The Dystopian Future of Facebook

Posted on November 27, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Mark Kernan

This year Facebook filed two very interesting patents in the US. One was a patent for emotion recognition technology; which recognises human emotions through facial expressions and so can therefore assess what mood we are in at any given time-happy or anxious for example. This can be done either by a webcam or through a phone cam. The technology is relatively straight forward. Artificially intelligent driven algorithms analyses and then deciphers facial expressions, it then matches the duration and intensity of the expression with a corresponding emotion. Take contempt for example. Measured by a range of values from 0 to 100, an expression of contempt could be measured by a smirking smile, a furrowed brow and a wrinkled nose. An emotion can then be extrapolated from the data linking it to your dominant personality traits: openness, introverted, neurotic, say.

The accuracy of the match may not be perfect, its always good to be sceptical about what is being claimed, but as AI (Artificial Intelligence) learns exponentially and the technology gets much better; it is already much, much quicker than human intelligence.

Recently at Columbia University a competition was set up between human lawyers and their AI counterparts. Both read a series of non-disclosure agreements with loopholes in them. AI found 95% compared to 88% by humans. The human lawyers took 90 minutes to read them; AI took 22 seconds. More incredibly still, last year Google’s AlphaZero beat Stockfish 8 in chess. Stockfish 8 is an open-sourced chess engine with access to centuries of human chess experience. Yet AlphaZero taught itself using machine learning principles, free of human instruction, beating Stockfish 8 28 times and drawing 72 out of 100. It took AlphaZero four hours to independently teach itself chess. Four hours from blank slate to genius.

A common misconception about algorithms is that they can be easily controlled, rather they can learn, change and run themselves-a process known as deep “neural” learning. In other words, they run on self-improving feed back loops. Much of this is positive of course, unthought of solutions by humans to collective problems like climate change are more possible in the future. The social payoffs could be huge too. But what of the use of AI for other means more nefarious. What if, as Yuval Noah Hariri says, AI becomes just another tool to be used by elites to consolidate their power even further in the 21^stcentury. History teaches us that it isn’t luddite to ask this question, nor is it merely indulging in catastrophic thinking about the future. Rapidly evolving technology ending up in the hands of just a few mega companies, unregulated and uncontrolled, should seriously concern us all.

Algorithms, as Jamie Bartlett the author of The People Vs Tech puts it, are “the keys to the magic kingdom” of understanding deep seated human psychology: they filter, predict, correlate, target & learn. They also manipulate. We would be naive in the extreme to think they already don’t, and even more naive to think the manipulation is done only by commercial entities. After all, it’s not as if there aren’t lots of online tribes, some manufactured and some not, to be manipulated into and out of political viewpoints, our fleeced of their money.

In 2017 Facebook said they could detect teenagers’ moods and emotions such as feeling nervous and insecure by their entries, a claim they denied later, adding we do not, “offer tools to target people based on their emotional state”. The internal report was written by two Australian executives-Andy Sinn and David Fernandez. The report according to The Guardian was written for a large bank and said that, “the company has a database of its young users – 1.9 million high schoolers, 1.5 million tertiary students and 3 million young workers”.

Going one better still, Affectiva, a Boston company, claims to be able to detect and decode complex emotional and cognitive data from your face, voice and physiological state using emotion recognition technology (ECT)-amassing 12 billion “emotion data points” across gender, age & ethnicity. Its founder has declared that Affectiva’s ECT can read your heart rate from a webcam without the you wearing any sensors, simply by using the reflection of your face which highlights blood flow-a reflection of your blood pressure. Next time you’re listening to Newstalk’s breakfast show, think of that.

Affectiva’s ultimate goal of course, when you get past all the feel-good optimistic guff about “social connectivity”, “awesome innovation”, and worst of all “empowering” is, to use their own words, to “enable media creators to optimize their content”. Profiting from decoding our emotional states in other words.

Maybe Facebook (and Google) would use this technology wisely for our benefit, then again maybe not. It isn’t such a stretch to imagine how it could be used unethically too. To microtarget customised ads and messages at us depending on our state of mind at given time, say, and allowing Cambridge Analytica to harvest the personal data of 87 million Facebook users to subvert democracy with Brexit & Trump. Facebook claims they weren’t aware of this though. Well, maybe, maybe not, and in spite of their protests in recent years they are still not especially transparent or accountable given their enormous cultural and social power in our lives. Curiouser and Curiouser you might think, and you’d be right.

The second Facebook patent is even more interesting, if that’s the right word, or dystopian if you prefer. Patented this June, published under the code US20180167677 (with the abstract title of Broadcast Content View Analysis Based on Ambient Audio Recording, application no: 15/376,515) illustrates a process by which secret messages- ‘ambient audio fingerprints’ in the jargon-embedded in TV ads, would trigger your smart technology (phone or TV) to record you while the ad was playing. Presumably to gauge your reaction to the product being advertised at you through, perhaps, voice biometrics (i.e. the identification and recognition of the pitch and tone of your voice).

As the patent explains in near impenetrable but just about understandable jargon this is done by first, detecting one or more broadcasting signals (the advertisement) of a content item. Second, ambient audio of the content item is recorded, and then the audio feature is extracted “from the recorded ambient audio to generate an ambient fingerprint” and finally, wait for it, “ the ambient audio fingerprint, time information of the recorded ambient audio, and an identifier of an individual associated with a client device (you and your phone or smart TV) recording the ambient audio” is sent, “to an online system for determining whether there was an impression of the content by the individual.” It goes on to say that “the impression of the identified content item by the identified individual” is logged in a “data store of the online system”.

It goes on to state that “content providers have a vested interest in knowing who have listened and/or viewed their content” and that the feature described in the patent are not exhaustive, and that “many additional features and advantages will be apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art…”.

It is already obvious we don’t know how much Facebook and other big tech platforms monitor us, neither do we know how much data they hold on us individually and collectively and, critically, who has access to that data and how they could use it.

If you can sell consumer goods by such manipulation why not whole ideologies, chipping away at our human agency one dystopian tech innovation at a time, paving the way for the morphing of late stage capitalism into authoritarian capitalism; one efficiency gain at a time.

If put into place such “innovations” are designed to monitor our emotional states for monetary gain. In essence, it is a type of online mood tracking where we are the digital lab rats. Facebook is already valued at half a trillion US dollars giving it huge economic and cultural power.

According to Private Eye magazine, Facebook’s legal team say the patent was filed “to prevent aggression from other companies”, and that “patents tend to focus on future-looking technology that is often speculative in nature and could be commercialised by other companies”. As Private Eye pointed out though, it’s not as if Facebook has been completely transparent about such secretive issues in the past or present. The fact that Facebook generates billions by manipulating our emotions is not a surprise us, their business model is based on it, but how they intend to do it in the future should surprise, and alert us. We are after all the product. Over 90% of their revenues comes from selling adverts. They have the market incentive.

How will all this play out in the future? It isn’t difficult to build a picture of a commercialised and rapacious big tech dystopia, the very opposite of the freedoms and civil liberties envisaged by the original pioneers of the internet, and the opposite of how they currently perceive themselves.

Verint, a leading multinational analytics & biometric corporation, with an office in Ireland, has been known to install and sell, “intrusive mass surveillance systems worldwide including to authoritarian governments”, according to Privacy International. Governments that routinely commit human rights abuses on their own citizens.

