Trisha Johnson

I was going to do a piece on the explosions in Boston, yesterday but, honestly, this from Dave Lindorff says it all. Anyone who’s read this blog knows I’m just a little preoccupied with events which support the idea that there is such a thing as ‘karma’ and that societies which become too enamored of, or too engrossed in, themselves – to the detriment of the rest of humanity – invariably wind up suffering the consequences of such an obsession. As Lindorff has subtitled his piece, it is time to Reap the Whirlwind.

I have not stopped looking at the comings and goings of idiots who claim the right to rule the rest of us. I’ve been busy finishing another Kindle Book called, “Miracles Don’t Come Cheap. Details are available at my website:

http://www.trisha-johnson.com/stories/stories.htm

Why not check it out?

The British newspaper, The Telegraph is running this piece today, in which General, Sir David Richards, the Chief of the Defense Staff states: “Britain could intervene militarily in Syria over the winter”. Well bully for you, General! I’m positively bursting with nationalistic pride over yet another glorious, heaven sent, opportunity to pound those darned Mooslims to dust.

Read the public comments, why don’t you?

What in the name of all that’s Holy is wrong with these people? Are they oblivious to the fact that we have no skin in this game?; that, thanks to the unrestrained, and criminal, excesses of the Banking Fraternity, our nation is – to use a widely used colloquialism – ‘potless’ and lacking even a small window to throw it out of?; that the public pension obligations of the British Government were announced yesterday and apparently have reached 348% of British GDP?; and, that getting involved in the Middle East will only encourage those crazy Americans – who never met a chaotic situation they didn’t want to get involved in, on account of their being the only ones who can fix things, and who just happen to be, equally potless and equally challenged in the ‘window to throw it out of’ department?

I do not live in Britain, anymore. Truthfully, I cannot! The place is full to overflowing with idiots who fall for the old, ‘We’re British, and our place is at the top of the heap’, bullshit, time and again.

So, General, Sir David Richards, the Chief of the Defense Staff, you go and have your little war. Go and win one for the team. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll even make it to the front line and put your own life on the line? Though, as is certainly the case with our ‘lead from the rear’, Prime Minister, Cameron, I rather doubt you will.

So, Mr. Obama, part time Messiah, and full time Israeli Vice President for American Affairs, has been returned to his golden throne atop the rotting corpses of his victims in Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Mali, Libya and, perhaps – still to come – Iran. How is it possible that the voters of a country we are told, repeatedly, is the ‘shining beacon on the hill’, the nation that sees further and clearer than any other, and represents man’s last, best hope, overlook the fact that this person, this peace laureate, is nothing more than a vile murderer of the innocent in far away places? How can it be?

Perhaps, since America is a nation born of a genocide, grown powerful by greed, mendacity and outright brutality and sustained by illusion and delusion, it is no more than a rhetorical question I’ve posed?

At least Romney remains free of the blood stains of slaughter, but only because he didn’t win the crown!

Two topics have been preeminent in my thoughts this week: Islamophobia and Climate change. As with many of man’s problems, the solutions are quite clear, but likely unenforceable because of deeply entrenched vested interests.

I’ll take the easy one first!

Much has been made of widespread protests throughout the Muslim world, both in the Western media as well as those suppurating dens of iniquity, namely, Washington, Westminster, Tel Aviv and Brussels, with a slight nod of the head in the direction of Canberra (the capital of Australia for all you well informed graduate students out there). What’s it really about? A movie that exists only in trailer form? I think not!

The simple truth about Islam is not that it wishes to remain stuck in medieval times but that, because of constant meddling on the part of countless foreign powers over the past two centuries, it has never had the opportunity to evolve as has Christianity. Ah, I hear you say, what about the fundamentalist Christian sects, with their in your face insistence that you ‘come to Jesus or be damned’? What about the Book of Revelation fanatics and their desire to bring about Armageddon and the Rapture? Are they any different? No, they are not, but there is within the Christian orthodoxy a wide divergence of the interpretation of the Bible which provides a counterbalance to the more extreme proponents of its message. This does not exist within the Islamic world, because it has been and still is under the malevolent influence of the West.

