Zero Point: Our 4th Industrial Revolution Against Their Great Reset

Posted on December 22, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Joaquin Flores

Genesis 1:26 – And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

Humanity is on the precipice of a new dark age, a long dark winter. It is one in which the technologies once developed to liberate humanity from toil, have developed further into a seemingly insurmountable techno-industrial leviathan. This is one based upon misanthropy, slavery, and human eradication. Called the Great Reset, it is being put forth by the same as those speaking of this 4^th Industrial Revolution.

But there is another 4^th Industrial Revolution which is on the horizon, one which places mankind at the helm of liberatory technologies like the internet of things (IoT) and 3D printing.

Hence, what is being termed the 4IR is in fact about subverting the actual 4IR towards the interests of the financialists whose old method of control (finance) is dwindling.

In this piece, we will attempt to shed light on two very altering visions of a 4^th Industrial Revolution. One of prosperity and individual human freedom as well as social liberty, versus one of repression and a new technocratic police state.

“The real 4th Industrial Revolution is about micro-production and each household, in its garage, owning its own means of production. That is the real promise of the internet of things and 3D printing. It is not about furthering globalization or the mass societies of scale towards an ever-larger pyramidically shaped control paradigm.”

Whose 4^th Industrial Revolution – Ours or Theirs?

There are two competing visions of the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR), and in that sense, two competing visions of a Great Reset. This is why we have posed the question in our essay Whose Great Reset? The Fight for Our Future – Technocracy vs. the Republic . Consequently, a lot of confusion has arisen about the 4^th Industrial Revolution; whether it is primarily an anthropic or misanthropic agenda.

This is chiefly because Klaus Schwab’s books ‘Covid-19 – The Great Reset’ and ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution’ appropriates the language of the coming 4^th Industrial Revolution, but puts forward another practically unrelated agenda entirely. The World Economic Forum, the ‘Davos People’, is a financialist network which looks upon the coming new epoch not with optimism, but with horror.

Just as the financialist system was about externalizing costs, now we find an entire social-psychological regime of externalizing horror. The horror and uncertainty of this time is in most ways a reflection of their own. The dominating ideas of any society are the ideas of its dominating class.

The moves of Schwab (and backed by the Rothschilds and their friends in big tech, and the Deep State writ large), are all moves to contain, control, and push-back the 4^th industrial revolution into a different kind of system. This is because the technologies which the actual 4^th Industrial Revolution really involve are to the detriment of the present ruling plutocracy.

To be clear, their Great Reset will not bring about the 4^th Industrial Revolution they speak of, nor as it was originally understood. The 4^th Industrial Revolution was originally thought to be new inventions that bring great freedom, and individual initiative that automation would allow for. These would break the fetters of the old economic model and unlock the potential of the new. It would not destroy society and imprison people, but magnify the plurality of a free society and liberate people from the planned obsolescence industrial model.

The real 4^th Industrial Revolution is the economic component of the Great Awakening and the 4^th Turning.

The old society was based in mass-scale industrial production, planned obsolescence, and the societies of mass-scale requiring bureaucracies. Those old bureaucracies and societies of scale mirror, in its social relations of production, the form lent to it by the means of production.

In other words, the society of mass industry and planned obsolescence at the economic level was the foundation for a society of mass bureaucracy and meaningless work at the social level. The bureaucratic revolution of the 1920’s and 30’s which was the New Deal and the Military Industrial Complex, was seen in other parts of the world as Marxism-Leninism and Fascism.

Consequently, as we have explained in ‘Coronavirus Shutdown: The End of Globalization and Planned Obsolescence – Enter Multipolarity’, that system relied upon planned obsolescence. The goal was not to produce access to the goods produced by industry, but to continue on the cycle of production and distribution as an over-arching control paradigm. This was to have people going to work every-day.

Therefore the focus of innovation has not been to increase the durability of goods, but to focus on adding features which, in terms of cost vs. benefit, were significantly higher in cost than realized benefit. And so marketing so heavily focused on the conspicuous consumption aspect of commodity ownership, for its conspiculous aspects, as explained by Thorstein Veblen in his seminal work The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), and operationalized in the revolution in advertising which is generally attributed to Edward Bernays’ 1923 classic Crystallizing Public Opinion. Moreover, the entire ‘philanthropic’ parade from Rockefeller down to Gates can only be fully understood through the lens of Bernays.

Origins of the 4^th Industrial Revolution

The phrase ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ we are erroneously informed by Wikipedia, is said to have been introduced by Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum. Yet this is credited based on a 2015 article published in the Atlanticist magazine, Foreign Affairs “Mastering the Fourth Industrial Revolution“ . This would go on to become theme of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos.

So what exactly is the 4th Industrial Revolution if not yet another ploy by the elites to use new technologies to further enslave humanity?

Wikipedia’s revisionism entirely ignores its use in futurist circles among thinkers, techies, and independent investors going back nearly two decades. These were in turn inspired by the New Wave Science Fiction movement of thee 60’s and 70’s, and a related genre, Cyberpunk. Even in the Wiki article which begins by falsely attributing 4IR to Klaus Schwab, they later admit that the term dates back to at least the Hannover Faire in Germany in 2011. But the term (or similar) dates back another decade before it. The concept itself dates back to the 19th century, seeing what increased automation would mean. This is a function of the organic composition of capital, the ratio of constant to variable capital.

Dragon investor knows that investing in a new product which lasts forever is a non-starter. And yet technology has long existed which could tremendously extend the lifespan of any given product. The replacement of plastic parts with the actually cheaper to produce tin, for example, has been documented for nearly 70 years as a product-life extending material.

This would have eradicated global poverty within a generation. But instead the control-paradigm which required the constant upwards redistribution of wealth towards the aim of control, and the requirement that people keep themselves busy with work (idle hands do the devil’s work), was the more ‘logical’ model, provided that the aim is conserving power and not liberalizing human freedom and dignity.

And so why we are seeing this great coup against republican democracies right now, the Covid-19 ‘Great Reset’, is not because the time is opportune nor because the financial elites are in a position of strength. It is not because they have done the sufficient ground work to smoothly transition into a post financial control matrix. But rather because time is running out and their position of strength is weakening by the day.

This is all because of the declining rate of profit which the 4th Industrial Revolution is the solution for. Those technologies have been developing swiftly since the 1950’s. Now to repeat, there are various possible iterations of ‘a’ 4th Industrial Revolution – some are emancipatory and liberatory in nature. And yet others (the one being pursued by the financial elites and as spelled out by the World Economic Forum) are based in misanthropy, population reduction, thought-control and policing, and the ‘long dark winter’.

Why would we want those who so disastrously brought about the ‘Great Reset’ to then go on to manage for us the ‘4^th Industrial Revolution’?

The roots of forecasting the 4^th Industrial revolution were based in post-capitalist economic theory, and looked at sub-dividing capitalism into further historical mini-stages. This was so that the development of capitalism away from variable capital (human labor) and towards constant capital (machines) could be more accurately described and projected. It was a descriptive and predictive model. Secondarily, it has always been a fact of life that many of the same technologies that can liberate humanity can also enslave them.

A better 4^th Industrial Revolution is about micro-production and each household, in a personal garage, having their own means of production. That is the real promise of the internet of things (IoT) and 3D printing. It is not about furthering globalization or the mass societies of scale towards an ever-larger pyramidically shaped control paradigm.

With that comes ‘self-employment’, and a tremendously reduced (and self-created) work schedule of working in one’s own garage. Now, there are various transitional models which involve more local community efforts, and the requisite specializations and down-stream repair micro-economies at the local level that would flow from this.

