General

The title for this piece is a line from the lyrics of “Strawberry Fields Forever”, sung for the bemusement and ponderation of future generations by The Beatles, and written by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, John Winston, and Paul James.  Back in ’67 when the song was new and freshly put to vinyl, the lyrics made perfect sense.  Of course, I was smoking a lot of weed in those days.  Socrates is credited with saying that the only thing we can truly know is that we can know nothing.  Enigmatic phrases from many of their songs would indicate that The Beatles concurred.

Ahh, little things count – you know, when those big bad ass union bosses pulling in $150K a year or more, yammer on about $15 an hour minimum wage, but, err, not for unions:

Could any dictator desire more? Almost the entire population of the Empire is now thinking the same way!
The populace is “educated” at schools and the universities staffed with submissive, and cowardly teachers and professors.
The populace is “informed” by hundreds of thousands of servile journalists and “analysts”. There is almost no deviation from the official narrative.
Congratulations, Western Empire! You have succeeded where others tried but failed. You have achieved almost absolute obedience and discipline, a total servility.

Officials in Jerusalem have approved a massive construction project, including plans for housing, shops and a hotel, on one of the largest and most historically important Islamic cemeteries in the Middle East.
A previous project to build a courthouse at the site, part of Mamilla Cemetery, was scrapped two years ago after it provoked a storm of protest.

The erasure of national sovereignty leads, not to Shangri-La as some would have us believe, but to a supranational consolidated ‘sovereignty’ presided over by banking interests, which is no sovereignty at all. On the contrary, it’s the Town Hall of the Panopticon. Greece is not some idiot uncle who simply needs a loan to get back in the fold. That’s a tragic misread. Greece is the canary in our mine-shaft, loss-leader on the road to global debt servitude. As goes Greece so too will go the world in due course. Others wait in the wings: Puerto Rico, Italy, Portugal, the US.

The behavior of an individual is determined not by their background, but by the character of their ancestry and cultural environment.
— Franz Boas, Race and Democratic Society (“Introduction,” 1945)

Are we special? Scientists have been asking that question for perhaps centuries. In various philosophical and religious ways, we have too.
The truth is that we don’t really know. Politicians, more assuredly, American politicians, feel obligated to say that America and Americans are special. The GOP, especially, bases its politics on a version of America having jingoistic trump (not with a big T) cards, one seen especially with the George W. Bush administration.

July 18th 2015 was the first day of this year’s summer camp for the world’s business and political aristocracy and their invited guests. 2,000 to 3,000 men, mostly from the wealthiest global one percent, gather at Bohemian Grove, 70 miles north of San Francisco in California’s Sonoma County—to sit around the campfire and chew the fat—off-the-record—with ex-presidents, corporate leaders and global financiers.

DV contributor Gary Brumback’s newest book, Corporate Reckoning Ahead, is available to DV readers as a free Kindle download from 20 July to 24 July.

Governor Bobby Jindal yesterday announced he is praying over his decision whether to run for president. Yesterday he also issued an executive order supporting discrimination against marriages by Louisiana gay and lesbian citizens, minutes after a similar bill was overwhelmingly rejected by the Louisiana legislature.