the soil, which is quite useful especially after heave rain.

The soil here was not good, it was a mixture of clay and construction rubble with a thin layer of humus. The former owner did his best to destroy the humus by applying large quantities of chemical fertilizer. When I moved in I found big bags of fertilizer and I was mystified. So much phosphate and nitrate just for a plain lawn and some bushes?

When I started gardening in earnest last summer I had to buy loads of humus. Every week and for a while nearly every day I filled up the car with 60 liter bags of various kinds of humus and peat that I applied strategically onto the new beds.

It must be about three to four tons earth that I have imported.

Everything here is composted and there are 12 compost containers. From next year on I will not have to buy humus anymore, because the compost containers will deliver quality earth with a high amount of organic material. The earthworms, the ants, and the root systems of trees and bushes will penetrate and break up the clay, old leaves and dead plants will increase the humus inch by inch.

I could have created a humus layer without importing earth, but it would have taken years and I didn’t want to wait that long. Many rural people in the world don’t have the resources that are available to me, they have to cope with the degraded soil as it is and make the best out of it.

In addition to the imported humus I covered the newly cultivated areas with moss and twigs from the forest. The forest is across the door and I go nearly every day and often several times a day to collect moss in two textile bags. Some of the moss is astonishingly deep rooted and one has to dig it out, but there are patches of moss who grow on a loose layer of decayed pine needles and one can easily pull of the moss together with the needles.

The patches of moss have then to be planted in the garden at the right place and at the right time. Best time is in early spring and late autumn after heavy rain, best places are in the shadow. Sprinkling the moss with loose earth, covering it with twigs, and repeated watering helps, but if it is hot and the sun shines nothing will help and the moss will shrivel, dry and die.

Even the dead moss is beneficial, it protects the soil and hinders weeds. Sometimes after a period of strong precipitation the moss that I considered to have died suddenly comes to life again.

The forest is not only an important source of moss and needle branches, it also shields the garden from climatic extremes (storms and temperature peaks). A friend who is an accomplished gardener had to come last year to fetch some sage plants because hers had died over the winter. Many other people told me that their perennial plants usually are all gone after a strong winter.

That doesn’t happen here and if there is enough moisture in the air and soil, plants will survive the winter. Last year most of the strawberries kept their leaves during the winter. They stopped growing but in spring they just took off and continued as if nothing had happened.

Many people in the world don’t have a forest across the door and the remaining forests are mercilessly destroyed. Many countries in the world are ecological disaster zones (most Middle Eastern countries, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Greece, Northern China). The remaining soil is destroyed by industrial agriculture, by mining, traffic, expanding towns, waste dumps, and other human activities.

The human population is still growing — how can people be fed without intact soil?

This will end badly!

One more thing: Did my laborious efforts pay off?

The strawberry yield was quite good, a bit better than last year. Strawberry fruits are ripening even now and when I go out I always find some eatable fruits. The yield will most likely not increase further but if I can hold it at the present level it is ok.

The vines were terrific, even the new plants without exception delivered a few bunches of grapes (everybody told me that one has to wait three years till they bear fruits — never believe the experts).

I dug in some potatoes just as a test and they grew nicely. These are friendly, good looking plants and they harmonize with the other garden plants. Yet I dug out only tree times the amount of planted potatoes which was a bit disappointing.

The fruit trees were even more disappointing, only one peach tree had 32 fruits, a remarkable achievement because the tree is now just three years old. Its older sibling unfortunately was completely infected by curled leaf disease. I had to remove all leaves and the tree grew a new set of leaves and looks very good and healthy now. But it lost all fruits in the process.

The apple trees got just a handful of fruits, which were delicious but eaten in a few days. The other fruit trees didn’t even bother to get fruits, they are all freshly planted and I will probably have to wait a few years till they contribute to my diet.

As a side note: The blacksmith who makes the cesspool cover is a friend of mine since thirty years. He is also an organic farmer and I’m allowed to plug as much apples from his trees as I need — which means that one shelf in the cellar is full of apples. Sometimes it is good to have real friends that one can meet in person. My virtual (online) friends would not be able to provide apples (maybe software for my Apple computers, but software cannot nourish me). My virtual friends would also not be able to forge a cesspool cover.

The berry bushes did fairly well, especially the blueberries. I had to buy a second (top loading) freezer and both freezers are full with boxes of berries and grapes.

The former owner of the property mistreated the garden terribly but I must at least give him credit for planting a hedge of blueberries. These are some 30 bushes which are old but still extraordinarily  productive. I added another 30 bushes and I also planted a dozen blue honeysuckle (also known as honeyberry or lonicera kamtschatica).

