This blog is dedicated to the struggles of people everywhere to advance human progress and save this planet from the decline of capitalism. Its focus, since 2011 has been supporting the emerging revolutions everywhere.
What was behind the Hawaii Ballistic Missile Alert Terror?
Introducing an important new documentary from Linux Beach on the ballistic missile alert that led over a million people in Hawaii to believe that had only minutes to live for 38 minutes on the morning of Saturday, January 13, 2018. That was the time between when the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency sent this warning to a million cell phones in Hawaii and the time they retracted it over the same emergency messaging system.
This documentary takes an in depth look at the false ballistic missile alert that terrorize Hawaii on the morning of Saturday, January 13, 2018. It combines real time news network footage from the day of the event, together with documentary footage from the Korean War, and archival footage from many other source to question the official explanation(s) of this terror event and the 38 minute delay in sending out the retraction. Evidence presented indicates that this was a planned exercise, a provocation for thermonuclear war, and a provocative case of a government terrorizing its own people.
How it came to be made
A number of luck coincidences came together to make the production of this very important film possible. Because I am protected by CA labor laws while my mostly TX coworkers aren't, my vacation hours roll-over from year to year whereas their's don't. So, as usual, I didn't join the scramble to burn vacation hours in December. Instead, I scheduled the third week off week in January for a bit of time off to read and relax. I didn't know that I was going to be hit with a bad case of timeline fever at the time.
The Friday evening before my vacation, I was browsing YouTube, and I noticed a channel streaming CNN in real time, Saturday morning, I woke up with a question: Could the software I use to download videos from YouTube also be used to capture this livestream? It took updating to the latest version and learning some new options, but by about 9AM PST I had CNN streaming live to my hard disk. I also found similar realtime streams for Fox News and Al Jazeera and got them going as well. This is how I came to be recording these channels as the false ballistic missile alert scare hit Hawaii.
Some of the most informative news about an event like this comes from the first reports from people in the area and the early explanations, for example, initially the Governor's office and the Trump White House gave very different explanations, caught on tape! Once I saw what I had captured, I knew what I had to do. I spent my vacation week huddled over my computers. I combined this event news footage with other found footage, including of American war crimes footage from Korea, to product a film that shows that the false Hawaii ballistic alert was a preplanned exercise designed to drive a war fever against North Korea. It was also designed to test local government and media compliance with federal policy, and raise the profile of the military in American life. It was designed to move us closer to thermonuclear war and was a flagrate example of a government terrorizing its own people.
Although I shot this out of the cannon in a week, I think it is my most important film ever, even compared to Vietnam: American Holocaust, because while that documentary was about remembering a holocaust, this is an urgent call to prevent one, a thermonuclear holocaust.
Please watch, download, and share widely.
In June of 2013 I wrote a guide to downloading YouTube videos with a program that is available for both Windows, Mac and Linux OS, Trust but Verify: How to Download YouTube Videos. The newest version even allows you to download livestreams, which is how I was able to capture much of the footage for this film.
In this era were freedom of information is being threatened as never before and important political and historical documentation is being removed daily from YouTube for a multitude of reasons, and especially because I have every reason to fear this film will be so threatened, I thought it would be a good time to dust off that blog, update it and make note of it again. The future existence of this and so many other important videos should not depend of the priorities of corporations, even Google. Please use youtube-dl to download this film and also to make a personal record of other YouTube videos that are important to you. Important records of people's struggles and suffering in Syria and Libya are possibly in the greatest danger. You might notice that many of the YouTube videos from those countries that have been featured in Linux Beach are no longer available, so get them while you can.
"We've gotten to a place where nobody can be honest about anything." -Tucker Carlson @ 03:19
Tucker Carlson began his Thursday evening Fox News show with a full-throated defense of President Donald Trump and his labeling of Haiti, El Salvador and unspecified African countries "shitholes."