AI and ‘cybernetics’ are also fields that are developing, but strictly speaking are irrelevant to the 4IR if the liberatory potential of post-scarcity economics is understood.

Cybernetics isn’t necessarily involved in the decentralized and localized outcomes of the IoT.

Applied cybernetics (as envisioned by the World Economic Form) and, with it, ID2020 and beyond, are the opposite of any 4^th Industrial Revolution if we understand the liberatory potential of 4IR.

Their vision attempts to ‘Uberize’ the entire economy. The idea here is to eliminate all permanent work, but in its place have non-contracted temporary work, which changes on a nearly daily basis. This is similar to the disastrous ‘Labor Ready’ model already seen in the U.S.

The dystopic idea here is that everyone has a ‘chip’ implanted in them, and this has all their biometric data as well as serving as their bank card. People will earn credits when they receive work assignments at a random new location on a given day, and successfully complete that work.

Unfortunately, the liberatory potential of the 4IR is not understood by those who quite rightly reject the financialist institutional version of it. How these work towards a liberatory agenda of personal freedom, localism, and the foundation for intentional communities based on shared values, is being obscured by the official proponents of the false 4th Industrial Revolution from the World Economic Forum.

In the same way that the financial elites have somewhat erroneously called their corporate-statist monopoly system ‘capitalism’ (if capitalism is understood as competition between players with equal legal rights), they are calling the next system they have in mind the ‘4^th industrial revolution’, when in fact it works against the actual 4IR that can be.

And while the phrases and incessant quacking about ‘decentralization’ and ‘internet of things’, along with ‘3D printing’ are also used in the false version of 4IR, likewise we have seen for the past hundred years the corporate monopoly system nevertheless use the language of ‘markets’, ‘private property’ and ‘freedom’ when in fact those components of the corporate system have not really been its most prominent features.

This, practically alone, informs us on the fraudulence which is the World Economic Forum’s 4IR. Just as ‘capitalism’ has not truly relied on free competition, the 4IR being proposed will not truly be based on a decentralized model of 3D printing.

Rather, they will sit on 3D printing and the internet of things until other, really unrelated technologies like pre-crime detectors and other surveillance state techniques, can be implemented. Then they will try to centralize 3D printing when by its very nature, it is best suited to decentralization – thus eliminating various downstream and distribution middle-men. Bear in mind, that the coercive techniques implemented first will be part of a global population reduction scheme with the aim of reducing the population by as much as 90% its present number.

But the aim for the plutocrats in transition to a new kind of oligarchy, they are trying to maintain what Karl Wittfogel described as a ‘Hydraulic Civilization’ in his seminal book Oriental Despotism (1957). Here we understand that the difference with the free-farmers and peasants typical of Northern Europe were made possible because of the relatively high level of annual rain-fail. In many ways, liberal ideas of personal freedom that developed out of the middle-ages and into modernity in Northern Europe are a vestige of this economic, agricultural, reality.

In contrast, the Chaldean and Egyptian hydraulic civilizations of which Rome took its model, were based upon a militarized control over relatively centralized waterways (the Tigris, Euphrates, and the Nile). Access required paying of taxes, fines, fees, military service, and a whole array of other control mechanisms. In a post-economic order that we see on the horizon, one component of this is the transformation of a whole and larger section of society into ‘contact tracers’, a new security apparatus of ‘block captains’, of snitches, of informants against the rest of society. A reference here is the 1977 science fiction work ‘A Scanner Darkly’, by Philip K. Dick

Today the oligarchs are trying to make a Hydraulic Society out of 3D printing, but first need to establish a new coercive model of control over these new productive modes. Even to the extent of manufacturing pandemics, forced lockdowns, and a ‘cyber-pandemic’ of intentional, rolling black-outs.

But the more obvious implementation of 3D printing is more akin to rainfall. That is the primary contradiction at present.

The cornerstone of any 4IR that is workable for humanity, in line with the rights of man and based upon the dignity of the human spirit, is by definition based on a new form of cottage industry which the internet of things and 3D printing make possible.

Humanity was made in the image of its creator, and is worthy of a society reflective of his magnificence. It’s time to blow up the dam and stand under the rain-fall.

Lies, “Yellow Journalism” and the Death of the Mainstream Media

Posted on December 21, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

During the era of Yellow Journalism in the U.S. which defined the type of journalism that existed before the start of Spanish-American War in 1898. The term, ‘Yellow Journalism’ was associated with various major newspapers that held no journalistic principals or truth, “sensationalism” or “eye-catching headlines” was the only truth that mattered for newspaper owners that exaggerated stories to sell newspapers and fill their pockets with profits. Today they sell you lies to support the agendas of major corporations and the Military-Industrial Complex because corporate interests pays the MSM handsomely to sell their wars, drugs and propaganda.

The accelerated downfall of the mainstream media (MSM) occurred since the election of Donald Trump. It’s apparent that the MSM has caught TDS, or Trump Derangement Syndrome. I don’t know what you feel or sense when you are watching the MSM, whether it’s CNN, MSNBC who are obviously liberal networks or FOX News who is aligned with the Republicans party, it’s almost like watching the twilight zone. Journalistic integrity has been absolutely flushed down the toilet. For the record, the MSM has been losing its reputation as a reliable news source way before Trump became US president, he just added TDS to the so-called “television journalists” on CNN and MSNBC. However, that did not stop CNN’s president Jeff Zucker to propose a weekly show with the US President on a call with Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen according to The Hill, “I have all these proposals for him,” Zucker reportedly told Cohen “I want to do a weekly show with him and all this stuff.” Despite the fact that anti-Trumpism is alive and well in the MSM, it’s hypocritical. CNN and MSNBC will surely miss Trump if Joe Biden officially steals the election because low-ratings will collapse both networks and even FOX news will suffer to a point without Trump being showcased regularly on television networks and that’s probably why Jeff Zucker, had reportedly called Trump “the boss” if he would have signed a contract with CNN.

The print media is also guilty for publishing numerous false claims, accusations and lies that has led to wars and regime change in various countries for decades. One recent example is the case with The New York Times who published an article with the worst possible title ‘The baseless ‘Great Reset’ conspiracy theory rises again’ yet, on November 1st, Time magazine published a cover story that read ‘The Great Reset’ on its front page. The media must think the people are that stupid, it clearly shows how they view its target audience. There are many reasons why liberal networks with the possibility of FOX news following in the same direction will collapse due to low-viewership ratings. CNN, MSNBC and FOX employs a long list of liars and state propagandists who were in previous administrations that offer their one-sided analysis and reports in domestic and foreign issues presented to the viewer. In an important note, all of the MSM networks are on board and all agree that no matter who is president, they know who their foreign enemies are when it comes to war because they all obviously work for the same US war machine. Remember when liberal media host on MSNBC, Brian Williams and his comment on U.S. missiles hitting Syrian airfields with Trump’s approval in 2017 as “beautiful”? I guess he thought Trump wasn’t so bad after all. The MSM is a propaganda organ of the Democratic party and to the Republican party if we include FOX news. All of US viewers are beholden to the US war machine that includes all special interest groups and major corporate powers that dictate to the MSM what to report and say to the public. Since 2016, the MSM has stooped to its lowest level of lies and deceit. Its journalistic principles have evolved into a joke, a laughing stock in the world of news. Here is a short list out of many lies by the MSM:

The Trump-Russia Collusion Hoax: 3 Years Worth of Conspiracy Theories

The Trump-Russia Collusion scandal was proof in itself that CNN and MSNBC are conspiracy theorists with no actual facts. Conspiracy theorists is defined as those who create “a theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators” Well there is a group of “powerful conspirators” that does explain a set of fake circumstances surrounding Trump’s collusion with Russia which in under the definition of a conspiracy theorist. It took 3 years of this non-stop nonsense about Trump and Russia colluding 24 hours a day which was way over the top for anyone, even for some democrats who turned into republicans because of the MSM lies. The nearly $32 million spent on the Trump-Russia Collusion report turned out to be a devastating blow to the Democratic party.

