COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

Trump turning US into ‘world champion of extreme inequality’, UN envoy warns
Special rapporteur Philip Alston, fresh from fact-finding tour, issues devastating critique of US society and condemns ‘private wealth and public squalor’

“Trump turning US into ‘world champion of extreme inequality’, UN envoy warns”

I’m sorry, but that is an uninformed statement.

I grew up in the United States, in a large city, and the kind of slums we see here have been around since I was young.

Detroit, Baltimore, Toledo, New Orleans, parts of Chicago, parts of New York, Newark, Gary, and dozens of other places would shock Europeans who are used to seeing only travel photos and Hollywood movies.

The stark poverty and ugliness are not in way distinguishable from parts of the third world.

And it’s not just cities. Many years ago, I was taking some photos of river bridges near Joliet, Illinois, and I turned onto a small road to get one of the shocks of my life. There was a sizable settlement of homemade shanty structures ahead on both sides of the road. It looked exactly like something from Soweto, South Africa, and perhaps worse.

The United States is full of such surprises. You find them in Appalachia and out on the Southwestern desert, quite apart from all the vast urban slums. A great many Americans live in beat-up little trailers in places like rural Maine or Arizona.

It isn’t Trump, although I’m sure he won’t be helping.

And it isn’t just Republicans.

Democrats in the national government along with Republicans have done nothing about this.

Obama, the first black president, did nothing.

The places I’ve listed plus many others have looked like scenes from hell for forty or fifty years.

America’s government has busied itself with creating new ruins in many parts of the world. instant ruins with bombs. That’s how it spends its time and resources.

Washington has shown no interest and made no effort for decades to help the American people. Washington resembles more an occupying power than a government “of the people.”

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY CHARLIE BROOKER IN THE GUARDIAN

 

Mr Brooker, this is an entirely silly piece.

First, you cannot use the word “theory” for a notion which is in your own words “unprovable.”

Theories, by definition, are capable of being disproved by data.

Otherwise, they are just notions. Much like the vapid content of dreams themselves.

The rest of this piece goes downhill from there.

It isn’t amusing. It’s dumb.

Where great power is at stake, believe me, conspiracies are a reality.

If you don’t know that, you’ve not read any history.

And if you’ve read no history, why bother are you bothering to write?

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

That must be some journal to publish such a feeble idea and some academic to come up with it.

It is simply ridiculous work to be called science or research or even an idea.

The standards in academia have fallen almost everywhere and thus the rise in pseudo-journals for second-raters trying to get published.

Our world can be divided into things which are simply facts and all the rest, including fears and lies and nonsense.

One certifiable fact of today’s world is that governments have invested increasingly in elaborate lies and misrepresentations to their people. This reflects both increased prosperity with so much more at risk than ever before and the world-scale of so many events and activities.

In Britain, the examples of Tony Blair’s stream of lies or the mysterious death of Doctor Kelly surely resonate with many ordinary souls who could never be called “conspiracy theorists.”

In the United States, the list is huge, as you might expect in a country whose establishment focuses on controlling events everywhere and telling others how to live their lives.

Another fact is that the very term, “conspiracy theorist,” was coined by the CIA decades ago to be used to disparage honest people who just want to know the truth about some important events such as the Kennedy assassination.

That term was picked up by the press and is still used to this day. It’s a rather sad reflection of the state of our press and its relationship to the government and the establishment.

Propaganda articles like this one – The Independent regularly does them to keep the term “conspiracy theorist” alive and flourishing – always dredge up the skeptics about moon landing, clearly in the eyes of most people a paranoid fringe group. We hardly need a professor’s formula to determine the validity of what is complete nonsense.

But such articles never deal with the really hard cases. The lies of Tony Blair. The murder of Doctor Kelly , a man who knew too much about WMD. The downing of Flight MH 17 and the unacceptable investigation of it. The American-induced coup in Ukraine. The murderous efforts of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel to topple Assad and turn Syria into the kind of broken mini-states we see in Iraq. The infinite lies that made a million deaths in Iraq possible. Israel’s explanations for the horrors of Gaza. And the list goes on and on.

Great powers playing dirty games lie and hide what they do every day, and calling someone a “conspiracy theorist” who says so is just derogatory, not informative.

It actually resembles, albeit in a lighter vein, calling someone who questions Israel’s brutal treatment of millions an “anti-Semite.” You might not think such a nonsense dirty tactic would work, but it is repeated day after day.

It was Hitler – one of history’s great liars and therefore an authority on the subject – who explained the concept of “the big lie.” Say even something outrageous often enough, and people will believe it, at least enough of them to matter.

Indeed that is a founding, unspoken principle of almost all advertising and of almost all our news sources today. And that is no “conspiracy theory,” just a hard fact.

 

 

John Chuckman

COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

I’m sorry, but to this moment, we do not know bin Laden plotted anything.

There’s never been a shred of proof.

The U.S. has always begged the question. When the Taleban government refused to extradite bin Laden, it was over completely correct procedure. The U.S. supplied not a jot of evidence with their demand, as is required for legal extraditions.

I thought you were in the news business, Independent, and disliked “conspiracy theories”?

And diesel fuel – jet fuel being a form of it – simply cannot burn hot enough to melt structural steel.

Moreover the designers of the twin towers over-built the buildings: they were designed to be able to take being hit by an airliner.

These are facts.

I’m not saying, and I don’t know, where they lead us, but I’ll always stick with facts as a foundation for thought.

The only certainty here is that the official story cannot be true.