China, a world leader in surveillance capitalism, recently declared that by 2020 a national video surveillance network, Xueliang, will be fully operationable, Sharp Eyes in English-Kafka and Orwell must be smirking knowingly somewhere. The term sharp eyes harks back to the post war slogan in communist China of “The people have sharp eyes”, when neighbours were encouraged to spy and tell on other neighbours of counter revolutionary or defeatist gossip about the 1949 revolution.

Democracies too have built overarching systems of surveillance. Edward Snowden told us in 2013 that the NSA was given secret direct access to the servers of big tech companies (Facebook, YouTube, Google and others) to collect private communications. As Glenn Greenwald said, the NSA’s unofficial “motto of omniscience” is: Know it all, Collect it all, Process it all.

Jaron Lanier, pioneer of virtual reality technology and a tech renegade, and an apostate to some, recently called the likes of Facebook and Google “behaviour manipulation empires”. Their pervasive surveillance and subtle manipulation through “weaponised advertising” he argues debases democracy by polarising debate at a scale unthinkable even just five or ten years ago, and it’s not only advertising that can be weaponised. Facebook, Google, Twitter and Instagram all have “manipulation engines” (algorithms we know little about) running in the background Lanier says, designed specifically by thousands of psychological & “emotional engineers” (“choice architects” or “product philosophers” to use the inane corporate gobbledygook). Their job is to keep you addicted to what’s now known as the “attention economy”-and attention equals profit. A better description still might be the attention/anxiety economy. Twitter has for instance a 3 second time delay between the page loading and notification loading, Facebook something similar-and always red for urgent. They are known in psychology as intermittent variable rewards, negative reinforcement in this context which keep behaviour going by the hope of maybe being rewarded, with a like or a follower. This builds anticipation and releases feel good neurotransmitters, and taps into your need to belong, and to be heard-we’re intensely social creatures. The downside is the opposite of course,where we can be thrown into an emotional rollercoaster if the expected dopamine hit doesn’t come.

The goal is addiction into a consumption frenzy of socially approved validation. Big Tech’s social media universe is, as one reformed “choice architect” put it, “an attention seeking gravitational wormhole” that sucks you into their profit seeking universe. If you don’t think so, check how many times you look at your phone every day. The average person checks 150 times. Most of that is social media. We’re all in an attention arms race now.

There is a great German word: Zukunftsangst. It means translated, roughly, future-anxiety. Maybe it should be renamed Zuckerbergangst instead.

Why you might consider the Buddha’s proposal

Posted on November 25, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Jack Balkwill

Source: Intrepid Report

The Buddha was said to have predicted the day he would die. When that day approached, his followers, weeping, asked him to stay with them. “I’ve told you that life is about suffering,” he reminded them, “would you have me continue suffering?” With that, his followers let go and allowed their beloved teacher to die in peace.

A thousand years after the Buddha’s death, a monk known as Bodhidharma is said to have brought a version of the Buddha’s philosophy from India to China, where it became known as Ch-an. There is no scientific evidence that Bodhidharma ever existed, but I believe he did, the evidence being the existence of Ch-an, which spread to Korea as Sen, and later to Japan as Zen.

Bodhidharma emphasized the Buddhist opposition to what they call the three poisons—hatred, greed and delusion—defining in three words everything which holds mankind back from constructing a heaven on earth. Understanding this enables adherents to define the causes of suffering and address them.

The Buddha had set out as a young man to discover the cause of suffering, and how to end it. Decades of failed attempts did not deter him. He tried to bring about suffering on himself, but told followers this did not work. Finally, he discovered that intense meditation was the answer to that which he was seeking.

Buddhism is said to have a hundred-thousand sects, but Bodhidharma’s philosophy is one of “Northern School” Buddhism, or “Mahayana” Buddhism, and is about living one’s life to make a better world by opposing hatred, greed and delusion with the goal of ending the suffering of others.

The Buddha was said to have laughed when a follower asked him if he were a god or prophet come to teach them, admitting only that “I am awake.” His Mahayana followers believe he was an enlightened person, with no supernatural powers. The Buddha said that anyone may become so enlightened, primarily through deep meditation, in which one comes in contact with the inherent wisdom of the universe.

Within this philosophy of opposing hatred, greed and delusion to perfect one’s world, there is a teaching that all of us have a role to play should we become aware (the first spark of enlightenment). The belief is that if one meditates long enough, one will discover that role. There is no perfect purpose, nor one better than another, so one person realizes a need to feed the hungry, another furthering the cause of world peace—there are countless ways to relieve suffering in the world.

In this philosophy one recognizes that we are here to make a better world in some way, not to accumulate wealth, or power, or fame, which are seen as delusions by Buddhists.

And so it is that we live in a world where there are thousands of heroes who go unrecognized, driven by a need to make this world a better place. Many may be unaware that they are practicing this engaged form of Zen. They are in the shadows, away from the spotlight of mainstream media. Much of what they do is anathema to the teachings of the establishment.

War, for example, is glorified by the establishment’s mainstream media, because the powers behind mainstream media—its owners, board members and advertisers—make a lot of money from war (through their expanded financial portfolios), and wealth is all that concerns our ruling plutocrats. Guests invited on the cable news networks to discuss wars are often retired generals, many of them on the boards of “defense” companies which profit from war. One does not see peace activists giving the other side, only one side is allowed on all of the TV networks, the side promoting war, guiding the beliefs of the masses.

Watching cable news channels for months one is not likely to see a story about world hunger, a daily problem around the globe. The hungry do not buy products, so are of no interest to the TV “news” networks, existing as they do to profit from the sale of products.

There is a massive amount of work to do in easing suffering that lies outside of mainstream media’s viewpoint.

In my meditation classes I finish my basic course with a discussion about “engaged meditation,” said by many meditation masters of the East to be the highest form of meditation. One meditates on one’s chosen role, sometimes for months, until one discovers one’s chosen role in contributing toward making a better world—free of hatred, greed and delusion.

One student asked me if her work at a battered women’s shelter was a good choice. I replied, of course, if that is what you need to do. Another asked if working at an animal shelter was worthwhile, it seemed to her that it might somehow be a lesser cause than working to end human rights [abuses] or some of the other causes. I replied that of course it is a worthy cause—anything that eases suffering in the world.

We live in a laissez faire capitalist empire in which hatred, greed and delusion are emphasized as ideals. One is told by one’s TV news to hate the Russians, Chinese, Iranians, Venezuelans and North Koreans. One is told that to be successful, all that matters is that one acquires large sums of money at any cost to the public interest. One is told that one’s taxes should go to supporting a worldwide empire which serves the plutocrats against the interests of the masses.

The Buddha would have laughed at all of this, pointing out that following the messages of the mainstream press is delusional. Instead, he would tell you that you have a purpose, and you can find it by meditating deeply on what your role should be in making a better world. Imagine the world we could have if more people did this, united in making a civilization dedicated to ending suffering.

THE IMPORTANCE OF ALTERNATIVE MEDIA

Posted on November 20, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By John Scales Avery

Source: Blacklisted News

The superficiality of today’s television

Social critic Neil Postman contrasted the futures predicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World in the foreword of his 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death”.