A letter that was addressed to Senator Lindsey Graham that was signed by John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence (NIA) for the Trump administration requested information on the FBI’s behalf concerning their Investigation. Ratcliffe declassified the information which exposed the scandal and as many of us knew from the start, it was a hoax. It all turned out to be a major humiliation for the MSM after the dossier was exposed as a Hillary Clinton smear campaign against President Trump. Hillary Clinton was on board with a plan to link candidate Trump in 2016 to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “In late July 2o16, U.S. intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by typing him to Putin and the Russians’ in hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The IC does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.” It also stated the following:

According to handwritten noted, former Central Intelligence Agency Director Brennan subsequently briefed President Obama and other senior national security officials on the intelligence, including the ‘alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services

The letter also included that “On 07 September 2016, U.S. intelligence officials forwarded an investigative referral to FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok regarding ‘U.S. President candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” The MSM including MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow (who cried on air) after the hoax was exposed was humiliated. The MSM has lost time, money and whatever they had left of their credentials based on Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia lie, at this point they should be all crying themselves to sleep at night.

CNN Claimed Ecuador’s Embassy in London is a ‘Russian Hacking Hub’

Another case of pure MSM propaganda was against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange who at the time was in exile in Ecuador’s embassy in London. The former President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa criticized the MSM’s side of the story on Ecuador’s Embassy in London as a ‘Russian Hacking Hub.’ Correa was interviewed by RT.com and this is what he said about CNN and other US media sources:

We never approved interference in the internal affairs of other countries, we respect every nation, that is why when we saw that Julian Assange was publishing the data of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election campaign, we warned him two or three times, and on the third or fourth time we acted, we cut the internet. The story that CNN wants to build, that in the embassy there was a center for espionage operations with Russian support, that we knew about it and approved it. That’s how they want it to appear. what they want to sell to the world. What CNN and other media are saying is rubbish, but were use to it. They are prepping for the show. The reason is, when they extradite Assange to the US and sentence him to life, they want the honest backing of the public, they are setting the stage

What CNN reported on December 9, 2017, was that Donald Trump, Jr. was offered “advanced access” to the DNC and Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks before those emails were made public. MSNBC also jumped on the band wagon and “independently confirmed” CNN’s evidence about the collaboration between the Trump team and WikiLeaks over the hacked DNC emails. It all turned out to be false information. The email which Donald Trump, Jr. received was a link that was published online and open to the public. If that is not reckless and irresponsible journalism on a grand scale or just plain spiteful propaganda to paint Trump’s team as Russian assets, I don’t know what is.

The Pentagon with Help from the MSM is Pushing Regime Change in Venezuela

The MSM’s Commitment to the Pentagon’s agenda of regime change in Venezuela has been steady as well with CNN has been following Trump’s Line on Venezuela who falsely claimed in the SOTU address last February when Trump declared Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s true and legitimate president. CNN claimed that the voters wanted Maduro to step down since the elections in January 2019, but there’s one problem with that statement, Venezuela’s presidential election was actually held on May 20, 2018. CNN’s story ‘Military helicopter crashes in Venezuela, killing 7, amid protests’ first reported on a helicopter crash that killed seven military officers then redirects the story to the political scene mentioning Juan Guaido, the unpopular political figure who was unpopular among the opposition he’s part of. Washington chose Guaido as the best puppet they can manage as it’s “acting President.” After all, Uncle Sam still makes important decisions for the Venezuelan elite and the rest of its Latin American puppet states. CNN said that “pressure is mounting on Maduro to step down, following elections in January in which voters chose opposition leader Juan Guaido over him for president.” Current president Nicolas Maduro won that election by more than 67% of the vote as Juan Guaido and his followers decided not to participate in the elections as a way of protest against the Maduro government.

Eventually Big Tech Will Collapse, And The Alternative Media Will Rise

I feel sorry for the MSM’s faithful viewers, frying their brains with absolute propaganda from their preferred sources of information. They could have done more productive things with their lives. Just imagine, decades of endless lies by the MSM. It’s hard to wrap my head around what and how the MSM reports to its target audience who accept what is reported as the truth. The media has used propaganda and flat out lies to manipulate the public into believing whatever they said to further Washington’s agenda at all costs, even if it means losing viewership and they still get paid no matter what. Real journalism has died a long time ago in the US and that’s why the alternative media has grown significantly to challenge MSM’s narrative.

Big Tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are trying to suppress the alternative media and the truth it reveals to the public by way of censorship, but guess what? There will be alternative platforms that will compete and outperform Big Tech in the future. We already have numerous platforms where alternative voices are heard such as http://www.bitchute.com, http://www.minds.com, ise.media, Global Research.ca, Information Clearinghouse, The Corbett Report, The Gray Zone, rt.com, sometimes even Al Jazeera can be truthful when it wants to be and many others that will rise to the occasion of telling or spreading the truth on various platforms. The MSM has embarrassed themselves to the point of no return. They are dead in its tracks and the world is waking up to that fact.

No Escape from Our Techno-Feudal World

Posted on December 20, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Pepe Escobar

Source: Global Research

The political economy of the Digital Age remains virtually terra incognita. In Techno-Feudalism, published three months ago in France (no English translation yet), Cedric Durand, an economist at the Sorbonne, provides a crucial, global public service as he sifts through the new Matrix that controls all our lives.

Durand places the Digital Age in the larger context of the historical evolution of capitalism to show how the Washington consensus ended up metastasized into the Silicon Valley consensus. In a delightful twist, he brands the new grove as the “Californian ideology”.

We’re far away from Jefferson Airplane and the Beach Boys; it’s more like Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” on steroids, complete with IMF-style “structural reforms” emphasizing “flexibilization” of work and outright marketization/financialization of everyday life.

The Digital Age was crucially associated with right-wing ideology from the very start. The incubation was provided by the Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF), active from 1993 to 2010 and conveniently funded, among others, by Microsoft, At&T, Disney, Sony, Oracle, Google and Yahoo.

In 1994, PFF held a ground-breaking conference in Atlanta that eventually led to a seminal Magna Carta: literally, Cyberspace and the American Dream: a Magna Carta for the Knowledge Era, published in 1996, during the first Clinton term.

Not by accident the magazine Wired was founded, just like PFF, in 1993, instantly becoming the house organ of the “Californian ideology”.

Among the authors of the Magna Carta we find futurist Alvin “Future Shock” Toffler and Reagan’s former scientific counselor George Keyworth. Before anyone else, they were already conceptualizing how “cyberspace is a bioelectronic environment which is literally universal”. Their Magna Carta was the privileged road map to explore the new frontier.

Those Randian heroes

Also not by accident the intellectual guru of the new frontier was Ayn Rand and her quite primitive dichotomy between “pioneers” and the mob. Rand declared that egotism is good, altruism is evil, and empathy is irrational.

