zn wrote:

This was all posted before.

Blum’s comment above is dated and sheds no new light, along with being wrong.

…

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Well even if all that were true (and again, unlike you, i dont know how true any of that is), it doesnt really resolve the question of “who started the Korean War?”

I mean, if all i knew was that John punched Sam first. That would not tell me who was more at fault or who really ’caused’ the fight. I mean, maybe Sam did all kinds of things to cause John to throw the first punch….blah blah blah.

Basically I’m saying War is complicated, and Information on war is difficult to trust. For me.

Let a thousand flowers blum.

w
v

Well, i know nothing about the Korean War, and I dont have time or energy to research it and even if i did, i doubt i would come to any clear conclusions — which is my continuing meta-point. I mean the Korean War is supposed to be one of those wars thats understood (at least according to the MSM) — and yet here we are debating about the causes.

Zn posts something by a chinese scholar translated by a State Department guy. The fact that a US State Department guy translated it, immediately triggered alarms and wariness in my brain. I didnt ‘dismiss’ it, but immediately i was wary of it — why? Cause the American powers-that-be lie constantly. BT posts other articles and I have no idea how trustworthy ‘they’ are. So, once again, I’m left in this postmodern “I dunno” state.

I’m in that state more and more these days. And i see no way out of it.

Thats just me. Other folks are living out other realities 🙂

w
v

Billy_T wrote:

Thanks, WV. That’s a really helpful clarification. Though it actually makes me feel kinda guilty after reading it. I’m guessing you were saying the above all along and I just didn’t pick up on it. That we really weren’t very far apart on this, etc. etc.

I like the metaphors of spikes and snowballing and the term “punctuated evolution.” And you can’t go wrong when you use “mutation.” It’s damn evocative of so much that’s happening these days, and connects with this feeling that the Sci-Fi is Now. Hat tip to George Allen.

;>)

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Yeah, i knew we were not far apart at all, BT. We, maybe, emphasize different things, and maybe use different metaphors gleaned from different books, but we both see a Corporate-Capitalist monster, I think. You call it King Kong, I call it Godzilla.
Somethin like that.

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Billy_T wrote:

I guess I’m being really confusing in my posts. My fault. I’m not saying things haven’t accelerated along Wolin’s inverted totalitarianism spectrum. They have. I’ve actually mentioned several times that since the neoliberal era kicked in, major privatization of public goods, services and assets keeps accelerating. Deregulation and massive tax cuts for the rich have as well. I’ve also mentioned that consolidation is accelerating, and that the powers that be are more sophisticated and better organized than they once were — especially since the Powell Memo.

But I see this as the natural progression of the capitalist system itself, as what it does when it’s left to its own devices. And I’m saying the secretive aspect of this has always been there.

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Well first off, let me Emphasize — I’m confused. The ‘situation’ confuses me. The corporotacracy, the deep-state, the corporate-capitalist system, The Corporate-Empire, the Neoliberal-Stability-seeking-Biosphere-destroyer….whatever label we wanna use — confuses me.

But i ‘expect’ to be confused by it — partially because so much of it is hidden, and secret and nondemocratic….CIA, NSA, Psyops, Backroom-Lobbying, etc, etc. Its impossible to ever HAVE all the information we need to really see it CLEARLY.
So i cant see ‘it’ clearly. I can only see…outlines, shapes.

I think its quite possible this modern, dynamic ‘thing’ is indeed a ‘natural progression’ of capitalism, BT. Could very well be. I dunno.
But it could also be…oh….sorta like…’punctuated evolution’ er somethin. I could be a ‘spike’ in the ‘natural evolution’ or a mutation of some sort 🙂 I dunno. It doesnt really matter to me that much — what matters more to me, is that its snowballing so fast now. The concentration of secret-power is increasing. It just looks like something qualitatively ‘different’ to me now, than it did a decade or so, ago.

It doesnt really matter whether its something ‘new’ or just a snowballing continuation of capitalism. It could be one, it could be the other.

w
v

Might as well include these paragraphs from Moyers essay. Its a messy concept. Its not ‘quite’ identical to “Corporotacracy” or “Corporate-Empire” but its close.:

“…The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street. All these agencies are coordinated by the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council. Certain key areas of the judiciary belong to the Deep State, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are mysterious even to most members of Congress. Also included are a handful of vital federal trial courts, such as the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted. The final government component (and possibly last in precedence among the formal branches of government established by the Constitution) is a kind of rump Congress consisting of the congressional leadership and some (but not all) of the members of the defense and intelligence committees. The rest of Congress, normally so fractious and partisan, is mostly only intermittently aware of the Deep State and when required usually submits to a few well-chosen words from the State’s emissaries.

the Deep State does not consist only of government agencies. What is euphemistically called “private enterprise” is an integral part of its operations. In a special series in The Washington Post called “Top Secret America,” Dana Priest and William K. Arkin described the scope of the privatized Deep State and the degree to which it has metastasized after the September 11 attacks. There are now 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances — a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government. While they work throughout the country and the world, their heavy concentration in and around the Washington suburbs is unmistakable: Since 9/11, 33 facilities for top-secret intelligence have been built or are under construction. Combined, they occupy the floor space of almost three Pentagons — about 17 million square feet. Seventy percent of the intelligence community’s budget goes to paying contracts. And the membrane between government and industry is highly permeable: The Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper, is a former executive of Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the government’s largest intelligence contractors. His predecessor as director, Admiral Mike McConnell, is the current vice chairman of the same company; Booz Allen is 99 percent dependent on government business. These contractors now set the political and social tone of Washington, just as they are increasingly setting the direction of the country, but they are doing it quietly, their doings unrecorded in the Congressional Record or the Federal Register, and are rarely subject to congressional hearings.

