The doomsday clock sits near midnight. You should be concerned. Here are two books I was examining yesterday and this morning.
In my opinion, these are two books that Americans should read.
There is also a video with Ray McGovern.
"The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. —Albert Einstein, 1946"
"Madness in individuals is something rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule." —Friedrich Nietzsche
Daniel Ellsberg's book, The Doomsday Machine is even more relevant today than it was when it was published in 2017. Then, the pundits were worried about Trump.
It is much more dangerous today with Biden, as we have a government run by NeoCon presidential managers and a Deep State that believes the US can win a nuclear war.
In 2017, it had taken Ellsberg 5 years to find anyone willing to publish it.
Vladimir Putin received a Russian translation: Certainly, part of the reason why he could not tolerate US missiles in Ukraine. He understood how insane The Americans were... That means us, but what we think does not matter. The Deep State does our thinking for us. You may vote if you wish. It feels good, but your vote is meaningless, as we live in the United States, a pretension of a Republic, that we pretend exists by calling it a Democracy.
Quote from The Deep State by Mike Lofgren.
“Anyone who has spent time on Capitol Hill will occasionally get the feeling when watching debates in the House or Senate chambers that he or she is seeing a kind of marionette theater, with members of Congress reading carefully vetted talking points about prefabricated issues. This impression was particularly strong both in the run-up to the Iraq War and later, during the mock deliberations over funding that ongoing debacle. While the public is now aware of the disproportionate influence of powerful corporations over Washington, best exemplified by the judicial travesty known as the Citizens United decision, few fully appreciate that the United States has in the last several decades gradually undergone a process first identified by Aristotle and later championed by Machiavelli that the journalist Edward Peter Garrett described in the 1930s as a “revolution within the form.” Our venerable institutions of government have outwardly remained the same, but they have grown more and more resistant to the popular will as they have become hardwired into a corporate and private influence network with almost unlimited cash to enforce its will.
Even as commentators decry a broken government that cannot marshal the money, the will, or the competence to repair our roads and bridges, heal our war veterans, or even roll out a health care website, there is always enough money and will, and maybe just a bare minimum of competence, to overthrow foreign governments, fight the longest war in U.S. history, and conduct dragnet surveillance over the entire surface of the planet.
This paradox of penury and dysfunction on the one hand and unlimited wealth and seeming omnipotence on the other is replicated outside of government as well. By every international metric of health and living standards, the rural counties of southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky qualify as third-world. So do large areas of Detroit, Cleveland, Camden, Gary, and many other American cities. At the same time, wealth beyond computation, almost beyond imagining, piles up in the money center of New York and the technology hub of Palo Alto. It piles up long enough to purchase a $95,000 truffle, a $38 million vintage Ferrari GTO, or a $179 million Picasso before the balance finds its way to an offshore hiding place. These paradoxes, both within the government and within the ostensibly private economy, are related. They are symptoms of a shadow government ruling the United States that pays little heed to the plain words of the Constitution. Its governing philosophy profoundly influences foreign and national security policy and such domestic matters as spending priorities, trade, investment, income inequality, privatization of government services, media presentation of news, and the whole meaning and worth of citizens’ participation in their government.
I have come to call this shadow government the Deep State. The term was actually coined in Turkey, and is said to be a system composed of high-level elements within the intelligence services, military, security, judiciary, and organized crime. In John le Carré’s recent novel A Delicate Truth, a character in the book describes the Deep State as “the ever-expanding circle of non-governmental insiders from banking, industry and commerce who were cleared for highly classified information denied to large swathes of Whitehall and Westminster.” I use the term to mean a hybrid association of key elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States with only limited reference to the consent of the governed as normally expressed through elections.
The Deep State is the big story of our time. It is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism and the militarization of foreign policy, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure that has given us the most unequal society in almost a century, and the political dysfunction that has paralyzed day-to-day governance.”
And a video and reminder: From Ray McGovern.
(from the video)
Biden could have stopped the Ukraine war with a phone call. But war was the intention of his handlers… The dangers today, and how Biden gave Putin no choice but to invade Ukraine. A clear reading of history going back to the death of Stalin, Crimea, and the 2014 USA-Nuland orchestrated coup in Ukraine. How the USA diddled Russia for decades, and how Biden lied to Putin when he said no missiles in Ukraine. This was a statement that was walked back by Blinken and those who run Biden a few weeks later, making Putin realize he could not trust Biden... Putin had read Daniel Ellsberg's book, The Doomsday Machine.