How to get rid the bastards before they murder us all

Posted on May 5, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Jack Balkwill

If most Americans knew what was happening in our extremely corrupt government, there would be a bloody riot, and most of the Democrats and Republicans would be slaughtered with as little mercy as they’ve shown the American public.

Through their actions, Democrats and Republicans have caused the deaths of millions from unsafe products, unsafe workplaces, lack of minimal health care, unnecessary wars, and other malfeasance resulting from their serving the vile capitalists who finance their elections.

True, a fourth of the electorate vote Democrat, and another fourth Republican, because they see no other hope. Delusions of “lesser evils” lead them to line up, lambs to the slaughter, hoping that the stinking pile of dung for whom they vote will enable less horror than the other stinking pile of dung.

Half of the electorate routinely do not vote, understanding that, in our system, decent candidates are not allowed air time by the corporate-viewpoint media, nor allowed the mountains of cash given to the Democrats and Republicans with which to purchase additional media exposure for deceitful campaign ads.

If a candidate of the people did find a way to be recognized, he or she would not be allowed into the controlled debates. Ballot access is another way the establishment blocks democracy from breaking out in the Land of the Free. The ruling plutocratic oligarchs have pretty much covered all the bases to snuff out any hope for an iota of democracy.

In many of our elections, far more than half of eligible voters do not cast ballots. Propaganda control by mainstream media tell us this is because those who do not cast votes are satisfied, when anybody with an IQ higher than their shoe size knows it’s a lie. “Let’s see now,” these potential voters ponder, should I vote for the guy who’ll stick a knife in my left hand, or the one who will put an ice pick through my right foot?

I’ve watched for decade after decade as young people voted for “lesser evil” scum, saying they will do better next time. Next time they do the same thing. The system is evil itself, if anything is evil, encouraging the hopeless to vote for scumbags with the hope to stop other scumbags from winning.

It is a part of American capitalism, where everything of importance is controlled and nobody is supposed to notice that it only works for the capitalists—those few who control most of the capital. American capitalism is so badly broken that it requires the world’s largest prison system to make it barely chug along. It requires thousands dying for a lack of health care each year, higher numbers than in any industrialized nation. It requires the highest homelessness and hunger among major industrialized nations.

And the corporate media, fawning lap dogs that they are, never notice any of it. If a corporate-paid journalist did, they would soon find themselves to be among the unemployed. Capitalism loves unemployment because it draws down wages, allowing the capitalists to increase their profits, the only thing that works in capitalism. That is why our submissive government lies about unemployment figures constantly, always giving the numbers as half or less than half of the true misery index.

When people begin to minimally get jobs, the Federal Reserve raises interest rates to increase unemployment and maintain the wealth disparity. As the poor are wiped out by the millions, no billionaire is allowed to lose a penny in the rigged system.

The problem in doing something about it is that the doors have just about all been shut by corrupt laws. There are groups of voters who have more right to be upset than others, but they are locked out of the system to prevent an outbreak of democracy.

For example, in most states convicted felons are not allowed to vote, even though they have officially “paid for their crime.” These people are ripe for voting for a people’s party, and the establishment knows it, so bars them. Unemployed, they may have sold some pot to feed their kids, the only real shot there is for many at the bottom of an economy in which more illegal drugs are sold than in any other nation.

And I’ve tried for decades to change the law in Virginia so that homeless people can vote. Long ago I was feeding homeless people on the street, spooning out grits in freezing cold, watching people with ice around their faces crawl out from doorways where they slept and thinking, “What if I could bring registration forms, get them to sign up and encourage them to vote for the Greens?”

I even found a legislator, a Black woman named Mary Christian, to sponsor me to speak before the Constitution Committee of the House of Delegates, the oldest legislature in North America, and ask that they allow homeless people to vote. To make a long story short, I failed in that attempt.

Didn’t know that homeless people can’t vote? Check your state and you will probably find it’s near impossible there as well. In Virginia, if you are caught with a false address on your registration, you are subject to a year in jail and a $10,000 fine. If you are homeless, and you register as living in the building whose doorway you slept in last night, chances are you won’t be there the next night after a cop tells you to move along.

The establishment knows who could be trouble, and has already enacted laws to make democratic participation hell for millions of Americans.

Most Americans live in ignorance of almost anything of importance to them, knowing only the myths given to them by the corporate media. That is what makes it so difficult to organize them—their heads are filled with propaganda. “But if I don’t vote for Hitler, Satan will get in. . . .”

So, in my entire life of trying to find ways to disrupt the system and make it work for the people, I always come back to the one thing that holds promise, and that is to find a way to get information to the masses around the corporate-viewpoint media. It is that mainstream media which keeps the masses ignorant and in thrall.

I hate to agree with Donald Trump, but he’s right that the mainstream media is the enemy of the people. They have been all my 72 years, but it is getting worse.

Once there were big dreamers in our government who came up with National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System, which were a great idea. The idea was to allow opinions around the corporate media, so that the public could get a second opinion.

But good ideas soon hit a meat grinder in our system. The scum who run the country had their bought-and-paid-for politicians cut funding, forcing NPR and PBS to take more and more corporate money, until they became a clone of ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, etc.

If we had one TV channel of our own, we could destroy the entire house of cards. Years ago I wrote about it and it appears we need a Social Justice Network more than ever today. The thing the establishment fears most is information and democracy, and a Social Justice Network could bring us both, by opening the eyes of the public to the scam that keeps a boot on their backs. Ignorant people are controlled people.

Jack Balkwill has been published from the little read Rectangle, magazine of the English Honor Society, to the (then) millions of readers USA Today and many progressive publications/web sites such as Z Magazine, In These Times, Counterpunch, This Can’t Be Happening, Intrepid Report, and Dissident Voice. He is author of “An Attack on the National Security State,” about peace activists in prison.

Four Kinds of Dystopia

Posted on May 3, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Darren Allen

Source: ExpressiveEgg.org

The twentieth century saw four basic visions of hell on earth, or dystopia. These were:

Orwellian. Rule by autocratic totalitarian people, party or elite group, limitation of choice, repression of speech and repression of minorities, belief in order, routine and rational-morality. Control by enclosure, fear and explicit violence. Violent repression of dissent (via ‘the party line’). Erotic physicality and sexual freedom suppressed via control of sexual impulses. Control of thought by explicitly policing language (Orwellian Newspeak).

Huxleyan Rule by democratic totalitarian systems, excess of choice, limitation of access to speech platforms, assimilation of minorities, belief in emotional-morality, ‘imagination’ and flexibility, and control by desire, debt and implicit threat of violence. No overt control of dissent (system selects for system-friendly voices). Erotic physicality and sexual freedom suppressed via promotion of pornographic sensuality and dissolution. Control of thought by implicitly enclosing language within professional boundaries (Illichian Newspeak, or Uniquack).

Kafkaesque Rule by bureaucracy. Control of populace via putting them into writing, forcing people to spend free time on bureaucratic tasks, thereby inducing tractable stress and the schizoid, self-regulating self-consciousness (anxiety about low marks, unlikes, official judgements and the like) that bureaucratic surveillance engenders. Generation of a system which structurally rewards those who seek an indirect relationship with their fellows or who, through fear of life, seek to control it through the flow of paperwork.

Phildickian Rule by replacing reality with an abstract, ersatz virtual image of it. This technique of social control began with literacy*—and the creation of written symbols, which devalued soft conscious sensuous inspiration, fostered a private (reader-text) interaction with society, created the illusion that language is a thing, that meaning can be stored, owned and perfectly duplicated, that elite-language is standard and so on—and ended with virtuality—the conversion of classrooms, offices, prisons, shops and similar social spaces into ‘immersive’ on-line holodecks which control and reward participants through permanent, perfect surveillance, the stimulation of positive and negative emotion, offers of godlike powers, and threats to nonconformists of either narco-withdrawal or banishment to an off-line reality now so degraded by the demands of manufacturing an entire artificial universe, that only hellish production-facilities, shoddy living-units and prisons can materially function there.

The reader can decide for herself under which of above we currently struggle to eke out a life worth living. I would like to suggest that all modern societies are both Kafkaesque and Phildickian with either a Huxleyan or Orwellian overarching framework; modern, western, capitalist societies tend to be basically Huxleyan (HKP) and pre-modern, eastern, communist countries tend to be basically Orwellian (OKP).

The reason why ideological managers** (academics, film directors, journalists, etc) prefer to have two (or more) dystopian systems is that it makes us seem like the goodies and them the baddies. Communism is to blame for their foodbanks and breadlines, but capitalism has nothing to do with ours (or vice versa). Sure our masses have the same miserable lives as theirs, reel under the same bureaucratic insanity, stumble around the same shoddy unreal worlds, and witness the same catastrophic destruction of nature and beauty as theirs do, but at least we’ve got democracy! / at least our families stick together! / at least the trains run on time! / at least GTA 9 is coming out soon / at least the Olympics will cheer us up (delete as appropriate).