When it comes to the new property rights of the new Eldorado, all power should be exercised by the Silicon Valley “pioneers”, a Narcissus bunch in love with their mirror image as superior Randian heroes. In the name of innovation they should be allowed to destroy any established rules, in a Schumpeterian “creative destruction” rampage.

That has led to our current environment, where Google, Facebook, Uber and co. can overstep any legal framework, imposing their innovations like a fait accompli.

Durand goes to the heart of the matter when it comes to the true nature of “digital domination”: US leadership was never achieved because of spontaneous market forces.

On the contrary. The history of Silicon Valley is absolutely dependent on state intervention – especially via the industrial-military complex and the aero-spatial complex. The Ames Research Center, one of NASA’s top labs, is in Mountain View. Stanford was always awarded juicy military research contracts. During WWII, Hewlett Packard, for instance, was flourishing thanks to their electronics being used to manufacture radars. Throughout the 1960s, the US military bought the bulk of the still infant semiconductor production.

The Rise of Data Capital, a 2016 MIT Technological Review report produced “in partnership” with Oracle, showed how digital networks open access to a new, virgin underground brimming with resources: “Those that arrive first and take control obtain the resources they’re seeking” – in the form of data.

So everything from video-surveillance images and electronic banking to DNA samples and supermarket tickets implies some form of territorial appropriation. Here we see in all its glory the extractivist logic inbuilt in the development of Big Data.

Durand gives us the example of Android to illustrate the extractivist logic in action. Google made Android free for all smartphones so it would acquire a strategic market position, beating the Apple ecosystem and thus becoming the default internet entry point for virtually the whole planet. That’s how a de facto, immensely valuable, online real estate empire is built.

The key point is that whatever the original business – Google, Amazon, Uber – strategies of conquering cyberspace all point to the same target: take control of “spaces of observation and capture” of data.

About the Chinese credit system…

Durand offers a finely balanced analysis of the Chinese credit system – a public/private hybrid system launched in 2013 during the 3^rd plenum of the 18^th Congress of the CCP, under the motto “to value sincerity and punish insincerity”.

For the State Council, the supreme government authority in China, what really mattered was to encourage behavior deemed responsible in the financial, economic and socio-political spheres, and sanction what is not. It’s all about trust. Beijing defines it as “a method of perfecting the socialist market economy system that improves social governance”.

The Chinese term – shehui xinyong – is totally lost in translation in the West. Way more complex than “social credit”, it’s more about “trustworthiness”, in the sense of integrity. Instead of the pedestrian Western accusations of being an Orwellian system, priorities include the fight against fraud and corruption at the national, regional and local levels, violations of environmental rules, disrespect of food security norms.

Cybernetic management of social life is being seriously discussed in China since the 1980s. In fact, since the 1940s, as we see in Mao’s Little Red Book. It could be seen as inspired by the Maoist principle of “mass lines”, as in “start with the masses to come back to the masses: to amass the ideas of the masses (which are dispersed, non-systematic), concentrate them (in general ideas and systematic), then come back to the masses to diffuse and explain them, make sure the masses assimilate them and translate them into action, and verify in the action of the masses the pertinence of these ideas”.

Durand’s analysis goes one step beyond Soshana Zuboff’s

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism when he finally reaches the core of his thesis, showing how digital platforms become “fiefdoms”: they live out of, and profit from, their vast “digital territory” peopled with data even as they lock in power over their services, which are deemed indispensable.

And just as in feudalism, fiefdoms dominate territory by attaching serfs. Masters made their living profiting from the social power derived from the exploitation of their domain, and that implied unlimited power over the serfs.

It all spells out total concentration. Silicon Valley stalwart Peter Thiel has always stressed the target of the digital entrepreneur is exactly to bypass competition. As quoted in Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, Thiel declared, “Capitalism and competition are antagonistic. Competition is for losers.”

So now we are facing not a mere clash between Silicon Valley capitalism and finance capital, but actually a new mode of production:

a turbo-capitalist survival as rentier capitalism, where Silicon giants take the place of estates, and also the State. That is the “techno-feudal” option, as defined by Durand.

Blake meets Burroughs

Durand’s book is extremely relevant to show how the theoretical and political critique of the Digital Age is still rarified. There is no precise cartography of all those dodgy circuits of revenue extraction. No analysis of how do they profit from the financial casino – especially mega investment funds that facilitate hyper-concentration. Or how do they profit from the hardcore exploitation of workers in the gig economy.

The total concentration of the digital glebe is leading to a scenario, as Durand recalls, already dreamed up by Stuart Mill, where every land in a country belonged to a single master. Our generalized dependency on the digital masters seems to be “the cannibal future of liberalism in the age of algorithms”.

Is there a possible way out? The temptation is to go radical – a Blake/Burroughs crossover. We have to expand our scope of comprehension – and stop confusing the map (as shown in the Magna Carta) with the territory (our perception).

William Blake, in his proto-psychedelic visions, was all about liberation and subordination – depicting an authoritarian deity imposing conformity via a sort of source code of mass influence. Looks like a proto-analysis of the Digital Age.

William Burroughs conceptualized Control – an array of manipulations including mass media (he would be horrified by social media). To break down Control, we must be able to hack into and disrupt its core programs. Burroughs showed how all forms of Control must be rejected – and defeated: “Authority figures are seen for what they are: dead empty masks manipulated by computers”.

Here’s our future: hackers or slaves.

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Yet Another Major Escalation In Establishment Internet Censorship

Posted on December 18, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

YouTube, whose corporate owner Google is arguably the most powerful company on earth, is now deleting user videos which claim the US election was fraudulent.

YouTube’s official statement on its decision to do this is very revealing, not so much for what it says as for what it does not say.

At no point does the video publishing platform attempt to argue that it is removing these videos because they jeopardize anyone’s health or safety, as it did when it began deleting videos deemed to be spreading misinformation about Covid-19.

At no point does it attempt to argue that these videos are inciting violence, as it did when it began deleting QAnon videos.

At no point does it claim that these videos are misleading voters, as it initially began collaborating with the US government to prevent, since all the voting is over and done with.

It’s simply deleting the videos because they are believed to be wrong. This is an important distinction, because it’s a marked deviation from the previous policy of content deletion used by YouTube and other new media platforms.

2/ Yesterday was the safe harbor deadline. Now that enough states certified their Presidential election results, we’ll remove any content published today (or anytime after) that alleges widespread fraud or errors changed the 2020 U.S. Presidential election outcome.

— YouTubeInsider (@YouTubeInsider) December 9, 2020

“Yesterday was the safe harbor deadline for the U.S. Presidential election and enough states have certified their election results to determine a President-elect,” YouTube writes. “Given that, we will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, in line with our approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections. For example, we will remove videos claiming that a Presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or counting errors. We will begin enforcing this policy today, and will ramp up in the weeks to come.”

I neither know nor care whether the sort of election fraud alleged to have taken place in the contest between Joe Biden or Donald Trump actually happened; I know the processes by which candidates are elevated to run in a US general election are corrupt and rigged from top to bottom, so the question of whether additional manipulation took place between two establishment-approved imperialist oligarch lackeys in a pretend election is not particularly interesting to me. But this new move by YouTube is a major escalation in the continually escalating rollout of internet censorship protocols by US government-tied Silicon Valley megacorporations.

Even if America did not have the single most flawed election system in the entire western world (and it does), and even if it had been conclusively proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that no election fraud of any sort took place (and it hasn’t), it would still be a massive escalation beyond previous online censorship protocols to begin censoring people simply because they are wrong. People are allowed to be wrong. A free society allows people the right to voice wrong beliefs because the only alternative is creating a monolithic Ministry of Truth which has authority over what the right and wrong beliefs are.