He wrote:

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”

Neil Postman’s book, “Amusing Ourselves To Death; or Public Discourse in an Age of Show Business” (1985), had its origins at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where Postman was invited to join a panel discussing George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. Postman said that our present situation was better predicted by Huxley’s “Brave New World”. Today, he maintained it is not fear that bars us from truth. Instead, truth is drowned in distractions and the pursuit of pleasure, by the public’s addiction to amusement.

Postman sees television as the modern equivalent of Huxley’s pleasure-inducing drug, soma, and he maintains that that television, as a medium, is intrinsically superficial and unable to discuss serious issues. Looking at television as it is today, one must agree with him.

The wealth and power of the establishment

The media are a battleground where reformers struggle for attention, but are defeated with great regularity by the wealth and power of the establishment. This is a tragedy because today there is an urgent need to make public opinion aware of the serious problems facing civilization, and the steps that are needed to solve these problems. The mass media could potentially be a great force for public education, but in general their role is not only unhelpful – it is often negative. War and conflict are blatantly advertised by television and newspapers.

Newspapers and war

There is a true story about the powerful newspaper owner William Randolph Hearst that illustrates the relationship between the mass media and the institution of war: When an explosion sank the American warship USS Maine in the harbor of Havana, Hearst anticipated (and desired) that the incident would lead to war between the United States and Spain. He therefore sent his best illustrator, Fredrick Remington, to Havana to produce drawings of the scene. After a few days in Havana, Remington cabled to Hearst, “All’s quiet here. There will be no war.” Hearst cabled back, “You supply the pictures. I’ll supply the war.” Hearst was true to his words. His newspapers inflamed American public opinion to such an extent that the Spanish-American War became inevitable. During the course of the war, Hearst sold many newspapers, and Remington many drawings. From this story one might almost conclude that newspapers thrive on war, while war thrives on newspapers.

Before the advent of widely-read newspapers, European wars tended to be fought by mercenary soldiers, recruited from the lowest ranks of society, and motivated by financial considerations. The emotions of the population were not aroused by such limited and decorous wars. However, the French Revolution and the power of newspapers changed this situation, and war became a total phenomenon that involved emotions. The media were able to mobilize on a huge scale the communal defense mechanism that Konrad Lorenz called “militant enthusiasm” – self-sacrifice for the defense of the tribe. It did not escape the notice of politicians that control of the media is the key to political power in the modern world. For example, Hitler was extremely conscious of the force of propaganda, and it became one of his favorite instruments for exerting power.

With the advent of radio and television, the influence of the mass media became still greater. Today, state-controlled or money-controlled newspapers, radio and television are widely used by the power elite to manipulate public opinion. This is true in most countries of the world, even in those that pride themselves on allowing freedom of speech. For example, during the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the official version of events was broadcast by CNN, and criticism of the invasion was almost absent from their transmissions.

The mass media and our present crisis

Today we are faced with the task of creating a new global ethic in which loyalty to family, religion and nation will be supplemented by a higher loyalty to humanity as a whole. In case of conflicts, loyalty to humanity as a whole must take precedence. In addition, our present culture of violence must be replaced by a culture of peace. To achieve these essential goals, we urgently need the cooperation of the mass media.

The predicament of humanity today has been called “a race between education and catastrophe”: Human emotions have not changed much during the last 40,000 years. Human nature still contains an element of tribalism to which nationalistic politicians successfully appeal. The completely sovereign nation-state is still the basis of our global political system. The danger in this situation is due to the fact that modern science has given the human race incredibly destructive weapons. Because of these weapons, the tribal tendencies in human nature and the politically fragmented structure of our world have both become dangerous anachronisms.

After the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Albert Einstein said, “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking, and thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophes.” We have to learn to think in a new way. Will we learn this in time to prevent disaster? When we consider the almost miraculous power of our modern electronic media, we can be optimistic. Cannot our marvelous global communication network be used to change anachronistic ways of thought and anachronistic social and political institutions in time, so that the system will not self-destruct as science and technology revolutionize our world? If they were properly used, our instantaneous global communications could give us hope.

The success of our species is built on cultural evolution, the central element of which is cooperation. Thus human nature has two sides, tribal emotions are present, but they are balanced by the human genius for cooperation. The case of Scandinavia – once war-torn, now cooperative – shows that education is able to bring out either the kind and cooperative side of human nature, or the xenophobic and violent side. Which of these shall it be? It is up to our educational systems to decide, and the mass media are an extremely important part of education. Hence the great responsibility that is now in the hands of the media.

How do the mass media fulfill this life-or-death responsibility? Do they give us insight? No, they give us pop music. Do they give us an understanding of the sweep of evolution and history? No, they give us sport. Do they give us an understanding of need for strengthening the United Nations, and the ways that it could be strengthened? No, they give us sitcoms and soap operas. Do they give us unbiased news? No, they give us news that has been edited to conform with the interests of the military-industrial complex and other powerful lobbies. Do they present us with the need for a just system of international law that acts on individuals? On the whole, the subject is neglected. Do they tell of of the essentially genocidal nature of nuclear weapons, and the urgent need for their complete abolition? No, they give us programs about gardening and making food.

A consumer who subscribes to the “package” of broadcasts sold by a cable company can often search through all 100 or so channels without finding a single program that offers insight into the various problems that are facing the world today. What the viewer finds instead is a mixture of pro-establishment propaganda and entertainment. Meanwhile the neglected global problems are becoming progressively more severe. In general, the mass media behave as though their role is to prevent the peoples of the world from joining hands and working to change the world and to save it from thermonuclear and environmental catastrophes. The television viewer sits slumped in a chair, passive, isolated, disempowered and stupefied. The future of the world hangs in the balance, the fate of children and grandchildren hang in the balance, but the television viewer feels no impulse to work actively to change the world or to save it. The Roman emperors gave their people bread and circuses to numb them into political inactivity. The modern mass media seem to be playing a similar role.

Our duty to future generations

The future of human civilization is endangered both by the threat of thermonuclear war and by the threat of catastrophic climate change. It is not only humans that are threatened, but also the other organisms with which we share the gift of life. We must also consider the threat of a global famine of extremely large proportions, when the end of the fossil fuel era, combined with the effects of climate change, reduce our ability to support a growing global population.

We live at a critical moment of history. Our duty to future generations is clear: We must achieve a steady-state economic system. We must restore democracy in our own countries when it has been replaced by oligarchy. We must decrease economic inequality both between nations and within nations. We must break the power of corporate greed. We must leave fossil fuels in the ground. We must stabilize and ultimately reduce the global population. We must eliminate the institution of war; and we must develop new ethics to match our advanced technology, ethics in which narrow selfishness, short-sightedness and nationalism will be replaced by loyalty to humanity as a whole, combined with respect for nature.

Inaction is not an option. We have to act with courage and dedication, even if the odds are against success, because the stakes are so high.

The mass media could mobilize us to action, but they have failed in their duty.

Our educational systems could also wake us up and make us act, but they too has failed us. The battle to save the earth from human greed and folly has to be fought in the alternative media.

The alternative media, and all who work with them deserve both our gratitude and our financial support. They alone, can correct the distorted and incomplete picture of the world that we obtain from the mass media. They alone can show us the path to a future in which our children, grandchildren, and all future generations can survive.