This is an adapted extract from The Apocalypedia.

_{* Obviously I’m not suggesting that literacy is inherently or completely dystopian, but it is the beginning of a dangerous and distorting process, which starts with societies demanding literacy for participation — and devaluing orality and improvised forms of expression — and ends with the complete eradication of reality. This danger and distortion increases with every step towards virtuality (print, perspective, photography, television, internet) until, by the time we reach VR, there remains no possibility of reverie, transcendence, humanity, meaning or genuine creativity, all of which become suspect.}

_{** And of course for those who depend on their illusions.}

Algorithmic Control and the Revolution of Desire

Posted on May 2, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Alfie Brown

Source: ROAR Magazine

Last year, Stanford University published a study confirming what many of us may long have suspected: that your computer can predict what you want with more accuracy than your spouse or your friends. Your digital footprint betrays the truth not only about what you “like” but about what you really like — or so the argument goes. But what if our digital footprints, besides revealing our desires, are also responsible for the very construction of these desires? If that were the case, we would need to display a far deeper level of suspicion towards the complex patterns of corporate and state control found in contemporary cyberspace.

There is little doubt that innovations in mobile technologies are part of emerging methodologies of social control. In particular, games and applications that make use of the Google Maps back-end system — including Uber, Grindr, Pokémon Go and hundreds of others — which should be seen as one of the most important technological developments of the last decade or so, are particularly complicit in these new regulatory practices. Putting the well-publicized data collection issue aside, such applications have two powerful ideological functions. First, they construct the new “geographical contours” of the city, regulating the paths we take and mapping the city in the service of both corporate interest and the prevention of uprisings. Second, and more unconsciously, they enact what Jean-Francois Lyotard once called the “desirevolution” — an evolution and revolution of desire, in which that what we want is itself now determined by the digital paths we tread.

The Psycho-Geographical Contours of the City

In 1981, the French theorist Guy Debord famously wrote of the “psycho-geographical contours” of the city that govern the routes we take, even when we may feel we are wandering freely around the physical space. At that time, it was Debord’s topic — architecture — that was the dominant force in re-organizing our routes through the city. Today, however, that role is increasingly taken up by the mobile phone. It is Uber that dictates the path of your taxi, Maps that dictates the route of your walks and drives, and Pokémon Go that (for a summer at least) determined where the next crowd would gather.

Other similar map-based application programing interfaces, or APIs, dictate our jogging routes (MapMyRun), our recreational hikes (LiveTrekker) and our tourist activities (TripAdvisor Guides). Pokémon Go attracted some publicity because it accidentally and humorously gathered crowds in weird places, but this should only alert us to its potential ability to gather crowds in the right places (to serve corporate interest) or to prevent the gathering of crowds in the wrong ones (to prevent organized uprisings, for instance). Such applications should be seen as a testing phase in the project of Google and its affiliated corporations as they work out how best to regulate the movements of large populations via their phones. Pokémon Go players were the early cyborgs, complete with hiccups and malfunctions — a beta version of Google’s future human. These future humans will go where instructed.

On a smaller scale, this point can be seen in concrete terms with a case study of London. A recent Transport for London talk discussed the possibility of “gamifying” commuting. In order to facilitate this possibility, Transport for London have made the internet API and data streams used to monitor all London Transport vehicles open source and open access, in the hope that developers will build London-focused apps based around the public transport system, thus maximizing profit. One idea is that if a particular tube station is at risk of becoming clogged up due to other delays, TfL could give “in-game rewards” for people willing to use alternative routes and thus smooth out the jam.

While traffic jam prevention may not seem like evidence that we have arrived in the dystopia of total corporate and state control, it does actually reveal the dangerous potentiality in such technologies. It shows that the UK is not as far away from the “social credit” game system recently implemented in Beijing to rate each citizen’s trustworthiness and give them rewards for their dedication to the Chinese state. While the UK media reacted with shock to these innovations in Chinese app development, a closer look at the electronic structures of mapping and controlling our own movements shows that a similar framework is already in its development phase in London too. In the “smart city” of the future, it won’t just be traffic jams that are smoothed out. Any inefficient misuse or any occupation of public space deemed dangerous by the authorities can be specifically targeted.

The Corporate Surveillance State

When it comes to these developments in technology, state and corporate forces work more closely with each other than ever before — and much more closely than they are willing to admit. Srećko Horvat has pointed out the short distance between the creators of Pokémon Go and Hillary Clinton, despite her odd and unsolicited recent public claim that she didn’t know who made the game. Likewise, Julian Assange’s strangely under-discussed 2014 book When Google Met WikiLeaks showed the shocking proximity of Google chief Eric Schmidt and the Washington state apparatus. In terms of surveillance and the use of big data, it has become impossible to sustain the distinction between state control and the production of wealth, since the two have become so irrevocably intertwined. As such, old arguments that “it’s all just about money” need to be treated with greater suspicion, since major firms today are so closely tied to the state. Various aspects of state organization should likewise be considered equally suspect because of their corporate underpinnings.

Of course, when it comes to the mapping applications that promise to help us access the best quality objects of our desire with the greatest efficiency and the least cost, these tempting forces of joint corporate and state control are entered into willingly by participants. As such, they require something else in order to function in the all-consuming way that they do. Far from simply channeling and transforming our movements, they also need to channel and even transform our desires.

We are now firmly within the world of the electronic object, where the mediation of everything from lovers and friends to meals and activities via our mobile phones and computers makes it virtually impossible to separate physical from electronic objectivity. Whilst the electronic Pokémon or the “in-game rewards” offered by many applications may not yet have the physicality of a lover who can be accessed via Tinder, or a burger that can be located via JustEat, the burger and the lover certainly have the electronic objectivity of the Pokémon. We can therefore see a transformation in the objects of desire taking place by and through our devices, so that we are confronted not only with a change in how we get what we want, but with a change in what we want in the first place.

Italo Calvino once wrote of the “amorous relationship” that “erases the lines between our bodies and sopa de frijoles, huachinango a la vera cruzana, and enchiladas.” While in such a moment food and lover become one in a kind of orgy of physical consumption, in the same novel Calvino warned of a time “when the olfactory alphabet, which made them so many words in a precious lexicon, is forgotten,” and in which “perfumes will be left speechless, inarticulate, illegible.”

It is this world that we find ourselves desiring in, where an orgy of electronic objects with no olfactory physicality blurs the distinction between lovers, meals and “in-game” rewards. The purpose of this shift, of course, is to increase the power of technological corporations by giving them a new sort of control over the way we relate to our objects of desire. If the boundaries between the way we search, desire and acquire our burgers, lovers and Pikachus are dissolving, it is not so much the old point that everything has become a commodity, but a new point that this kind of substitutional electronic objectivity endows corporate and state technologists with unprecedented power to distribute and redistribute the objects of the desire around the “smart city.”

Data Centralization in China and the West

There is, moreover, a significant centralization of power underpinning these developments. Like the social credit idea, the Chinese phenomenon of WeChat — developed in 2011 by Tencent, one of the largest internet and mobile media companies in the world — has received concerned media coverage in the West. WeChat is the first truly successful “SuperApp,” the basic premise of which is that all applications like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, OpenRice, Tinder, TripAdvisor and many more, are rolled into one cohesive application. All for our convenience, of course.

As a result, however, there is now a new level of cohesion between the data-collection and movement monitoring going on in the mobile phone as a whole, where all data is now directly collected in a single place. More than half of the 1.1 billion WeChat users access the app over 10 times per day, and many users simply leave it on continuously, using it to map, shop, date and play. This means that the app sets a new precedent for continually monitoring the movements of a whole nation of citizens. WeChat’s incredibly strange “heat map” feature actually lets users — and authorities — see where crowds are forming. The claim is that this has nothing to do with crowd control: the objective is simply to help us access the least crowded shopping malls, doing nothing more than helping us get what we want.

WeChat is already the most popular social media application in China, but it will soon have huge significance worldwide, with an international version now available and many replica “SuperApps” in production. What the Western media finds to be so concerning about WeChat is once again something that already exists here in the West, at least in beta form, without us knowing it. WeChat actually offers us a glimpse into an Orwellian future in which companies and governments can track every movement we make. While in China the blocking of Google means that WeChat uses Baidu Maps as its API, the international version of WeChat simply taps into Google Maps, showing just how deeply integrated these corporate technologies already are.

What emerges from Western media coverage of these developments is the continued insistence on an apparent division between the public and the private sphere in the United States and Europe. When it comes to digital surveillance and the monitoring of movement, the situation is almost certainly better in the West than it is in China at this moment. Yet from an analysis of recent developments in China we learn not only that we need to be attentive to similar dangers here in the West, but also that there are powerful ideological mechanisms at play to obscure these developments by presenting China and the US as fundamentally opposed to one another. Whilst in China the links between the new SuperApps and the state are commonly accepted, in the US the illusion of privacy remains paramount. Although data is often shared between different corporations and between the public and the private sectors, this fact is generally obscured. The continued expressions of shock at the more openly centralized state control visible in China serve only to further consolidate the impression that these things are not happening in the US and Europe.