Britain deserves much of the blame for the travails of the modern Muslim world and is still busy setting Muslim against Muslim today, though, to be honest, these days, in the capacity of principle supporter and coat holder to the Americans. One can, however, if one is quiet enough, still hear ‘Westminster’ whispering encouragements in the ear of this or that American President to keep prodding the ‘fuzzy wuzzies’. Space does not permit a full history of Britain’s nefarious undertakings in the Middle East, but some events are worth noting:

1) The British invasion of Afghanistan, December, 1838, the premise of which was: “in order to ensure the welfare of India, the British must have a trustworthy ally on India’s western frontier”. It was also to provide a bulwark against Russin influence. In that respect, the Cold War truly began in the nineteenth century! The British were roundly defeated by the Afghan tribesmen, though most of the soldiers killed in that skirmish were Indian.  Naturally! Later, on November 12, 1893, Amir Abdul Rahman Khan of Afghanistan and Sir Mortimer Durand, the foreign secretary of the British Indian government both agreed and signed the Durand Line Treaty, setting up the border between Afghanistan and then British India/present-day Pakistan. The boundary was established in the Hindu Kush in 1893 running through the tribal lands between Afghanistan and British India, marking their respective spheres of influence and effectively cutting the Pashtun nation in half.

2) Britain’s involvement in Sudan, where they came up against a popular Arab uprising lead by the Mahdi.

3) The Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917, which stated, “His Majesty’s government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” Palestine was a British Mandate carved out of the former Ottoman Empire, post WW I, at that time. To be fair, the British Government offered the Jews a homeland in British East Africa. The Jews, understandably, declined!

4) Another spoil of WW I was Iraq, where Britain found itself holding the bag, so to speak. Britain redrew the map of Iraq, jamming Kurds, Sunni and Shia together in an administrative abortion called Iraq. Iraq was tough to administer during that time. A million British troops were unable to quell the constant rebellion, even with chemical weapons. It might seem a little odd that the administration of George W. Bush would be ignorant of the religious and ethnic tensions present in that land, even under the iron rule of Washington’s man, Saddam Hussein. I’ll be charitable and put it down to Attention Deficit Disorder! Of course, after the Iraq war (the second one, that is), the moment Western troops left, the Iraqi government drew closer to Iran. But, that’s not the worst of it! During the build up to that war, sanctions imposed by Blair, Clinton and Bush Junior were the direct cause of the deaths of half a million Iraqi children, and the best that Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State in the Clinton administration, could come up with when asked about this appalling fact was, ‘that it was a price worth paying’. And the West is now applying those same sanctions to Iran. And, for what? Oil! Not to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Oil! Think about that next time you fill up your gas tank.

5) Britain’s long involvement in Saudi Arabia, a nation rich in oil, ruled by a despotic royal family, who espouse an extremist form of Islam, Wahhabism, and having a significant Shia population who favor closer relations with Iran.

6) In Egypt, Britain’s involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood, see here, and here.  The West is once again uneasy over the ascendency of the Muslim Brotherhood, in particular its clear intention to make Eqypt the leader of the Arab world (a desire it has always had) and its recently declared objective of overthrowing Abdullah bin Al-Hussein, the present King of Jordan.

7) Britain and America conspired to overthrow the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran in 1953, with the intention of installing Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi as Shar (King) of Iran in order to gain Western dominance over Iran’s large oil reserves. The Shar was the first Arab leader to recognize Israel. And the list goes on!

We now have the British once more in Afghanistan, up to their tricks in Iraq and the Horn of Africa, and pushing for war against Iran.

Britain thrived, technologically and commercially once Henry VIII expelled the Church of Rome from the body politic and relegated religion to the role of instructor and social conscience. Over time, Europe followed suit. Now, imagine the Islamic world, freed of Western interference, freed of being ruled by Western puppets who govern by military force, whose weaponry is paid for by the West (foreign aid), who provide the people with no national identity other than through their religious connections, one with the other, and across national boundaries, so desperate for real leadership that they will embrace any charismatic leader, religious or not, who might step forward to resist Western tyranny. Do Muslims as a whole support terrorism? No! Is Islam itself a religion steeped in violence? Of course not! Terrorism gives justification for the West’s continued involvement in the Muslim world. That’s why Western governments fund so many terrorist groups: it’s good for business! I firmly believe that given the freedom to elect their own leaders and to follow their own path for growth that over time, we would see the reemergence of the real Middle East which gave us Mathematics, Astronomy and Legal Jurisprudence. The Islamic religion would still be a central part of Muslim life, but it would take on the role of instructor, guide and conscience – just like Christianity.