A book discussing the importance of alternative media can be freely downloaded and circulated from this address:

http://eacpe.org/app/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Searching-for-truth-by-John-Scales-Avery.pdf

More freely downloadable books and articles on other global problems can be found on the following link:

http://eacpe.org/about-john-scales-avery/

Once We Awaken

Posted on November 18, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Rudy Avizius

Source: OpEdNews.com

Do you get a sense, that something is wrong
like that dissonance, that does not belong

As we move through the journey of life, many people are experiencing a sense of dis-ease, that something is off-kilter, that the narratives we are receiving do not match the reality we are experiencing. There is great hope in this knowledge because once one recognizes this dissonance the process of awakening begins.

Deep down way inside, you may have suspicions
that much what we’re told, are but veiled omissions

The narratives are controlled by a small handful of people who determine what issues and discussions we should be examining. As we watch the main stream news and follow social media, the news and discussions we see are mostly spectacle designed to boost ratings with little or no coverage of the real issues such as: our wars without end, corporate and big money control of government and media, or anything critical of the powers that be. Most of the journalists we see on the main stream media are basically celebrity faces who no longer practice journalism, but are simply parroting what those in power want them to say with little effort made to investigate and corroborate the stories. There is great hope in recognizing this knowledge, as it allows one to view the narratives more critically and to filter out what does not resonate with them.

Why do we listen, to those who would divide
those who leave us empty, with our humanity denied

Both of the main stream political parties support the Military/Industrial/Security Complex.
Both of the main stream political parties support the multiple simultaneous wars and occupations of other nations.
Both of the main stream political parties support a foreign policy of economic and military sanctions on nations that wish to pursue paths that do not fit interests of the global central banking system.
Both of the main stream political parties support their corporate donors over their constituents.
Both of the main stream political parties voted to extend the surveillance of citizens.
Both of the main stream political parties have made little or no attempt to stop the flood of big money into political campaigns.

However, the powers that be are very successful at projecting that there is a real difference between the two political parties. Both political parties are successful in getting people to fight each other over social issues that in the big picture are really not the key issues. Then, as long as the people are focused on fighting each other, those who orchestrated this fight enjoy the benefits of this effective diversion, keeping people from paying attention to the criminal syndicate that has taken over the government. There is great hope in recognizing this old divide and conquer tactic because once one does recognize it, one can stop fearing or hating “the other” and recognize that we have far more in common than what is dividing us. We can stop with name calling and finger pointing, and instead engage in meaningful conversations.

Why listen to those, with so little to tell
the very same ones who, have so much to sell

So many listen to the main stream media where sensationalism such as murders, car crashes, kidnappings, sex scandals and the like dominate the content. This is the same media where 90% of the media is owned by 6 corporations. One does not need a PhD to understand that this concentration of control over the narrative that people experience is not a positive development. Those that control the news keep the masses living in fear. This fear can take many forms, but often it is physical, economic, or social.

This is the same media that now has 36% of its hourly content filled with commercials. The fact that people are recognizing this is good news because they will become more discerning about who they give their money to. They will start to question whether they really need that product or service, or do they just want it.

Once we will awaken, things won’t be the same
we will manifest, an end to their game

Once we will awaken, the angels will observe
as those with dark souls, we’ll no longer serve

Our current political system has been totally corrupted by those with vast accumulations of money. This cuts across all ideologies and political party lines. This system of legal bribery has even been ratified by the highest court in the land which opened the floodgates to even more money corroding our system. How can someone represent you when they are being paid millions to represent others? What we need now goes beyond simple reforms and enters the realm of transformational change. Many articles and videos (mostly those in the alternative media space) connect these dots so that more and more people are becoming aware. This awareness or awakening is a critical step as it opens up the possibility for transformational change to take place.

The changes we are seeking will not take place from the top down, they will take place from the bottom up. Those who benefit from the current paradigm have little motivation to implement meaningful changes. Once we are ready to accept our own roles in this process, we will realize that what needs to happen is that we have to change ourselves. Once we stop playing their game of competing with each other, we will start cooperating instead. Local, self sufficient, and resilient communities will spring up like wild flowers in a field where they grow much of their own food, start their own currencies, and their citizens will stop buying from the big corporations, instead they will patronize their local businesses.

The current system of how we create and distribute money is at the very heart of most of the problems we face. It is absolutely amazing that people will work a significant portion of their lives away to earn money, and yet have only the most elementary understanding of how our debt based monetary system works. What does debt based monetary system mean? When was the last time your main stream media covered this? When was the last time your school taught you this? Why is this information withheld?

This debt based monetary system perpetuates and amplifies the inequalities of how Earth’s abundant resources are distributed. Our very existence on this planet is being threatened as unlimited economic growth within a finite biosphere remains the current paradigm. Until we move to a totally new monetary system, we are only hacking away at branches, and not getting to the root of the problem. There can be no effective transformation of our societies until this happens.

The models for a new monetary system are already in place. However the private individuals who have been given the monopoly power to create money and are benefiting from the current system will fight to make sure that knowledge of these systems does not spread widely. Those benefiting from the current system will work hard to make sure it stays firmly entrenched. When was the last time you heard a corporate media network discuss monetary reform?

Once we have local control of money, food production, energy generation,and governance, the current paradigm of corporate and big money control of our systems will simply become obsolete. It will simply fade into oblivion as it becomes less and less relevant. There will be no need to confront the system. Once we awaken and change our ways, we will “manifest an end to their game”.

Those who sell their souls, for their daily bread
may not take the time, to think of what’s ahead

There have always been those who would sell their souls and use the excuse “it’s my job” to justify their actions. From those who tortured Jesus to more modern times with concentration camp guards to even more currently the mercenaries who were hired to confront those seeking to protect their water supplies from pipeline companies.

Think about this, these mercenaries are people who left the communities they pledged to “protect and serve” to answer a call to “protect and serve” corporate interests in another community, while these same corporate interests were placing local people’s water supplies at serious risk.

These mercenaries were the tip of the spear, there were many behind the scenes who acted as enablers for their behaviors. There were the corporate executives, prosecutors, judges, minor bureaucrats, and politicians without whose support, such injustices could never take place. Those who served helping these forces have “sold their souls for their daily bread.”

“It was my job” is not an acceptable response when it curtails the access of life sustaining necessities of fellow human beings.

It is very easy to develop an “I see nothing” attitude, or to allow oneself to be silenced by monetary gain by “playing along” with those who control and manipulate the system. It is time to witness, it is time to speak up, it is time to resist when you see injustice taking place.

Those that are insatiable, always seeking moar
ever quite so willing, to send others to war

Why do we accede, to their self served schemes
rather than just simply, following our dreams

Once we awaken we will no longer serve those who think only of themselves and their own self serving schemes. YOU can start making a huge difference by the way you spend YOUR money. Think about this, when you give your money to someone or some corporation, as you are transferring some of your your power to them. Is this really something you wish to do?

Do you shop at a local merchant or do you save that 35 cents by buying from Amazon? Do you give a percentage of every purchase to the big banks by using credit cards or do you pay in cash? Do you buy animal products humanely produced? Do you buy organic food or food produced using chemicals that threaten our ecosystem (and your health?) Do you bank at a “too big to fail bank” or a local community bank or Credit Union? Sometimes the lowest price or convenience is not the best buy and can carry an even higher unseen cost.