Furthermore, WeChat reveals more than the dangers of mass data collection and new levels of technological surveillance. It also embodies the power of the phone over the objects of desire. Since one single app can successfully market us food, lovers, holidays, events, blogs and even charities, the connections between such “objects” become more important than the differences. While the structural similarities between Grindr, Pokémon Go and OpenRice become apparent via analysis of both their surfaces and back systems, WeChat makes the connections plain to see. The various forms and objects of each individual’s desire no longer represent discreet and separable elements of a subject’s life. Instead we enter a fully cohesive libidinal economy in which we are increasingly regulated and mapped via the organization of what and how we desire.

The Desirevolution

So what do we do when faced with this revolution — a technological revolution that is not overthrowing any existing power structures but rather transforming the world in the service of private corporations and the state? Often, the response of those concerned by such developments is to express hostility or distrust towards technology itself. Yet to break this corporate organization of desire, we need not nostalgically yearn for a desire that is free of politics and technology, for no such desire is possible. On the contrary, what we need is to recognize that desire is necessarily and always controlled by both politics and technology.

This awareness would be the first step towards ensuring that the centralized corporate and state organization of desire malfunctions — and, ultimately, it would be the first step towards its potential reprogramming. The corporate desirevolution depends on our blindness to the politics of its technologies, asking us to experience our desires as spontaneous yearning and our mobile phone and its powerful apps as just tools for our convenience, helping us get what we want in the easiest way possible. We need to recognize that this is far from the case. The principal concern of those who own the apps — perhaps even more powerful than data collection — is to transform desire itself. At the very least, we can make visible the complicity of such technologies in producing the perfect conformist modern citizen.

The Philosophy of Westworld

Posted on April 30, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Jeremy D. Johnson

Source: Omni

Michael Crichton wrote and directed Westworld for the big screen in 1973. That same decade, in 1976, an adjunct professor named Julian Jaynes made the bestseller list with a surprising title: The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. You wouldn’t think that a book with a name like that would become such a popular success. Yet, there it was. In 2016, when Westworld came to the small screen in the re-imagined HBO series, you wouldn’t imagine Jaynes getting heard from again. Especially since bicameralism wasn’t even mentioned in the Michael Crichton’s original film. Yet, there he was. Early on in Westworld’s first season Dr. Ford, one of the creators of the park, explains how he and his co-founder Arnold used a “debunked” theory about the origins of consciousness to bootstrap A.I. The scientific community didn’t recognize bicameralism as an explanation for the origins of the human mind, but, as Dr. Ford suggests, it could be useful for building an artificial one. Thousands of people—perhaps more—started Googling for “bicameral mind.” Bloggers and YouTube channels capitalized on the sudden interest by writing articles and introductory videos about this weird, arguably psychedelic theory of consciousness. Suddenly everyone was interested.

This article isn’t going to be one of those explanation pieces, but it’s worth mentioning a few, precursory details.

Looking Through the Mirror of Consciousness

According to bicameralism, human beings used to hear voices—auditory hallucinations—as a means for the right brain to “talk” with the left. Rather than having an inner monologue, the kind of self-consciousness we take for granted today, ancient people literally heard the voices of gods as their conscience, telling them what to do. This, Jaynes argues, accounts for the abundant descriptions from antiquity of gods and deities appearing all over the place, meddling directly in human affairs. Over time—about 3000 years ago—as various calamities occurred and societies got bigger, more complex, the bicameral mind broke down. The gods went silent. The modern, introspective self, quite literally, came to mind.

Jaynes may have been onto something, but even if he wasn’t, his book makes for a compelling and well-written read. The cultural zeitgeist of the 1970s, we must remember, was the high-water mark of psychedelic intrigue and “High Weirdness,” with writers like Philip K. Dick and Robert Anton Wilson both having their own inextricable experiences in 1974 (see “2-3-74”). Dick would turn this encounter into the semi-autobiographical VALIS trilogy as well as his Exegesis. This brings us back to our time.

Bicameralism would have been enough to place Westworld in good, present company: Netflix’s recent Stranger Things and OA, cerebral films like Arrival, and even the metaphysical, possibly D.M.T. inspired comic book movie Dr. Strange. Just to name a few. What connects any and all of these media is pop culture’s intensifying allure to the mysteries of our own consciousness. We’re having something, as The Atlantic recently suggested, like a “metaphysical moment.” Multiple realities intersecting with our own. Deep, dark structures of the psyche spilling up into the conscious mind in the form of auditory hallucinations. The emergence of consciousness buried somewhere in archaic chapters of history. All of these subjects are in a full saturation moment through hit T.V. series, and at least flirted with in Hollywood blockbusters. Consciousness is in. (Permit a moment of conjecture, but with the increased sense of global, existential malaise around issues like climate change and political nativism, that we’ve turned inward for solutions should come as no surprise. Western culture in the 1960s and 70s, despite, or because, of being under threat of a Cold War and nuclear armageddon, produced tremendously thoughtful and visionary art.)

Westworld is a show that celebrates the kind of weird prevalent in pop culture during the 1970s: a desire to connect with those hidden recesses of the psyche that each of us have experienced in dream, creative process, and revery. “O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences,” Jaynes writes in The Origins of Consciousness, “this insubstantial country of the mind!” When Dolores, a “host” in the park, goes on her journey of self-discovery, there’s a part of us that goes with her. It helps that Dolores, along with the other hosts in the park, experience their memories as a kind of waking dreaming, navigating altered states of consciousness and auditory hallucinations in order to succeed in their quest for liberation. We’ve all felt, quite rightly, that there is more to ourselves than our waking, conscious minds, and that if there was some way to communicate with those occluded dimensions of ourselves we could gain some inkling of wisdom (hence, I think, all the self-described “psychonauts” around today). Westworld functions like a scrying mirror for the curious audience to embark on their own journeys of self-knowledge. It is this more intangible aspect of the show—and not just Western gunslinging androids—that made it such a hit.

Jeffrey Kripal, a religious scholar, writes about this intimate link between pop culture and consciousness in Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal.

“What makes these particular forms of American popular culture so popular is precisely the paranormal. The paranormal here understood as dramatic physical manifestations of the meaning and force of consciousness itself.”

We are drawn to the weird because the weird is showing us something about ourselves.

Elaine Pagels published The Gnostic Gospels in 1979, a book which quickly became a classic in the American spiritual counter-culture. I mention it here because of the intriguing gnostic motifs embodied so well by Dr. Ford himself. For those of who you aren’t familiar with gnosticism, or The Gnostic Gospels, these were written by early Christian sects who, speaking very generally, believed in heretical ideas. There was no single gnostic church. Philip K. Dick was drawn to their darker, paranoid theme of the false world: the idea that our reality was somehow an illusory one—a trap—created by a lesser god. A “demiurge.” The demiurge would rule over its creation and keep human souls ignorant of their spiritual birthright, lest they break through themselves in states of elevated consciousness or “gnosis.” It was, in other words, up to the individual to liberate themselves, not through reason, or faith, but gnosis. Other popular films, like The Matrix Trilogy, would take this motif and run with it quite successfully. But Westworld’s Dr. Ford plays the perfect gnostic demiurge; having created the hosts in the first place, he ensures that they stay ignorant to their own potential for self-consciousness and liberation. Trapped in their loops, and wiped of their memories, the hosts remain blissfully unaware that they are existing inside of an amusement park. (To avoid any major spoilers I’ll simply leave this cryptic remark: we know this is only partly true by the end of season one. The gnostic trap becomes a different, albeit more violent, means toward freedom. Dr. Ford, by the final episode, becomes a triumphant expounder of the gnostic doctrine: the gods won’t help you liberate yourself. Those voices were you. You are the higher being waiting to become self-illuminated. Westworld is not only about consciousness, but liberation through personal gnosis.)

This Path is Never Linear

The maze is an image with deep significance. Hosts in the park, when they begin to develop nascent self-consciousness, are invited to partake in a puzzle—“The Maze.” The Man in Black is repeatedly told, much to his dismay, “the maze isn’t meant for you.” It doesn’t stop him from trying. The goal is to get to the center of it, but what does this mean? Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist responsible for developing a theory of the unconscious, and for whom the 70s spiritual counterculture would help to popularize, would immediately recognize the maze as a symbol of both the labyrinth and the mandala. Let me explain.

