Strange Bedfellows
Strange Bedfellows
Junious Ricardo Stanton
They say politics makes for strange bedfellows meaning the quest for
power often unites the most disparate and unlikely individuals and
groups as allies in their quest for power. Total opposites,
antagonists and others find themselves linked in pursuit of their
goals for power. We are seeing this play out in the 2024 presidential
selection process. Donald Trump is heir to the new Republican Party I
say new party because the GOP of the Bu$h, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Colin
Powell global warmonger cabal has morphed into something different
and embraced Donald Trump a man who didn’t campaign on or promise
more wars, designate new global Islamic threats but turned inward and
offered hope to “Make America Great Again” a slogan he
plagiarized from Ronald Reagan.
In 2016 Trump was scoffed at and mocked because he said he wanted
to get along with other countries like Russia, China and North Korea,
establish robust trade with them and the rest of the global
community. For that he was demonized, derided and scorned by the
military industrial complex and their media stooges. Lies were told
and he was portrayed disingenuously as a flunky for Vladimir Putin
and Russia.
Meanwhile after decades of covering over his grift, corruption,
racism, sexism, his constant warmongering and the rapid decline of
his mental acuity and physical dexterity, Joe Biden was
unceremoniously kicked to the curb by the Democratic Party big wigs.
Kamala Harris was immediately elevated and thrust to the top of the
Democratic ticket but not through voter choice via primary elections,
local caucuses or any other forms of democratic engagement but by
pure fiat! The party shot callers put her up and that was that.
Despite the undemocratic way she was selected and foisted upon the
party and public, it is the Democrats constantly echoing the canard
“our democracy is at risk”. Their hypocrisy is boundless. They
must think the American public are stupid.
Political
campaigns are not immune from the culture wars and the growing
divides
and schisms
in America today. As the campaigns progressed there was much talk
about threats to democracy, Donald
Trump was cast as the new
Hitler and on and on. We saw a
push to line up endorsements to support each candidate. Celebrities
not known for civic activism, engagement or
geopolitical awareness like
Beyonce and Taylor Swift were lauded for supporting Kamala Harris.
Bruce Springsteen has come out in favor of Harris as have a host of
pop and Hip Hop artists and well known actors.
I’ve never been a fan of
celebrity endorsements because I don’t know how much celebrities
know about geopolitics and what is going on in the world. We need
well informed folks sharing information with us, not shallow
shills and compradors
selling us out to a political party or candidate.
Unions like the Teamsters and Firefighters who historically endorsed
candidates declined due to a split when the rank and file supported
Trump or Harris but the union leadership supported Harris or Trump.
An elitist newspaper like the Washington Post declined to endorse
either candidate which prompted its editor Robert Kagan a prominent
Neocon and key participant in the Project for the New American
Century to resign in protest. Wow, a warmonger who helped peddle
lies about Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and
influenced elected officials to invade Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and
Libya gets himself in a snit and quits because his newspaper doesn’t
want to go on record supporting Kamala Harris?!
The oddities keep piling up. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who was running
essentially as an independent because the Democratic Party, the party
of his father and two uncles but now the same party talking about
saving our democracy; froze him out of the primary process, just like
they did US Senator Bernie Sanders during the last election cycles!
Kennedy is best known as a critic of Anthony Fauci and the COVID
responses that have done so much to destabilize and wreck this
country. Kennedy worked hard to get on state wide ballots. He had a
large following but he subsequently dropped out of the race and
joined Donald Trump’s campaign. So did former Democratic
Congresswoman Telsi Gabbard a US National Guard Medic who was
deployed to active duty in Iraq. While in Congress Gabbard was an
outspoken critic of US foreign policy and the escalating wars the US
was sponsoring or engaged in. She joined the Republican Party and is
campaigning for Trump! Elon Musk the billionaire who owns Space X,
Tesla and X (formally Twitter) who exposed the blatant censorship the
former owners unleashed on Donald Trump and ordinary Americans when
he purchased the social media platform, is a heavy supporter of Trump
and his message of national self-sufficiency.
Meanwhile staunch liars and warmongers like: Dick Cheyney, John
Bolton, Michael Hayden John Negroponte and a host of the other
architects of the disastrous Global War on Terrorism and imperialist
resource wars that have kept the US embroiled in ongoing foreign wars
since 9-11, are all coming out in favor of Kamala Harris! Are you
kidding me?!
