Comments

Hi Matthew,
I know you worked hard on this piece but it runs so counter to much of what we support on candobetter.net that I feel constrained to make these comments.

MATTHEW wrote: The West is learning about Collective Responsibility: We are starting to realise that all the little decisions we make about what to do, or what not to do really matter. We are learning that throwing our plastic bag (or our used coffee cups, or our cigarette buts) into the street, does matter - because collectively all this rubbish is having an impact on our environment and especially our wildlife.

SHEILA: Who is this 'we'? The situation seems to be becoming worse, not better. We are losing environmental protection laws; consumption continually rises. New generations grow up with very little understanding or interest in wildlife or habitat loss. In the 1970s people were more aware and had more traction. Then NGOs were seduced into cooperating with corporations and receiving government grants. They were easily infiltrated and gutted.

MATTHEW wrote: We are learning that things we once thought of as insignificant are in fact significant and often have far reaching effects. In Australia we have learned that longer showers affect our water supplies, that our small individual actions are impacting our water storages as well as the flow down our rivers, and consequently the water available for farming and other purposes.

SHEILA: Water has been commodified to take advantage of forced population growth. Farmers have been ruined by having their water diverted to intensive irrigators and pig farmers. Steve Bracks was a major propagandist for mass immigration and 'saving our water for future generations' and he was behind the water grab in the Mallee Wimmera that Pipe Right Inc tried to fight and lost. see "Government interference in Wimmera Mallee Water - some recent history" Consider the $3b at stake in the Wonthaggi Desalinisation Plant and consider how strong a protest this drew and how the judiciary silenced this protest by bankrupting the NGO. Water is a focus of massive corruption in this country and globally. The outsourcing of its management has brought billions to the 1% and has taken our power to control its use away. Furthermore the business model is totally unsustainable, See, "Critique of Environment Victoria's 'Six Steps to Water Leadership' workshop"

MATTHEW wrote: What an awakening! Who would he guessed that city dwellers, so removed from nature and so supplied with apparent excesses of everything from water to electricity to coffee (and a wide variety of palm oil products) would start to become aware of the plight of coffee growers (and of deforestation) in distant lands, and to change their habits based on this knowledge!

SHEILA: They only change their habits based on growthist propaganda, which subsumes all independent voices, fooling the uncritical. And it works on guilt (which seems to be the message you are faithfully relaying here, although probably without any focused benefit). I haven't noticed the growthists pushing against palm oil. It is everywhere. In soap, in washing powder, in shampoo...

MATTHEW wrote: We are coming to realise that there is such a thing as collective responsibility - that we cannot disassociate ourselves from the society we live in and its impacts locally and globally. It is becoming increasingly difficult for Westerners to say about foreign wars that they personally have nothing to with them. All a protaganist must do is ask, well do you drive a car? Then you use oil and in one way or another are contributing to problems in the middle east. Do you use a computer, mobile phone or iPad - then how can you say that you and your actions play no part in the conflicts in Africa over the scarce resources used to make these devices? Do you buy manufactured goods from China? Does your country sell them the coal used to power those factories? Then how can you say that Chinese pollution not - even if in only some tiny way - your fault? One challenged by such a statement may retort: "I have no choice but to drive a car, that is how most westerners live" or "I have no choice but to buy Chinese goods, as these goods are not produced here". But they used to be - why are they not made here now?

SHEILA: Because, against the wishes of the population, globalism broke down trade protection (A terrible policy amongst many better of Whitlam's) and put an end to a swathe of small businesses. Those that survived have since been decimated by the cost of land, rent, power, water which makes production costs too expensive, reduced profit margin and makes Australia uncompetitive with most other countries which have much lower land-costs. See "Land and Rent Costs to Business make Australia uncompetitive"

MATTHEW wrote: This raises the second thing we are learning - consequences accumulate not only over space but over time. The purchasing choices of recent decades, and the constant search to save a little here and there has had far-reaching effects. Our choices have supported companies that seek to produce things as cheaply as possible, and punished those that payed good wages and provided good conditions, Thus we as a nation have shed industries, and jobs, that it seems will never be regained. And now many of us really have no choice but to buy the cheapest, as our job market shrinks and the pressures we bought to bear on overseas countries are now brought to bear on us? And it is mostly the younger generation who struggle to find work and who are paying exorbitant prices for things that were - until fairly recently - relatively affordable eg: housing and basic utilities.