In addition to that I have fetched wild blueberries from the forest but it is very difficult to transplant them successfully because the wild blueberries are all connected with a net of creeping rootstalks (rhizomes) and these connections remain active indefinitely. One plant that has found a water source will support all the other plants of the colony and the plants which are exposed to sunlight will send back sugar and other products of photosynthesis.

Which means that one has to dig out the whole colony of wild blueberries to successfully establish them in a new place. Until now I have only four thriving colonies of wild blueberries, the other attempts seem to fail, though I cannot rule out that in spring some plants will rise again.

Gooseberries and jostaberries are doing well though the oldest jostaberry bush seems to be dying. Fortunately I have propagated it by hardwood cutting.

Blackberries, raspberries, red and black currents are not my absolute favorites but they need no special care and just grow. The wild blackberries and wild raspberries emerged by themselves, they came from the wood. Wild blackberries and raspberries are very aggressive and I have to be careful to keep them in check, things easily could get out of hand.

Wild blackberries have terrible thorns which easily break away and remain stuck into the skin. But their fruits are delicious, far more tasty than the fruit of their cultivated relatives. Wild blackberries are useful to protect certain areas from unwelcome visitors (mainly my feline friends).

Herbs for tea (marigold, camomile, sage, stinging nettle, several varieties of mint, lemon balm) are plentiful, providing more tealeaves than I will ever need. The same can be said about chard and chives. I let a few chard and chive plants bloom and I’m curious if they spread. I would like to have more ramson (wild garlic), garlic, onions, and would like to propagate them by myself but right now I don’t have the experience and the knowhow. This is a project for next year.

The little pumpkin plants, which had grown unplanned and unexpected on top of an open compost container from pumpkin seeds in the kitchen garbage were not easily to transplant and were cruelly decimated by slugs. Yet enough survived and grew up to conquest a wide area of the garden, converting it into a “pumpkin jungle” and making it completely inaccessible. 58 pumpkin fruits resulted.

The tomato harvest was beyond any expectations. I never would have thought, I never would have dreamt of, I was speechless! I have harvested the tomatoes now five times. The new greenhouse is empty but in the old one there are still plants with ripening tomatoes. I carried bucket after bucket filled with tomatoes into the house, the kitchen was completely full, I was running out of baskets, boxes, containers.

I started canning tomatoes and that work kept me busy for days. Humidity in the kitchen rose to 80 percent.

This is the real thing, this is a serious step to self sufficiency. I will not need to buy tomatoes in a shop anymore. Even now the kitchen is full with tomatoes. One shelf in the cellar is full of tomato jars.

Not unsurprisingly a certain kind of tomato fatigue has set in. Rice with tomato soup, lentils with tomato soup, tomato salad, raw tomatoes in between as a snack, tomatoes in all imaginable variations. I even mix tomatoes into my muesli. I will get used to them, one gets used to a lot of things. Btw., aren’t tomatoes supposed to be healthy?

What else happened?

I deactivated my Facebook account. I easily found the option in the privacy settings. Facebook will keep all my date indefinitely, but they have not much because I didn’t use their service since one year.

And:

Just out of curiosity I visited the alternative (pseudo, self declared, fake, phony — choose the attribute of your liking) news aggregation site Common Dreams and it was, as always, amusing and sobering at the same time.

I continue to wonder:

How long will renowned alternative pundits contribute articles when their musings are regularly blasted, denounced, dressed down, ridiculed, and cut to bits by commenters?

How long will the site owners continue to publish pieces which are half-baked, ignorant,  shallow, meaningless, and therefore most predictably will cause a negative reaction?

How long will it take till donors, supporter, contributors, readers realize that a profit oriented alternative news site is a contradiction in itself, is a scam, a ruse, an artifice, a con?

How long will it take till the commenters realize that their opinion is ignored and their voice not heard outside the secluded brotherhood (and to a lesser extent sisterhood) of commenters? How long will it take till they realize that reading and commenting on this site will not change anything and is a waste of time?

How long will the Common Dreamers be able to dream on before the harsh realities of power politics, the ongoing class war, resource depletion, and environmental destruction wakes them up?

I could ask the same question about readers of other alternative media like Huffington Post, Democracy Now, Salon, Alternet, etc. I could ask the same question about a myriad of analogous accounts, pages, and communities on Facebook and Twitter.

Activities like writing posts and critical commenting are tolerated and probably even well liked by the masters because in this way their subjects can let off steam and are also easily to monitor. Whatever the official privacy rules may be, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ undoubtedly present their alternative minded users to the NSA on a silver platter.

