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It's All Over Now Baby Red, White and Blue

some thoughts by Phillip Farruggio


Leave your stepping stones behind there, something calls for you
Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you
The vagabond who’s rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore
Strike another match, go start anew
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue
Those are lyrics from the great Bob Dylan song It’s All Over Now Baby Blue ( 1965). How appropriate they are now in Amerika 2018. We have finally become a damaged empire due to a mega variety of reasons. Foremost is the delusion of far too many of us that we a nation victimized by forces of terror outside of our influence. Well, anyone who takes the time to turn away from the narcotics of electronic gadgetry, 24 hour sports, sexual delights, addictive cigarettes, alcohol and other drugs of preference, along with mainstream media’s embedded- with- empire phony news, would see that ( sadly ) our nation is the role model for terrorism. As we float aimlessly into the narrow straights of both national and individual economic turmoil ( even bankruptcy ) the ‘ movers and shakers’ of this empire laugh all the way from their well secured gated communities to their banks and investment houses.
Can this all not be a dream, contrary to what most Eastern philosophies teach? After all, could George Orwell have written a better story with a Reality Television star becoming president? As with those lemmings who thought the Gordon Gecko character in Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street was sacrosanct in his belief that ‘ Greed is good’, so too those with but ‘ A pot to piss in’ followed almost religiously a billionaire so called populist demagogue who peddled the same crap. He did not ‘ drain the swamp’, rather filling it with more super rich ‘ Greed is good ‘ muck. Yet, it only shows how much our Amerkan populace can continue to take from an enema bag overloaded with…
We who love the country we grew up in, and see through this con job, signed off by the two halves of our Two Party political scam, have a civic duty to stand up and say ‘ NO MORE!’ One afternoon a few short years ago, as my 85 year old peace activist friend John and I stood outside our library holding signs to protest this Military Industrial Empire, a lady from Germany came up to us. She complimented us on our activism and made a cogent point: ” You Americans have so much to be angry with concerning this government and it’s phony wars. You have but two of you standing out here each week. If this was Germany and my country did what yours has done, there would be literally a thousand people out here with you.” Well, it seems that my fellow citizens have become too comfortable living in this feudal society. Psychologists refer to this kind of mindset as that of enabling. How many Apple Annies must there be on the street corners of our nation before we all get wise?
PA Farruggio
April 2018

Philip A Farruggio is a son and grandson of Brooklyn , NYC longshoremen. He has been a free lance columnist since 2001, with over 300 of his work posted on sites like Consortium News, Information Clearing House, Global Research ,Nation of Change, World News Trust, Op Ed News, Dissident Voice, Counterpunch, Activist Post, Sleuth Journal, Truthout and many others. His blog can be read in full on World News Trust., whereupon he writes a great deal on the need to cut military spending drastically and send the savings back to save our cities. Philip has a internet interview show, ‘ It’s the Empire… Stupid’ with producer Chuck Gregory, and can be reached at [email protected] )

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tomiejones
tomiejones
Apr 13, 2018 9:52 AM

Reblogged this on circusbuoy.

Professor Lapis Lazuli
Professor Lapis Lazuli
Apr 12, 2018 3:44 PM

Our future has never been brighter – and there’s nothing more brilliant than the light of a modern day thermo nuclear weapon – or maybe all 63,000 of them. In a lesser form this happened over half a century ago with the Cuban Missile Crisis where Kennedy and Kruschev were actually prepared to talk things over in the face of catastrophe, and most of us got through that in one piece. Many still believe that we can get through this too. One problem is that the abject nihilism that is being furthered by those who preach their doctrines of annihilation, is actually feeding the desires of the psychopaths who advocate it in the first place. It does not have to be a self-fulfilling prediction – you need not resign – you need not quit – but it would help if the US State Department and the current UK Government did.