SHEILA: Once again a consequence of destroying local production and encouraging massive imports from poorer countries, paid for by credit cards marketed by the 1% who profit from all this.

MATTHEW wrote: So - slightly older Australians might say - this is not my doing, others allowed this offshoring of our industry, others allowed the highly profitable (for packaging companies) disposable plastic bottle industry to supplant the previous, much more sustainable, refundable bottle system (remember the glass bottles, which you would get 20c for if you returned - back when 20c was the cost of playing an arcade video game?) But it was our doing - collectively. Who else can be held responsible for the paths our society has taken?

SHEILA: The power elite who have allowed the public messaging stick to be captured in the form of the duopoly press who also control the political elite here. Australians have been disorganised in a big way and have been led to believe that what the mass media and the ABC pretend is public opinion really is, so they feel alone and invalidated. See Taking back the talking stick (Which is why the alternative media like candobetter.net should validate them, not just repeat the brainwashing of the mass media and government which blames us all or says we wanted this. People fought all of this as much as they could. They lost to traitors like Keating and Hawke profiting from Reagan Thatcher economics post oil shock - but there was a completely different way of behaving, which was the tack taken by Europe.)

MATTHEW wrote: Who? People in other countries? Which such people had such control over us? Our tiny elite - our 1%? Do 1% of people really have so much sway over the other 99%?

SHEILA: Absolutely! Haven't you read anything about the Property Council of Australia or the Multicultural Foundation of Australia? (see "Australia - Standing room only when 80% of Australians do not want a big Australia." Look at the political theory of focused benefits and diffuse costs in a democracy.
Haven't you noticed how mass media and government continually make up stories about why we are at war, which they market repetitively to less and less well-educated generations? Generations who have not even learned clear thinking, let alone history or geography. The anti-war movement has been completely subsumed to the pro-refugee movement, which is carried by the mainstream media because it benefits their war industries by drowning out the fact that refugees are created by wars.

MATTHEW wrote: Are we really that powerless? Or is the truth that the 99% - or least a large proportion of them - were in some way complicit? Is it true that evil men only succeed where good men stay silent? So where were the good men? Where were the 99% of good men, and women, who could have stood up and stopped any of these things - if they really wanted to? Or were the 99% happy to go along and allow, for example, the introduction of negative gearing?

SHEILA: Negative gearing as the major cause of housing unaffordability is another furphy. It's just a form of investment with logical tax deductibility. (See "Are the Greens on the right track with respect to negative gearing? - Article by Sally Pepper." It is part of the fuel of massive over-reliance on property development in our economy, fueled by mass immigration and constant population movement in search of jobs, divorce, etc. There are many ways to counter the overimportance of the real-estate sector of the economy, but manipulating negative gearing so that it only applies to new constructions accelerates the property development juggernaut and habitat destruction. As well, it pits home owners against non-home owners when the two should be in solidarity about the right to shelter. There is never any real focus on the property industry that benefits disproportionately from negative gearing - it is instead held up as a growth industry that gives people 'jobs' [which they would not be so reliant on if they were not all in debt].

MATTHEW wrote: To not stand up against something so obviously unjust and unfair? Perhaps it didn't seem important, just like many of these things; the growing use of plastics, the growing dependence on cars, and the subsequent relative degradation of public transport infrastructure. So what we are now learning is that these small things do matter - and in the long run they matter a lot! So what is to be done now? It is clear that now we must change our old indolent ways - we must start to stand-up for what is right, big things of course, but also we must take responsibility for our small decisions too. Why buy a disposable coffee-cup (another piece of land-fill, if it doesn't end up in the bay)? Why buy $1 milk when you know farmers are struggling, for goodness sake we can nearly all afford to pay a fair price for milk!

