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What Justifies the Adoption of Convenient Fantasy and Denial of Inconvenient Truth?
By Steve Salmony
Culture presents us with much that is real and also less that is illusory. From a psychological standpoint, because humans are shaped early and pervasively by cultural transmissions in our perception of reality, it is an evolutionary challenge for humankind to see the world as it is. When a psychologist thinks a patient is suffering from a mental illness, that is an evidence-based clinical judgment. However, general standards of normalcy are not clinical judgments, but matters of socio-cultural norms and conventions that are full of correctly perceived aspects of reality as well as some misperceptions of reality. Deeply disturbed mental patients distort reality drastically. "Normal" people pay no attention to them. Or if attention is paid to them, it is usually just long enough to put them away. After all, they are crazy; they cannot distinguish what is fantasy from what is real.
By contrast, organizations like nation-states, as well as cultures, appear not to misperceive reality so sharply, yet distortions of what large aggregates of people perceive do remain. A term of art in psychology is useful here, "folie a deux." The term means that two people share an identical distortion of reality. This understanding leads to other terms, "folie a deux cent million" for a social order or "folie a deux billion" for a culture. These terms refer to a misperception of reality commonly held by many people of an organization or culture. One way to define the highest standard of what is “normal” for the individual and for human aggregates could be looked at in terms of what is free of illusion, what is in scientific fact real.
Encircling Russia with US Bases
by Stephen Lendman
In 1991, after the Soviet Union dissolved, everything changed but stayed the same. As a result, today's stakes are far greater, presenting much larger threats to world peace.
In America, neocons are still dominant. Obama is more belligerent than Bush, waging four wars and various proxy ones. The Israeli Lobby, Christian Right, and other extremist elements drive them. Conflict is preferred over diplomacy.
Congressional majorities support Washington's imperial agenda, including global militarization against potential challengers and America's main rivals - China and Russia, encircling them belligerently with bases and strategic weapons. It's a policy fraught with danger.
WHO caves: Allows smallpox stockpiling for three more years
By Rady Ananda
Once again, the World Health Assembly failed to set a deadline for the destruction of smallpox samples, delaying discussion for another three years. Though it still affirms the need for live sample destruction, the two-day “contentious debate” (repeated for the last 25 years) ended on May 24 in a victory for bioweapons development in the U.S. and Russia.
“The retention of the existing stocks of smallpox virus are not required” to maintain and bolster current vaccine supplies, argues Dr. D. A. Henderson in Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science. Through current technology, smallpox vaccines can be developed from the known genome. Live viruses are simply no longer needed.
The claimed need to protect against smallpox appears to be a ruse for the development of its use as a bioweapon. Given the history of its use in Native American genocide, the United States should be specifically banned from possessing the live virus. But, this is the same country that’s radiating with impunity the Middle East with depleted uranium.
Amid bloody repression, Zelayas returns to Honduras
By Rady Ananda
Since Obama's first coup on June 28, 2009, when Honduras President Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped and flown to a U.S. military base in Palmerola before being spirited out of the country in his pajamas, Honduras has endured lethal repression under the US-installed dictator, Porfirio Lobo. But today, May 28, 2011, Zelaya returned.
(Image: Porfirio Lobo and Manuel Zelaya shake hands on May 23, 2011)
On May 23rd, Colombia president Juan Manuel Santos and Venezuela president Hugo Chavez brokered a deal that allowed Zelaya to return so that Honduras will be readmitted to the Organisation of American States, thus gaining access to international "aid" funds.
‘America’s’ Fascist Paradigm & the Myth of Democracy
Larry Pinkney
“Terrorism has replaced Communism as the rationale for the militarization of the country [America], for military adventures abroad, and for the suppression of civil liberties at home. It serves the same purpose, serving to create hysteria.”-Howard Zinn
“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”-Malcolm X [el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz]
A woefully uninformed and/or a perniciously misinformed populace will, in the distorted name of ‘patriotism,’ repeatedly commit the most horrendous atrocities. Such people do not recognize the precariousness of their own existence, the fleeting nature of their own humanity, or the preciousness of Mother Earth and the rest of the global human family. Such people provide fertile soil for fascism to take root and grow. This is the stark reality for an enormous amount of the population of the United States of America, who has been psychologically, institutionally, and systemically trained to be ahistorical and to cling to systemic mythology rather than reality, no matter how obvious such reality might be.