And, now to Climate Change. There’s not a lot to say, really. After all, do you, do any of you, intend to give up driving your truck to work, engaging in tractor pulls, mud racing, going to the mall, traveling by plane to the furthest reaches of the planet, running your A.C. at 70 degrees, rain or shine? Do any of you intend to give up eating non-seasonal produce, flown from the other side of the world? Will you ever stop purchasing stuff made in China, brought to your local Walmart by container ships and 18 wheelers? Will any of you protest the massive pollution caused by wars and the energy consumption required to power them? Will you insist the energy companies clean up their act, that gas drilling which causes earthquakes and pollution of the fresh water table (even the drying up of the Mississippi River, it’s been suggested) be more closely regulated? I doubt it! So, climate change and its effects on humans and the natural world is here to stay.

Oh, I know, people are talking about it. There’s Solar Power and Wind Turbines and Wave Power and all that awesome stuff, but it’s true impact on America’s C02 emissions is negligible. The Germans get it and have proven it can be done and done effectively, but in the Land of the Free, it’s nothing more than a socialist plot!

Don’t look to the politicians to fix this! They’re owned by Wall Street and the Energy Companies. Any solution offered by these intellectual midgets will be skewed to making them and their cronies even richer. Like a Carbon Tax for instance. It’s a scam, designed to sell carbon emission quotas to countries which do not currently produce such emissions in exchange for money so WE can keep spewing the stuff into the atmosphere with a clear conscience. It’s bullshit and it won’t work! Watch any TV program on the subject and you’ll hear the same old arguments: it’ll require a reset of our quality of life to a pre-industrial level. Yada! Yada! What they won’t tell you, other than in a throw away statement as the credits are rolling, is that humans have destroyed half of the world’s rainforests, mostly under the auspices of the IMF and World Bank, who hand out loans to impoverished governments in exchange for their planting vast forests of Pine Nuts, or Soya, or beef for hamburgers which further enrich Western Corporations and the banks who own the IMF and the World Bank.

Want to help fix climate change? It’s simple. Buy only what you need for yourself and your family. Teach your kids the old-fashioned concept of saving up for what they want. Grow your own food. Quit using credit! And, become an Eco-anarchist by planting trees, anywhere and everywhere. Trees consume CO2. I know this because, in Belize, the increased level of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere is making our rainforests and coconut palms grow at a tremendous rate. Belize has planted more than two million trees over the past decade. Mexico has planted one point two billion trees during that same period and is close to reducing its deforestation rate to zero. Even Guatemala has joined the club, working with Belize to plant aerial pathways for migrating animals. Trees are not difficult to propagate. They require no loans from the IMF and the World Bank to pay for them, and anyone can plant them – even children. The best part is: those crooks on Wall Street won’t make a penny from it, which is why they never mention it!

Read this today!

Need I say more?

The proposition that our world, in terms of its biosphere and resources – both organic and mineral – is close to being overwhelmed by relentless population expansion is not a new one; nor is it unique to humans. Any organism, confined within a geographic or environmental boundary, that lacks a natural predator, or has evolved to occupy a specific niche, will, if its reproductive rate exceeds its mortality rate by a large enough margin, eventually face the possibility of extinction. Of course, there are factors besides mere population growth which impact the longevity of a species: for instance, the organism’s food source may be able to keep pace with its growth rate, the organism may produce little in the way of waste material, resulting in little effect on the biosphere which it inhabits. However, all things being equal, exponential growth typically results in a species’ eventual demise as the biosphere its self undergoes evolutionary changes, or is impacted by some kind of calamity. This story has been repeated over and over again as now extinct species proved to be incapable of responding to sudden change. Unfortunately, humans are not your average organism. Not only are we breeding faster than we die, we are constantly redefining our interaction with the natural world in ways which facilitate our continued numerical growth – to wit, improved healthcare and the eradication of diseases by immunization, the widespread use of pesticides, fertilizers,  genetic modification, and the wider distribution of basic food stuffs, such as cereals and rice, which can now be transported rapidly from nations with a surplus to those suffering from a deficit.

Malthus devoted much of his academic energy to the study of the relationship between a population and its food supply, though, to be honest, this was hardly news! Famines have been regular visitors throughout human history. What Malthus did was to show that we held our own survival in our hands. It’s a misconception that he espoused genocide, nor was he an advocate for the policy of limiting or reducing population growth according to racial stereotype, he simply put forward the idea that humans were more than capable of managing their reproductive rate to match the local availability of food, given that increasing agricultural productivity to match a burgeoning population was a lengthy and often difficult undertaking. He also pointed out that if humans did not control population growth, nature, in time, would do it for them.