SHEILA: People might start out by trying not to use throw away cups and by trying to buy less-exploitative milk, but given the increasing rates of debt and precarity, many people make cuts even to the smallest expenses. Most people do not use throwaway cups in their homes, but hospitals and corporate cafeterias and many cafes now do. Why? I would like to know. They seem to prefer it to investing in dishwashing machinery.

MATTHEW wrote: So I suggest we all do take personal responsibility for the collective actions of our society - we are part of it, and we cannot disassociate ourselves from it or its effects. We cannot say that homelessness, unemployment, unprofitable farming etc, are not our fault - because in some way these things are only the way they are because we allow them to be. Deep down we know this - the next step is to honestly acknowledge it. White Australians know that collectively they carry the responsibility to amend past mis-deeds. We know it matters for a white Australian Prime-Minister to apologise to the Indigenous people of this land. It is effectively a collective apology.

SHEILA: Apologies are cheaper than land-tenure. Australia didn't give back their land and successive PM's are trying to free-title indigenous land - to make it another brick in the yellow brick road of the 1% who benefit from real-estate speculation in a growing population. No treaty has been negotiated. Cheap, these apologies. I find them shamefully superficial.

MATTHEW wrote: Some may deny they have any responsibility for the past and for the on-going situation of Aborigines in this country - but they do. As long as we do not have a treaty with the Aborigines we are letting them down.

SHEILA: That's right, but do you think the governments and press intend to allow the idea of a treaty to reach serious debate? Of course not.

MATTHEW wrote: Who else's responsibility is it to fix past wrongs? Is it just the job of a few politicians?

SHEILA: A 'few' politicians? A mass of overpaid, commercially well-connected stooges in internationally affiliated parties with globalist agendas. They should represent us on this, but they represent the banks, the land-bankers and the press moguls. That is why there are such attempts to get new political parties going, but since they are rarely covered in the mainstream media, it is difficult to get them known - because we do not have any other state or national media besides the ABC and Murdoch/Fairfax. Furthermore it is clear that the vast bulk of our politicians do not respect or fear the public - and why should they? The state pays and controls the police, the army, and the law-makers.

MATTHEW wrote: Or some social welfare workers? Or is the responsibility of everyone of us to ensure that everyone else in our country is treated justly; treated fairly; treated humanely?

SHEILA: Bureaucracy has that effect. Once you might have gone next door and taken a child out of a dangerous situation, but these days you fear prosecution because it is 'not your job'. So you ring the police or child welfare. Our societies are segmented into roles that divide us and disempower us which are regulated from top down and people don't know each other due to population movement (moving house, migration, commuting) and we have little presence or power at local and neighborhood level.

MATTHEW wrote: Again the question arises - if it is not up to you - then who is it up to? The person next to you? Why them and not you? Thus we must start to take responsibility for our actions - including our past mistakes. We must have sufficient humility to do this, and also sufficient selflessness to not worry about how our own personal situation may be detrimentally effected by doing the right thing - that is if we want to live in the country where the right thing is done. Because if we do not, then we keep going right on ignoring all problems we are collectively creating by putting our heads in the sand, seeking the cheapest bargains where-ever we can, and allowing ourselves to be more and more driven to the level of animals by the selfish, individualistic, competitive nightmare we are currently experiencing.

SHEILA: This message is what we hear all the time from the mass media and the churches. The meek shall inherit the earth, but in the mean-time, shut up and look to your own sins. It is all 'our fault', but we have so little power and talk so little with each other. We have been diversified, not just by mass immigration, but by our jobs, our new classes, our educations, debt and overwork, that it is very hard for us to find common values. Candobetter.net tries to bring these matters to the foreground and create awareness and promote organisation to take back the talking stick; we are not into telling the masses that they are guilty of creating the problems from which the one per cent all benefit. with the mass media there is a resemblance to the organised church, which conveyed from the pulpit what it deemed the public needed to know, and urged them to consult it about any problems instead of their taking power for themselves.