He had Jose Parra, the "Latino communications director for Barack Obama's 2012 campaign," on as a guest. Carlson couldn't understand why anybody thought Trump's comment was racist. As usual, he acted as if it was just beyond the understanding of an intelligent white guy like himself and he called upon Parra to explain. He also called upon Parra to defend Haiti.
Carlson: President Trump said something that almost every single person in America actually agrees with. An awful lot of immigrants come to this country from other places that aren't very nice. Those places are dangerous. They're dirty. They're corrupt. They're poor, and that's the main reason those immigrants are trying to come here, and you would too if you lived there. President Trump asked why America doesn't receive more immigrants from places you might want to visit on vacation. Why aren't we getting more people from Norway, he said, which by almost any measure including the UN's measures is the most developed and richest country in the world. While saying this Trump used an expletive, and that's not surprising either since he uses them all the time and was speaking privately and yet for some reason virtually everyone in Washington, New York, and LA considered this a major major event. @00:11
Carlson's generalizations of various third world countries as dangerous, dirty, and corrupt is, of course, a racist stereotype that tells us more about the workings of his own mind than it does about Haiti, El Salvador or Africa. All around the world, you will find big cities that are "dirty" or have "dirty" parts depending on how you define "dirt" [see yesterday's blog], and dangerous and corrupt, make me think of Putin's Russia first, although there are a host of contenders. And while Norway may be a great place to vacation, it might not be for everyone. Business Insiderranked it the third most expensive place in Europe to vacation, at $183.76 per night, more expensive than Rome ($153.84), London ($151.40), or Paris ($145.89). Carlson probably also isn't a fan of Norway's 27% corporate income tax rate.
Carlson is sidetracking the discussion to avoid the main issue, which is that Trump didn't just swear, he used a word that raises very potent primeval images because it speaks darkly to the unconscious mind of the racist. The main tactic he uses to sidetrack the discussion is to set up a straw comparison so he can complain about "dishonesty," as through he honestly can't see why people say Donald Trump is a racist:
Carlson: I think we're kind of having that debate but what bothers me about the explosion this afternoon is the dishonesty in it, and I'll just give you one example: Joan Walsh over at MSNBC, an analyst over there, was asked just a minute ago would you rather live in Haiti or Norway, and she said with a straight face "I can't say." Now that's lying! If we've gotten to a point where we all have to pretend that every country is exactly as nice as every other country then we're being dishonest.
Even a billionaire like Haiti's Gregory Brandt above can't do this on most days in Norway.
While Carlson is clearly striving to equate Norway with "good" and Haiti with "bad," the question of which place an individual might prefer to live in is not as clear cut as Tucker would like us to believe. It really is a question of personal preference, and Carlson is forgetting at least two important facts: 1) The rich live well everywhere, and 2) Norway is cold no matter how rich you are. Also 8 hours of sunlight is the longest day, 18°C (64°F) is about the hottest, and cold is a whole nother story, so it certainly won't be everyone's cup of tea.
Carlson: We know he said these countries are crummy places, okay? They're holes or whatever profanity, but the people who left those countries, some of them rode trains all way through Mexico or hid in a wheel well of a plane to leave, they would agree with that. So why the outrage? Is it you have to lie, and pretend as Joan Walsh does "I don't know if I'd live in Norway or Haiti." Like we've gotten to a place where nobody can be honest about anything.
Carlson most conveniently forgets that Haiti was wrecked by an earthquake exactly eight years ago today, 3 million people were affected and as many as 316,000 lost their lives, and El Salvador was been ravished by civil war that led to 40,000 political murders and other manmade problems, and with regards to those, the United States has a lot to answer for:
Carlson: I mean one is the richest country in the world [ed note: Qatar ($124,930) > Norway ($70,590) per capita] , the other is one of the poorest countries in the world. You think it's immoral to point that out? It's a statement of values? I'm asking you a very simple question: If Haiti isn't such a bad place why don't we say to the people who are here temporarily in refuge from Haiti go back? It's great! We don't say that because it's not great actually. It's everything the president said. It was not an attack on Haitians. It's an acknowledgement that their country is not as nice as other countries, and if you can't even say that out loud without being called a racist by people like you, and the morons over on MSNBC...I'm saying anybody who says that's a racist statement should explain how it is.