Stranger still is the fact the Democratic Party and Kamala Harris
have acknowledged and accepted their endorsements. What’s up with
that? What does this say about her as a potential president and the
prospects for peace?! Why aren’t more people asking her and
Democratic Party officials about this? Where is Bernie Sanders when
the nation needs him?
The somnambulance of the American people is astounding; we are
literally sleepwalking, being glibly led into more wars, economic
conflict and ruin while a dog and pony election show keeps us
distracted and unaware. We are being duped big time while people like
me warning about the nexus between strange bedfellows, national
priorities and policies goes unheeded.
-30-
At The Crossroad
At The Crossroad
Junious
Ricardo Stanton
As we approach the last week in October 2024 the planet and humanity
finds itself at a proverbial crossroad and we have to make a
decisive choice, which way we will go. We find ourselves confronted
with a presidential election in the US, with wars escalating in
Eastern Europe and West Asia that could very easily spiral out of
control into major regional and or global conflagrations.
America has a direct hand in all of these conflicts; yet neither
major candidate in the US presidential race is addressing this
situation on meaningful levels and the comatose and somnambulant
American public seems okay with this! The US is supplying weapons,
logistics and tactical support to Ukraine and Israel in the hundreds
of billions of dollars killing millions of innocents while roads are
flooded and bridges are washed away here in America and the US
government seems powerless to assist.
We have misplaced our priorities. Our so called leaders are choosing
war profiteering thousands of miles away over peace and prosperity
here at home. Is it because we are so distracted by our gizmos and
gadgets, so focused on keeping up appearances, being superficial and
shallow we’ve failed to grasp the obvious; we are in the midst of a
societal collapse of Biblical proportions and we’re standing at the
precipice of all out global war? Has the corporatist mind control
apparatus successfully short circuited and neutralized our brains so
we no longer sense impending danger, we’ve lost grip of reality and
no longer realize self preservation is the first law of nature?
We find ourselves at a crossroad. What is a crossroad you ask? A
crossroad is where two or more roads intersect. Crossroads present
options for travelers to choose/decide which way they want to go.
Today we face an opportunity to choose which direction, which path we
will take. We have a choice. Which road will we take?
There is a myth about Robert Johnson a Mississippi Delta blues man
who wanted to be great and famous. According to the myth he went down
to the crossroad of routes sixty and forty in Mississippi where he
sold his soul to the devil in exchange for guitar proficiency and
fame. Have we like Robert Johnson in that tall tail sold our souls to
the devils of materialism, technology, hedonism and apathy at the
crossroad of modernity, morality and ethics? Have we abandoned or
ignored our souls for the flim-flam and okey-doke propagated by
psychotic overlords? Have we made the wrong the choices, taken the
wrong roads gotten lost and now face the dire consequences of our
foolish choices?
It’s time to reassess where we are, where we’re heading, which
direction we are going and whether or not those leading us are
qualified to do so? We have some deep and profound choices to make;
not just about who to vote for but about what type of society and
world we want to live in, what type of people we want to be, what
values we want to embrace and how we want to live!
We don’t have to go out like docile sheep. We are powerful beings.
We have agency and choice. We can choose which roads we want to
travel, the directions and destinations we want to go. We can choose
peace over war. We can choose life over murder. We can chose the
greatest good for the greatest number of us. We can choose nihilism
or we can choose Ubuntu- I am because we are, we are because I am.
Time is of the essence, we are at a crucial crossroad, which road do
we take?
-30-
Living In A Conundrum
Living in A Conundrum
Junious Ricardo Stanton
The Chinese have a saying, “May you live in interesting times.”
Well, we’re certainly living in interesting times to say the least.
We are living in an Orwellian scenario where the world is upside
down, language has been weaponized in an effort to maintain and
reinforce the Bizzaro World reality we are living in. For example we
are told war is peace, invasion and genocide is defense, oligarchy
and plutocracy rule by the rich and powerful is democracy. We are
living in a dystopian nightmare.