Reactions: Danielle Brian on Legalized Corruption
Photo: Dale Robbins
Washington is the most important node of the Deep State that has taken over America, but it is not the only one. Invisible threads of money and ambition connect the town to other nodes. One is Wall Street….continued…see link. Or not.

See this right here is one reason why i use the term “deep state.” To me, this is a big part of why I think we are dealing with something ‘different’ than at any time in the past:

“…In 2010, almost a decade into this secret war with its voracious appetite for information, the Washington Post reported that the national security state had swelled into a “fourth branch” of the federal government — with 854,000 vetted officials, 263 security organizations, and over 3,000 intelligence units, issuing 50,000 special reports every year.
Though stunning, these statistics only skimmed the visible surface of what had become history’s largest and most lethal clandestine apparatus. According to classified documents that Edward Snowden leaked in 2013, the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies alone had 107,035 employees and a combined “black budget” of $52.6 billion, the equivalent of 10% percent of the vast defense budget…”

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nittany ram wrote:

The problem with all this is that there are no genes that are population specific. The frequencies in which they appear can vary between populations, but none are exclusive to a certain population. Genetic variation is greater within a population than between them. So even if they developed a biological weapon targeted against a certain population, there would be potential for a lot of collateral damage among other groups that weren’t targeted. So to me, the risk of developing bio-weapons against genes in certain ethnic populations would be too risky, unless they weren’t worried about it moving through other populations with varying degrees of virulence.

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And do you think ANY of that ‘collateral damage’ stuff would cause the CIA
to stop researching it, Nittany?

What do you think?

w
v

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link:http://projectcensored.org/16-human-genome-project-opens-the-door-to-ethnically-specific-bioweapons/

Human Genome Project Opens the Door to Ethnically Specific Bioweapons
April 30, 2010

In October 1997, Dr. Wayne Nathanson, chief of the Science and Ethics Department of the Medical Society of the United Kingdom, warned the annual meeting of the Society that “gene therapy” might possibly be turned into “gene weapons” which could potentially be used to target particular genes possessed by certain groups of people. These weapons, Nathanson warned, could be delivered not only in the forms already seen in warfare such as gas and aerosol, but could also be added to water supplies, causing not only death but sterility and birth defects in targeted groups.

Current estimates of the cost of developing a “gene weapon” have been placed at around $50 million, still quite a stretch for an isolated band of neo-Nazis, but well within the capabilities of covert government programs.

On November 15, 1998, the London Times reported that Israel claimed to have successfully developed a genetically specific “ethnic bullet” that targets Arabs. When an Israeli government spokesman was asked to confirm the existence of ethnic weapons, he did not deny that they had them, but rather said, “we have a basket full of serious surprises that we will not hesitate to use if we feel that the state of Israel is under serious threat.”…

The U.S. has a long history of interest in such genetic research. The current home of the Human Genome Project is the Cold Springs Harbor laboratory on Long Island, NY-the exact site of the notorious Eugenics Research…

The November 1970 issue of the Military Review published an article entitled “Ethnic Weapons” for command-level military personnel. The author of the article was Dr. Carl Larson, head of the Department of Human Genetics at the Institute of Genetics in Lund, Sweden. Dr Larson wrote of how genetic variations in races are concurrent with differences in tolerances for various substances. For instance, large segments of Southeast Asian populations display a lactose intolerance due to the absence of the enzyme lactase in the digestive system. A biological weapon could conceivably take advantage of this genetic variance and incapacitate or kill an entire population……
…..

Update by Greg Bishop
….
……When the London Times broke the story of the Israeli bioweapons project and interest in the development of pathogens that would disable or kill by ethnicity, they quoted an unnamed British intelligence source that said that these sorts of weapons were “theoretically possible.” They were not only “theoretical” but had been researched for nearly 50 years. The lynchpin of the Times article was the writer’s reliance on a specifically genetic explanation for ethnic weapons…

…
…For more information on this story:

Hersh, Seymour M. Chemical and Biological Warfare: America’s Hidden Arsenal, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1968.
Piller, Charles. Gene Wars: Military Control Over the New Genetic Technologies, Beech Tree Books, New York , 1988.
Spiers, Edward M. Chemical and Biological Weapons: A Study in Proliferation, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1994.

Dartmouth Undergrad Journal of Science Online
Genetically Engineered Bioweapons: A New Breed of Weapons for Modern Warfare

“…Although bioweapons have been used in war for many centuries, a recent surge in genetic understanding, as well as a rapid growth in computational power, has allowed genetic engineering to play a larger role in the development of new bioweapons. In the bioweapon industry, genetic engineering can be used to manipulate genes to create new pathogenic characteristics aimed at enhancing the efficacy of the weapon through increased survivability, infectivity, virulence, and drug resistance (2). While the positive societal implications of improved biotechnology are apparent, the “black biology” of bioweapon development may be “one of the gravest threats we will face” (2).

Limits of Past Bioweapons…”

Link:http://dujs.dartmouth.edu/2013/03/genetically-engineered-bioweapons-a-new-breed-of-weapons-for-modern-warfare/#.WZ3kXOlGlPY