Malthus steered clear of highly emotive pronouncements such as, ‘we need to redistribute global wealth’, or ‘we must aim for a human population of 1.5 to 2 billion’.  Paul Ehrlich, Bing professor of population studies at Stanford University in California and author of the best-selling Population Bomb book in 1968, has not. In a piece published by the British Guardian newspaper, he asserts that our population must be reduced by [my calculation] some five billion souls. Plus!

Ehrlich finds himself in broad agreement with a British Royal Society report that states that human population and consumption should not be divided. I quote: “[They] multiply together. You have to deal with them together. We have too much consumption among the rich and too little among the poor. That implies that we are going to have to somehow redistribute access to resources away from the rich to the poor. But in the US we have been doing the opposite. The Republican party is wildly in favor of more redistribution, taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich.” Unquote. Oh, yeah, like it’s different in Britain, or Europe, for that matter, where the only people who count are the Criminal Fraternity of International Bankers and their political bitches, and everyone else is disposable! For their part, neither Ehrlick, nor the cerebral midgets at the Royal Society tell us how this is to be accomplished! Meanwhile, in the real world, Obama – and Bush/Blair and Clinton/Blair, before him – have been doing their best to reduce the global head count, but their focus has been the Muslin world, which accounts for 2.1 billion people, and the result can best be described as ‘nickle and dime’. No attempt has been made by them to reduce the Chinese (1,336,718,015) or Indian (1,189,172,906) populations, or the Japanese (126,475,664), though they are busy removing themselves from the physical plane by the slow motion suicide of radioactive poisoning! Then there’s the Africans, with a total of 922,011,000 ‘useless eaters’, every one of whom has the effrontery to wander aimlessly about a continent that contains oodles of the mineral deposits we in the West so assiduously covet. I’m pretty good at Mathematics! If we whack just these people – and leave the Japanese to take care of themselves -  it’ll subtract 5,674,377,585 from the current global head count of 7,038,987,027, leaving 1,364,609,442 which is right in Ehrlich’s sweet spot.

So, my question is: who gets to die? My next question is: who gets to choose who gets to die?

Let’s check out America’s (that is the West’s) Foreign policy stance. Killing Muslims – Check. Killing off the Chinese – planned, as soon as we find some other impoverished nation to make Ipods and cheap stuff for Walmart to sell to the rubes. Killing off the Indians – we’ll get Pakistan to do it. Africa – well, Libya, Sudan and Somalia are a good start. Japan – we gave them Stuxnet, so they’re screwed, anyway!

Is it so surprising that the think tanks which pollute the Washington Beltway, Westminster and the European Parliament are pressing for foreign policies that produce the results Paul Ehrlich and the Royal Society so fervently espouse? Not that I’m suggesting Ehrlich and the authors of the Royal Society report are promoting genocide; nor do I suggest they’re front men, testing the water of public opinion. What I do say is that it’s clear their message has been received, loud and clear, in the corridors of power and the actions required to achieve a ‘sustainable’ global population are, as I write this, well in hand.

When it comes to abortion, I admit I have mixed feelings. First of all, I was given up for adoption a few weeks after my birth, so I’m only too aware that I might never have existed had my biological mother decided not to proceed with the pregnancy. However, while I’m not in favor of abortion, personally, I regard any woman’s decision to discontinue a pregnancy as being hers alone – along with input from family members and the medical profession – and not the subject of government diktat, since government serves only itself, never the individual.

What, then, is driving the Republican Party’s anti-abortion hysteria, which risks alienating the greater part of the electorate, namely, women? I assert it has nothing to do with the sanctity of life! I base my claim on the clear evidence that the Republicans and their Democratic counterparts, by their actions, appear equally committed to the eradication of large numbers of brown and black people across the entire planet – including within the U.S., its self – by means of incarceration, war, covert military and intelligence operations, drone attacks, financially induced famines, environmental destruction and pollution.