The whole point of the segment was to defend Trump's "shithole countries" statement by claiming that it wasn't a racist slur. The denigration of Haiti and Joan Walsh was just fill, and Tucker Carlson managed to talk his way through the segment without mentioning "shit" by that or one of its many other names. He acted as though he was ignorant of what it was about Trump's comment that made it so incendiary, and thoroughly racist to the core. I would point him to yesterday's blog, How Trump's "shithole" comment reveals the psychology of his racism for an education, but he has already made it clear in at least one past show that he clearly understands even his own infantile obsession with feces and how it is intertwined with the mythology of racism.
Tucker Carlson used the feces fantasy to condemn Roma people, which he called "gypsies" moving to Pennsylvania. Anna Merlanwrote about it in Jezebel, 18 July 2017:
[O]n Monday, he invited a Roma filmmaker named George Eli on his program and demanded to know why his people can’t use toilets:
Eli gently suggested that both the townspeople and the new arrivals “are suffering from a little bit of culture shock.” But Carlson had poop on his mind, and could not be swayed.
“I have heard a lot of people mention, I hate to say it, public defecation,” Carlson told Eli. “There are a lot of news stories about this going back a long time in the UK and here.” He mentioned pooping on “playgrounds and sidewalks and front steps... That seems to me to be a hostile act.”
Eli chuckled but kept it together, telling Tucker that while he didn’t know exactly what was going on in Pennsylvania, “I’ve been Roma all my life and my family’s been Roma all my life and we use bathrooms... I can’t respond to something I’ve never seen as a Roma person.”
Tucker could not be swayed. He wanted to talk about the poop. “What’s that about?” he inquired. “It’s not something you need to do. So you have to assume it’s a statement.”
Eli did his best here, pointing out that some Roma people are from rural areas without great sanitation, while also clearly thinking to himself, “Why does this guy want to talk about poop so bad?”
Tucker Carlson wanted to associate the Roma people with poop for the same reason Donald Trump has taken to calling poor countries populated by people of color "shithole countries." This infantile association is one of the strongest fortifications white supremacy has built into western culture and in times when white hegemony is being threatened, they feel the need to rev it up.
As we come to grips with the fact that an overt racist controls the greatest nuclear arsenal on the planet, and is leading the United States into nuclear confrontations with an Asian nation, it would be useful to take a deeper look at the psychology of the racist.
Donald Trump's recent remarks that called Haiti, El Salvador and African states "shithole countries," as compared to Norway, gets more to the root of how his childlike mind really thinks about race than just about anything he has ever said. As an aside, I would say that is just one more sign of his quickly deteriorating mental condition. But more to my main point Joel Kovel'sWhite Racism - A Psychohistory, Columbia University Press, 1984, goes into great detail in its 301 pages about how infantile fantasies of feces underline the psychology of aversive racists like President Donald Trump. We know he is an aversive racist because he hates to be around black people. He would even have black employees removed from the floor before visiting his casinos. Here are a few brief excerpts that speak to the aversive racist's obsession with "shit":
We observe here some of the basic aspects of aversive racism. There is the sense of conflict, both against better knowledge and against moral judgment: "It won't rub off." . . . 'I shouldn't be that way." And there is the sense of something so urgent and immediate and existentially valid that it overrides these scruples and forces the white person away. This something is the fantasy of dirt.
Recall that dirt is at symbolic root anything that can pass out of the body, and that hence should not pass back into the body, nor even touch it. Thus the common theme of the three quotes: contact with black hands contaminates food and makes it unfit to enter the body; contact with a black body will result in the blackness rubbing off on one's own precious body and thereby befouling it.
...
The nuclear experience of the aversive racist is a sense of disgust about the body of the black person based upon a very primitive fantasy: that it contains an essence-dirt-that smells and may rub off onto the body of the racist. Hence the need for distance and the prohibition against touching.
