Taktsang Palphug Monastery (“the Tiger’s Nest”) is a renowned Buddhist sacred site in the Himalayas. The temple complex is located in a steep cliffside in the upper Paro Valley (Paro District) in Bhutan. In its locality, the people celebrate Tsechu, a popular folk festival in honour of Padmasambhava sometime during March or April.
BMD
Yes… there are conspiracy theories pushed by the likes of Trump, Palin, Ryan, et al… and by Clinton, Carville, Obama, and the MSM. I’d say that both sides of the duopoly share an agenda (the enrichment of the One Percent and fuck-all to the rest of us) and that they deploy lies in the service of that agenda. That’s simply logic, not a conspiracy…
The most dastardly deeds conducted by governments and big non-government bodies aren’t secrets. They’re out in the open. The problem is that we ignore them rather than they suppress them. The internet and social media are wonderful places. They constitute a marketplace of ideas, but like any marketplace, some watches are Rolex and some are fakes. One could lament the fact that some liberals and globalists still use social media, but free speech is free speech. One has to take the inane with the profound.
However, adding to the chorus of annoyance isn’t just those reading from the post-modern liberal, non-denominational, trans-human, inter-species hymn-sheet. There are also wild conspiracy theorists. They come in all intellectual shapes and sizes. There is a big difference between questioning more and being a conspiracy theorist. Questioning more means the following:
These are just some examples. However, if one takes even a casual look at Facebook or Twitter, one can find myriad conspiracy theories. There are of course some genuine dark conspiracies, but much of what conspiracy theorists agonise about is an “open conspiracy”. It’s not that they suppress the truth as much as we ignore it. Most of what people think is done by a dark gloved hand is there for all to see, so long as they take the time to see it. The following examples are open facts that many tend to distort by pretending they’re part of a deeper conspiracy.
The deep state manifestly exists. It’s a concept to denote the broadly uniform agenda pushed for by individuals in organisations like the CIA, NSA, Pentagon, NSA, big finance, and members of Congress. None of these things is secret. To take one example… arms-makers want to sell, war allows them to sell more, members of the government who are on the take from arms dealers (in one way or another) will push for war. It’s logic, not metaphysics.
Here is one from the liberal MSM side of things. Contrary to popular myth (enforced by the MSM), not all conspiracy theories are from alternative media and certainly, not all are from the libertarian right. The conspiracy theory goes, “Russia invaded the Donbass”. Well, Russia hasn’t invaded the Donbass, although even if they did, it wouldn’t be so much an invasion as it would be de-facto recognition of the sovereignty of the Donetsk and Lugansk Peoples Republics. If it existed, it’d be Russia aiding a fraternal friend. Many in Russia and the Donbass want that to happen. Nevertheless, the current Russian government has thus far aimed at solving the conflict without coming to the military assistance of their allies. Russia took a different approach to its friends in the legitimate government of Syria.
Next, the MSM conspiracy theorists say, “There are Russian weapons in the Donbass”. Of course, there are. There are Russian weapons all over the globe because like US weapons, they mass-produced them over several decades. In the case of the Donbass, most Russian weapons are old-Soviet models taken from the increasingly defeated fledgling Ukrainian/Kiev army. One can find Russian weapons everywhere from Angola to Lebanon. If you can found them there, of course, they’re in former Soviet territory on the border of the modern Russian Federation. It’s not rocket science, it’s just some old rockets that one can easily purchase virtually anywhere in the world.
Many Israeli politicians want to annex what is left of Palestine. This isn’t a conspiracy; it’s a stated agenda. Its advocates don’t hide it. The fact that many in the wider world don’t care about this agenda shows that either they’re in league with the interests of such politicians or that they simply are indifferent. Again, nothing secretive.
Obama said, “Assad must go”. Obama tried to get him to go and he failed.
Bush said, “Saddam must go”, and he went.
Hillary & Co said, “Gaddafi must go”, and he went. She even gloated about it on camera, saying, “We came, we saw, he died”. Far from a closeted conspiracy, Hillary Clinton waved her blood-soaked hands for the world to see.
Clear open facts easily debunked the lies that the aforementioned figures used to sell their régime-change agenda. Those “questioning more” did so then. The sad reality that those with vested interests didn’t listen was because they simply didn’t care about the facts. They were and remain driven by their agenda.
Many speculated that US government agencies of the have the means to spy on private citizens. Edward Snowden and the Wikileaks Vault 7 release detailed just how they accomplished this. The beauty of Wikileaks is that it provides facts for the often intelligent speculation that the powers-that-be deride as wild conspiracy theories. Here one sees that intelligent speculation is different from making up a complex web of Illuminati-controlled reptilians who seek to do what the very real CIA is doing with apparent ease.
Many think that the EU is a dark conspiracy that intends to erode the sovereignty of nation-states. European leaders from Monet and Schuman to Junker and Barroso said just this. Just because their speeches are often too boring to listen to, doesn’t mean that they aren’t making them. Such men favour closer European integration and “harmonisation” (homogenisation) to create a single united Europe. Agree or disagree with the goal, but don’t say it’s supine.
Many conspiracy theorists say that Soros is using his vast finances to fund violent protests, which are often the prelude to régime-change. HE IS! Moreover, he says so, as do the websites of his organisations like Move On and Open Society. The scary thing about Soros isn’t that he’s secretive. The scary thing is that Western governments and the UN allow him to use his wealth to destabilise sovereign states, defying international law.