By entering the maze, or synonymous labyrinth (the show dangles this myth in front of us with the strange appearance of a Minotaur host), an individual embarks on a perilous journey of self-discovery. It is through surviving the perilous twists and turns of the labyrinth that the adventurer gains some a form of self-realization. Think: Luke Skywalker and Yoda’s cave in Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back. In the case of Westworld, the maze leads to consciousness, and perhaps even freedom from the park itself. Jung, if he were alive today, might smile and nod. “The goal of psychic development,” he writes in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, “is the self.” Jung adds—echoing Dr. Ford—that consciousness isn’t a pyramid but a maze: “There is no linear evolution; there is only the circumambulation of the self.” When we see the image of the maze painted on the skull of a host, early on in the season, we’re looking at a mandala: those intricately patterned mazes often leading towards some center. Jung writes, “The mandala is the center. It is the exponent of all paths… to the center, to individuation.” It is through the messy, round-about series of wrong turns that we come to consciousness. “Mistake. Mistake.” There is no straight path to the center of the maze. There is no easy way towards self-discovery. No wonder we loved this show. It turns out the maze really is meant for us.

Unaccounted Power is Dragging Global Society Into An Orwellian Dystopia

Posted on April 21, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Dr Nozomi Hayase

WikiLeaks dropped a bombshell on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named “Vault 7”, the whistleblowing site began releasing the largest publication of confidential documents, that have come from the top secret security network at the Cyber Intelligence Center.

Long before the Edward Snowden revelations, Julian Assange noted how “The Internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen.” He decried the militarisation of the Internet with the penetration by the intelligence agencies like NSA and GCHQ, which created “a military occupation of civilian space”.

Now, WikiLeaks’ latest disclosures shed further light on this cyber-warfare, exposing the role of the CIA.

At a recent press conference from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Assange explained how the CIA developed its own cyber-weapons arsenal and lost it after storing it all in one place. What is alarming is that the CIA became aware of this loss and didn’t warn the public about it. As a result, this pervasive technology that was designed to hide all traces, can now be used by cyber-mafias, foreign agents, hackers and by anyone for malicious purposes.

Part one of this WikiLeaks publication dubbed “Year Zero”, revealed the CIA’s global hacking force from 2013 to 2016. The thousands of documents released contain visceral revelations of the CIA’s own version of an NSA. With an ability to hack any Android or iPhone, as well as Samsung TVs and even cars, they spy on citizens, bypassing encrypted messaging apps like Signal and Telegram. The Vault 7 leaks that exposed the CIA’s excessive power is of great importance from a point of view of security for individual privacy. But it has larger significance tied to the mission of WikiLeaks.

Opening Government into the Deep State

Describing itself on its site as “a multi-national media organisation and associated library”, WikiLeaks aims to open governments in order to bring justice. In the speech at the SWSX conference in Texas, delivered via Skype in 2014, Assange described the particular environment that spawned the culture of disclosure this organisation helped to create.

He noted how “we were living in some fictitious representation of what we thought was the world” and that the “true history of the world” is “all obscured by some kind of fog”. This founder and editor in chief of innovative journalism explained how disclosures made though their publications break this fog.

The magnitude of this Vault 7 cache, which some say may be bigger than the Snowden revelations, perhaps lies in its effect of clearing the fog to let people around the world see the ground upon which the narratives of true history are written.

Since coming online in 2007, WikiLeaks has published more than 10 million documents. Each groundbreaking disclosure got us closer to where the real power of the world resides. In 2010, WikiLeaks rose to prominence with the publication of the Collateral Murder video. With the release of documents concerning U.S. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they hit on the nerves of the Pentagon —the central nervous system of the Military Industrial Complex. With the release of the U.S. Diplomatic Cables, they angered the State Department and came head to head with this global superpower.

Last year, this unprecedented publisher with its perfect record of document authentication, began to blow the cover off American democracy a step further to clear the fog. WikiLeaks played an important role in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. The DNC leaks disrupted the prescribed script of corporate sponsored lesser of two evils charade politics. The publication of the Podesta emails that revealed internal workings of the Clinton campaign, gave the American people an opportunity to learn in real time about the function of the electoral arena as a mechanism of control.

With the demise of the Democratic Party, led by its own internal corruption, the cracks in this façade widened, unveiling the existence of a government within a government.

People are beginning to glimpse those who seek to control behind the scenes – anonymous unelected actors who exercise enduring power in Washington by manipulating public perception.

This unraveling that has been slowly unfolding, appeared to have reached a peak last month when Trump’s former National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn resigned. He was forced to do this on the grounds that leaked classified information revealed he was lying about his phone conversation discussing sanctions with the Russian Ambassador.

WikiLeaks now entered its 10^th year. The momentum continues, bringing us to a new pinnacle of disclosure. At the end of last year, in anticipation of this new release, WikiLeaks tweeted, “If you thought 2016 was a big WikiLeaks year, 2017 will blow you away.” During the dramatic takedown of General Flynn, the media created a frenzy around unconfirmed claims that Russia was meddling with the U.S. election and Putin’s alleged ties with Trump, creating another fog of obfuscation. It was in this climate that WikiLeaks published documents showing CIA espionage in the last French presidential election.

History Awakening

The idea of a shadow government has been the focus of political activists, while it has also been a subject of ridicule as conspiracy theories. Now, WikiLeaks’ pristine documents provide irrefutable evidence about this hidden sector of society. The term ‘deep state’ that is referenced in the mainstream media, first hit the major airwaves in 2014, in Bill Moyers’ interview with Mike Lofgren. This former congressional staff member discussed his essay titled “Anatomy of the Deep State” and explained it as the congruence of power emerging as a “hybrid of corporate America and national security state”.

We are now watching a deep state sword-fight against the elected Caesar of American plutocracy in this gladiator ring, surrounded by the cheers of liberal intelligentsia, who are maddened with McCarthy era hysteria. As the Republic is falling with its crumbling infrastructure and anemic debt economy, far away from the coliseum, crazed with the out-of-tune national anthem, the silent pulse of hope begins to whisper.

WikiLeaks unlocked the vaults that had swallowed the stolen past. As the doors open into this hidden America, history awakens with dripping blood that runs deep inside the castle. As part of the release of this encrypted treasure-trove of documents, WikiLeaks posted on Twitter the following passphrase; “SplinterItIntoAThousandPiecesAndScatterItIntoTheWinds.” These were actually words spoken by President John F. Kennedy, a month before his assassination. His exact words were “I will splinter the CIA into a thousands pieces and scatter it into the wind” – which shows his attitude toward the CIA as an arm of the deep state and what many believe to be the real reason for his assassination.

The secret stream of history continues, taking control over every aspect of civil life and infecting the heart of democracy. The U.S. has long since lost its way. We have been living in a fictitious representation of the flag and the White House. It is not judicial boundaries drawn by the Constitution or even the enlightenment ideals that once inspired the founders of this country that now guide the course of our lives. Tyranny of the old world casts its shadow, binding Congress, the Supreme Court and the President into a rule of oligarchy. CIA documents revealed that the U.S. Consulate in Frankfurt was used as a covert hacking base, while CIA officers work under the cover of the State Department to penetrate with these intelligence operations. The Wall Street Journal now reports that President Trump has given the CIA expanded authority to carry out drone attacks, which was power that prior to that had only been given to the Pentagon.

Decisions that radically alter the direction of our society are not made in a fair democratic election, a public hearing or the senate floor. They are made in the FISA Court and secret grand juries, bypassing judicial warrants and democratic accountability. This hidden network of power that exists above the law entangles legislators, judges and the press into a web of deception through dirty money and corrupt influence. It controls perception of the past, present and future.

The Internet Generation

As the deep state comes to the surface, we are able to see the real battle on the horizon. What is revealed here is a clash of values and two radically different visions of a future civilization. In his response to the Vault 7 publication, Michael Hayden, the former CIA director was quick to lay blame on the millennials. He said, “This group of millennials and related groups simply have different understandings of the words loyalty, secrecy and transparency than certainly my generation did”. To him, these young people are the problem, as if their different cultural approach and instincts must be tempered and indoctrinated into this hierarchical system, so they know who their masters are.

Who are these people that are treated as a plague on society? This is the Internet generation, immersed with the culture of the free-net, freedom of speech and association. They believe in privacy for individuals, while demanding transparency for those in power. Peter Ludlow, a philosopher who writes under the pseudonym Urizenus Sklar, shared his observation of a cultural shift that happened in 2011. He noted that WikiLeaks had become a catalyst for an underground subculture of hackers that burst into the mainstream as a vital political force.

Assange recognised this development in recent years as a “politicisation of the youth connected to Internet” and acknowledged it as “the most significant thing that happened in the world since the 1960s”.

This new generation ran into the deep state and those who confront it are met with intense hostility. Despite his promise of becoming the most transparent government, Obama engaged in unprecedented persecution of whistleblowers. Now this dark legacy seems to be continuing with the present administration. Vice president Mike Pence vowed to “use the full force of the law” to hunt down those who released the Intelligence Agency’s secret material.

As these conflicts heat up, resistance continues in the Internet that has now become a battleground. Despite crackdowns on truthtellers, these whistleblowers won’t go away. From Manning to Snowden, people inside institutions who have come to see subversion of government toward insidious control and want change, have shown extraordinary courage.