The masters know from the postings, blogs, comments, whom to monitor more closely just in case the growing frustration leads to activities beyond posting and commenting. But the danger of this to happen is minuscule, because, as I mentioned already at the start, people have only one life and the day has only 24 hours.

Those who participate in virtual communities are not likely to participate or organize real life communities. They will not have time to build local networks and participate in community projects who could diminish the dependency on old systems. Those who participate in virtual communities will continue to support the military machine with their tax money even if they castigate it.

One more aspect the masters will certainly appreciate: Those who spend their time watching screens of various sizes (computer, TV, smartphone) can be easily misled, manipulated, duped, and confused. The pictures on the screens are mostly altered, retouched, photoshopped, the stories told are mostly fiction, and the presented facts are most likely fabrications.

Dear reader of this text, you are a seasoned user of the internet and proud yourself to easily separate fiction and facts. You know their game, you cannot be fooled.

Lucky you! I personally have no problem to distinguish between propaganda and genuine reporting, but as it stands now, most of the media content is propaganda, and I have great difficulties to find out the few hard facts, the needles of truth hidden inside a gargantuan haystack of lies. I have great difficulties to peak through the smokescreen of misinformation and make sense of the blurred contours and figurations. I have great difficulties to reassemble the scattered pieces of the puzzle into a picture.

I try to interpolate, to equalize, rectify, and straighten. I use logic and common sense.

You do that too, of course, and you have made up your mind about economic growth, financial bailouts, austerity, the benefits of global trade, and the need of technological progress.

Do you find the philanthropy of Bill Gates and his efforts to privatize the US education system, promote GM-crops (in cooperation with Monsanto), and reenergize nuclear energy (TerraPower) impressive?

Are the philanthropic efforts of the Goldman Sachs Foundation, the Koch Brothers, The Kaiser Family Foundation, and the substantial corporate donations to charities not examples, that capitalisms works, that capitalism has a “human face”?

Of course, the companies have to balance the philanthropic efforts with their shareholders’ needs.

Please tell me: Why don’t the billionaires and the corporations not simply pay their fair share of taxes so that welfare programs can be sustained and extended?

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Dear reader of this text, I know that you examine every information critically. You don’t believe the official versions about the JFK and MLK assassinations? The Watergate narrative is ok, you think?

Jack Ruby, Yasser Arafat, Hugo Chavez, Michael Hastings. Funny, how my brain unexpectedly associates these four names.

I assume that you feel strongly about the reported atrocities of Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad. Do you despise Vladimir Putin? Do you cherish the work of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Avaaz, OSI, Freedom House, Golos, and the various humanitarian UN organizations?

Am I right to assume that you are questioning the official infos about the state of the oceans, about Fukushima and the resulting radioactive contamination, about various WMD threats, about 9/11, about the Osama bin Laden raid, and about the war on terror in general?

Am I right to assume that you are not a conspiracist but don’t completely dismiss theories of a New World Order, Mind Control (MK-Ultra), the Permanent Government, false flag operations?

Well, the Military Industrial Complex — what can one say…. And well, NSA spying programs Tempora, Prism, Muscular, Apalachee, Blarney, Fairview, Oakstar, Lithium, Stormbrew (the list is for sure incomplete). 

Join one of the hundreds of conspiracy forums and/or consume your daily dose of David Icke via his website and YouTube channel. Both of this will have dire consequences for the establishment.

Dear reader, as a seasoned internet user and multitasker you have no difficulties to follow my meandering thoughts and erratic jumps to seemingly unrelated issues. You easily understand the hidden messages and cues, messages and cues, which not even the cray supercomputers in Fort Meade can decipher. Such is the power and magic of our brains pattern recognition.

Well, I’m not sure that there are any hidden messages and cues in this text. I just write what comes into my mind.

One of the reasons that I’m reluctant to publish new blog posts is my inability to deliver really well composed, well formulated text. I read my old posts and some of them are quite good (for a “non native”), but I cannot meet this standard now, because my brain is filled to the brim with gardening knowhow, with the shapes of leaves and the images of pests, and with the time schedules of the next days (including a list of the most important things to do and the detailed plans how to successfully accomplish the tasks.)