Brutally Remastered
Brutally Remastered
Apr 12, 2018 2:52 PM

Hmmm, how dare Trump stop the TPTP, talk about guarding borders and insist on immigration rules (as his predecessors), hope for dialogue with Russia and help to de-nuclearise North Korea and plan to meet with it’s esteemed leader?
The nerve.

Google Talpiot Program
Google Talpiot Program
Apr 12, 2018 4:30 PM

Trump’s a total puppet – a deliberate agent for the purpose of political polarisation – and likely a pedophile.

Brutally Remastered
Brutally Remastered
Apr 12, 2018 4:34 PM

Thank you Hillary.

Google Talpiot Program
Google Talpiot Program
Apr 12, 2018 4:42 PM

Seriously look up Trump’s connection to Jeffrey Epstein and Roy Cohn.
There are no good choices in the American system – both are totally controlled and comprised through methods such as sexual entrapment.

Big B
Big B
Apr 12, 2018 5:14 PM

Do you know what happened to Donald and Jeffrey’s twin rape case against the plaintiff “Jane Doe”? Was it simply memory-holed because Trump became POTUS? Cos Jeff is on licence and would go down for life. Well, maybe, if he was Black?

Google Talpiot Program
Google Talpiot Program
Apr 12, 2018 6:46 PM
Reply to  Big B

The plaintiff was Katie Johnson. There is definitely an establishment protection of Epstein.
He got less than two years and the man who made sure that was the case (Acosta) was hired by Trump for this cabinet!
Why is the establishment protecting Epstein?
Well there were hidden cameras in his New York apartment and his huge wealth a source of mystery. His black book of contacts had people such as Ehud Barak etc. in it.
Looks like a Mossad sexual blackmail operation from the available evidence.

Big B
Big B
Apr 12, 2018 7:13 PM

His little black book also had both the Clintons, Peter Soros, Alan Deshowitz and Trump’s names in it. Classic honeytrap; wasn’t that what you were saying? All aboard the ‘Lolita Express’!

Google Talpiot Program
Google Talpiot Program
Apr 12, 2018 8:10 PM
Reply to  Big B

Yes exactly.
Also Roy Cohn (Trump’s mentor) was mob connected and also rumoured to be involved with sexual honeytrap operations for intelligence services. Particularly involving underage boys.

Dagandy
Dagandy
Apr 12, 2018 7:09 PM

Naaa
If he was he would be embraced by the rest of the bastards .
He isn’t embraced by anyone or thing but the silent majority

Google Talpiot Program
Google Talpiot Program
Apr 12, 2018 8:06 PM
Reply to  Dagandy

The whole point of having two opposing puppets is that you have to make it look like they are actually opposed to other.

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Apr 12, 2018 11:57 PM

Why should the DPRK de-nuclearise and the USA, the only state to use them on defenceless humans, and the force that murdered four million Koreans and bombed the entire country to rubble, need not. And the DPRK can see from the Libya example, that attempting to co-operate with the butcher boys only ever ends in treachery and destruction.

Seamus Padraig
Seamus Padraig
Apr 12, 2018 2:51 PM

I gotta rant for a minute–hope you all won’t mind. But I hear this stuff an awful lot from the alt-Left, and it really gets on my nerves:

As with those lemmings who thought the Gordon Gecko character in Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street was sacrosanct in his belief that ‘Greed is good’, so too those with but ‘ A pot to piss in’ followed almost religiously a billionaire so called populist demagogue who peddled the same crap. He did not ‘ drain the swamp’, rather filling it with more super rich ‘ Greed is good ‘ muck. Yet, it only shows how much our Amerkan populace can continue to take from an enema bag overloaded with …

And what were people supposed to do? Vote for Hillary? Hillary, who had openly campaigned on a ‘no-fly zone’ in Syria? Hillary, who still blames RussiaRussiaRussia for her very very understandable and richly deserved defeat? Really? Obviously, there were many good reasons to question Trump’s sincerity, ability to follow through on his promises, motivations, etc., etc. But Goddamn it! If nothing else, at least the guy pretended to want a change of policy. Were we supposed to go and give Hillary an open mandate for business-as-usual?
Oh wait, I get it: we weren’t supposed vote at all, right? Maybe we just should’ve stayed home on election day and handed the country to Hillary by default, right? After all, as we all know, voting changes nothing, right?