MATTHEW wrote: So let all Australians - new to the country or old - take responsibility for the lack of a treaty with the decendants of the original inhabitants of this land. And let the older Australians apologise to the younger generations for the mess they have left them to deal with. Then let us hope that the Indigenous and the young can forgive and then we can all get on with fixing this mess, recreating a truly human, civilised, society in which both people and planet are cared for. The alternative is now obvious - it leads to oblivion of all that is good, leaving a bunch of increasingly selfish people fighting over the decaying scraps of a dying planet.

SHEILA: An indigenous treaty without an end to mass immigration would be laughable. So let's make that part of the treaty. That would also benefit everyone else born or resident in this country - except the 1%.

from Qld koala population at risk (8/5/16) | Sky News:

The future of South East Queensland's koala population hangs in the balance after a report revealed populations in some areas had declined by as much as 80 per cent. The University of Queensland report that claimed koalas living in and around Brisbane were at risk of extinction.

Aleppo Doctor Attacks Western Media for Bias, Censorship and Lies         

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article44597.htm

       By Silvia Cattori
 

Dr Nabil Antaki could have abandoned Aleppo to ensure his own safety. Instead he decided to remain and to serve the besieged people of his City, working with various local charities.  Above all, he wanted to bear witness to the destruction caused by Western support for the foreign armed groups who have been systematically destroying Syria and terrorising its people for the last 5 years.
Yesterday Silvia Cattori recorded this report from Dr Antaki on the recent amplification of propaganda surrounding events in Aleppo.  It has been translated from the French by Vanessa Beeley.
 

“With regards to recent events in Aleppo, I state very clearly that the mainstream media are lying by omission. Since the beginning of the war in Aleppo that began 4 years ago, they have consistently failed to report all the facts.
All of us here in Aleppo are disgusted by their lack of impartiality and objectivity. They only ever talk about the loss of life in the east of Aleppo which is entirely controlled by Al Nusra, a terrorist group affiliated with Al Qaeda. These are their “moderate rebels” a title that affords them an unmerited degree of respectability.
This same media remains silent on the daily losses and suffering endured in the Western areas of Aleppo living under the rain of mortar fire from these terrorist factions.  This media never mentions the terrorist blockade upon our people or the electricity cuts and water shortages inflicted upon us by their “moderate rebels”
Read more on Aleppo’s terrorist blockade, water shortages and starvation here: Syria, from the Sublime to the Shameful.
This media never mention the continuous bombardment and the carnage we have witnessed in western Aleppo where every single sector has been targeted. On a daily basis we see dozens of people murdered.

What makes these omissions even more despicable is that these areas represent 75% of Aleppo and there are 1.5 million people living in them. Compare this to the 300,000 living in the eastern zone which is occupied by terrorist groups.
This twisted narrative engenders the belief that these terrorist groups that are attacking us are actually the victims. Even more abhorrent, these media have distorted our “Save Aleppo” appeal, to make it look as if we are calling for Assad and the Syrian Army to cease hostilities!
This is FALSE. Added to which, they are not “Assad’s forces“, they are the national forces of the regular Syrian army that is defending the Syrian State.
The western and gulf media could at least have had the decency to mention the terrorist massacres of our people. For example, on Friday 30th April, when one of their mortars targeted a mosque at prayer time.
The attacks and losses we suffer are reported in a way that leaves the public in the dark about the true perpetrators of these crimes.
For three days now, these media outlets have been accusing the “Assad regime” of bombing an MSF hospital [Medecins sans Frontieres] to the east of Aleppo and of killing the last paediatrician in the city. This demonstrates that, for these media, the only priority is this pocket of the city where terrorists are embedded.
The three quarters of Aleppo under Syrian Government control where numerous paediatricians are practicing is of no consequence for this media. We witnessed the same bias when Al Kindi, the biggest hospital in Aleppo, was targeted by terrorist mortars and then intentionally burnt down about 2 or 3 years ago. The media ignored this criminal act.
We are disheartened and disgusted by this continuous disinformation.”
Nabil Antaki |30th April 2016

Original: http://arretsurinfo.ch/alep-linformation-mensongere-continue-par-nabil-antaki/

Translation: VANESSA BEELEY | MAY 1, 2016

In the 18:17 minute video Oliver Silverstein 'Stone' Movie SNOWDEN is a Limited Hangout in AMTV YouTube channel presenter Christopher Greene (pictured) claimed that Edward Snowden was not who he claimed to be. In fact he was still working for the United States' government! He also claimed that the United States and Russia were acting together with Edward Snowden to mislead all of us.