I would be satisfied with my writing, if I could deliver a piece like this:
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.at/2013/09/which-way-to-heaven.html

Following are links to articles that I found interesting:

Cheap nuclear:
http://www.nbcnews.com/science/fukushimas-radioactive-ocean-plume-due-reach-us-waters-2014-8C11050755
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/inspector-says-japan-needs-international-help-for-nuclear-plant-a-921302.html
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/oct/30/hinkley-point-nuclear-power-plant-uk-government-edf-underwrite
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/chinese-leadership-announces-new-focus-on-green-energy-a-917389.html
Is this the much needed change of Chinas environmental policies? They still build more nuclear power plants (waiting for a “Fukushima accident” to happen).

Mind Control and New World Order news:
http://brucelevine.net/8-ways-young-americans’-resistance-to-domination-has-been-subdued/
http://www.globalresearch.ca/corporate-child-abuse-the-unseen-global-epidemic/5352919
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/world-bank-whistleblower-karen-hudes-reveals-how-the-global-elite-rule-the-world

Imperial news:
http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/stories/2012/october/15/safety-net-hospitals.aspx
http://www.globalresearch.ca/obamacare-is-another-private-sector-rip-off-of-americans/5352559
http://www.workers.org/articles/2013/10/04/senseless-killing-miriam-carey/
http://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/pdfs/MakingSenseFromSnowden-IEEESecurityAndPrivacy.pdf
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/nsa-gchq-attack-tor-network-encryption
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/11/the-nsa-is-sharing-data-with-israel-before-filtering-out-americans-information/?wpisrc=nl_tech
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23049737
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/secret-nsa-documents-show-how-the-us-spies-on-europe-and-the-un-a-918625.html
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/can-there-be-a-non-us-internet
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/us-modernizing-its-nuclear-arsenal-despite-criticism-over-weapons-a-932188.html

Imperial conquest news:
http://www.voltairenet.org/article180803.html Thierry Meyssan is a highly respectable journalist but known for overly optimistic assumptions as well as for bold and often incorrect conclusions. This time he seems to get it perfectly right and his report is conclusive and in accord with most other information sources.
http://rt.com/op-edge/syria-world-hate-message-604/
http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_66092.shtml (an excellent analysis).
http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_65985.shtml
http://www.workers.org/articles/2013/09/09/pinochet-suharto-u-s-supported-dictators-killed-people/
http://www.voltairenet.org/article180423.html

Related
http://www.globalresearch.ca/israels-secret-nuclear-biological-and-chemical-weapons-nbc/5352454
http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/if-charles-taylor-war-criminal-then-so-are-obama-bush-and-clinton

The question remains, if this text is really necessary and useful. Why do I do this?

Answer: It is my contribution to human knowledge. I tell what I have found out over the years and publishing it on a blog seems to be the most unobtrusive and humble way of presenting the findings to my fellow humans.

I don’t promote the blog and don’t ask anybody anymore to read the posts. Take it or leave it. I opted out of the rat race a long time ago and I’m not in a competition with anybody. I watch the efforts of fellow bloggers to promote their sites with amusement. What do they hope to gain? Why don’t they just live a happy life and publish a post every now and then with their compiled wisdom?

I don’t disguise myself and don’t trick somebody with a different worldview into reading the posts.

Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, Salvador Allende, Mohammad Najibullah, Yasser Arafat, Muammar Gaddafi, and Hugo Chavez are my heroes, Leon Trotsky and Fidel Castro Ruz are important influences.

I reject and oppose superstitions, ideologies, and religions.

As I look into the fire of the stove I see two burning logs, one lies across the other. Somehow they resemble a burning cross, reminding me of the Ku Klux Klan. When I turn my head a 170 degrees I see in the distance the cross on the church steeple. It is probably made of wrought iron and could last for centuries. This is a small village but it nevertheless has two churches, one for Catholics and one for Protestants. The services are probably not well attended, as Europe becomes more and more secular.

Good so!

Catholics and Protestants killed each other in the millions during the Thirty Years’ War. This was not an isolated incident, throughout human history religious motivated wars were an imported means of population control. Do I regard religion as the worst bane of humanity?

No, Wars and TV come first.

Nobel Peace and Human Rights Propaganda

Finian Cunningham  Press TV

The Nobel Peace Prize should be renamed the Nobel Propaganda Prize, after this year’s ever-so contrived award to the UN-approved chemical weapons team sent to disarm Syria.

Various dubious winners of the illustrious prize include former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (who oversaw the genocidal carpet-bombing of Indochina during the 1970s), two former terrorists (Irgun leader Menachem Begin and Chief Operations Officer of Palmach Yitzhak Rabin), fraudulent bankster Muhammad Yunus (who is battling corruption and tax evasion charges), US President Barack Obama (despite his use of assassinations and murderous aggressions in multiple countries, including Iran, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria), the European Union (who got the prize in behalf of NATO for killing Muammar Gaddafi and turning Libya into a failed state).