We who love the country we grew up in, and see through this con job, signed off by the two halves of our Two Party political scam, have a civic duty to stand up and say ‘ NO MORE!’ One afternoon a few short years ago, as my 85 year old peace activist friend John and I stood outside our library holding signs to protest this Military Industrial Empire …

But here’s the thing: why is it that precisely those people who insist (not necessarily without reason, I might add) that voting is waste of time seem to put so much faith in the alleged ‘power of protest’? I mean, when is the last time that protests ever stopped or prevented a war? The usual answer given to that question is, of course, Vietnam. Now, I don’t personally think the protests were the main reason the US eventually lost, although they certainly didn’t hurt; but the fact remains that that was 50 years ago! And since then?
But hey: since it requires a bit more physical effort than voting, and might even get you arrested, it just must be more virtuous than voting! Even if it, too, has no effect.

kayaboosha
kayaboosha
Apr 12, 2018 8:59 PM
Reply to  Seamus Padraig

Whether you want to hear it or not,voting is rapidly being shown to be a waste of time, not just in the US, but everywhere on the planet. Mainly in the west. It is actually laughable when I talk to some people and say Assad is democratically elected, Or Maduro. I am told they are rigged elections. What can possibly be more rigged than being left with a choice of either Clinton or Trump? Democracy in the west is dead and it is destroying real democracy everywhere else on the planet while pretending to save the world.
There hasn’t been any real protest since the Vietnam protests. People are drugged and subdued and worn down and browbeaten. At some point though this mass of discontent will explode and the longer it takes for that to happen the bigger the mess will be. Tragic, but it has to happen because we cannot carry on with these narcissistic psychopaths leading us and the planet to destruction.
Voting won’t fix it, that doesn’t leave many alternatives.

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Apr 13, 2018 12:05 AM
Reply to  kayaboosha

After years where EVERY opinion poll, by Westerners, local stooges of the West, and Russians, shewed Putin’s support to be consistently 70% or so, when he wins with 70% or so of the vote, the fakestream media scum still have the audacity to claim the election was ‘rigged’. The downfall of humanity has been caused by the failure to find any way, any system, philosophy or religion that could resolve the question of the morally, spiritually, psychologically and intellectually Evil individual. Indeed, in total contrast, systems where the psychopaths were actually empowered and advantaged, like capitalism and ‘Western Exceptionalism’ were created instead, and our fate sealed.