The whole video should have taken 5 minutes at the most, but Christopher Green managed to keep it going for 18:17 minutes. Fell free to watch the video linked to above, but I recommend: don't bother.

In the meantime, please do everything you can to promote Oliver Stone's "Snowden". See your local cinema management and ask and urge them to show it.

John Gray Says Human Progress Is a Myth

Dennis K wrote:

They have no choice but to learn to live with it, and damn to hell those who suggest otherwise. So stoically walk arm and arm and face your destiny with a smile and defiance.

I don't accept that Europeans or Australians have "to live with" what the ruling elites have planned for them. The anti-immigration and anti-globalist National Front of Marine Le Pen won 27.73% of the vote in the first round of the December 2015 French regional elections, more than either the openly pro-corporate Union des Démocrates et Indépendants on 26.65% of the vote or the 'left wing' 'Parti socialiste on 23.12% of the vote.

However, the National Front failed to win a single region, because the other two parties acted together against the National Front during the second round.

Marine Le Pen is a member of the European Parliament. There is good reason to hope that the National Front, with a capable leader like Marine Le Pen and grass roots action, will be able to overcome the manouvers by the other two main parties and win the next French elections.

See also : The Brussels Attacks – Another False Flag? (23/3/26) by Peter Koenig | Global Research, Syria condemns Brussels terrorist attacks, says they are result of wrong policies in favor of terrorism (22/3/26) | SANA

In Brussels Attack: The True Implications of ISIS Links (22/3/16) | New Eastern Outlook (republished (23/3/16) in Land Destroyer) Tony Cartalucci uses his exceptional insight and knowledge of Syria and European politics to show how suspicious and inconsistent is the official mainstream narrative of the Brussels Bombing of 22 March.

However, this otherwise informative article is unjustly critical of Europeans who actively opposed the huge wave of immigration suddenly imposed upon them by politicians, notably German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the corrupt Turkish President Erdogan.

Cartalucci cites a Guardian op-ed of 22 March which claims that the terrorists were long time residents of Europe and not new arrivals. This would hardly be surprising, as it would surely require local knowledge and familiarity in order to be able to carry out such a devastating attack. Cartalucci continues:

Should the Brussels attack be linked to this same terror network, it will greatly complicate efforts by some to leverage this tragedy to further their agendas against refugees ...

...

In Europe, where the flames of a "clash of civilizations" are being furiously and intentionally fanned, ISIS serves as a constant implement to empower extremists on both sides, while drowning out the voices of unity, moderation, and peace in the middle. It allows for a growing police state and xenophobic tendencies to flourish at home, while justifying further war abroad.

Presumably Cartalucci considers German Chancellor Angela Merkel to be for "unity, moderation, and peace" and would label those, who voted against her in the recent German regional elections as well as the 143 women assaulted in Cologne on New Year's Eve, and those who tried to protect them, 'extremists'.

RT's Lizzie Phelan raises concerns about Russian withdrawal from Syria

In the above video, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Defence Minister state their plans to pull out most Russian military forces from Syria, except for the air base at Lattakia and the naval port at Tartus. The reasons they give are that the terrorists have been defeated and that the Syrian Army, Hezbollah and the Kurdish YPP have matters under control.

RT's reporter in Syria, Lizzie Phelan, largely confirms this. However, she goes on to point out that there was fear amongst local Syrians that some terrorists may use the opportunity to relaunch their war against the Syrian Government. There had been daily breaches of the ceasefire by terrorists. Lizzie Phelan, herself, had only recently witnessed, near her, the explosions of two mortar bombs launched by terrorists, explode near her in Daraa.