A Norwegian-based committee of seemingly Scandinavian neutrality makes the award every year as it has done for more than a century ever since 1901. The prize was the creation of Alfred Nobel, a major armaments manufacturer. That in itself speaks volumes of the institution’s contradictory nature.

Last year, the winner of the Nobel Prize was yet another disgrace to morals and commonsense in the form of the European Union. How can a bloc of governments be remotely considered peaceful when it is wiping out basic social welfare for millions of its citizens in the service of criminal banks and elite private wealth? Or when it is lifting a weapons embargo on extremists running amok in Syria? Or colluding in the enforcement of crippling economic sanctions on Iran — based on nuclear calumnies cooked up by Western military intelligence — sanctions that are killing women and children from the lack of basic imported medicines?

While there have been a few deserving winners of the Nobel Peace Prize down through the years, nevertheless it is best to treat this institution with skepticism, if not derision. The meritorious aspects of the award can serve to give credence to the dubious and deplorable associates. In that way, it is more a Propaganda Prize than a Peace Prize. 

This year’s recipient, the inspection team belonging to the OPCW (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons), has only begun their work last week to dismantle stocks of weapons-grade chemicals in Syria. This is part of the arrangement that Russia proposed last month to avert an illegal war of aggression being planned by the Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama. The Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad has fully signed up the disarmament process.

However, it is precocious, to say the least, to award the OPCW with the Nobel prize, just like it was for the Oslo-based committee to give the award to Obama in 2009, only within months of his first election and before he went on to prove himself one of US-America’s most warmongering presidents since World War II.

How do we know that the OPCW will be effective in disarming the chemical weapons of the Western-backed mercenary groups fighting to overthrow the Assad government? How do we know that the OPCW will not mischievously misuse its remit and Nobel Laureate status to advance the Western propaganda narrative against the Syrian government? 

The awarding of a peace prize based on no track record conjures suspicion that the institution and its benign connotations are being used to inculcate a reprehensible political agenda. The same insidious propaganda formula of supposed virtue concealing vice can also be seen in the report this week by the New York-based Human Rights Watch group on massacres carried out by foreign-backed militants in Syria.

That report accuses up to 20 Al Qaeda-linked groups, including Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Shams), of killing scores of civilians in Syria’s western Latakia Province during early August.

Such apparently damning testimony from a Western human rights organization may seem like a positive development.

But, as with the Nobel Peace Prize, there is a very real danger that the HRW report is merely acting as a whitewash of Western government crimes.

For a start, the HRW report claims that it has found the “first evidence of crimes against humanity by opposition forces”. That infers that previous atrocities are attributable to the Syrian government forces. This is simply false. Many reliable sources have found that most, if not all, major massacres in villages and towns across Syria over the past two and half years have been committed by the anti-government mercenary groups.

Western media and human rights groups, including HRW and Amnesty International, have deliberately or incompetently misattributed those crimes to Syrian government forces, which then serve to bestow a false moral authority on Western governments for their illicit interference in Syria.

For example, both HRW and Britain’s state-run media outlet, the BBC, as well as the US government’s Voice of America, have run reports that Syrian state forces carried out napalm bombings of schools in Raqqa and Aleppo in the north of the country. These reports are based on unverified amateur video released by so-called opposition groups, such as Ahrar al-Sham, which themselves have been involved in carrying out atrocities, as in Latakia Province during August.

HRW and the Western media continue to blame the chemical weapons incident on 21 August near Damascus on the Syrian government. HRW has openly attacked other credible sources, which have reported that that incident was a heinous fabrication, very possibly perpetrated by Western-backed militants as a calculated provocation.

There is strong suspicion, backed up by circumstantial and testimonial evidence, that the children portrayed as poisoned in the opposition-released videos of the 21 August incident in East Ghouta near Damascus were kidnapped by militants during their terror raids on villages in Latakia in the previous weeks. Their deaths were therefore staged for vile propaganda purpose, with which the Western governments, media and human rights industry have subsequently lashed Bashar al-Assad, eventually leading to the appointment of the OPCW inspection team and, bizarrely, their Nobel award.

The latest report by HRW on the massacres in Latakia notes that there are still over 200 people, mainly women and children, missing from those attacks. But HRW does not address the glaring connection to the anonymous child victims filmed in the East Ghouta incident.

A further insidious propaganda effect of the HRW report into the massacres by militants in Latakia is that it reinforces the illusion that the militants in Syria are divided between the “bad extremists” and the “good moderates”, whom the Western governments support. HRW says that it found no evidence linking the supposedly Western-backed Free Syrian Army to the Latakia atrocities.