Binra (@onemindinmany)
Binra (@onemindinmany)
Apr 12, 2018 11:19 AM

If there is a false thinking that results in a fake life at cost of true, does the answer lie in the attempt to blame, shame and bring penalty of retribution upon the evil – as if to stamp it out? Whether seen in the ‘other’ or in our own powerlessness or impotency?
False thinking runs as if true, by being reacted to as if true. The pain of guilt seeks protection behind freeze of fear, and the acting out of fears seems to protect a separated part, seeking some sense of ‘relative innocence’ to guilt projected, accused and punished in ‘others’. And so the self-righteous hate does the very evil it accuses in others – and sees it not.
Denied guilt usurps the mind by making a mask of denial in which guilt-thinking runs a fear protection racket as a tyranny demanding sacrifice of life, joy and freedom. False escapes only seem to work temporarily, at cost of deeper entanglement in our own deceits, and shifting forms seem to indicate change in which a problem has been solved, or redefined in such a ways as to be pushed out of range of immediate focus. Self-evasion piles up denials that operate a charged undercurrent to narrative assertions increasingly recognized as hollow – and a hollowness that evils use as agency to effect their fantasy vengeances and gratifications over a hated and unworthy sense of life and world.
The voice for guilt is vicious hatred. To listen to it is to feed it, and yet to blot it out is to let it grow upon you in the dark. A true correction is to listen to the voice for truth and abide there while the guilt rises up and passed over. The nature of the fruit of deceit is such that wisdom lies in not taking it as your own, or using it for yourself.
The sense in which a false sense of self and world is undone of the capacity to pass off – and thus be acted from – as if true, is the release of a burden to a new chapter. As Dylan says (and you can feel for the voice for truth yourself), “Don’t look back!
If your foundation wakes from mis-identification, you HAVE a basis from which to choose instead of being run by old habit. Old habit may run on a long time after you wake – but that is not the voice you want to listen to so learn not to be deceived.
The thinking mind is NOT your friend – and does not speak for or even know, You. It is a masking adaptation to a world it unknowingly creates – not in the sense of a true creation – but in generating filters and meanings that run a corporate distortion and false currency of thought and perception traded as if true.
Withdrawing support and allegiance from the false by focusing fully in the true does not go to the thinking mind for the determining or ‘proving’ of true – but to the truly recognized match of giving and receiving true witness. We uncover an innate integrity by living from it, rather than ‘seeing’ only in terms of marketising and weaponising.
‘The wicked shall perish’ points to false or unsupported thinking, and all that fruits from it – not the living. Truth is not destructive to its own – and that which has no foundation in truth, isnt.
Fighting perceived and conceived evil appeals to the heroic self vindication of identity in the untrue seeking to become true, and may react in us before we have even noticed the baited trigger.
True witness brought present – is the idea of speaking truth to power, or saying NO! to a disintegrity as a witnessing to release of a false allegiance. These align in true power when they are held in the heart’s discernment – but are easily subverted to hate agenda by divisive thinking born of guilt-driven blame.
To feel what we feel – and abide there in willingness for true – is the territory in which underlying beliefs and thinking that defines us, comes to the surface to be truly seen and evaluated. That which is not true of you, is then no longer entangled with what is, and falls away to an appreciation of wholeness of being – even to the sanctity of being. This is wholly worthy of defence by vigilance against deceit.
Regardless ‘who’ operates an agency of deceit, it is your own ‘back door’ that lets it run you, by inciting fear, guilt and division. Properly seen, your ‘persecutor’ educates you to maintain the integrity of your communication by rooting in presence instead of passing off in seeming.
Worth-ship of guilt and fear as power is a hidden worship. The masquerade played over the unacceptable seems to make it meaningful to those who want to play the illusion of power over life, even into the depths of subjection to a tyrannous demand for sacrifice of life to a fantasy of power.
Fantasy given power by false-flagged deceit is the nature of a self-dissociation into an arena of displacement for the psychic-emotional charge that would otherwise be felt at Home – but is diverted into trouble abroad. This is being shown on the Big Screen of a collective consciousness – but do we recognize it speaks directly to each of us – if we have eyes to see and ears to hear?
There isn’t a simple way to communicate the nature of such complex defences in the terms OF the mind made for such defence. But communication in truth is life itself – and is lived in true willingness and desire, not under aegis of complex thinking of priesthoods of expertise in obfuscation.
What is not used, fades from non use. What we share, grows by sharing. It is never that we are without choice, but more that we are blind to the choices we are already making, that frame us in a tyranny of false ‘choices’.