...
Although the fantasy of dirt, and its projection onto the black man, attained its full force at a late stage in our history, it was present from the beginning as an element of the white man's reaction to the black. As Jordan comments when he introduces the theme of anal fantasies in his study of early American racial attitudes: "One sort of stress arose from emotional turmoil within individuals, and here it is possible to gain an occasional glimpse into the deepest, least rational meaning [italics his] of human blackness for white men . . . the Negro's appearance, his blackness, seems to have served certain deep-seated unconscious needs of at least some white men. There are sufficient indications of this fact in colonial America to make ignoring it difficult. Sexual intermixture was frequently referred to as 'staining' the white population. . . .""
Gross elements of these aversive fantasies still persist in our culture and wherever racism is found. The idea of "staining" the blood lives on in the "mongelization" fantasies cherished by all racists, and especially in America where, as Jordan points out, the belief emerged that the Negro's blood shared in the general filthiness illustrated by his skin, and that this same "blood" would be directly transmitted through the generations should intermarriage occur. Then there is the coarse racist epithet "boogie," a word applied both to the black human being and to specimens of mucus that, because they come from the body, automatically become a symbol of dirt. The list of dirt fantasies which whites apply to the Nego could be extended indefinitely.
Just as the basic dirt fantasy emerges early in human development, so does its application to black people. This point has been subjected to empirical proof in an outstanding example of social anthropological work by Mary Ellen Goodman. As reported in her book, "a sample of 104 small children, both Negro and Caucasian, revealed the uniform fantasy that a ), Negroes differed from whites in being dirty and that b), this implied a sense of basic inferiority. These beliefs set in during the pre-school years and had become quite well developed by the age of four."
The author writes perceptively of how the sense of inferiority so engendered enters into the minds of the black children to produce the nuclei of a lifelong low self-image; and of how the reverse conviction settles into the personalities of the whites. In this study, we can sense the depth of the irrationality inherent in the problems of race. As Goodman comments, "the fact is that mere intellectual awareness of the physical signs of race is not all of the story. There is another part which is not merely startling but quite shocking to liberal-humanitarian sensibilities. It is shocking to find that four-year-olds, particularly white ones, show unmistakable signs of the onset of racial bigotry."
We have been talking of dirt, which represents a set of peculiar fantasies based upon bodily experience. The central aspect of bodily experience upon which this tissue of daydreams rests is, of course, the act of defecation, and the central symbol of dirt throughout the world is feces, known by that profane word with which the emotion of disgust is expresses: shit. Furthermore, when contrasted with the light color of the body of the Caucasian person, the dark color of feces reinforces, from the infancy of the individual in the culture of the West, the connotation of blackness with badness. And since this dark brown color is derived from blood pigments, since in fact blood is the only internal bodily substance which is dark, the absurd beliefs about "staining" the blood through intermarriage with "inferior" races gain an ironic verification-one which, however, the proponents of these beliefs would be loath to accept.
Thus the root symbol between the idea of dirt and the blackness of certain people is that highly colored, strongly odored, dispensable and despised substance which the human body produces so regularly. How strange that this substance-which, after all, knows the body on the most intimate terms, and which is, aside from the pathogenic bacteria occasionally associated with it (another piece of reality immaterial to the life of fantasy ), certainly innocuous enough-should have received the brunt of such contempt and rage! Almost as peculiar is-the general reluctance to come to realistic grips with those distortions of the world which so clearly derive in part from their symbolic association with feces.
We can see from this presentation that Donald Trump's use of the word "shit" in reference to countries of color was no accident. He didn't just use a bad word, he used a word that reveals the inter infantile associations that drive the current president of the United States whenever the thinks about people that don't look like him.