However, this is contradicted by earlier reports that the leader of the FSA, General Salim Idris, (a moderate “darling” of Western governments), was in Latakia during the murderous rampages. Not only was Idris present in Latakia, he was videoed celebrating “the success” of operations.

On August 11th, the New York Times reported: “The visit by the Free Syrian Army commander, Gen. Salim Idris, appeared intended to show that he and his fighters were also involved in the Latakia seizures [sic] as part of a new front in the civil war.” That report added that Idris crowed about “accomplishments” in a released video.

The Human Rights Watch group is therefore not a positive contribution to clear the fog of war that the West has been pumping out relentlessly over Syria — far from it. HRW is a deep and insidious part of the problem. In fact, it is whitewashing the very real criminal involvement of Western governments and media in the covert war of aggression against Syria.

Nobel Peace Prizes and Western human rights groups may sound innocuous. But they are a central part of the Western propaganda machine, as much as MI6, CIA, Mossad, the Pentagon, Whitehall and the panoply of Western news media outlets with notable and celebrious titles, such as BBC and New York Times.

Note of the Editor:

This years Nobel Peace Prize award has definitely a political purpose, which is: to shift the focus of attention from the atrocities committed by the murderous, from the West onto Syria unleashed terrorist gangs, to Syria’s army and the nations defense capabilities. This award intends to foster the impression, that the government controlled chemical weapons were an imminent threat to the population and a factor in the ongoing war.

Throughout the 20th century, beginning with the 1931 award for Nicholas Murray Butler, who was a conservative Republican and a racist, to the awards for Kissinger, Sakharov, Begin, Rabin, the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s choices intermittently reflected the political views of the West, but in the 21st century the Nobel Committee has become decisively partisan and can now be rightfully added to an ever growing array of NGOs (Al, HRW, Avaaz, OSI, Freedom House, Golos) who clandestinely or openly carry the water for the ruling elites of the neocolonial powers.

 An (incomplete) list of questionable Nobel Peace prize awards:

Nicholas Murray Butler,
Henry A. Kissinger
Andrei Sakharov
Menachem Begin
Shimon Peres
Yitzhak Rabin
Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank
Barack H. Obama
European Union

The Anti-Syria Chemical Plot

Jim W. Dean  Press TV

“Deep within every one of us lies a natural understanding of good and evil. That is why one man can tell the truth convincingly…but it takes the entire apparatus of the state to peddle a lie, and propagate that lie to new generations.”  Mahatma Gandhi

I watched with absolute astonishment how quickly the West and the Obama regime moved to put wind into the sails of the totally bogus claims of the Syrian army using nerve gas on its own people in the Damascus suburbs when the effectiveness of its traditional counter insurgency operations have been on display for months now. I don’t know a single soul who believes the army would do this.

That the Syrian National Coalition would attempt this Hail Mary pass to trigger a “red line” incident to bring in the Western cavalry (NATO) to save them has been expected by the independent intelligence community. And yes, the photos of lot of dead kids came as no surprise. Killing kids also is a Zionist specialty as they have had a lot of experience at it.

The West has been supporting this reign of terror on the Syrian people for some time now through its admitted aiding and abetting the arming, training and supplying of a diverse array of cut throat criminal insurgent groups recruited from the hovels of North Africa and the Middle East.

Their Persian Gulf State proxies have provided only a thin veil of cover for the introduction of the Neo-Al Qaeda groups who are perpetrating a daily slow motion 9/11 upon the people of Northern Syria. Have those who have supported these terrorists been denounced by the US, the UN, or NATO? Hell no…they have not. Their inaction has been a crime in and of itself.

And the reason would be that the Persian Gulf proxies might then get angry and go public with the revelation that everything they have been doing was with the full knowledge and approval of their Western partners, those seemingly so concerned about these recently mass murdered innocent people. But I see no rage in their hearts for the deaths they are responsible for via the al-Nusra Takfiri throat cutters.

In 2006 General Wesley Clark once touched on this situational ethics tactic with his famous quote on the Iraq war:

“They (the government) actually believe that the major obstacle to success in Iraq is the American people…that we are the obstacle to success. If they can keep us from knowing the truth, they think they can win!”

The UN and Mr. Ban Ki-moon come out looking just as bad, or worse. Has there been any mention of even an investigation of the Persian Gulf state proxies being in violation of international terrorism laws which would actually list them as targets for pre-emptive strikes? Is the UN Secretary threatening to hold a vote to have them kicked out of the UN, sanctions being imposed and international law proceedings against them under the terrorism and war crime statutes? Of course not.

