Russia has always fascinated me–the mystical orthodox faith brought to Kievan Rus in the ninth century, the stern heroes who defended Muscovy against the Golden Horde in the 13–15th centuries, the vast spaces, the remarkable literature of Pushkin and Tolstoy, the Bolshevik Revolution against imperialism … The West has always been a bit jealous of its proud race of genius.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.
— from Shakespeare’s Macbeth
Fifty Years after rhapsodic auguries of the acid-informed era involving the coming “Woodstock Nation,” the US citizenry — convulsed by violence, strung out on all the wrong drugs, and with the Rolling Stones still touring — stumble in mortification through the grim phantasmagoria of the United States Of Altamont. What a long, strange, bad (Nixonian in its dour, paranoid cultural and political aura; Reagan/Clinton/Obama in noxious, neoliberal fantasy; Bush/Trump in cresting tsunamis of raging stupid) trip it has been.
It is no secret that charter school advocates become disingenuous and belligerent when endless problems in the scandal-ridden charter school sector are exposed, criticized, and opposed with greater depth, sophistication, and regularity.
It used to be done regularly and it worked: The West identified a country as its enemy, unleashed its professional propaganda against it, then administered a series of sanctions, starving and murdering children, the elderly and other vulnerable groups. If the country did not collapse within months or just couple of years, the bombing would begin. And the nation, totally shaken, in pain, and in disarray, would collapse like a house of cards, once the first NATO boots hit its ground.
Such scenarios were re-enacted, again and again, from Yugoslavia to Iraq.
We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 1922
Some corporations and governments have used the US public as guinea pigs in uncontrolled experiments conducted without the public’s approval. They were often gambling with our well being when they introduced new products or conducted risky tests. In contrast, there were usually few risks for the CEOs or government officials in charge of these unacknowledged experiments.
It would appear that the Jeffrey Epstein case has pushed its bony elbows through the gauzy fabric of our “reality” narrative and bumped us all closer to a long overdue CRISIS of confidence with both our government and the mainstream media.
Faction: a number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.
— James Madison Federalist #10