As we develop our own resilient local communities and economies, our dependencies on the corporate model will be reduced, weakening their tight grip on us. Mother Teresa once said “I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples.”

Once we will awaken, we will clearly see
many of the others, who’ve also broken free

This is the best part of the awakening process. It is easy to think that the problems we face are overwhelming and that nothing can be done. The powers that be want us to think that way. Yet as we awaken, it becomes very clear that there are so many more of us that feel this same way than we originally believed. Once we awaken we become aware of others who have broken free. It is very empowering once we realize we are not alone. A critical mass is forming. It turns out that it takes only 10% of a population to bring about real changes.

We live in a world of abundance. There is enough air, water, and food for every person, animal, and plant on the planet. We have the resources and ability to make our existence here a paradise, to continue to develop socially, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. It is within our power to create a true golden age on this blue oasis floating through space and attain wondrous levels of development on a personal, family, community, regional, and global level while creating this paradise.

Jeff Sessions Reminds Everyone Why He’s the Worst Attorney General in Modern History

Posted on November 15, 2018 by Reid Mukai

“He was a racist when appointed, a racist while serving, and a racist to the very end.”

By Jessica Corbett

Source: CommonDreams

In his last “evil” act as head of the Justice Department under President Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions reminded “everyone yet again why he’s been the worst attorney general in modern history” and drastically limited the ability of federal officials to use court-enforced deals to require reforms at police departments that are found systematically violating people’s civil rights.

Sessions, on his way out the door, reminds everyone yet again why he’s been the worst attorney general in modern history. https://t.co/W9MQpRhTxG

— Trevor Timm (@trevortimm) November 9, 2018

Shortly before Trump forced Sessions to resign on Wednesday—and appointed a temporary replacement who is hostile toward Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation—Sessions signed a memorandum (pdf), as the New York Times reports, “sharply curtailing the use of so-called consent decrees, court-approved deals between the Justice Department and local governments that create a road map of changes for law enforcement and other institutions,” by imposing “three stringent requirements for the agreements.”

The decrees were, as the Times noted, “used aggressively by Obama-era Justice Department officials to fight police abuses,” but soon after Sessions took office, he had signaled he would scale back their use and “ordered a review of the existing agreements, including with police departments in Baltimore, Chicago, and Ferguson, Mo., enacted amid a national outcry over the deaths of black men at the hands of officers.”

Sessions’ last-minute final act was met with widespread outrage, but not surprise—rather, as many critics quickly pointed out, it fit with the patterns of Sessions’ moves throughout his tenure as attorney general.

“From day one, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions expressed open and naked hostility to the use of consent decrees, especially in the civil rights context,” said Kristen Clarke of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “This action by Sessions, on his way out the door, seals his legacy as an obstructionist when it comes to advancing justice and protecting rights in our country.”

It’s like Sessions thought, “What’s one more, big thing I can do to make sure governments across the country can get away with racist violence?” And then quietly snuck it into federal law just as the movers showed up. Good riddance. https://t.co/f8YeOE8ZTn

— Eric Klinenberg (@EricKlinenberg) November 9, 2018

I would never expect Sessions to be anything other than an unrepentant civil rights foe until the very last minute,” tweeted Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

On his way out the door, Sessions issued guidelines to limit scope, duration & effectiveness of consent decrees which are used in all types of civil rights cases, including those addressing police abuse & misconduct. Sessions was true to form until bitter end. https://t.co/oIvWR5WDT2

— Leslie Proll (@LeslieProll) November 9, 2018

“He was a racist when appointed, a racist while serving, and a racist to the very end,” Josh Moon of the Alabama Reporter said of his state’s former senator. “There is no redeeming quality to Jeff Sessions. He’s a horrible racist at his core.”

Once a racist, always a racist!… https://t.co/APaVV3oQwc

— Charles M. Blow (@CharlesMBlow) November 9, 2018

The New Republic‘s Matt Ford concluded simply, “He is who we thought he was.”

Although Sessions, much to Trump’s frustration, recused himself from the Mueller probe, while serving as attorney general, he made several moves—including canceling Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and implementing the “zero-tolerance” policy that tore migrant children away from their parents—that had civil and human rights advocates constantly raising alarm about “the Trump/Sessions white supremacist agenda.”

Even before news broke about his memo to curb the use of consent decrees, social justice advocates began to document Sessions’ record as he departed.

“Jeff Sessions was the worst attorney general in modern American history. Period,” the ACLU charged in a series of tweets on Wednesday that, among other things, noted his discrimination against trans people, enthusiastic enforcement of racist drug laws, and use of religion to attack women’s reproductive rights.

Sessions allowed the DOJ to function as the political arm of the Trump administration to undo fundamental rights, disregarding years of legal precedent.

The Senate must demand that any nominee for attorney general commit to not interfere in the special counsel investigation.

— ACLU (@ACLU) November 7, 2018

One of the most prominent parts of Sessions’ legacy is the immigration crisis he leaves behind, as Julia Preston outlined for The Marshall Project on Wednesday. Acknowledging Preston’s report, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law summarized on Twitter, “On President Trump’s favorite issue, the departing attorney general leaves behind record-breaking backlogs of cases, onerous constraints on judges, and a bulwark of punitive attitudes toward families seeking asylum.”

On President Trump's favorite issue, the departing attorney general leaves behind record-breaking backlogs of cases, onerous constraints on judges, and a bulwark of punitive attitudes toward families seeking asylum. https://t.co/SkncryfyBM

— Lawyers' Committee ☎️866-OUR-VOTE (@LawyersComm) November 8, 2018

The Rule of the Uber-Rich Means Tyranny or Revolution

Posted on November 14, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Chris Hedges

Source: TruthDig

At the age of 10 I was sent as a scholarship student to a boarding school for the uber-rich in Massachusetts. I lived among the wealthiest Americans for the next eight years. I listened to their prejudices and saw their cloying sense of entitlement. They insisted they were privileged and wealthy because they were smarter and more talented. They had a sneering disdain for those ranked below them in material and social status, even the merely rich. Most of the uber-rich lacked the capacity for empathy and compassion. They formed elite cliques that hazed, bullied and taunted any nonconformist who defied or did not fit into their self-adulatory universe.

It was impossible to build a friendship with most of the sons of the uber-rich. Friendship for them was defined by “what’s in it for me?” They were surrounded from the moment they came out of the womb by people catering to their desires and needs. They were incapable of reaching out to others in distress—whatever petty whim or problem they had at the moment dominated their universe and took precedence over the suffering of others, even those within their own families. They knew only how to take. They could not give. They were deformed and deeply unhappy people in the grip of an unquenchable narcissism.

It is essential to understand the pathologies of the uber-rich. They have seized total political power. These pathologies inform Donald Trump, his children, the Brett Kavanaughs, and the billionaires who run his administration. The uber-rich cannot see the world from anyone’s perspective but their own. People around them, including the women whom entitled men prey upon, are objects designed to gratify momentary lusts or be manipulated. The uber-rich are almost always amoral. Right. Wrong. Truth. Lies. Justice. Injustice. These concepts are beyond them. Whatever benefits or pleases them is good. What does not must be destroyed.