Most humiliating of all are the pitiful mutterings of the Obama regime about “target updating”, dusting off “contingency plans” to be ready to attack Syria when the President gives the green light. Do they really think the public is so stupid as to not see through this charade in two seconds?

The SNC leaders should all have international arrest warrants put out for them this weekend. Their uploading of the atrocity videos before the event was alleged to have happened was indeed an unprecedented major blunder.

The West and the UN proceeded with their saber rattling as if the video timing gaff did not totally expose the slaughter of these innocent people as the dying gasp of a morally bankrupt SNC. That effectively put their stamp of approval on the committed atrocity and the attempted deception. They are turning a blind eye to the obvious, makes them look like co-conspirators of the SNC, a huge credibility mistake on their parts.

Basic intelligence analysis 101 proceeds on a dual track, looking at what you can see to measure its veracity, and then more importantly looking for missing clues, things that should be visible if the purported act did actually happen as claimed.

Right off the top there are no photos of 1,300 dead victims, and for good reason. There are not that many. Why are bodies of dead children not shown with the dead families, as they would normally be buried together? All we have are claims from a totally unreliable entity (the SNC) who has every reason to have staged the event. Even an idiot would realize this, and the US military and intelligence agencies surely do.

You might ask where the SCN could get such a chemical weapon to use in this war crime. Who has the largest stockpile of WMD including chemical and biological weapons in the Mid East? It is Israel of course.

Is Israel a biased party here, also engaged in supporting the insurgent training, arming and slipping them some Sarin gas to use in a “red line” triggering event? Has Israel ever attacked the United States or run a major false flag operation to make use of American military power? The answers are yes and yes.

Not only is Israel the lead suspect in doing this but it is nearly certain that Washington is fully aware and approving. If not,  the offensive use of WMD by Israel should normally result in ending all US aid, but we know that this will never happen, because the Israelis will just say: “You told us it was OK.”

Painfully absent from those in power in the West is any appearance of objectivity in analyzing the gas attack claims. The usual mutterings are being made about need to check the facts and confirm sources but that has no validity.

The US and the West have watched their allies slaughter of the Syrian people without a single mention that I am aware of for any law enforcement or military action being taken against them. Who has ever heard a call for the Free Syrian Army to be holding trials for the worst murderers in their ranks, who has ever heard an appeal to the al-Nusrats?

I have to use an age old cliché but it fits so well, “The emperor doth wear no clothes.” To even describe the Western leaders response to this latest war crime as a “foreign policy” is a smear on the phrase.

It is more of a three ring circus. Not the entertainment kind, but the brutal version put on the the Romans in the Colosseum where citizens watched the unfortunate victims die before them as a form of state policy public diversion of that time. Doesn’t this shoddily done false flag attack bare similar motivations?

The bottom line question is, why now such a saber rattling show is being put on? General Dempsey has already said that he can destroy the Syrian Air Force but that would have no strategic effect for improving “American interests”. He said that even if the FSA won there was no evidence that they would be beholden to American interests.

Have you noticed how no one ever lays it out to us what those interests are? It’s a bit odd isn’t it, almost like they want to wait until the thing is over and then tell us with 20/20 hindsight.

Obama covered himself with there being no attack without a UN mandate. Russia and China will never go along with that, so don’t hold your breath for the cruise missiles to start flying. But that said, what is being rolled out now with all the war blustering is the classic “preparing the minds” of the public for something. We have been here many times before. We know the smell.

Could that be in regard to the French reports of CIA and Israeli trained commandos crossing over from Jordan into Syria to help prop up the big losses the insurgents are taking? Are they there as a feint, or a deterrent to the Russians forward deploying their advanced S-300’s close to the border so they can intercept enemy air attacks inside the originating country where they can fire GBS guided munitions?

Notice Iran’s and Russia’s exercise of restraint in the face of public war strike displays of the US. All Iran says is that its growing military power is no threat to any regional neighbor unless it is attacked. Yet the West and Israel do not require an attack to threaten massive use of their military power. They claim the right to attack “potential threats” (defined by them of course).

Who is playing the big bad bully here, the nations of the East, who usually are portrayed as bogeymen, or the proverbial peace and democracy loving West? If the world would held a vote tomorrow we all know who would win the aggressive threat vote. But that is a democracy game the West does not want to play. 