The association with blood also glimpses why questioning Barack Obama's right to the presidency on account of birth was such a good proxy for questioning this right to the presidency on account of race for Donald Trump and his followers. Here is another short excerpt from Kovel's book:
By and large, connections between feces and the various symbolic organizations with which it is associated remain deeply repressed. The substance itself is abhorred, although the word, shit, is used freely enough; but for the rest the connection is mediated through the more remote, and hence less threatening, symbols of dirt. However, as we have observed in the case of castrative wishes, the deeper meaning becomes more explicit when the social structure within which these fantasies are realized becomes strained. Just as when a Negro became "uppity," he could expect a kind of brutal reprisal that might culminate in a castrative lynching, so when blacks today "move too fast" for the taste of whites one may expect certain raw manifestations of anal fantasies.
Whether he realizes it or not, this is where Donald Trump was coming from when he said:
"Why do we want all these people from 'shithole countries' coming here?"
These brief excerpts hardly do Kovel's work justice so I hope you will read the book. I also hope these short selections will show that Donald Trump's "shithole countries" comment came from a very dark and very warped place in his infantile brain.
There has been a lot of discussion of the Stephen Miller fracas with Jake Tapper on CNN today, but since I haven't heard anyone comment on how Miller smuggled white supremacist dog whistles and talking points into his monologues, I thought I'd make this contribution to the discussion.
There are two place that Miller did this:
Stephen Miller @7:48
I think that what the point is is that his [Steve Bannon] role has been greatly exaggerated whereas the president hasn't gotten the due that he deserves for the movement that he put together to tap into the kinds of people whose life concerns don't get a lot of attention on CNN, not a lot of hours of coverage on this TV talking about the working class construction workers who've lost their jobs to foreign labor, there's not a lot of coverage on this TV about the people getting slaughtered in sanctuary cities, you don't do a lot of human interest stories about immigrant communities under siege from ms-13, he tapped into a reality that has happened in this country [that] is not covered on this network and I know you think I'm interrupting you but I think the American people deserve to have two or three minutes of the truth and we've let you know here's the truth.
It's interesting that he used the phrase "tap into" and "tapped into" to describe the nature of their propaganda operation. You tap into, or mine, something that already exists, in this case racist elements within American culture, because you can turn it into something of value to you. For Donald Trump, this means power and money. The policy dog whistles are what they use to drill down into the psyche of the worker, sometimes without her even realizing it, to extract that wealth, in this case votes and political support.
Even though automation has been the main competitor for jobs in the United States, and the AI revolution promises to replace 7 million professional driving jobs in the next decade, Miller draws attention to foreign workers facing the same dilemma.
He talks about people getting slaughtered in sanctuary cities when only a tiny percentage of the murders in any US city are committed by people here illegally.
To prove he's not racist, Miller speaks of concern for immigrant communities, but his real point is how terrible ms-13 is. The truth is the new Trump/Miller immigration policies are the biggest problem these communities now face, while sanctuary cities exist to allow these besieged immigrant communities to feel that they can call the police when ms-13 comes around.
Stephen Miller @11:06
The president's tweets absolutely reaffirmed the plain spoken truth. A self-made billionaire, revolutionize reality TV, and tapped into something magical that's happening in the hearts of this country. The people that you don't connect with and understand, the people whose manufacturing jobs have left, who've been besieged by high crime communities, and who've been affected by a policy of uncontrolled immigration, those voices, those experiences don't get covered on this network.
Again Stephen Miller resorts to the language of exploitation before enumerating his racist talking points. This time it is "tapped into." What he calls "magical" is simply a resurgence long ingrained reactionary ideology and culture, and what he euphemistically calls "the hearts of the country," are the fears some white Americans have about a future where they don't automatically come first.
Of course, he has no solution for the manufacturing jobs that have left, and the reality is that jobs leaving for foreign shores is no longer a big job killer. The big job killer is automation, and Trump and company have just passed a tax bill designed to encourage corporations to bring billions of tax free dollars back to the US to invest in automation and things like driverless trucks.
Instead he points them at what he wants everyone to see as the problem: "high crime communities," dog whistle for communities of non-white people, and "uncontrolled immigration," meaning non-white foreigners.