Those of us who’ve been warning of the dangers of government-aligned plutocratic corporations lowering their standards for silencing speech further and further were not committing a slippery slope fallacy; it’s not fallacious to warn of a slippery slope when the slope is demonstrably real. The fact that we’ve been methodically paced from accepting the cross-platform deletion of Alex Jones a couple of years ago to random internet users being silenced for no other reason than expressing wrongthink today shows us the slope is very real and very consequential, and our slide into information totalitarianism will continue if something major does not change.

"Do I believe the 2020 election was stolen? No. But I also didn’t believe the election was stolen from Hillary Clinton in 2016, when the Internet was overrun with conspiracy theories nearly identical to the ones now being propagated by Trump fans." https://t.co/nvH0isGvaN

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 11, 2020

Matt Taibbi has written a solid article condemning YouTube’s latest ramp-up and highlighting the double standard in the way Democrats have been pushing narratives about Trump colluding with Russia to fraudulently steal the 2016 election for four years with no consequences whatsoever while Trump supporters are banned from doing essentially the exact same thing. I would add that the primary source of this double standard is not ideological bias (though that’s surely a factor as well) but the coziness these Silicon Valley tech giants have formed with US government agencies who signed off on Russiagate but not on Trump’s claims. It’s not so much a liberal bias as it is a US intelligence cartel bias.

In reality, there was never any more evidence for liberal claims of Russia interfering with the US election in any meaningful way than there is for election fraud in 2020. Actual journalists and impartial social media platforms would have recognized the indisputable fact that the Russian hacking narrative was extremely porous and remains completely unproven, and the narrative about Russian memes swaying the election is a complete joke. The only thing giving the Democrats’ claims more narrative weight than those of the Republicans today is that one was endorsed by the US intelligence cartel (the same US intelligence cartel which just so happened to wind up advancing multiple preexisting agendas using Russiagate) and the other was not. That’s it.

Those who understood that whoever controls the narrative controls the world and that plutocrat-controlled mass media is the linchpin of the oligarchic status quo were very excited about the arrival of the internet, because they understood its information-democratizing potential. Now we’re all watching those hopes slowly eroded into nothing as the same power structures which control and influence the mainstream media now work to take full control over online information.

But Not Videos Claiming Donald Trump is a Russian Agent, Because That's the Acceptable Election Conspiracy Theory https://t.co/gtfz4WZTlX

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) December 9, 2020

“On average 88% of the videos in top 10 search results related to elections came from authoritative news sources (amongst the rest are things like newsy late-night shows, creator videos and commentary),” YouTube boasts in the aforementioned statement on its deletion of wrongthink election videos. “And the most viewed channels and videos are from news channels like NBC and CBS.”

As though rigging your algorithms to give users results which link to the same plutocratic media outlets who’ve helped deceive the public about every war and continuously manipulate them into believing status quo politics totally work is something to be proud of.

If information which isn’t approved by the powerful continues to be squeezed into smaller and smaller fringe circles, the information-democratizing potential which once gave revolutionary thinkers so much hope will be completely nullified, and all that will remain is a network which allows establishment power structures to distribute propaganda much faster than they could back in the days of the old media. Here’s hoping our rulers fail in their attempts to do this, and that we succeed in our desire to stop them.

America’s Future is Liberal Fascism Sporting a Smiley Shirt and Armed With a Syringe

Posted on December 17, 2020 by Reid Mukai

The globalists responsible for engineering a medical tyranny across much of the Western world have something valuable to teach right-wing nationalists and would-be fascists, and that is you don’t sell your damaged product out of the barrel of a machine gun, but rather dripping from the end of a syringe that promises to end all pain and misery.

By Robert Bridge

Source: Covert Geopolitics

Patrick Henry, one of America’s more outspoken Founding Fathers, famously remarked “give me liberty or give me death” when the life of his nation was on the line. Today, America’s famous battle cry has been replaced by a masked and muffled gasp that advises, without hope of a second opinion, “give me lockdowns and keep me safe.” So terrified is the American public of catching a virus that comes with a 99 percent survival rate that they are willing to forego Thanksgiving, the great national holiday commemorating – with no loss of irony – their Pilgrim ancestors’ collective courage to overcome the wild, hostile conditions of their new land.

It must be said that no fascist party has ever been so adept when it came to sealing the collective fate of their people to a common enemy. That’s because the threat facing mankind today, or so we are told, is not some nefarious ideology, like communism, or even a terrorist organization that the masses can be rallied to fight. Rather, the threat is a microscopic contagion that is capable of invading every nook and cranny of our lives. Already the age of manly handshakes is over, replaced by an emasculated majority, while an entire generation of youth now looks at their fellow human beings as infernal germ factories.

And unlike a traditional enemy that can be seen, attacked and eventually defeated, the coronavirus – we have been oddly forewarned – will make landfall again and again, while regularly morphing with comic book abilities into an increasingly deadlier villain. In this landless battle, only the medical authorities are decorated as heroes, while the people, lacking the professional credentials, are forced to be passive and helpless onlookers, their freedom of movement severely constrained. More importantly, the forces of nationalism have become irrelevant; only a globalist, one-world-order response can defeat this pandemic.

There is very good reason to suspect, however, that either the science on all of this is half-baked, or we the people are being intentionally duped on a grand scale. In fact, it’s probably a little bit of both. First, relying on nothing more than empirical evidence, it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that there is no existential emergency confronting mankind. If there were, we would expect to see decomposing bodies piling up in the streets, like in the medieval times during the Black Plague. This would be especially the case among the homeless population, which is certainly not practicing social distancing etiquette as they pass around open containers on street corners.

Nor does there seem to be any massive queuing up at hospitals for emergency treatment. In fact, as early as April, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told President Trump that the Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort deployed to New York City by the federal government to help fight the coronavirus outbreak was “no longer needed”. Cuomo said the need for the support vessel “didn’t reach the levels that had been projected.” And I am certainly not the only one who has noticed that Covid cases seem to fluctuate curiously with the political climate.

Plenty of hospital rooms. You’ve got that right! https://t.co/lg0Bb2Ai9j

— Richard citizen journalist (@DPotcner) October 28, 2020

Let’s not forget that the overwhelming majority of Covid ‘victims’ recover nicely at home, according to no less of an authority than Anthony Fauci. At the same time, many people who acquire the disease are asymptomatic and never even knew they were infected. Children, meanwhile, seem amazingly impervious to the virus. That is not to say that there has been no sign of a virus this winter season. Of course there has been, just like every year. But while Covid cases may be on the rise in some places, and invisible in others, the death rate from this illness remains low and tumbling, predominantly hitting elderly people already suffering from comorbidities.

There are other reasons to be suspicious that what we are dealing with is not a first-class medical emergency, but rather something much more sinister. Like maybe an excuse for rolling out a Western-made vaccine that carries a microchip implant with tracking technology? Such a claim will sound less fantastic when it is realized that it has already been developed.

It is no secret that just one month before Covid-19 made its dramatic landfall in the United States, purportedly from Wuhan, China, MIT researchers announced a new method for recording a patient’s vaccination history: storing the smartphone-readable data under the skin at the same time a vaccine is administered.

“By selectively loading microparticles into microneedles, the patches deliver a pattern in the skin that is invisible to the naked eye but can be scanned with a smartphone that has the infrared filter removed,” MIT News reported. “The patch can be customized to imprint different patterns that correspond to the type of vaccine delivered.”