We find ourselves in the midst of a conundrum, a puzzling situation
in which we are being gaslighted, deliberately confused, bamboozled
and deceived by the government, the mass media and even the
institutions we’ve relied upon in the past for truth and guidance
like religion and education. The plutocratic overlords are
successfully turning the world upside down. Their agenda of social
reengineering and global realignment is moving at an accelerated
pace. These misanthropes are not only attempting to reconfigure the
global economic and political system, they are aggressively working
to alter what it means to be human! The adverse consequences of their
arrogance and hubris are being experienced globally.
The healing profession is knowingly making us ill and killing us;
it’s called iatrogenic injury. The food industry is not providing
nourishing foodstuffs and the government allows them to create,
distribute and market harmful products, this is called regulatory
capture or institutional corruption. The politics and electoral
process is contaminated by lies, deceit and overly influenced by
bribery aka campaign contributions, “donations” and gifts. Our
organized religions have turned their backs on ethics and morality,
they tolerate or are openly engaged in activities which don’t
reflect their professed creeds, doctrines and dogma.
This upside down discombobulation is taking a heavy toll on our
mental, emotional, psychological as well as physical health and well
being. We have allowed self-styled experts, fakers, fraudsters and
con artists to sway us and drag us into an abyss of ignorance,
benightedness, vulgarity, decadence and debauchery. Their goal in
addition to making obscene profits is to reshape our values,
worldview and behaviors. We have been lied to incessantly by
advertisers, the government and the media in general which has
created an alternative reality that far too many of us internalize
and accept as our every day norm.
We are addicted to gizmos, gadgets and media that are literally
rewiring our brains, making us less competent, less interdependent
and divided. The great irony is “Social Media” has been
documented as making us less social, it is decreasing our social
skills and competencies, making us more isolated, mentally deficient
and less astute especially the younger demographics.
Our
options are being constricted,
the power elites
have manipulated us into a position of being so stupid (in a stupor)
we think choosing the lesser of two evils is a viable and
acceptable choice! Evil is
evil no matter what degree or level it presents
itself. This is the
conundrum we find ourselves in today.
How
do we pull ourselves back from the abyss? How
do we regain our mental
acuity, confidence,
decisiveness and self- determination. How
do we reverse the slide into insanity, decadence and Zombification?
Survival is the first law of
nature, but we are being
conditioned to suppress our innate desire to live lives of meaning
and purpose and acquiesce to
this dystopian hellscape?
How do we shake off our lethargy, arouse ourselves from our
somnambulance, energize and
invigorate ourselves and
reassert our agency? How do
we determine we are not going to go out like this?
First
we have to realize and
acknowledge the dire
state we are in and decide
to snap out of it. It
takes
courage to go against the
grain. Maya
Angelou said, “The greatest of all the virtues is courage. Because
without courage you cannot consistently practice all the other
virtues. You cannot be consistently loving, kind, forgiving and
compassionate without courage pushing you onward.” To that I add
you cannot live with purpose, intention and meaning in a society such
as this without courage. We have to have the courage of our
convictions. We have to generate the courage to live with intention,
live in peace, practice kindness and ethics Have the courage to be
all the CREATOR intends for you to be, to be authentic, live in
integrity to your purpose and
actualize your potential.
Courage will dissolve the conundrum and you will see clearly and act
in accordance to your values, purpose and intention.
-30-
Blessed Are The Peacemakers
Blessed Are The Peacemakers
Junious
Ricardo Stanton
As the world
spirals towards war on multiple fronts: Eastern Europe, West Asia and
in the not too distant future Taiwan, it behooves us to think about
the alternative to global destruction. The only way the planet can
survive the madness metastasizing around the world is if more and
more of us make a genuine commitment to peace, true peace. Peace
depends upon one deciding to live a life dedicated to peace and
nonaggression. Peace begins and spreads one person at a time.
The plutocrats have
duped us into thinking peace is secured only by arming ourselves to
the teeth, possessing huge stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.
That type of thinking is what drives and enriches the US Military
Industrial Complex. The military industrial complex thrives because
of the consciousness of the US misleadership, they love war because
war is profitable.
Looking at the
history of the United States through a filter of rationality and
truth, we realize this country loves war, it cannot be denied since
it has been at war with one tribe, group, nation state or other for
ninety-three percent of its existence! Let that marinate for a few
minuets, ninety-three percent of this nation’s existence has been
taking up arms and killing fellow humans!