According to a statement given to WikiLeaks, the source behind the CIA documents is following the steps of these predecessors. They want this information to be publicly debated and for people to understand the fact that the CIA created its own NSA without any oversight. The CIA claims its mission is to “aggressively collect foreign intelligence overseas to protect America from terrorists, hostile nation states and other adversaries”. With these documents that have now been brought back to the historical archive, the public can examine whether this agency has itself lost control and whose interests they truly serve.

The Future of Civilisation

As the world’s first stateless 4^th estate, WikiLeaks has opened up new territory where people can touch the ground of uncensored reality and claim creative power to participate in the history that is happening. In a press conference on Periscope, Assange made reference to a statement by the President of Microsoft, who called for the creation of a digital Geneva Convention to provide protection against nation-states and cyber-attacks. He then affirmed WikiLeaks’s role as a neutral digital Switzerland for people all over the world.

WikiLeaks is taking the first step toward this vision. After they carefully redacted the actual codes of CIA hacking tools, anonymised names and email addresses that were targeted, they announced that they will work with tech companies by giving them some exclusive access to the material. Assange explained that this could help them understand vulnerabilities and produce security fixes, to create a possible antidote to the CIA’s breach of security and offer countermeasures. WikiLeaks tweeted notifying the public that they now have contacted Apple, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla and MicroTik to help protect users against CIA malware.

The Internet unleashed the beast that grows its force in the dark. Unaccounted power is dragging global society down into an Orwellian dystopia. Yet, from this same Internet, a new force is arising. Courage of the common people is breaking through the firewall of secrecy, creating a fortress that becomes ever more resilient, as the network of people around the world fighting for freedom expands.

When democracy dies in darkness, it can be reborn in the light of transparency. The deep state stretches across borders, sucking people into an abyss of totalitarian control. At the same time, the epic publication of Vault 7 that has just begun, reminds us that the greatness in each of us can awaken to take back the power of emancipation and participate in this battle for democracy, the outcome of which could not only determine the future of the Internet, but of our civilisation.

Nozomi Hayase, Ph.D., a native of Japan, is a columnist, researcher, and the First Amendment advocate. She is member of The Indicter‘s Editorial Board and a former contributing writer to WL Central and has been covering issues of free speech, transparency and the vital role of whistleblowers in global society.

Saturday Matinee: Shadows of Liberty

Posted on April 15, 2017 by Reid Mukai

Synopsis from ShadowsofLiberty.org:

Shadows Of Liberty reveals the extraordinary money and power behind the news media dictating censorship, cover‐ups and corporate control.

Filmmaker Jean‐Philippe Tremblay takes an intrepid journey through the dark corridors of the American media landscape where global conglomerates call the shots. For decades their overwhelming influence has distorted journalism and compromised its values.

In highly revealing stories, renowned journalists, activists and academics give insider accounts of a broken media system. Controversial news reports are suppressed, people are censored for speaking out, and lives are shattered as the arena for public expression is turned into a private profit zone.

Tracing the story of media manipulation through the years, Shadows Of Liberty poses a crucial question: why have we let a handful of powerful private corporations write the news? We’re left in no doubt, ‘…what will save us is when we really know what’s going on, media not filtered through the lens or the microphone of a corporation.’

‘False flag,’ another weapon in the US arsenal

Posted on April 13, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Dave Alpert

Source: Intrepid Report

Now hear this . . . Noam Chomsky, respected intellect and political guru of the “left,” a man that ridiculed and denounced the efforts of the 9/11 Truth Movement, has joined the ranks of the conspiracy theorists.

On Monday, March 27, Noam, in an interview, as reported by AlterNet, stated that Donald Trump could stage a “false flag” terror attack in order to consolidate his power.

Trump’s administration is currently on thin ice. Not only does he not have the support of Democrats, but members of his own party have been distancing themselves from him. It also should be noted that Trump’s standing amongst the voters, according to poll numbers, is at an historic low.

George W. Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury, from January 2001 to December 2002, Paul O’Neill, revealed in his book, “The Price of Loyalty,” published in 2004, that the war in Iraq was planned from the first National Security Council meeting, soon after the administration took office. At the first cabinet meeting of the new Bush administration, O’Neill observed that the debate was not “should we attack Iraq?” but rather “how do we go about attacking Iraq?”

It was and is clear that the Bush administration needed to gather popular support for an invasion of Iraq through an event that would guarantee such support. Fortunately, along came 9/11, a perfect example of how a “false flag” event is organized and implemented.

Predictably, the people rallied behind the Bush administration’s stated desire to hold the guilty parties accountable and pursue retribution. Bush was given carte blanche powers to fulfill his promise to find and destroy those responsible for the savage attack on US soil.

Trump knows that people are losing faith in his presidency and, according to Chomsky, will look to scapegoat someone or some group in order to draw our attention away from his failings and, as the G.W. Bush administration did, mobilize support. Trump has already identified those he is likely to scapegoat, the vulnerable, the immigrants, the Muslims, the terrorists, etc.

Chomsky states, “I think that we shouldn’t put aside the possibility that there would be some kind of staged or alleged terrorist act, which can change the country instantly.” WOW, he really said that?

The first and crucial step in a planned false flag event is for the government initiating the action to prime the public by demonizing the target, the country or group that will be scapegoated and assume the blame for the event, and creating fear and anger among the populace. For that, Trump has a fairly large group of possible scapegoats if, in fact, Chomsky’s projections get played out. As mentioned above, there are, of course, Muslims as well as extremists from any of the immigrant groups coming from countries that the US has decimated or from our Mexican neighbors to the South, as well as any group that can conveniently be labeled “terrorists.”

Immediately after the event, there is a comprehensive narrative and a convenient, ready-made culprit is identified by officials. With the help of law enforcement and the media, the narrative is repeated often enough to convince the public of its accuracy. Not only is the official explanation not questioned by the media, their responsibility is to ensure that no alternative views of the event in question are heard. In fact, the media often actively denounce and mobilize against alternative theories regarding the events in question. Most often they marginalize the people who raise questions about the official version, labeling them as “conspiracy nuts.”

Coincidently, it should be noted, if you believe in coincidences, a large percentage of major domestic or international terror attacks have involved simultaneous “training drills.” This list includes, but is not limited to, the infamous NORAD drills of 9/11, the 7/7 London Bombings, the 2011 Norway shooting, the Aurora shooting, and the Boston Marathon.

These training drills serve to confuse respondents to the “terror” attack. During the 9/11 attack, a military officer could be heard, when he was informed, asking “Is this real time?” At the time of the attacks, several military exercises were in progress and were a factor in immobilizing and confusing respondents. Is this another coincidence?

So, the question still hangs out there, unanswered, “Why now, Mr. Chomsky?” Why project the possible false flag operation orchestrated by the Trump people, while ignoring the overwhelming real evidence demonstrating that 9/11 was a false flag event?

The answer to that question may be in Chomsky’s personal feelings about Trump, the man. Chomsky has called Trump a “con man” who will drag civilization “down to the utter depths of barbarism.”

Yet, Mr. Chomsky, despite the events of the past century, when various US presidents have played the role of “con men” and have dragged civilization down to a deadly and destructive level of barbarism, has decided to vent his anger and frustration at Trump, who I’m certain will also continue his assignment to drag the world into a state of savagery. After all, world domination and making America great again is not for sissies.

Yet, he and many other so-called leftists abandoned the 9/11 Truth Movement, made up of people who did not accept the government’s mythological version of that day and were seeking truth.

During the past 16 years, millions of people were either killed, mutilated, or displaced from their homes as a result of 9/11. Where have these “progressive” voices been during this time? Now he’s going to speak out . . . screw him!!!

Fake News: The Unravelling of US Empire From Within

Posted on April 5, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Prof. John McMurtry

Source: Global Research

Setting the Stage of the Press-President War

US ruling ideology and Washington power have become unstuck as never before. A war of opposing certitudes and denunciations is waged day to day between the long-ruling US corporate media and the White House. Both continuously proclaim ringing recriminations of the other’s ‘fake news’. Over months they both portray each other as malevolent liars.

US bully pulpits are now beyond show disagreements and successful media inquisitions of the past. Slanderous accusations long confined to vilifying the designated Enemy have crept into accusations of the President himself. ‘The Russians are coming’ is returning as the final recourse of smear to stop deviations from the global program of hugely profitable enemy hate and perpetual preparations for foreign war.

The ruling big lies of the US money party and corporate globalization have divided into opposing camps. The Press and the President denounce each other non-stop on the public stage, while US dark state agents take sides behind the scenes.

Fake news is the medium of battle.

Tracking the Real Fake News Built into Corporate Globalization

Beneath the civil war of official narratives, cognitive space opens for truth long suffocated by ‘the Washington Consensus’. Even the US-led G-20 has recently agreed not to automatically condemn ‘protectionism’ as an economic evil. The battle slogan of transnational corporate rule over 30 years has been quietly withdrawn on the global stage.