Consider the statistics provided for 1995, by the web site, AbortionFacts. They are quite revealing! Of all the abortions undertaken during that year, 57.8 percent were white, 33.9 percent were black, while only 5.3 per cent were other racial types. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention web site contains more recent information. I quote from their report “Among women from the 37 areas that reported race for 2007, white women (including Hispanic and non-Hispanic white women) accounted for the largest percentage (55.9%) of abortions; black women accounted for 36.5% and women of other racial groups for 7.6% of abortions…”

So, over a fourteen year period, the percentages have changed very little! It would be simplistic to fixate on this one figure: the analysis is far more complex than that! However, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the demographic shift in political power, from white to non-white, resulting from the higher birth rates of non-whites is exacerbated by the act of abortion.

Much of the impetus for the Republican assault on abortion comes from the religious right in America, who fund so many of its politicians. The same religious right which has demonstrated by its clamorous support for Bush’s crusade against Islam – dutifully continued under Obama – a commitment to the continuation of White Supremacy.  Perhaps this is also the motivation for the Creationism movement? It was Bishop James Ussher who insisted the Earth was a mere six thousand years old, but he was motivated less by truth than the desire to  establish the superiority of the scholarship practiced by the clergy of his reformed faith over that of the Jesuits, the resolutely intellectual Roman Catholic order. His work featured prominently in the Scopes trial, thereby introducing an act of religious ‘oneupmanship’ into a serious scientific legal debate. Is it any wonder modern America is so schizophrenic? Though I have no problem with those who believe that the Bible is a literal history of Earth, and do so honestly and in true faith, this is not what the abortion and evolution debates are about at the political level. While the theory of evolution is anathema to the White Supremacist because it implies that, not only did humans evolve from primates, but that the first humans were likely black skinned, abortion, as it pertains to the white race, is potentially a death sentence!

Right wing religious leaders are driven not only by dogma, the need to remain relevant and the desire to control the prevailing social dialogue, many claim they – white people, that is – have the God given right to govern the entire world, even to the point of orchestrating its eventual destruction! (See, Dispensationism and Dominionism).  How are they different to Xerxes, Attila the Hun, the Romans or the Mongol Hordes? When argument fails them, they resort to fear mongering. I believe, given their willingness to ostracize, even slaughter,  those who hold a contrary view, the abortion issue is really about the loss of religious and political control as the white race declines and non-whites (and, possibly, a different religious group) seize the reigns of power. While many Church members undoubtedly entertain these same fears, they have also shown themselves willing to follow their leaders without question. The politicians? They are nothing more than opportunists in this issue and will maintain their allegiance to the religious right only as long as the donations and votes keep coming.

I guess that just leaves the Eugenics movement! I’ll get to that next time….

Disclosure: I am English, Anglo Saxon and white.

I don’t think anyone who browses the alternative news websites is unaware of the breathtaking hypocrisy of Western politicians; but it seems to me that the U.S. Republican Party has scaled the heights of Everest this past week as they seek to prohibit abortion under any circumstances, including rape, incest and a threat to the potential mother’s life. Of course, to do that, they have to redefine rape, so we have the lunatic Congressman Akin claiming that the female body has the ability to reject the rapist’s semen and thereby avoid pregnancy. When called on this ridiculous claim, he blamed the medical profession for misleading him. When that strategy didn’t work, he attempted to segregate the violent act of rape into ‘legitimate’ and, presumably, ‘non-legitimate’ (though this later granulation was not spoken of). Once the crapola hit the fan, we got to see Romney and Ryan doing the old Aztec two step, suggesting that they would exclude rape, incest and life threatening situations from the proscription on abortion – even though Ryan is known to have supported several previous attempts at overturning Roe vs Wade. Though to be fair, he did previously agree that abortion should be available where pregnancy presented a threat to a woman’s life, and has very recently argued that ‘rape is rape’ and that a woman subjected to non-consensual intercourse ought not to be forced to carry a child conceived during a rape to term. Then again, he is seeking election to the ‘second chair’ and the renegade Congressman isn’t helping him in that regard! His assertion that Romney would be the lead on this issue is not comforting, however, since that upstanding gentleman is known to change his opinion more frequently than most of us change our undergarments.

With ‘Republican’ Texas now forcing women who seek abortions to subject themselves to mandated ultrasounds  and ‘counseling’ 24 hours prior to an abortion – not to mention other state officials pushing forced, intrusive probings of their female constituents’ nether regions, and Romney’s plan to cease funding for Planned Parenthood – the well informed reader can come to only one conclusion: the Republicans have succeeded in reinventing themselves as the New American Taliban!

This development should bode well for future negotiations between a Romney administration and their Afghan counterparts. I see American troops coming home by March, 2013! Hoorah!