Can the UN be Trusted to Grant Long Overdue Statehood to Palestinians?
Stuart Littlewood
Hamas don’t think so… Do you?
One of Hamas's top men, Mahmoud al-Zahar, says he doesn't trust the United Nations to hand statehood to the Palestinians.
Dr al-Zahar notes http://www.almanar.com.lb/english/adetails.php?fromval=2&cid=23&frid=23&seccatid=23&eid=13883 that Bush promised an independent state and Obama can’t even stop the illegal settlement-building. There has been a long list of disappointments with the international community.
Asked whether Hamas was willing to accept the existence of the Zionist entity, al-Zahar replied: "The question is whether Israel is ready to accept the Palestinian state..."
It is interesting to see Dr al-Zahar speaking up more. A founder of Hamas and a member of its 'politburo', he is listed as the government's foreign minister and was the Resistance movement’s first press officer back in 1987.
He’s regarded as a hard-liner. But who wouldn't be if he'd suffered as cruelly at the hands of the Israeli regime as this man. Al-Zahar was expelled in 1992 (along with Ismail Haniyeh) to South Lebanon and subsequently targeted for assassination. In 2003 an Israeli F-16 bombed his home killing his eldest son and seriously injuring his wife. In 2007 another Israeli air-strike killed his youngest son.
Wisconsin Judge Strikes Down Anti-Union Law
by Stephen Lendman
Since taking office on January 3, Republican Governor Scott Walker waged war on public workers and their unions, aiming to restrict collective bargaining rights to wage negotiations before ending them altogether.
He also demanded draconian health insurance and pension contribution increases, doubling them for state employees during hard times when they're already strapped to make ends meet. Doing so called for pay cuts ranging from 8 - 20% ahead of more planned reductions coming.
More Myth than Massacre at Srebrenica
by Stephen Lendman
Headlines explaining former Serbian General Ratko Mladic's May 27 arrest allege his 1995 responsibility for massacring 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica. True or false is at issue. More on that below.
Meanwhile, inflammatory accounts already convicted him by accusation, including New York Times writers Dan Bilefsky and Doreen Carvajal headlining, "Serbia Says Jailed Mladic Will Face War Crimes Trial," saying:
Arresting him "signal(ed) Serbia's intention of finally escaping the isolation it brought on itself during the Balkan wars," ones Western media, including The Times, consistently misreported on throughout the 1990s, culminating in NATO's 1999 war of aggression, falsely called humanitarian intervention.
So why are they so awesomely beautiful?
Raymond Ponzini
Colombians have a genetic heritage dating back some 500 years. They are predominantly descended from two groups of genetically diverse peoples: the Spanish who had survived an arduous journey across the Atlantic and a hundred mile trek through the Amazon jungle, and the indigenous South American Indians who had lived and developed in the ideal conditions of the southern hemisphere for some 10,000 years. Today 50% of Colombians are mestizo, which is a mixture of white, Spanish, and Indian ancestry. 25% are white, 20% are mulattoes, 4% are black, and 1% percent are Indians.
Perhaps the most important factor influencing the genetics of the southern hemisphere and Colombia is the equatorial sun. The energy of the sun at that latitude effects physical development and greatly enhances the nutritional quality of food. Typically the Colombian diet consists of a wide variety of fresh fruits, nuts, vegetables, fish, chicken, and beef, with very little canned food and fast food. In general Colombians have not been exposed to as many toxins as those living in the northern hemisphere.
How Progressives Can Take Back America
by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy
Many 'progressives' who voted for Obama expected a 'savior'. There are none! The best strategy left to disappointed progressives is to take back the party many believe abandoned them. I was among those who believed Clinton should have taken a stronger stand in defense of liberal and/or progressive values. I despised 'triangulation'.
My biggest disappointment was Janet Reno's attack on the Branch-Davidians in Waco, an unlawful attack violating federal and state laws --most egregiously --the presumption of innocence and every due process clause known to exist anywhere at any time to include our own 14th Amendment
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