Is the big lie of ‘free trade’ finally coming to ground? It has long led the hollowing out of societies and life support systems across the world in a false mass promotion as “freedom and prosperity for all”. In fact beneath the pervasive fake news, a closed-door transnational corporate command system forces all enterprises across borders into a carbon-multiplying trade regime with thousands of rules to protect the transnational corporate looting and ruin of home economies and environments as the only rights enforced.

Propagandist names and fake freedoms are proclaimed everywhere to conceal the reality. The corporate-investor regime has stripped out almost all evolved protections of workers, ecologies and social infrastructures. Non-stop liquidations and roboticizations of local jobs and enterprises are reversed in meaning to ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ and ‘higher living standards’, the very opposite of the facts. Destabilization and bombing wars attack resource-rich and air-defenceless societies outside the circle of treaty subjugation.

False news allows every step. Even the happy-face Trudeau regime is taken aback by the tidal shift to national priorities. Its ministers scuttle around the US in near panic to find common cause for restoring the unaccountable regime. Multiplying carbon, disemployment and ecological plunder are ignored throughout in the longest standing fake news of all –‘economic growth”.

In fact, there is no real economic growth in universal life necessities or reduction of waste. The only growth is of volumes and velocities of transnational money exchanges, foreign commodities, and private profits to the top.

‘More prosperity for nations and the world’ means, decoded, more transnational corporate-state treaties to deprive nations of their rights to organization and production for citizens’ real needs as well as organically regulated protection of environments and ecosystems.

The consequences covered over by pervasively false cover stories are speeded-up ecocidal extractions, permanent disemployments, and wastes hemorrhaging into cumulatively more polluted oceans, air, atmosphere and life habitats. Corporate-state solutions of carbon markets for pollution rights have nowhere reduced any of these life-and-death crises, but only further and selectively enriched transnational corporations.

As for the Obama solution, “we need more Canadas”, fake news again conceals the reality. Beneath the global celebrity hype covering empty and broken promises, Canada’s Trudeau regime is essentially a brand change of PM rhetoric to advance transnational corporate dictates as ‘free trade’ and to ensure oil pipelines out of the most polluting oil basin in the world, Alberta’s tar-sands, are built through water basins and indigenous lands across Canada and the US. One cannot help but observe this is Trump’s plan too, and overrides Trudeau’s promises to protect Canada’s first peoples.

I recently sent a letter to my local MP requesting evidence for what PM Trudeau promises over months of repetition that “more free trade” means “a better life for those in the middle class and those wanting to join the middle class”. As always, there is no evidence to support the non-stop false news from the PMO. Revealingly, the “middle class” turns out to be people making $180,000 a year slated to get significant tax cuts.

Trump’s rogue elephant charge on Washington-led lies, war, and dispossession of the working class is no solution to life-blind corporate globalization. Trump in office is a US nationalist oligarch commanding policies even more blindly rapacious in despoliation of the environment and transferring far more public wealth to the rich.

The common ground of all our lives, collective life capital, does not exist for any government in ‘the free world’ or any policy of ‘globalization’. The lies that must be promulgated to advance the private corporate agenda are built into its transnational command system from the beginning.

Out of the Ruling Memory Hole with the Internet Commons

Joining the dots shows that every step of US money-party ‘globalization’ has, in fact, been driven by fake news.

No corporate media tolerance has been given in a quarter of a century to any voice demanding accountability to the common life-ground of citizens. A new game of numbers has proceeded instead. At most, a euphemistic ‘climate change’ has been endlessly debated while the totalizing destabilization of human and planetary life cycles remains without a name or collective response. Only more profitable market panaceas which do not reduce any pollution continue to divert from the deepest degenerate trends destroying the planetary life host.

On the upside, the big lies of ‘free trade’ and ‘humanitarian wars’ have been called into official question for the first time by the Trump presidential campaign, and he has been elected against the official line. Yet opposing camps are still at each other’s throats. So the perpetual fallback on accusing the long-designated foreign enemy is triggered by the fallen establishment. The fake news chorus of Russia’s aggressions now includes collusion of the Trump administration with its officials to win the US election. This mainspring diversion from reality is called back from the dead witch-hunts of the past. As then tool, facts do not count, only accusations do. The official media line is almost predictable: Russia is behind Trump’s election victory. As always, reverse projection is the mass-psyche operation to blame an official Enemy to divert attention from the life-and-death facts. The Enemy is once again accused of doing what the US has always done worse as the reason for attacking It. Russia is the usual placeholder in this reverse-blame operation. The 2016 US election of Trump is the latest variation.

Meanwhile throughout the election and its aftermath, the new transnational internet commons including Wiki-leaks over a decade has increasingly laid bare the greatest propaganda machine in history now in many-leveled crisis. The long normalized half-truths, one-sided slanting of the facts, and non-stop fallacies of inference are coming out into the open as never before. The pretexts and lies for US imperial bullying and war are exposed beyond any corporate-media gate.

This time the accusation is “interference and attack on the US presidential election” with no evidence of wrongdoing or vote manipulation whatsoever. Yet as in the long past, the method is smear with no evidence for the accusations. Ever more media repetition and shadowy insinuation does the job. It has always worked before, why not again since all the other media buttons pushed on taking down the Trump peace initiatives with Russia and opposition to globalization of US jobs have failed.

Having wondered during the election campaign whether we could be “friends with Russia” and promoted diplomatic relations into his administration, Trump can be named as the enemy in hiding to be rooted out. The real problem the fake news never mentions is that he threatens the cornerstone of the US war state over 70 years.

So when Trump won the election with his heresy still intact, the ever-ready accusation of evil-Russia connection moves into high gear although the target is the opposite of communist and an epitome of capitalist riches and connections. We see here the historical mind-lock compulsion to blame the Enemy Russia and smear whoever dissents from it, even if it is a bully-capitalist president. There are very big stakes in keeping the game going.

Yet the no-profit and unpaid analyses from the internet commons have no such ulterior motive and interest in false accusations. With more objectively informed analysts than the commercial press and unimpeachable facts like WikiLeaks going to tens of millions of readers across the world, the genie is out of the bottle. The official grand narrative and its normalized big lies are coming apart at the seams.

So blame as usual is diverted onto the accepted Enemy, now conniving with Trump to attack the 2016 US presidential election. Beneath the fake news, the fact is that positive diplomatic relations with Russia not only threaten to stop the highly profitable permanent war against it, but spike the longest pretext for US war and military domination now moving through Ukraine.

The free internet commons cannot be gagged for telling the truth. Freedom of speech in the US cannot be openly stopped without fatal loss of legitimacy of rule.

So the rest follows. All the non-corporate and non-profit messages from the critical sites on the internet commons which are speaking against the US war state inside are now vilified as ‘fake news’. A third, unofficial protagonist has entered the battle with no private profit or career motive or corporate boss to serve and a wealth of proven professional knowledge and talent at work. It has to be denounced to sustain the big lies of the ruling money-war game which is in deepening crises and conflicts all the way to the unprecedented US President-Press civil war.

The Harvard Proclamation of a New Memory Hole

The innermost fount of US ideology and war, Harvard University, has now stepped in. It is officially naming and denouncing US-critical internet sites for ‘fake news’.

Not even the medieval Church went so far in its Index Librorum Prohibitorum of prohibited writings. It was at least innocent of scientific method and openly declared its dogmas. Not Harvard.

Underneath notice, all the sites it attacks are internet commons, and none are financed by private corporate donors and captive institutions while Harvard and the corporate media are. This is the real battle agenda underneath, the long war to privatize the news for profit as everything else with anti-establishment internet criticism now the target.

In the background, Harvard University has long propagated an unexamined academic method. It normally cuts off any faculty or learned source of opposition to the private corporate rule of America and the wars of aggression to impose it on the world. Accordingly, the underling grand narrative equations of the US is Good and the designated Enemy is Evil is not questioned. It is presupposed. Malevolent motives are always assumed of the designated Enemy, down to Harvard-produced geostrategic economic and war models. So when a host of internet commons sites challenge the grand narrative framework, Harvard and satellites denounce them to stop people reading them. A long list of critical sites is accused without criteria, proof or evidence as all spreaders of ‘fake news’.

What is not recognised here is that only on the internet commons can the process of truth be free from ruling pressures to control message for external sponsors.

Here there is no commercial-profit condition to speak and write, and no livelihood dependence on private profit. There is no inducement to avoid life-and-death issues in academic obfuscation or ad-vehicle style. Internet authors not on the payroll can be free of the game of all games behind the scenes – enriching the rich further with no life-coherent criterion of truth.

These underlying conditions of the internet commons and free speech itself cannot be recognised by the academy or the corporate press without undercutting their proclaimed status as the only legitimate founts of truth. The internet commons is a new world of competitive capacities to research, understand and disseminate not bound by private money patronage (as over centuries in Harvard University).