The pathology of the uber-rich is what permits Trump and his callow son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to conspire with de facto Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman, another product of unrestrained entitlement and nepotism, to cover up the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, whom I worked with in the Middle East. The uber-rich spend their lives protected by their inherited wealth, the power it wields and an army of enablers, including other members of the fraternity of the uber-rich, along with their lawyers and publicists. There are almost never any consequences for their failures, abuses, mistreatment of others and crimes. This is why the Saudi crown prince and Kushner have bonded. They are the homunculi the uber-rich routinely spawn.

The rule of the uber-rich, for this reason, is terrifying. They know no limits. They have never abided by the norms of society and never will. We pay taxes—they don’t. We work hard to get into an elite university or get a job—they don’t. We have to pay for our failures—they don’t. We are prosecuted for our crimes—they are not.

The uber-rich live in an artificial bubble, a land called Richistan, a place of Frankenmansions and private jets, cut off from our reality. Wealth, I saw, not only perpetuates itself but is used to monopolize the new opportunities for wealth creation. Social mobility for the poor and the working class is largely a myth. The uber-rich practice the ultimate form of affirmative action, catapulting white, male mediocrities like Trump, Kushner and George W. Bush into elite schools that groom the plutocracy for positions of power. The uber-rich are never forced to grow up. They are often infantilized for life, squalling for what they want and almost always getting it. And this makes them very, very dangerous.

Political theorists, from Aristotle and Karl Marx to Sheldon Wolin, have warned against the rule of the uber-rich. Once the uber-rich take over, Aristotle writes, the only options are tyranny and revolution. They do not know how to nurture or build. They know only how to feed their bottomless greed. It’s a funny thing about the uber-rich: No matter how many billions they possess, they never have enough. They are the Hungry Ghosts of Buddhism. They seek, through the accumulation of power, money and objects, an unachievable happiness. This life of endless desire often ends badly, with the uber-rich estranged from their spouses and children, bereft of genuine friends. And when they are gone, as Charles Dickens wrote in “A Christmas Carol,” most people are glad to be rid of them.

C. Wright Mills in “The Power Elite,” one of the finest studies of the pathologies of the uber-rich, wrote:

They exploited national resources, waged economic wars among themselves, entered into combinations, made private capital out of the public domain, and used any and every method to achieve their ends. They made agreements with railroads for rebates; they purchased newspapers and bought editors; they killed off competing and independent businesses and employed lawyers of skill and statesmen of repute to sustain their rights and secure their privileges. There is something demonic about these lords of creation; it is not merely rhetoric to call them robber barons.

Corporate capitalism, which has destroyed our democracy, has given unchecked power to the uber-rich. And once we understand the pathologies of these oligarchic elites, it is easy to chart our future. The state apparatus the uber-rich controls now exclusively serves their interests. They are deaf to the cries of the dispossessed. They empower those institutions that keep us oppressed—the security and surveillance systems of domestic control, militarized police, Homeland Security and the military—and gut or degrade those institutions or programs that blunt social, economic and political inequality, among them public education, health care, welfare, Social Security, an equitable tax system, food stamps, public transportation and infrastructure, and the courts. The uber-rich extract greater and greater sums of money from those they steadily impoverish. And when citizens object or resist, they crush or kill them.

The uber-rich care inordinately about their image. They are obsessed with looking at themselves. They are the center of their own universe. They go to great lengths and expense to create fictional personas replete with nonexistent virtues and attributes. This is why the uber-rich carry out acts of well-publicized philanthropy. Philanthropy allows the uber-rich to engage in moral fragmentation. They ignore the moral squalor of their lives, often defined by the kind of degeneracy and debauchery the uber-rich insist is the curse of the poor, to present themselves through small acts of charity as caring and beneficent. Those who puncture this image, as Khashoggi did with Salman, are especially despised. And this is why Trump, like all the uber-rich, sees a critical press as the enemy. It is why Trump’s and Kushner’s eagerness to conspire to help cover up Khashoggi’s murder is ominous. Trump’s incitements to his supporters, who see in him the omnipotence they lack and yearn to achieve, to carry out acts of violence against his critics are only a few steps removed from the crown prince’s thugs dismembering Khashoggi with a bone saw. And if you think Trump is joking when he suggests the press should be dealt with violently you understand nothing about the uber-rich. He will do what he can get away with, even murder. He, like most of the uber-rich, is devoid of a conscience.

The more enlightened uber-rich, the East Hamptons and Upper East Side uber-rich, a realm in which Ivanka and Jared once cavorted, look at the president as gauche and vulgar. But this distinction is one of style, not substance. Donald Trump may be an embarrassment to the well-heeled Harvard and Princeton graduates at Goldman Sachs, but he serves the uber-rich as assiduously as Barack Obama and the Democratic Party do. This is why the Obamas, like the Clintons, have been inducted into the pantheon of the uber-rich. It is why Chelsea Clinton and Ivanka Trump were close friends. They come from the same caste.

There is no force within ruling institutions that will halt the pillage by the uber-rich of the nation and the ecosystem. The uber-rich have nothing to fear from the corporate-controlled media, the elected officials they bankroll or the judicial system they have seized. The universities are pathetic corporation appendages. They silence or banish intellectual critics who upset major donors by challenging the reigning ideology of neoliberalism, which was formulated by the uber-rich to restore class power. The uber-rich have destroyed popular movements, including labor unions, along with democratic mechanisms for reform that once allowed working people to pit power against power. The world is now their playground.

In “The Postmodern Condition” the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard painted a picture of the future neoliberal order as one in which “the temporary contract” supplants “permanent institutions in the professional, emotional, sexual, cultural, family and international domains, as well as in political affairs.” This temporal relationship to people, things, institutions and the natural world ensures collective self-annihilation. Nothing for the uber-rich has an intrinsic value. Human beings, social institutions and the natural world are commodities to exploit for personal gain until exhaustion or collapse. The common good, like the consent of the governed, is a dead concept. This temporal relationship embodies the fundamental pathology of the uber-rich.

The uber-rich, as Karl Polanyi wrote, celebrate the worst kind of freedom—the freedom “to exploit one’s fellows, or the freedom to make inordinate gains without commensurable service to the community, the freedom to keep technological inventions from being used for public benefit, or the freedom to profit from public calamities secretly engineered for private advantage.” At the same time, as Polanyi noted, the uber-rich make war on the “freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of meeting, freedom of association, freedom to choose one’s own job.”

The dark pathologies of the uber-rich, lionized by mass culture and mass media, have become our own. We have ingested their poison. We have been taught by the uber-rich to celebrate the bad freedoms and denigrate the good ones. Look at any Trump rally. Watch any reality television show. Examine the state of our planet. We will repudiate these pathologies and organize to force the uber-rich from power or they will transform us into what they already consider us to be—the help.

Whither Russiagate?

Posted on November 12, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Philip Giraldi

Source: OffGuardian

Two years have passed since the 2016 presidential election. Allegations that foreign interference had influenced the result, perhaps decisively, began to surface even as the last ballots were being counted. Against all odds underdog Donald J. Trump had been elected president and the Establishment, which denigrated him throughout the campaign, had to find a scapegoat to explain their failure to elect the preferred candidate. The scapegoat turned out to be Russia.