While the main point of Stephen Miller's little fracas with Jake Taper was to defend his boss from charges that his lunacy is evolving, we can see from his statements above, pushing their white supremacist agenda is never far from their thoughts.
By John Reimann republished with permission from Oakland Socialist, January 1, 2018
Middle East Iran protests: A turning point?
Ongoing protests in Iran. Is this a turning point?
Are the protests in Iran a turning point in the global class struggle?
They started on Thursday in Iran’s second largest city, Masshad around the issues of high prices and unemployment. The very next day they had spread throughout the country, including to Tehran. There is actually some suspicion that the “hard liner” supporters of Ali Khameini were behind these original protests in order to embarrass President Rouhani over the deal he made with Obama. If so the whole thing certainly backfired, since within 24 hours the issue had moved to include protests against the clericals and against the Revolutionary Guard. There were also several instances of crowds trying to invade government buildings, possibly to get documents showing government corruption.
Earlier Workers’ Strikes
Yurt coal miners protesting Rouhani. They shouted him down, blocked his car and stomped on the roof and hood.
This movement did not spring up out of nowhere. In May of last year, there was an explosion in a coal mine in Yurt, Iran, which killed some 40 miners. Rouhani visited the mine and was shouted down by the miners, who pounded on his car and jumped on the hood and roof and drove him off. The Alliance of Mid East Socialists reported at the time that workers were saying things like: “Mr. President, none of you knows what it means to be a mineworker. You only remember us now that we have lost 40 miners, 170 children have lost their fathers and 40 women are widowed. Why don’t we have safe working conditions?” Another mineworker said: “I swear to the Holy Koran that we don’t have bread to eat. I am in pain. . . Do you even know what a mineworker is? We work but we don’t have any insurance.”
and others. These strikes revolved around privatization of government-owned companies and the layoffs and even non-payment of wages that resulted.
Echo of Arab Spring
These protests, then, seem to be taking the path that the Arab Spring did, especially in Egypt, where there was a series of strikes against privatization for several years prior to the general uprising of 2011. And that general uprising throughout the Arab world helped create a global mood of revolt that included the Occupy movement in the United States.
Bus drivers in Tehran demanding the
release of their leader Reza Shehabi.
See this article for more information.Occupy movement in the United States. Likewise, the defeat of the Arab Spring set off a wave of reaction. It gave a tremendous boost to Islamic fundamentalism, including terrorist attacks both within the Muslim world and outside. This combined with the collapse of the Occupy movement and the general rise of nationalism globally to increase the chauvinist and racist reaction here in the United States. It was largely on that basis that Trump was elected.
So, now the question is whether this renewed movement in Iran will set off a new wave of working class struggle. Will it possibly encourage a similar movement in Saudi Arabia, for example, which is already experiencing a shake-up at the top? If so, it could really undermine the bitter sectarian war between the Shia and the Sunni. What affect will it have on the war in Yemen and in Syria too?
Women join the protest. Inevitably, the issue of women’s rights will be raised if the protests continue.
Also, there are reports that the youth are also taking up issues of social and sexual freedom under this puritanical regime. Inevitably this will also involve the issue of women’s rights. Trump
Trump has tweeted support for the protests in Iran, but he’d better look out. Just like he painted all immigrants and all black people with one brush (as criminals), so he’s painted all Muslims and, especially, all Iranians as terrorists. But if Iranian workers are seen as fighting for jobs and a better living standard, that stereotype won’t fly with millions of US workers any longer. As one union carpenter had said to this writer shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed: “What will they use to scare us now that Communism is gone?”
Nothing is guaranteed. There are hints of nationalism in the protests. Probably US imperialism will try to find a way to influence the events. But we should remember the myth of the Greek goddess Athena, who sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus. Just as that myth was exactly that – a myth – so is it a myth that revolutionary movements spring to life fully formed.
Confusion and set-backs are inevitable. But if these protests continue and deepen, they have the potential to reverse the period of sectarianism, racism and division in which the working class presently finds itself. We need to watch this situation closely and lend support in any way we can.