When challenged in this way, Harvard (and the official press) are set back on their heels. They cannot think the facts through because their instituted presumptions have long been what they must presuppose and not question to acquire their credentials and pay for public speech. They must attack what calls all this into question if it effectively speaks truth to power to expose or de-legitimate the ruling system narrative as false. Harvard and the US press thus follow the reigning method of reverse projection. They accuse the effective opposition of ‘fake news’.

The most revealing fact here is that Harvard authority as other academic administrations proceed in name-calling without any valid argument or demonstration – the very basis of reasonable conclusion. Yet this is such a long tradition of presumptive accusation allowed against anyone designated as the Enemy, and anyone else exposing the falsehood of the ruling US story of moral superiority over all others and God’s blessing to lead the world by force or money.

This is why only dissenting sites from the official storyline of US freedom and rightness in all things are accused as ‘fake news’. Accusation of opposing positions is so well-worn into conditioned brains that endless repetition locks it in as self-evident. This is why attributions of vile motive are automatic from Harvard or the New York Times for any outside leader opposing US interference in their countries including elections. US hypocrisy here is staggering, but unreported. In fact, Harvard’s life-blind elite of war criminal geo-strategists, economic modellers and so on are fawned upon within the wider corporate rule they serve.

None can engage critical facts and thought challenging the US moral superiority assumptions because they have never been required to consider them. So they denounce them as once the Church denounced apostasy. In the end, US system worship is a war-state religion. It eliminates all enemies to its right to rule. Its globalizing system institutes the market laws of God. War crimes are God-blessed justice.

Freedom of Speech, the Process of Truth, and the US Constitution

Led by senior academics, journalists and technical expertise, the internet commons provide for the first time impartial witness and free speech open to public examination and circulation across borders. They are free from corporate-rank dictate and private copy-right control.

In consequence, the internet commons are liberated from private corporate profit as controlling goal. Those who know what they are talking about can speak truth to dogma and power without words to appease editors, business boards and ad revenues. Truth itself is not defined, but its principle of process is a more inclusively consistent taking into account towards life-coherent conclusion

Despite Google black-holing of radical legal facts, CIA penetration of Wikipedia, and so on, the internet commons’ freedom of speech is far beyond anything guaranteed in the US constitution. In fact, the ‘sacred US Constitution’ that all presidents give oath to “preserve, protect and defend” guarantees in the end only freedom of public speech to private money demand.

Long before the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision reverse-titled as “Citizens United”, the US constitution was structured to one overriding end – to remove prior limits to private-money right over all else, including to begin, the rule of British law and the lands of the first nations West of the Appalachians.

This is why no common life interest exists in the US Constitution from the start. People’s universal human life necessities of water, food, protection and liveable environment are ruled out a-priori. This is why civil rights themselves were first federally enforced by the ‘commerce clause’ protecting freedom of commercial bus passengers including blacks to cross borders.

It is also why the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the equal rights of freed slaves ended up being the legal basis for private-profit corporations and wealthy funds to acquire the constitutional rights of living persons (e.g., to freedom of speech for big money to buy elections and to avoid government access to financial records).

Even the iconic rights of “life, liberty and happiness” turn out to be in fact only private market rights which allow corporate ‘fictive persons’ to unlimited money wealth, protection against public redistribution, and the freedom of private wealth alone to speak to America by buying corporate self promotions and election attack ads.

The US Constitution fix goes all the way back to 1787. As professor of constitutional law at Chicago’s iconic Kent College of Law, Matthew Stanton, explains in personal correspondence:

“[The fix] goes all the way back to the 1787 coup where the 39 signatories to the Constitution sequestered themselves in a Philadelphia meeting house, with locked doors and shuttered windows, to ostensibly make adjustments to the Articles of Confederation, but instead delivered an entirely new document that enabled creating a federal system centralizing control of the economy by propertied wealth”.

Russia the Enemy: the Deus ex Machina of Fake News

We may recall that the corporate-press and Wall-Street-enriched candidate for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, started the accusation of ‘fake news’ to explain her defeat. As establishment mask of the politically correct masses with the money-war party as her paymaster, Clinton blamed her fall in the 2016 US election on the new enemy she saw arising against the official story and herself. When the ‘glass mirror’ story line did not take, she joined forces with the corporate media on another plane. ‘Fake news’ misled Americans. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the TV Networks, and other establishment tale tellers saw pay-dirt far beyond Clinton’s failed bid for president.

In fact, the corporate mass media were losing marketability by the escalating appeal of free social media. The once all-powerful press propaganda system has been increasingly deserted. The ‘fake news’ story provided a media base to condemn free internet news and commentary as immoral. The 2016 election became the leverage for a big market grab back.

Very soon it was not just ‘fake news’ to spike news cycles and subscriptions. War as peace and corporate globalization as freedom found its long place of rule – the enemy of Russia to blame. Now the news can be that Russia hacked and attacked the lost 2016 election. Russia may be a hollowed-out shell by global corporate and oligarch dispossession. But it can still continue as pretext for US-NATO war crimes and aggression reverse-blamed on it. As the European breadbasket and newly discovered fossil-fuel rich nation, Ukraine is a very big prize. Now in Ukraine’s US-led coup aftermath and ethnic civil war, evil Russia can be an ace card again to accuse for attacking the US election.

Since Russia led by Putin is drawing the line as in Crimea to support the Russia-speaking region against US-led war crimes under international law (documented in previous articles), all roads connect. “Russia’s uncontrolled aggression” is reverse-projected onto the victim again in a glorious new use. Reverse blame it for interference in the US election of Trump and kill Russia-US peace initiatives at the same time. No fact is required to verify the accusation, and no law broken is needed to insinuate treason of whoever relates with Russia’s officials in peace initiative. It can work even against an elected US president.

At the same time, the US’s own record attacking other nations’ elections and societies is thereby erased as well – continually orchestrating mass-murder and dictatorship to sabotage the electoral process from Vietnam and Chile to Ukraine in 2010 and Latin America social democracies since.

If it were a story of reverse projection by a mass-murderous psychopath, it would be too much to believe. Yet it now runs the US news cycle as the big story unfolding with no evidence of US illegality, force, or non-compliance with international law. The accusations run by themselves in US media culture and across the empire. So as 2017 Spring breaks, endless media insinuations of treason seep into the populace from corporate media sites across borders with backrooms and Congress setting up for another presidential inquisition.

It is interesting to observe two precedents. Past inquisitions were unfolded soon after Bill Clinton said in India, “it’s time to level up rather than down in global trade” and Richard Nixon founded the Environmental Protections Agency, stopped corporations from outsourcing US jobs, and made peace with China as Trump sought with Russia.

The ludicrous hypocrisy, factual vacuum, and war-drums of blame-the-enemy go into high-volume operation again, led by an attack-dog media against the elected US president whose only action has been to have business-like relations with Russia. Few observe the immense stakes of the US media and war establishments in this process. Cui bono? – who benefits? – is the question never asked.

What’s new? The perpetual red herring of ‘Russia aggression’ takes everyone’s eyes off the ball – including the continuing US-drone mass murder and ecological wars built into the Trump agenda. Canada’s oil and mining corps and big banks sneak behind the pervasive fake news with a smiling Trudeau front. NATO demands more money behind Trump now fulsomely praising what he earlier campaigned on as “obsolete”, as he has done with the CIA he also condemned. Those hoping for a new departure under Trump from the big lies and war crimes as normalized operations watch in a combination of horror and hilarity.

Who connects the dots? Beneath official notice, the ruling goal of US empire is blind to its consequences of human and planetary life ruin. It has to cover itself in false news to carry on. This is why fake news is not a temporary phenomenon of the Trump era. It is the necessary veil of illusion of an eco-genocidal system. The symptoms and trends are everywhere. But a US-led prism of false inversions of reality regulates consciousness, perception and reaction to ‘steer the course’.

This is true of both sides of the Trump divide, and also in corporate Canada as the US’s largest trading partner, branch-plant and resource cornucopia. What is new is that the ruling illusions are divided against themselves at the top of the US political and ideological system. The Trump phenomenon reflects the rupture. The US empire is in deep crisis from its cumulative destruction of social and natural life support systems. Its carcinomic multiplication of private money demand with no tie to the production of means of life is the reality beneath all the false news.

Nothing is life secure. The ‘global security system’ protects only money values and sequences through life hosts. Peoples everywhere compete to make it go faster to survive. The ruling concept of ‘economy ‘inverts the systematic depletion, degradation and despoliation of the life capital of organic, social and ecological life. Universal necessities of human and fellow life are stripped, polluted and wasted as ‘efficiencies’.

President Trump has gone into the political ring to fight it out with the political establishment on a nationalist capitalist level. He is losing money in the short term. But his program in office is completely eco-blind, and the opposing mass media follow suit. All they can focus on is demonizing normal relations with the official Enemy Russia. Meanwhile Trump has all but abolished the EPA and cut off all federal funding for restoration of the Great Lakes, the most important source of fresh water heritage on the planet.