The Robert Mueller led inquiry into the election has been running since May 2017. It has been tasked with determining whether the Trump campaign colluded corruptly with the Russian government to influence the outcome of the election. It has worked hard to delegitimize the president without that being its stated objective and has had a certain measure of success in doing just that.

But apart from a couple of low-level convictions for perjury, Mueller has come up with nothing that convincingly demonstrates that Moscow had some kind of plan to disrupt the elections and thereby damage American democracy. There was, to be sure, some Russian government sponsored probing and what might be described as attempted influencing, but that is what intelligence agencies do to justify their existence. The worst culprit when it comes to election interference worldwide is undoubtedly America’s own Central Intelligence Agency, which has been doing just that since 1947. But apart from some low-level activity, there has been nothing to suggest some kind of grand design orchestrated by Russian President Vladimir Putin to overthrow or cast into confusion the American government.

No one should ever let a good story line go to waste, so the U.S. mainstream media has bought into the proposition that Russia did both interfere in and influence the result of the election based on the assumption that where there is smoke there must be fire with little in the way of evidence being provided. Some media outlets have maintained that the margin of victory for Trump was actually “made in Russia,” meaning that he is ipso facto Moscow’s puppet. It should be noted that this is the same media that embraced Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and transatlantic gliders back in 2002 and the Syrian use of chemical weapons more recently, suggesting that the relationship between demonstrated facts and what comes out in the reporting is very tenuous.

To keep the story fresh, both government and the media have now been suggesting that there has already been an attempt by Russia to interfere in the 2018 midterm election which will take place on Tuesday. The New York Times describes an “elaborate campaign of ‘information warfare’ to interfere.” On October 19th, federal prosecutors charged Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova of St. Petersburg Russia, a woman whom they labeled the project’s “chief accountant.” She allegedly managed a budget to “sow division and discord” in the lead-up to the voting. The Times goes on to describe how “She bought internet domain names and Facebook and Instagram ads and spent money on building out Twitter accounts and paying to promote divisive posts on social media.”

And the list of culprits has also been expanded to include China and Iran, if one goes by PBS’s coverage of the story. One would not be surprised to see North Korea added to the list, as it is convenient to keep all of one’s enemies in one place, all on the march to destroy American democracy and its political institutions before the GOP and Democrats finally get around to doing it.

One might easily regard the never ending Russiagate saga as a bit of an amusement, but there are actually real-life consequences to corrupting the popular sentiment in a large and powerful nuclear armed nation like the United States by constantly discovering new enemies to stimulate the selling of newspapers and television ad time. At a minimum, phony threat accusations create paranoia and also mistrust in the institutions that are supposed to be protecting the country.

And there are also other less tangible consequences, namely that the constant crying wolf over the Russians and Chinese corrupting America’s political system actually does tell the voters that their vote does not matter as outside forces beyond their control will determine the result anyway.

Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian studies at Princeton University, has been arguing for some time that the pursuit of Russiagate and the various delusions that have become attached to it is doing grave damage not only to the bilateral relationship between Moscow and Washington but also to perceptions of the state of the U.S. political system. His latest article in The Nation entitled Who is really undermining American democracy? has as a sub-heading “Allegations that Russia is still ‘attacking’ US elections, now again in November, could delegitimize our democratic institutions.”

Cohen argues plausibly how the “undermine American democracy” meme may itself erode confidence in U.S. political institutions because if the trick of claiming outside interference can to be used successfully once it will be used again even after Trump is gone. If there are claims by losing candidates that Russia or some other foreign power interfered in the midterm this week it will inevitably jumpstart a witch hunt to find those congressmen who were “helped.” The legitimacy of congress itself will be in question.

Cohen also argues that “Russiagate has revealed the low esteem that many U.S. political-media elites have for American voters—for their ability to make discerning, rational electoral decisions, which is the bedrock assumption of representative democracy… Presumably this is a factor behind the current proliferation of programs—official, corporate, and private—to introduce elements of censorship in the nation’s ‘media space’ in order to filter out ‘Kremlin propaganda.’ Here, it also seems, elites will decide what constitutes such ‘propaganda.’”

It is the ultimate irony that the most powerful and least threatened country in the world – the United States of America-runs on fear. The obsession with possible foreign interference in U.S. elections reflects the fundamental insecurity of the elites that actually manipulate the system to benefit themselves and their constituencies. If the midterm results do not satisfy the Establishment and the “foreign menace” again is surfaced as causative it will, in truth, be the beginning of the end for American democracy as mistrust of the integrity of the government institutions will continued to be eroded. The alternative? Tell Robert Mueller to put his cards on the table and prove what is being generally accepted as true regarding Russia or fold up his tent and go home because he is no longer need.

Lost in the Theatre of Data, Dada, and Emotional Manipulation

Posted on November 11, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Edward Curtin

Source: OpEdNews.com

“It is not only information that they need — in this Age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it”What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves”what may be called the sociological imagination.”

— C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 1959

“‘Our own death is indeed, unimaginable,’ Freud said in 1915, ‘and whenever we make the attempt to imagine it we can perceive that we really survive as spectators.’ It is thus the very habit of military situations that turn them theatrical. And it is their utter unthinkableness: it is impossible for a participant to believe that he is taking part in such murderous proceedings in his own character. The whole thing is too grossly farcical, perverse, cruel, and absurd to be credited as a form of ‘real life.’ Seeing warfare as theatre provides a psychic escape for the participant: with a sufficient sense of theatre, he can perform his duties without implicating his ‘real’ self and without impairing his innermost conviction that the world is still a rational place. Just before the attack on Loos, Major Pilditch testifies to ‘a queer new feeling these last few days, intensified last night. A sort of feeling of unreality as if I were acting on a stage”.'”

— Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

“The society whose modernisation has reached the stage of integrated spectacle
is characterised by the combined effect of five principal factors: incessant technological renewal, integration of state and economy, generalised secrecy, unanswerable lies, and eternal present . . . .”

— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“Hi-diddle-dee-dee

An actor’s life for me..

Hi-diddle-dee-dum

An actor’s life is fun”

— Walt Disney, “Pinocchio”

It was 100 years ago this November 11^th when World War I ended. This “War to End All Wars,” resulted in the death of approximately 9 million soldiers and 9 million civilians. The brilliant leaders who waged this war — the crème de la crème — men who, in their own warped minds, possessed impeccable logic and rigorous reasoning, expected the war to be over in a few months. It lasted four years. Like their more current American counterparts before they launched the war against Iraq in 2003, they expected a “cakewalk” or a “slam-dunk” (the former term is racist and the latter a sports term, perfect unconscious verbiage for the slaughter of “lesser” humans). All these principals were data demented, they had lined up their little toy ducks in a row and expected a neat and logical outcome. Or so they said. The new weapons would make quick mincemeat of the enemy. Technology would expeditiously destroy to expeditiously save. Nothing has changed in one hundred years

Such instrumental logic and its positivistic data reductionism has now deeply infected the popular mind, as common sense has been destroyed by government and mass media propaganda so blatantly ridiculous that only a hypnotized person could believe it. But so many have been hypnotized and follow the repetitious and overwhelming streaming of each day’s markedly ad hoc “news,” following the Pied Piper to their doom via the wizardry of digital technology. Raptly attentive to the “politainment” that passes for journalism, they pin ball between alleged assertions of fact cobbled together with tendentious and faulty logic and theatrical displays of emotion meant to manipulate an audience of spectators in the national theatre of absurdity. It is all show and tell in which the audience is expected to react emotionally rather than think, with images and feelings having replaced concentrated reflection, and facts and evidence having disappeared like a coin from a magician’s hand.