Would it surprise anyone to know that the research was funded largely by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the same family venture that now provides the bulk of funding to the World Health Organization?

In a new interview, Bill Gates authoritatively states that mass public gatherings will not come back “at all” until we have mass vaccination. Who made him king of the world? https://t.co/siW7bZ9yGc … https://t.co/ivaCI8eAEl

— Alternative News (@NewsAlternative) April 4, 2020

Then, in September 2019, ID2020, a San Francisco-based biometric company that counts Microsoft as one of its founding members, announced a new project that involves the “exploration of multiple biometric identification technologies for infants” that is based on “infant immunization.”

We could continue here with a long list of other disturbing technologies that would effectively turn people into walking antennae for the rest of their lives, but the point is hopefully clear: although many people might be willing to accept a vaccine against Covid-19, they probably do not want the extra technological add-ons that people like Bill Gates, a man with zero medical qualifications, seem extremely anxious to include.

“The food supply chain is breaking,” Tyson Foods warns in a full page ad in NYT today pic.twitter.com/5cyusH6L9V

— Ana Swanson (@AnaSwanson) April 26, 2020

So what can Americans expect next? How about ‘Freedom Passes’ that Britons may need before they are able to return to some semblance of normalcy?

According to the Daily Mail, “Britons are set to be given Covid ‘freedom passes’ as long as they test negative for the virus twice in a week, it has been suggested…To earn the freedom pass, people will need to be tested regularly and, provided the results come back negative, they will then be given a letter, card or document they can show to people as they move around.”

And this is what they call a “return to normalcy.”

Personally, I call those plans the approach of fascism. And for those who doubt that it could not happen in America should heed the words of the late sagacious comedian George Carlin, who once quipped that “when fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jackboots. It will be Nike sneakers and smiley shirts.” Had Carlin been alive today to see the tremendous mess we’ve inherited, he would most likely have included a syringe in the neo-fascist’s toolkit.

Tears in Rain: ‘Blade Runner’ and Philip K. Dick’s Legacy in Film

Posted on December 16, 2020 by Reid Mukai

Blade Runner, and the work of Philip K. Dick, continues to find its way into our cinemas and minds. How did the visions of a paranoid loner become the most relevant science fiction of our time?

By Sean Bell

Source: PopMatters

You are an unusual man, Mr. Asher,” the cop beside him said. “Crazy or not, whatever it is that has gone wrong with you, you are one of a kind.”– Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said.
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…”
— Roy Batty, Blade Runner.

Los Angeles, 2019. The script simply reads: “Ext. Hades – Dusk”. Chemical flame bursts into the perpetual, post-nuclear Los Angeles gloom from skyscraping smokestacks, rising out of an industrial landscape Hieronymus Bosch might have envisaged. Flying cars flit through the darkness like fireflies. The camera moves slowly over impossible architecture with the immensity and decaying grandeur of ancient Egypt; a phantasmagorical megalopolis strung with necklaces of neon. The music rises.

The last war is over and nobody won. The Earth is living on borrowed time. Science has destroyed all boundaries between the real and unreal except those we choose to impose. Policemen are murderers, androids are lovers, nobody can be trusted, and everybody dies. Welcome back to the world of Blade Runner. Every time we return, it becomes more recognisable. Perhaps we never left.

Santa Ana, 1981. By now, Philip K. Dick — author, religious visionary and possible schizophrenic, who once said “You would have to kill me and prop me up in the seat of my car with a smile painted on my face to get me to go near Hollywood” — has read and approved the shooting script for Blade Runner by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, as well as viewed a test reel of the movie’s groundbreaking special effects. In an effusive letter to Jeff Walker, the man in charge of the film’s marketing. Dick makes his prophetic opinion clear.

“Let me sum it up this way,” he wrote. “Science fiction has slowly and ineluctably settled into a monotonous death: it has become inbred, derivative, stale. Suddenly you people come in, some of the greatest talents currently in existence, and now we have a new life, a new start. As for my own role in the BLADE RUNNER project, I can only say that I did not know that a work of mine or a set of ideas of mine could be escalated into such stunning dimensions. My life and creative work are justified and completed by BLADE RUNNER… It will prove invincible.” (‘Letter to Jeff Walker regarding Blade Runner“ on Philip K Dick.com)

Dick, with a writer’s knack, chose the right words. Blade Runner has survived everything that could be thrown at it, including its initial critical reception, successive unsatisfactory edits, and dilution by both the science fiction genre and the film industry, which would plagiarise its vision with varying degrees of shamelessness for the next three decades. Yet nothing has been able to replicate its unique synthesis of elements, melding equal parts noir, action, romance, cyberpunk, dystopia and a meditation on what it means to be human. Whether praised or disparaged, ignored or overexposed, it has seen off all critics and challengers. Blade Runner‘s invincibility endures.

Unfortunately, the inimitable artistic fortitude of Ridley Scott‘s best work also allowed Hollywood to practice its favourite hobby of missing the point. The novels (or rather, in the film industry netherworld, ‘properties’) of Philip K. Dick — a writer largely unappreciated in his own lifetime who, at his lowest, claimed he he could not afford the late fee for a library book and infamously sustained himself on horse meat from a local pet store — have become highly prized and sought-after by studios eager to import intelligent ideas, rather than go through the hassle of conceiving their own. In the (twisted) spirit of Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale“, no need for originality, we can develop it for you wholesale.

Question the nature of identity with Colin Farrell’s Douglas Quaid /Hauser as he flees the futuristic gunfire in the remake of Len Wiseman’s Total Recall (2012, an adaptation of an adaptation, as it were). Consider the limitations of free will with Tom Cruise’s Chief John Anderton (a well-known fan of unstable science fiction writers) in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2012) while wondering how short he really is. Watch Jon Woo’s Paycheck (2003) and wonder how much Ben Affleck is actually being paid to appear in this piece of shit.

The names change, but the formula remains the same. Each summer, there must be blockbusters, and to fill the gaps in between the explosions with the barest bones of a Phil Dick story is, to the studio mindset, to buy instant, ready-made philosophical depth and artistic worth. Just add CGI!

Improbably, with 11 films based on his work and more in the pipeline, Dick has become the most adapted science fiction author in cinema history… And I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

“It’s a film about whether or not you can have a meaningful relationship with your toaster.” — Harrison Ford on Blade Runner in an interview with The Washington Post, 11 September 1992

That Scott is a director second only to George Lucas in his determination to tinker with a bygone masterwork until it meets his ultimate, exacting satisfaction (at last count, there are seven different versions of Blade Runner floating around the ether, finally culminating in Scott’s so-called ‘final cut’ in 2007), when a startling new interpretation of the film appeared online this June to wild acclaim, he had nothing to do with it. Instead, it was the work of the artist Anders Ramsell, who painstakingly recreated every frame of the movie’s opening 13 minutes with 3,285 gorgeous, haunting, impressionistic watercolours.

Improbably, with 11 films based on his work and more in the pipeline, Dick has become the most adapted science fiction author in cinema history… And I’m not sure that’s a good thing.