The Manning Verdict

About the Manning Verdict: The Implication of Placation

Diane Gee  Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox

Bradley Manning was sentenced to 35 of the possible 136 years they could have given him. Eligible for a parole hearing in 10, it will likely come up in 7 with “time served.” The MSM tried to frame as “accidental” the civilian murders on the released war-porn video, one of many such images and videos Manning witnessed, despite the soundtrack showing the unadulterated blood-lust and glee at the hit. Even the judge could not find “damage-done” though at one point, Manning did the smart thing and offered a general apologia prior to sentencing.

Lets face it. People we are bombing know we double-tap. Thats why they hate us, beyond the general “invade my country and kill my family and take all my resources” general hate. We kill civilians with GLEE. 

Manning’s statement today was profound. 

“Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy-the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism, the Japanese-American internment camps-to name a few. I am confident that many of our actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light. As the late Howard Zinn once said, ‘There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.’”

So, as the unexpectedly soft sentence came?  My though process was as follows… 

While it is a travesty of justice, I am mildly astonished that the sentence was that light in this toxic political climate. He will be eligible for parole in 7 years (with time served) and there is a move on the table to lessen or commute his sentence. I have to think it was not mercy, more likely fear of making people rally against harshness that influenced this. They fear us.

I would like to expand on that thought process:

Manning did no damage, and they know it.  His barbaric torture prior to the trial was nothing but a warning to other whistleblowers, by an administration that has gone after more whistleblowers than all other presidencies in our history combined. “Here be monsters!” was their warning. “Be afraid,” was their cry, while they made Manning an example to us all.

Had Snowden not come along? Manning would be doing life.

They fear us so much, that now they are playing a game of manipulation to stave rebellion as the Empire falls like a clumsily built house of cards, on a gusty August afternoon, in the autumn of Global Climate Change. You know, because he who is hung last and has the most hoarded might have half a fucking chance when the feces hit the proverbial fan.

But as more unfolds on Snowden? They may have to throw us a bone with Manning, to show they are “fair.” The thing is? Manning did no real damage, except in the US’s view of themselves, while Snowden could bring down the whole house of cards.

Snowden is danger. Snowden can do real damage. The fear and loathing doesn’t drip, its being mainlined faster than a junkie slamming the plunger into his DTing veins. Our allies are at our bequest, treating Glenn Greenwald’s family like terrorists. They are smashing hard drives like the 2nd graders who think if they tear up the test they failed, it won’t count. I mean really, in exposing the mining of the cloud you are actively doing, you don’t understand the information is already in the cloud? You might just be too stupid to live. But they do understand it. They are grasping at intimidation straws thinking as they slip over the waterfall, that they can scare the water into not flowing.

Ok, enough bad mixing of metaphors, but it is hard not to become personally invested and animated by what is happening.

So, when Snowden is assassinated? Mysteriously dies? Is found naked and high and in some compromising position with more questions than answers? We will have reasonable doubt they would “go that far” because “Manning got a fair shake.”

They will have more credibility by giving us the sacrificial “thief” in the crowd than the actual “savior.” In other words? They can afford leniency with Manning — they already broke him, and it took 3 years to so do. By giving us him? When they go after Snowden by any means necessary, they can use Manning as proof that they are not monsters. And Monsters with a capital M they are. Manning is expendable to them — a PR gift to us without appearing weak, while Snowden? He is public enemy numero uno, biotches.

I would not be entirely surprised if Obama commuted Manning’s sentence, which of course would feed the plan of the Democratic demise in the next POTUS round, in the name of SECURITY and evil “socialism.” Obama was a perfect tool to bring a Police State with little resistance. But now that so many cats are exiting said sacks? They need a Daddy-figure badass to bring it into full fruition.

It is, in fact, 12 fucking dimensional chess. Just not the game you thought. Black you lose, white they win, baby. Its the Uniparty.

“Don’t make them rise up over the one we already broke, who didn’t harm the Elites at all, or we will never get away with flaying the man who really can hurt us. Never give suffering people a martyr. Give them hope, and doubt.”

Sometimes I wonder why I am the only one who is sick enough to think like they do. I feel like a profiler who is too deep in the criminals’ minds….

I can see this playing out, and people’s outrage, which will be so very short lived since its not hundreds of years. I can see something happening to Greenwald and Snowden, and mainstream Americans having “reasonable doubt” that we had “anything!” to do with it… since it happened in one of those countries we see as savage and alien in our ignorance. Especially now that Manning got a surprisingly fair shake from a government we all have been seeing more and more as totalitarian.

Its so easy to confuse us.

But? If you had everything? How would you play it? Placate, obfuscate, eliminate.

I would play it exactly like this. Mark my words, so will they.