Today there are
wars raging around the globe many we don’t know about because the
corporate mind control apparatus doesn’t cover them, places like
Sudan, Burkina Faso, Myanmar and Columbia just to name a few. War is
counterproductive, disastrous and rarely accomplishes anything
positive. In modern warfare it is the innocents who bare the brunt of
suffering and death, children, women and male noncombatants are the
ones displaced, maimed, wounded, traumatized and killed during these
conflicts. For what, mineral resources, geo-strategic positioning,
the egos and pride of warmongers, profiteering and money?
Life is precious,
sadly most of the world doesn’t even pay lip service to this fact.
Yeah they may say it on occasion but the actions of the oligarchs and
plutocrats who run multinational corporations and governments
demonstrates daily our lives do not count, we do not matter unless it
is profiting them!
In the cosmos peace
is preeminent. When we look into the heavens we do not see clashes of
worlds, eruptions of wanton violence and destruction, we see
expansion in an orderly harmonious fashion. The word universe
means one song. We are all linked together in a magnificent ecosystem
that blends spirit and the material. The ancients had a saying, “As
above so below” meaning on this physical plane, our personal
activities and interactions should mirror the peace, harmony and
orderliness of the universe. We have gotten away from this notion as
we push the limits of modernity and so called progress.
If we are to
prevent the annihilation of humanity we must return to thinking and
acting peacefully. Since peace is not a priority in America we have
to take the initiative to place real peace in the forefront of our
ideation and actions. What does peace mean to you? How much thought
have you actually given to what this world would be like if peace
permeated our conversations, discussions and activities? What is your
idea of peace collectively and personally? Is it the absence of
negative thoughts, hostility, is it compassion, empathy, tolerance
and non-violence?
You don’t have to
be a monk, a saint or a hermit to live a peaceful life. It doesn’t
mean you never get angry, it does mean you use restraint and
self-mastery. To be a peaceful person you just have to make a
commitment to being at peace in every situation. Is this possible?
Yes because others have done it. Yes because there are/were cultures
in human history around the world where peace self-knowledge and
self-mastery were encouraged and practiced. Ancient Egypt was such a
place, the Society of Friends is a group that promotes personal and
collective peace as are many mystical and metaphysical organizations.
Is everyone perfect? No. The goal is personal peace or equanimity
remaining calm, collected, focused and in control, even in the most
dire, stressful and trying situations.
Peace is not the
conscious suppression of one’s emotions. Peace is a state of mind,
a consciousness that allows one to tap into an inner reservoir of
clam even if you are a “type A” personality. Peace doesn’t mean
you allow folks to walk over you or exploit you. In fact it is the
opposite. During a tense situation remaining peaceful (full of peace)
is beneficial in practical ways. You will be more alert, more focused
and aware rather then uptight and overwhelmed by emotions, you will
be less apt to say the wrong thing to make the situation more
volatile. You will be in control of yourself which is all you can be
and do.
Am I suggesting you
become an evolved master in this lifetime? No, I am suggesting there
is another way to live rather than highly agitated, on edge, high
strung and emotionally discombobulated. Peace and calm generate good
health, you are not in constant fight/flight mode which saves your
vital organs and prevents the constant secretion of the fight flight
hormones cortisol, glucagon, epinephrine and norepinephrine.
You
are more balanced and in harmony within yourself. Peace generates
eustress the good/beneficial stress like when you are doing something
you really enjoy and you lose track of time.
Practice
deep breathing several times a day, calm your mind as you breathe
deeply, refrain from fighting the thoughts and images that pass
through your consciousness, remain quiet, observe them without
judgment or energizing them; stay serene. Practice this when you are
alone but also when you are out and about in the world, when you are
faced with stressful situations, events and people you might perceive
as threats. In the calmness you will realize usually they are not a
threat and
if they are you will be better prepared to deal with them.
There
are blessings attached to being peaceful: you are calmer, more
reserved, less agitated, you think more clearly and you act more
rationally than when you are not agitated. Good health is a
by-product of inner peace. Blessed are the peacemakers.
-30-