Anandamide
Anandamide
Apr 12, 2018 10:13 AM

As you say… In the Eastern wisdom traditions, then this world is known as a dreamworld… indigenous shamans and also the Western mystery schools declare this also..
But as in dreaming when we sleep at night, we can be confused, unconscious or overwhelmed, or we can wake up and become lucid… Once we become lucid in the dream we can relate to the content with wise, discriminative, compassionate mastery, and in doing so we will transform the most fearsome ‘demons,’ as they also, beyond all of their fearsome masks, desire harmony also…. They just haven’t been able to find the way, so they try to gain a sense of power through dominating people who appear different to them.
Unfortunately most people don’t awaken in their dreamtime. Either when they go to bed at night or in the waking state… It’s a practise worth exploring and is readily available to everybody…. It should be taught in school, along with mindfulness and conflict resolution.
The dreamtime can be a nightmare which is continuously self perpetuating and continues to intensify until we realise the gift of the nightmare, which is an invitation to embrace our shadow and wake up to a more wholesome, heart centred life…
Seems to me that that’s where we are in our collective dreaming right now and we’re being invited to wake up beyond the limiting beliefs, the guilt, shame and fear which we have been conditioned with throughout many generations, by political and orthodox religious indoctrination…. The same institutions who are now gathering for war in defence of their ignorant interpretation of reality…. If only they were to wake up and realise it was love which they truly desire…. Surely that’s our deeper calling in amidst all of this.

Binra (@onemindinmany)
Binra (@onemindinmany)
Apr 13, 2018 10:22 AM
Reply to  Anandamide

I cant get behind wishing others change their mind. I have to let my mind be changed – and then know that others are in their freedom and live that TO them – rather than seeing them in chains, wishing it were different as my gift to them (and myself).
Dreams given the power of acceptance as real – are suffered as real. Whatever is given power will be experienced powerful – but wishing something so is not truly willing and thus acting – but more a rehearsal for a world that never comes or the narrative replay of the world that never was.
This is not other than the ability to experience imaginatively according to the direction of our creative imagination. We can be led by false thinking to disempower ourself – and if we fear the power of Mind, we will do so as a self-protective set of brakes against any real change to a state of self-deprivation.
When we run on auto-programmings of accepted ‘reality’ instead of owning and knowing our true desire – then desire works through artificially limiting distortion – as within the framing of the dream in which love lost is sought outside oneself as a cover for the hatred believed within. Love’s true and natural desire is to extend or share, like a cup which runneth over or a light whose nature shines – and so it is through willingness to give that love re-members itself. All modes of lack-driven getting maintain the dream of the getter. Whose fantasy fulfilment is essentially private. This applies regardless of scale. A private ‘reality’ self specialness at odds with ‘what is’ – regardless its positive or negative cycle of boom or bust. Now we are collectively programming for such subjection as ‘technocracy’ – to feed the illusion of private identities as an asset management of human pharming. A nightmare indeed – but all can be ‘read’ to the exposure of the deceits and devices by which we are entranced, participant and identified falsely.
Now the spell is broken enough to challenge its framing thought such that the script or active purpose is of an awakening to dreaming, as a precursor to waking itself – which is the recognition you are not in it.
On surface terms, false framed thinking works ‘suggestions’ to scripted reaction. It could also be called force-framed thinking – where the force of hidden or denied emotional energy demands sacrifice of perspective freedom to the re-enactment of ancient defence of the mask…
Releasing the defences against self-honesty amidst the fearful is necessarily fearful – but the shift of context makes all the difference, for the movement of life supports the desire for life – where the defence against feared self or life operates under siege against literally impossible odds. This sense of ego or self imaged apart and alone is the lack that drives a world in its own image. It seems to be you – not least by the attempt to escape it.

vexarb
vexarb
Apr 12, 2018 7:18 AM

Easter message from Osip Mandelstam 1891-1938:
I shall arise and say, “The Sun”.

Fair dinkum
Fair dinkum
Apr 12, 2018 2:21 AM

Midnight Oil were a bit more blunt.
(As some Aussies tend to be).
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SAFv2NEE-_c

Lyn Smith
Lyn Smith
Apr 12, 2018 2:20 AM

Karl Kolchak
Karl Kolchak
Apr 12, 2018 2:15 AM

It’s all over, indeed. I just hope we go down without taking the rest of humanity with us.