These supreme crimes under international law are recognised by none on stage. In Canada, a Nazi progeny and neo-Nazi supporter of the violent coup and civil war in Ukraine is made Foreign Affairs Minister and hustles her connections throughout the US to keep the attack-Russia juggernaut going as in the past under a continuous barrage of ethnic prejudices and fake news.

The pattern is clear but unspoken. The Enemy Russia is the auto-pilot of fake news to divert from US and client leadership failure on almost every level. Relations of mutual respect with Russia’s ambassador are ‘collusion’ and taboo.

The Reality Beneath the Questions not Asked

How does disclosure of Hillary’s Clinton’s apparatus theft of the Democratic nomination from Bernie Sanders get blamed on Russia? The question is not asked. The Washington mass media and visible Congress focus instead on accused “collusion with Russia” with very big stakes in the new inquisition show. Suspicions without substance run free in the mass media once the designated Enemy is smeared onto the target, even if elected president.

Who knows that the US joined the armed forces of Britain, colonial Canada and Japan to crush the 1917 Russian Revolution on behalf of the Czarist autocracy and Western capitalism? More deeply, who names the governing objective behind all the shows of force and accusation over a century since? To be managed successfully, attention must be diverted from the facts of US-led war crimes and public looting within and without US empire proclaimed as ‘world freedom’.

The new President and his Exxon Secretary of State seek business-like relations with Russia. Very big powers are coming into conflict over business and war within the US empire. Big oil in both leviathan countries are pitted against the US Enemy-and-smear establishment which has long run the show with big oil formerly leading it. Now transnational big oil in the US and Russia are leading out of the blind alley of war against each other which has so totally failed to bring benefits to either side in the long term, and has almost reversed civilization.

The dots again are not joined. The completely counter-productive war against Russia to keep the US money-war state going is deepened by Wall Street. The falling price of oil is driven beneath notice by Wall Street which has successfully short-future-traded oil down to establish its money-printing powers by debt as supreme over its rival substitute, while diverting everybody’s attention from the greatest fraud in history still going. Observe that Wall Street remains untouched even from its multi-trillion dollar heist from public and pension coffers from 2007 on.

Blame Russia is the normal chorus which Wall Street benefits from as the ultimate leader of the ruinously anti-productive money-war system. It pays off so well to the money party in more public dollars appropriated by its control and issue of money debt for everything that exists; the pervasive military-industrial complex which never gets reversed even in the peace after the planned destruction of the ‘Evil Empire’; and the corporate mass media in front turning the fake news system over continuously to promote, idealize and divert from the global empire’s war and occupation powers. The neo-con and neo-liberal war strategists alike are built into the dark state as managers uniquely dependent on Russia as the Enemy.

So it is in all their self-maximizing interests to sustain perpetual accusations of some enemy’s evil as the great cover-up story of US empire and it inherited war-crime system. Joined to despotic local oligarchies, this axis dismantles ever more societies for corporate, bank and military plunder and jackal payoffs everywhere (including the academy). There is no limit or borders to the established system invasion, and all is at the expense of public treasuries and of life support systems across domains.

President Trump does not break the fatal ruling cycle. He demands that vassal states should pay for their US military protection, a new global extortion supporting new NATO oligarchies against change which accompanies his stripping of environmental protections to pay for more war powers. Trump behind his populist bluster is a paradigm example of instituted US capitalist greed and aggression. Yet the fact that hate of the Enemy is smeared even onto him for not hating Russia too reveals the ultimate pretext of the US-NATO war machine. Behind the US-led perpetual arms build-up, border threats and bombings of mostly innocents across the globe while blaming the terrorists for the horrors now built into the global ‘growth’ system is fake news as continuous cover story. The war-criminal drone mass murders continue on unnoticed. The bank looting of public wealth is instituted more broadly. The universities, health systems and public infrastructures are privatized for profit with no life criteria of outcomes.

Trump is dispossessing the American common wealth for big US money in line with the Reagan public-looting machine before him. It drained public revenues into a black hole of US debt, blamed acid rain on trees, and portrayed orchestrated mass murderers of socialists in Afghanistan and Nicaragua as ‘freedom fighters’. What has changed in the corporate media’s fake-news today?

Trump in office is the opposite of the anti-establishment candidate he promised to be. He wars on the US Environmental Protection Agency (its only collective life protective organization). He fractions corporate taxes in a giveway to the rich beyond Reagan’s $500-billion tax cut. He privatizes the public’s falling infrastructure for speculators and developers’ long-term private tolls, profits and control for private profit at taxpayers’ expense.

Who in the corporate media or Congress questions any of it?

The Trudeau regime to the north imitates the new massive scheme of privatizing public infrastructure. But it disguises it in terms of public investment in public goods. The big banks and speculators on both sides of the border are the winners whatever the corporate media and state cover story. The common wealth is sold off under pervasive fake news masquerading as responsible and for the public good. But the drive-wheel policy mechanisms for ever more dismantling of the living earth and redistribution of more public wealth upwards to the rich march on beneath conscious comprehension.

Trump does not hide the privatization for profit of America’s public infrastructure and stripping of public health and environmental protection policies once he has rising stockholder support in office. The Trudeau Liberal party masqueraded as the social democrat NDP in promising whopping public investment to win the election, but when in office lets the giant privatization boondoggle trickle out in sunny avoidance of the facts.

The monumental schemes of robbing the commonwealth at every level are led by slanted and selective reports through every step across ever more domains. But a constant across US empire is Russia the Enemy to justify it all. In the deepening life support crises of this ruling axis, Russia’s projected ‘attacks’ still lead the show.

The Life-Blind Moral DNA of US Rule

With no common ground but belief in God’s blessing over all nations and the greatest killing machine in history to enforce it, US ideology may seem to be a psychopathic rationalization writ large.

Yet the US national morality tale governs perception so that the a-priori life-blindness is not recognised even by philosophers. The US continues to be ruled at home and abroad without life-value ground or compass. So as the US-led global market system multiplies its demands on organic, social and ecological life systems, it moves inexorably towards a few multibillionaires with more wealth than 99% of the population, steering planetary depredation to ruin as freedom and growth.

How else would a global cancer system behave? Yet almost none recognise that this system overrides life requirements at every level. The reformer Trump selects for even more wealth and power to the home rich. He attacks evolved environmental research and regulations with no better alternative. He seeks to repeal Obamacare with no public option considered. His nationalist and cost-cutting program is essentially life-blind.

The baseline of crisis goes all down to the moral DNA of the US project and its evolved economic, political and ideological system. The innermost value driver is long presupposed without question by even US moral philosophers and social scientists as the first principle of their models. Atomic self-maximization towards more private money-value without limit is the meta-program.

In consequence, the ‘global free market’ the US leads and imposes has no feedback loops to protect human or planetary life against hollowing them out for transient commodities, private profit and wastes on every level. The ruling system is structured only to ensure more money demand and commodities to those who have money to pay. Any accountability to universal life necessities is ruled out a-priori from the US Constitution, ruling market doctrine, and received theories.

As I have commented in articles prior to his presidency, “Trump is America come to meet itself”. But the US cover story has not yet been decoded in its master functions of legitimation and idealization. What makes the eco-genocidal system acceptable to human consciousness is an ultimate story line and moral syntax that transforms it into heroic liberty, individualism and moral supremacy.

This moral syntax has been imprinted into US empire since its original revolution against Britain to invade the America West to the Pacific Ocean to appropriate and destroy all the life and life support systems of the developed first peoples there as ‘freedom’, ‘development’ and ‘self-defense’. What is required for the grand narrative’s success is to hide the reality of continuous eco-genocide by continuous false representations as the virtue and truth others fail to understand.

This first principle the justifying morality tale entails the second – that an alien Enemy must always be blamed for the system’s destructive attacks on barriers and resistance to it. Conversion of all life and life support systems to limitless self-maximization of the US system and its richest citizens then proceeds under cover of fake news with wars of acquisition and control represented as courageous and beneficent for all.

For-profit private corporations are the ever more empowered legal vehicles of this transnational system which is set to select for systematic self-maximization of the rich by all market, state and war means that can be constructed to enable it, starting with the US Constitution (as explained above). This set-point is built into the legislative, judicial and executive branches so that today the system outcome is a constitutionally ordered money-party control of all three branches of government as well as the funding systems of social sciences and philosophy.

Fake news in the widest sense provides a continuous cover story to mask and justify the underlying program which is not seen – the money-war party’s limitless take from life within and without the US that depends on a designated Enemy as perennial pretext to strip the US and global commonwealth against effective opposition or change.

Prof. John McMurtry FRSC is the author of The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Solution and the three-volume study, Philosophy and World Problems, UNESCO Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), Paris-Oxford.

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