This technological surround-sound theatre has reduced everything to play-acting, with audiences and their puppeteers playing reciprocal parts. Theodor Adorno analogizes thus:

“Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound film, far surpassing the theatre of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise detail without losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces its victims to equate it directly with reality. The stunting of the mass-media consumer’s powers of imagination and spontaneity does not have to be traced back to any psychological mechanisms; he must ascribe the loss of those attributes to the objective nature of the products themselves, especially to the most characteristic of them, the sound film. They are so designed that quickness, powers of observation, and experience are undeniably needed to apprehend them at all; yet sustained thought is out of the question if the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts.”

Meanwhile, the real business of murder, mayhem, and economic exploitation continues apace. As one “small” example of a fact relegated to oblivion by our mainstream media, in Gaza this past week, Israeli occupation forces killed Nasser Azim Musabeh (12), Mohammed Nayef Ai (14), Mohammed Ali Mohasmmed Anshasi, (18), Iyar Khalil Al-Sha’er (18), Mohasmmed Bassam Mohammed (24), Mohammed Walid Haniyeh (23), and Mohammed Ashraf Awawdeh (23). But such facts don’t matter since these dead young people were already reduced to invisible people not worthy of a mention.

Rather, pseudo-debates and pseudo-events are created by media and political magicians whose goal is to confuse the audience through information (data) and emotional overload into thinking that they are “freely” choosing what is always the same, to paraphrase Theodor Adorno. It is a conjurer’s act of mind manipulation in support of a repressive political and economic ideology built on false dichotomies. The political/media empire creates its own “reality” that the captivated audience takes as reality, as their emotions swing from outrage to laughter and their electronic clickers jump them from show to show, from CNN or Fox or the New York Times to Saturday Night Live in the land where there is no business but show business. “Amusing ourselves to death,” as Neal Postman so aptly put it. To which I would add: As we put others to death outside the show.

The other day I was in a library and was looking through a large book of World War I photographs from the Imperial War Museum that I found lying on a table. They were arranged chronologically from the start of the war in 1914 to its end in 1918. Fascinating photos, I thought. I went through the book page by page, examining the photos one by one, beginning with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand by a young guy, on through the photos of stiff British war-hawk leaders in double-breasted suits, through photos of the trenches and the new weapons until I reached photos of the treaty to “end” it. By the conclusion, I felt exhausted and knew nothing new. Photos as data. Click, click, click: How many are enough? It was like spending an hour with the mainstream corporate media, and much of the alternative press. It was like a black and white movie in no motion. Same old, same old, as a young man I know often says when I ask him what’s new. Same old data via photographs. War is hell. Ditto. Bodies get blown to bits and decompose in mud. Ditto. Heads get separated from necks and blood pours forth. Ditto. War is hell. Ditto. Great leaders meet and end the carnage. Ditto.

Ditto Data Dada. I had to imagine the subsequent pages and years as these great leaders, so disgusted by war, prepared for the next one, and the one following, etc. Ditto, data, dada.

I understood then why the first famous Dadaist piece of art that emerged from absolute disgust with the data driven crazies who started and waged WW I was Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 “Fountain,” a porcelain urinal signed by R. Mutt, a message to tell the “great” leaders to piss off.

But Dadaist art, like all avant-garde art, gets quickly sucked into the maw of the entertainment complex, which is another name for the propaganda complex. As the word media means etymologically — magicians — these sorcerer’s have developed and use every bit of black magic to engineer the consent of the bewildered herd, to blend the words of two of America’s key propagandists from the past: Edward Bernays, Freud’s American nephew and President Woodrow Wilson’s master propagandist for WW I, and the famous journalist Walter Lippman. Bernays put it straight and succinctly:

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of engineering of consent. The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process. It affects almost every aspect of our daily lives.

Last week I attended a production of the play Annie in a community theatre in a liberal town in the northeast. The show was sold out, and I was there because my lovely granddaughter was performing in the play, one whose story and music I was very familiar with. The show was delightful and the audience was enraptured by the performances and the wonderful music. If you are not familiar with the story, it is about an 11 year old orphan named Annie who, in 1933 when FDR has assumed the presidency, is in search of her biological parents. Together with other orphans in a NYC orphanage, she is treated miserably by a character named Miss Hannigan. By the play’s end, Annie is adopted by a wealthy man to presumably live happily ever after. At one point in the play, this wealthy man brings Annie to Washington D. C. to meet his friend, President Roosevelt. He says to FDR, Franklin, you need to do something and get my factories humming again. In this scene, Roosevelt and his cabinet, the wealthy man, and Annie sing the very upbeat song — “Tomorrow” — which Roosevelt loves since it offers hope in the dark time of the great depression. Everyone sings the stirring song, many in the audience silently singing along and the mood in the theater elevates. By the play’s end Annie is adopted by the wealthy man, whose name is Daddy Warbucks. This super-capitalist billionaire with a mansion on Fifth Avenue and a heart of gold has made his riches making weapons for WW I, though this is not spelled out in the show. I kept wondering what the audience of liberal-minded people were thinking, or if they were, about the strange fact the hero of the show was a man with a war-monger’s name whose factories had produced armaments that had created tens of thousands of war orphans and who was urging the liberal Roosevelt to get his munitions factories up and running again in 1933. I suspected they weren’t thinking about this at all and that the work of subtle propaganda was being magically induced at an unconscious level. For how could such a nice, caring guy, who adopts the cute Annie and who sings such tuneful songs, be a killer?

I guiltily thought: I shouldn’t be thinking such thoughts, as I also thought how can I not think them. Emotionally I felt one thing, and intellectually another. This was the classic double-bind.

Upon further reflection, I realized that this is how the finest propaganda works. It splits people in two and works subtly. Emotionally you are pulled one way, and intellectually another, if you are thinking at all. There are certain connections you are not supposed to make or verbalize, when to oppose the powerful sway of the media’s emotional appeals is considered a betrayal of your humanity and certain victims, such as a cute orphan or acceptable victims, even when that doesn’t follow logically.

But in the Magic Theatre that is American life, false choices are the essence of the show. Democrats vs. Republicans, Clinton vs. Bush, Bush vs. Obama, Obama vs. Trump, liberals vs. conservatives, and on and on endlessly. It’s Dada, my friends, all theater. The next election will change everything, right? “The sun’ll come out/Tomorrow, So ya gotta hang on/’Till tomorrow/ Come what may.”

Only when we leave the theatre can we see the real play. But that’s a bold act for which no Oscars, Tonys, or Emmys are handed out. And outside the theater’s warm embrace, it’s cold, and you feel like an orphan looking for a home, no matter how much blood-money purchased it. But don’t go in; it’s a trap.

	You Don’t Have To Wa… on You Don’t Have To Wait For Hal…
	ALL OUT WAR ON THE L… on ALL OUT WAR ON THE LIFE F…
	Pacific.scoop.co.nz… on Killing the Biosphere to Fast-…
	Reid Mukai on Saturday Matinee: Wizards
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: Wizards

After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Category Archives: media