“It’s a film about whether or not you can have a meaningful relationship with your toaster.” — Harrison Ford on Blade Runner in an interview with The Washington Post, 11 September 1992

The painting technique employed to create this effect is known as aquarelle, which also acts as a sly commentary on Blade Runner‘s repeatedly-rejiggered legacy: because of its transparency, with aquarelle nothing can be painted over — once a mistake has been made, it has to be lived with. But as I watched what Ramsell called his ‘paraphrase’ of the movie, the familiar scenes and faces and voices emerging from the flickering, sensuous wash of colour, it seemed all the more appropriate. Other than Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, I can think of no other film that so looks like a painting without paint — a piece of art that evokes other art, and yet remains entirely itself.

This is all a long way of saying that Blade Runner is beautiful, in almost every way possible. This has, ridiculously, sometimes been described as being to its detriment: Roger Ebert, one of the film’s more famous naysayers, wrote in a contemporary review in the Chicago Sun-Times that “It looks fabulous… but it is thin in its human story,” (11 September 1992) an oddly myopic remark to make about a parable on the nature of humanity. True, Blade Runner has an embarrassment of style, but never at the expense of substance, much like the best examples of the Cinema du look movement, which was just emerging in French cinema at the time of Blade Runner‘s release. Indeed, in appearance and atmosphere, Blade Runner is so distinct that it changed the aesthetic of science fiction, and new subgenres have since been invented simply to describe it — ‘future noir’, coined by the critic and filmmaker Paul M. Sammon, being the most enduring.

To those who have yet to experience the film, I wonder what to say that has not been said elsewhere. Based on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner somehow manages to be simultaneously the truest adaptation of Dick’s work yet produced — in spirit, if not plot — and also the freest in its interpretation of the material.

The central premise remains in both book and film; Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), halfway between policeman and bounty hunter, makes his living by tracking and killing androids that are almost entirely indistinguishable from humans, living amongst us under false identities. The supposed test for distinguishing real from unreal humans is that of empathy, but as Deckard methodically adds to his ‘artificial’ bodycount, he begins to question who is really the unemotional machine.

Blade Runner dumps much of the novel’s narrative furniture — Scott justified this to Dick by saying: “You know you’re so dense, mate, that by page 32, there’s about 17 storylines” — in a way that, in almost any other adaptation, would be considered sacrilege. Most noticeably, in the novel, Deckard is trapped in a barely functional marriage, while in the movie, Harrison Ford’s laconic protagonist is the classic bachelor gumshoe.

Also prominent in the book are ‘Mercerism’, the religion based around its followers’ empathy for a man whom others were throwing rocks at, and the ‘Mood Organ’, the household device which stimulates any mood the user wishes to experience, and which much of the population now depends on in order to face another bleak, post-apocalyptic day — two tragicomic creations typical of Dick, but too wry to fit with the Blade Runner‘s overall tone. Despite such changes, Dick’s reading of the screenplay convinced him that this film could express his ideas in a way he had not thought possible.

The production could hardly be called smooth. Even before its release, troubling rumours had begun circulating, and as Paul M Sammon wrote ,”by the time BR (Blade Runner) officially completed principle photography in July on 1981, the gossip has become more specific — BR‘s workload had been horrendous, its shooting conditions miserable, and its director, difficult. Moreover, the whispers went, BR’s moneymen were unhappy, its leading man had clashed with his director, and the crew had been near revolt.” Some of these stories were indeed true, but one should bear in mind that movie moneymen are nearly always unhappy, and Harrison Ford will always be the man who told George Lucas that “you can type this shit, but you sure as hell can’t say it.”

Paranoia Runs Through Blade Runner Like a Knife Edge

When Blade Runner was first released, the reviews ran from lukewarm to underwhelmed to baffled, a fact that many critics have been doing their best to forget in the intervening years, polishing the film’s legend in a frantic effort to make up for missing the boat first time round. Considered today, in our gleaming plastic future of bad credit and worse politics, where we are reliant not on humanised robots but dehumanising gadgets, and where much of the movie’s retro-futurism appears as quaint as it does prescient, what is left to say about Blade Runner?

Should I recite the plaudits that have become ritualistic? Should I point out the Roy Batty’s (Rutger Hauer) ‘tears in rain’ monologue is among the most moving and eloquent ever written or performed? Or that Vangelis revolutionised jazz, electronic music and film scoring simultaneously in one of the best soundtracks ever composed? Is it really necessary to highlight the acting of all involved; Harrison Ford as one of the best soulful detectives to grace noir of any kind, an understated and heartbreaking Sean Young (as Rachael), a dangerous but innocent Daryl Hannah (as Pris), or Rutger Hauer’s mixture of the psychotic and the Shakespearean? Do I need to praise the costumes, the set design, or the script which balances so many themes, so many hidden or implied meanings, with such grace and economy?

Well, yes. You want a criticism of Blade Runner? I would’ve liked more of Edward James Olmos’ Gaff. He’s cool. I also want Deckard’s coat.

But we need to be reminded of these things, every now and again, as each new generation discovers the film afresh, and especially when the next logical question becomes: how did Blade Runner get it so right, more so than any other adaptation of Dick’s work since? What did it understand that they did not? To try and answer that, we have to go back to the source.

“Phil acknowledged that his talk sometimes sounded like “religious nonsense & occult nonsense” — but somewhere in it all was the truth. And he would never find it. God himself had assured him of that.” — Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick.

In 2000, at the one and only Disinfo Con — a friendly gathering of millennial deviants concerning all things ‘counterculture’ — Grant Morrison, a writer who could arguably be counted as one of Dick’s prodigious bastard literary offspring, opened his keynote speech marvelling at the fact he spent his youth reading Robert Anton Wilson and now, all these years later, “we’re standing here, we’re talking about this shit and it’s real.”

Fans of Philip K. Dick have been feeling like that since at least the ’70s, when the dark realities on the other side of the Drug Revolution and the true possibilities of an all-powerful Nixonian surveillance state were becoming painfully apparent. Then as now, we use Dick’s paranoia to express our own.

Dick once commented that, with the making of Blade Runner, what had once been a private world that only he inhabited was now open to all; they would live in its murky depths, just as he did every day. At first, one might think that a paranoid and delusional visionary — and I use the word in its most literal sense — would want nothing more than for others to see and experience what he does. But perhaps Dick didn’t want anyone in his world. Maybe he didn’t think his world should be suffered by anyone else.

The fantastic, tortured mind of Philip K. Dick has been discussed, analysed and treated like an object of supreme curiosity since his death in 1982 (a few months shy of Blade Runner‘s release) and before. He had eked out an impoverished existence writing science fiction since the ’50s, when it was less a genre than a ghetto, and could only make a living by producing at a furious pace which he fuelled with huge amounts of amphetamines, at one point producing 12 novels over the course of two years.

But Dick was ever a seeker of truth, which made him, strangely, something of an oddity in science fiction. Within these novels, beneath the aliens and spaceships, moon colonies and interstellar wars, was arguably the best satire being done in science fiction on American life outside of Kurt Vonnegut‘s oeuvre, the philosophical undertones and untrammelled, often gothic imagination of which called to mind Jorge Luis Borges more than Isaac Asimov. The uniting thread that runs through his work — and, eventually, his life — is the notion that reality, as we know it, is fundamentally untrustworthy.

As the ’60s wore on, Dick’s involvement with the drug culture increased, adding a psychedelic aspect to both his ever-evolving philosophy and his ever-present paranoia. In 1971, Dick experienced a defining moment: his home was broken into, his safe blown open, and many of his personal papers burglerized. He never discovered who was responsible, though he had many suspects — local drug addicts, Black Panthers, the police, the FBI, the Soviets, or any of these, pretending to be one of the others.

