Blocked by Computer Problems, Terrified by Ukraine Crisis

MY APOLOGY TO EVERYONE for my prolonged silence. December was a cruel month, and January, damnit, has been no better. My desktop computer died just as I finally found my way out of the miasma of self-inflicted obligations I described on 7 December, my last entry here until now.

The computer's death was no surprise. A gift-horse into whose mouth I should have looked very carefully, it was a notably troublesome machine from day one, and it had been seriously ill for the past two years.

All that kept me from going mad with the resultant anxiety was the virtual life-preserver given me by Adrienne, my (still) dearly beloved second wife (to whom again thanks), who bought me a Samsung laptop Christmas before last.

While the presence of the laptop was as soothing as a bedtime backrub, my fear and loathing of alien technology -- that is, of anything that cannot be repaired or maintained with hand-tools,  a can of WD-40 and a roll of duct tape -- kept the little machine in its original packaging until the dying desktop's final electronic spasm. 

And then of course I discovered that learning all this new stuff -- Microshaft's Windows 8 versus the Ubuntu  (Linux) to which I had grown fondly accustomed -- was a hard-school detour through ignorance and vexation, a rite of passage in which I am now at the equivalent of kindergarten passing into first grade. 

If I live -- and I believe the prognosis is good -- I should be back and posting regularly to Outside Agitator's Notebook by next weekend. 

Meanwhile, apropos the Ukraine crisis,  here is a link to a vital report by Robert Parry on the relentlessly escalating U.S. imperialist aggression that could literally trigger the end of the world as we know it -- and quite possibly the end of our species as well.

Addendum 11:20 p.m.:

I seem to have been banished by Robert Parry from his ConsortiumNews website,  forever prohibited from ever again commenting thereon.  This is a surprise as I have only posted there a few times, often with applause from other posters, and have never been involved in any on-site disputes or other such unpleasantness. 

Here then is what I would have said in response to Parry's report had I not been electronically gagged:

Just as (another poster) observed, the culture-war issues implicit in Putin's curiously self-defeating persecution of Pussy Riot and Russian homosexuals have been parlayed by the U.S. government's privatized propaganda apparatus into a clever ploy to silence even the most steadfast opponents of U.S. imperialist aggression. Add that to the methodically conditioned U.S. ignorance of history plus the ever-more-inflamed manifest-destiny fanaticism evident in the sweeping Republican victory in last November's elections, and the probability of an apocalyptic outcome is overwhelming. Josef Goebbels would be proud.

That said, two points come to mind immediately:

Those who rule the U.S. today are most likely the descendants of the Bankers Plot conspirators of 1934, who sought to oust President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, impose fascist dictatorship and so join Washington D.C. to the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis in its quest for a global empire. Berlin's primary ambition in those days was the conquest of Russia and the enslavement of its people. Given present-day events in Ukraine, I cannot but wonder if this same ambition was passed on to the present generation of U.S. Rulers by the Bankers Plot conspirators and their Nazi collaborators.

If this is indeed the case -- if the U.S. aggression in Ukraine is fostered by those influences and the boost they surely received via the influx of Nazi war criminals after 1945 -- then all that can save us from Armageddon is a sudden Ruling Class awakening to the indisputable fact the womb of Mother Russia is also the tomb of empires. That is the lesson learned by Darius the Great, the Mongols, Bonaparte, Hitler and a long litany of lesser would-be conquerors including the Teutonic Knights and the Victorian-era British, the latter of whom discovered in the Sepoy Mutiny the then-inconceivably long reach of Russian intelligence capabilities.

It should be noted too that Hitler's Germans believed themselves to be this planet's “master race,” an earlier expression of the divine-right-to-rule doctrine that is now resurrected as U.S. “exceptionalism.”

Let us therefore fervently hope We the People are not to be the next students of what invariably happens when the Bear Mother is goaded in her own den – especially since this goading, with its potential employment of thermonuclear weapons, could destroy our species and most other life forms as well.

It's a helluva grim way to begin OAN's new year, but for those of us in the 99 Percent, that's the nature of life (and death) under capitalism. As depressing as Parry's report is -- and as pissed off as I am at being banished from his website --  I nevertheless urge you all to read his text and disseminate it as widely as you possibly can. 

LB/24 January 2015

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