I’m sympathetic with those who look for a hidden hand in all foul acts and deeds. Sometimes, people feel powerless before the fact that grave injustices exist in the world. However, as Shakespeare said, “The fault… is not in the stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings”. The best way to fight the problems arising from open conspiracies against justice, morality, and legality, is to fight them in the open using facts and opinions derived from a thorough analysis of those facts.
11 March 2017
The Duran
http://theduran.com/7-conspiracy-theories-that-arent-actually-conspiracy-theories/
Voices from Russia 
How Intellectual Élitism Divided America Since the Vietnam War
Tags: American history, history, intellectuals, middle class, political commentary, politics, United States, USA, Vietnam War, Working class
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It’s a problem that America must address and soon. In a Constitutionally classless society like the USA, intellectual snobbery/élitism is often a default form of pervasive bigotry allowed to permeate society. People more notice other forms of monetary and racial discrimination; so, they come under more frequent criticism. Unlike modern Britain, pre-1917 Russia, or pre-Revolutionary France, the USA’s foundation was on an ideology of classlessness. However, here’s an inherent contradiction. The human world, like the animal world, both consciously and unconsciously ranks things. Primitive societies rank people by their usefulness. Such societies value the strong are over the weak amongst men and the fertile over the infertile amongst women. Feudal societies tended to make things easier by dictating one’s worth by birthright. One can say the same of the Hindu caste system, only with an added spiritual component. However, in a society like America, one can make up the rules of snobbery as one goes along.
During the US Civil War, people had to grapple with racial snobbery, something which in parts of the USA lasted in a formal sense into the 1960s. During the so-called Gilded Age of the late 19th century, wealth was a go-to form of snobbery, although the Federal Income tax and later, the Great Depression, tended to mitigate the public display of such attitudes by the early 20th century. However, since the time of the Vietnam War, intellectual snobbery became the defining movement in all-American snobbery. The 1960s was an era when most Americans had decent economic living standards and it was an era where southern segregation ended, white kids listened to black music, and America’s external might appeared to be strong.
In spite of this, the Vietnam War helped solidify a plague upon American society that exists to this day. During the war, the draft brought many young American men into the armed forces. One of the more common ways to avoid serving in Vietnam was going to a college or university, for being a student exempted one from the draft in essence. Because of this, there was a supposedly equal society where those outside the university environment died in the rice paddies of Southeast Asia whilst college-educated young men partook in the pleasures of the affluent American 1960s. Although Richard Nixon ended the use of drafted soldiers in 1973, America has yet to recover from the ingrained intellectual snobbery born of the Vietnam draft.
Because all societies, including communist ones, have various types of snobbery, it often requires a new snobbery to replace the old. Because many of today’s wealthy in the West prefer to make money and not spend it, the idea of Gatsby style snobbery looks set to remain in a bygone age. Because black and white culture is increasingly integrated, it’s hard to think that a white kid listening to primarily black hip-hop music would be conspicuously racist. Yet, intellectual snobbery remains. Not only this, it’s actively cultivated by the liberal élite. Rather than concealing their snobbery like a wealthy man driving a cheap car or a racist pretending to be neutral on the subject they actively promote it.
Hillary Clinton calling Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables” was a crucial example of this as was Meryl Streep’s speech at the Golden Globe awards in Beverly Hills. One sees this snobbery everywhere from the liberal British comedian Dom Joly ridiculing conservative social-media users who don’t use spell-check to US commentators like Bill Maher and Stephen Colbert who continually deride Trump voters as “stupid rednecks”, as though their votes don’t count because of the baseless assumption that they aren’t highly educated. Even if all Trump voters were poorly educated, why should this matter? Modern democracy is about people having representation in exchange for taxation. In the 20th century, the franchise broadened to include all adult citizens except the criminal. It isn’t about how intelligent, how rich, how white, how black, how female, or how tall one is. Furthermore, an elongated and expensive education is no substitute for common sense, psychological maturity, and experience in the real world.
When the war ended in 1975, many Vietnam veterans came to resent the war and oppose much of what it did to society. In this sense, Vietnam veterans adopted the same “opposition with hindsight” attitude to the war as the rest of America. Yet ultimately, the liberal movement didn’t attract many of these men. In many cases, however, the conservative movement of the post-Vietnam era did. The veterans couldn’t relate to the college-educated snobs who wrote hippy rock songs about the war while smoking pot and impregnating the local women, while they, the draftees, were in Southeast Asia being shot at from the trees. Even though many of these college/university students were anti-war, their daily realities were far removed from the men who actually fought the war. Many of the soldiers felt that many college-educated individuals in the anti-war movement condescended towards them, and not even attempt to understand, let alone relate to them. This is why many of these men voted for the hawkish Ronald Reagan in his landslide victory of 1984. Where Reagan’s liberal Democratic opponent Walter Mondale was unintentionally condescending, Reagan was a masterful communicator who had a way of making people feel included irrespective of their status in society. Until the liberal élitists learn this, they may be out of power for a long time. The liberals did as good a job at losing as Trump did at winning. Liberal élitism remains a key reason for both.
10 March 2017
Adam Garrie
The Duran
http://theduran.com/intellectual-elitism-dividing-america-since-vietnam-war-video/