The effect it left on Dick was to give him proof, unexplained and terrifying, that his paranoia was somehow justified. There had been comfort in simply telling himself he was crazy. But after years of grappling with his mental health, someone, it seemed, truly was out to get him.

“I mean,” he told the Aquarian magazine in a 1974 interview, “it’s a very frightening thing when the head of a police department tells you that you better leave the county because you have enemies, and you don’t know who these enemies are or why you’ve incurred their wrath.”

When one is peripherally aware of one’s own tenuous psychological condition (which we must be, we tell ourselves, if we have any hope of overcoming it), the uninitiated cannot imagine the sheer anguish, the self-doubt, the fear that follows when you know you cannot trust your own mind, and you cannot trust anyone to help you. The luckiest paranoids are also egotists, or better yet, megalomaniacs; they face the lurking forces of imagined persecution with a defiant roar or a knowing smirk.

Dick, on the other hand, was a sensitive, fragile, frightened soul, as well as a possible undiagnosed schizophrenic. His subsequent religious experiences — a series of hallucinations in which a beam of pink light connected him with a “transcendentally rational mind” — may have been his brain’s attempt to soothe his paranoia, or merely the next stage of his mental instability. In either case, as always, it provided inspiration for another novel.

Critics and biographers often talk about Dick’s paranoia and delusions like they were shocking fashion statements or extreme political opinions — just another interesting aspect to the bizarro image of a literary titan. What they don’t say, although the evidence is all around us, is that Dick’s paranoia is ours, as well. Ours may not have such colourful outlets or dramatic results, but we shall always carry our paranoia with us. It cannot be blotted out. There will forever be dark fears lurking in the deeper pools of our mind about our untrustworthy friends, co-workers, policemen, criminals, the FBI, the CIA, the Communists, the aliens, or God himself… and beyond. Existence will always be open to question, forever taunting us with its uncertainty. We can’t trust reality, but we have to live there.

This paranoia runs through Blade Runner like a knife edge. You cannot trust others, or yourself. You cannot trust your memories, your past, or your future. The entire world may be against you, even if it doesn’t appear to be. Then again, you don’t have to like it.

The heroes and villains of Blade Runner do not like, or accept, the oppression of the paranoid worldview. Deckard fights a series of seemingly impossible battles, even against what he thought was true, and finds romance where it should be impossible. Roy Batty, the leader of the renegade replicants, fights against death itself, seeking to extend and outlive his designer-mandated expiration date. The inhuman fights to become human, so humans must prove their humanity. This is the message at Blade Runner‘s core, and it has never been replicated.

Near the end of Dick’s 1976 novel Radio Free Albemuth, the protagonist, an author surrogate for Dick who also writes pulp science fiction, is faced by a gloating representative of the government conspiracy that the writer has become entangled with, who coolly informs him they will continue to put out books under his name — lurid trash scattered with a few of the author’s trademark concepts to keep it recognisable for his fans, but encoded with non-too-subtle propaganda messages designed to keep its readers afraid and unenlightened.

At our most cynical, it’s sometimes difficult not to think of Hollywood the same way: trading on Dick’s name and style and core ideas, but discarding the message and the mind behind them.

Authors often have to face a string of misfires and misinterpretations before their work gets the cinematic treatment it deserves; Dick, on the other hand, got a masterpiece on the first go. And it remains ours to enjoy: Blade Runner, as Dick wrote, is invincible.

Maybe it’s finally time for Hollywood to leave the legacy of Philip K. Dick at the local bookstore, where it belongs.

“What matters to me is the writing, the act of manufacturing the novel, because while I am doing it, at that particular moment, I am in the world I am writing about. It is real to me, completely and utterly. Then, when I’m finished, and I have to stop, withdraw from that world forever — that destroys me… I promise myself: I will never write another novel. I will never again imagine people from whom I will eventually be cut off. I tell myself this… and, secretly and cautiously, I begin another book.” — Philip K. Dick, “Notes Made Late At Night By A Weary SF Writer”, 1968.

Here’s Why You Should Skip the Covid Vaccine

Posted on December 15, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Mike Whitney

Source: The Unz Review

“The world has bet the farm on vaccines as the solution to the pandemic, but the trials are not focused on answering the questions many might assume they are.”
Peter Doshi, associate editor of the British Medical Journal and assistant professor of pharmaceutical health services research at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy

“The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.”
Albert Einstein

The new Covid vaccines will make billions of dollars for the big pharmaceutical companies, but here’s what they won’t do:

The vaccines will not cure Covid
The vaccines will not prevent people from contracting Covid
The vaccines will not prevent Covid-related hospitalizations
The vaccines will not prevent Covid-caused deaths

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “If the vaccine does not protect me from getting Covid (or dying from Covid), then why should I take it?”

And the answer is: “You shouldn’t. It makes no sense at all, especially in view of the fact that new vaccines pose considerable risks to one’s health and well-being.

“Risks,” you say? “No one said anything about risks. I thought this wonderful new Covid cure was entirely risk-free; just take the jab and– Presto– life goes back to normal.”

Wrong. There are risks, significant risks that the media and the medical establishment have papered-over with their ridiculous Happy Talk about “miracle” vaccines. But all of this is just public relations hype designed to hoodwink people into injecting themselves with a dubious substance that does NOT do what it’s supposed to do, and which DOES pose serious long-term risks to one’s health.

So, let’s dig a little deeper into this question of risks and see what are the experts saying. Check out this excerpt from an “Open Letter From: UK Medical Freedom Alliance To: The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization… for COVID-19 in the UK.”:

“It is worrying that recent Parliamentary discussions seem to not attach proper weight to any concern about vaccine risks and the right to informed consent, while focusing solely on strategies to increase the uptake of vaccines in the general population.

Inadequate Assessment of the Public Health Risk from a Covid Vaccine

In a recent letter to the British Medical Journal (BMJ), physician Arvind Joshi warned against the disaster that could result from this misguided policy and outlined the serious risks involved to the public and other serious issues that are being taken if a Covid Vaccine is rushed out without thorough and adequate safety and efficacy testing:

“Adverse effects like Subacute Sclerosing Pan Encephalitis, Ascending Polyneuritis, Myopathies, Autoimmune Diseases, and rarer chance of triggering development of malignancies are most dreaded possibilities.“...“The rush for the Vaccines should not lead to disaster.” (Note: There is a more comprehensive list of potential ‘bad outcomes’ in the link to the article.)

Virus-vectored and genetically engineered vaccines could undergo recombination or hybridization with unpredictable outcomes.…Previous attempts to develop coronavirus and other vaccines e.g., RSV and dengue, have been hampered by the problem of ‘antibody dependent enhanced immunity’(ADEI), which has led to severe illness and deaths in the animals and human subjects involved in the trials28. This phenomenon only becomes apparent after vaccination, when the subject is exposed to wild virus at some point in the future. Worryingly, the Covid Vaccine trials have not been conducted in a way to exclude the possibility of this serious sequalae occurring months or years after vaccination...

Late onset adverse vaccine effects such as Subacute Sclerosing Pan Encephalitis (SSPE),Ascending Polyneuritis, Myopathies, Autoimmune Diseases, Infertility and Cancers cannot be ruled out with short duration trials.” (“Open Letter From: UK Medical Freedom Alliance To: The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization… for COVID-19 in the UK.”)

It’s all very technical, but the truth is plain to see: There are serious risks associated with taking the Covid-19 vaccine. Most vaccine recipients will experience only minor aches and pains but some will undoubtedly get quite ill and permanently damage their health. No one really knows for sure because there have been no long-term trials. The Covid vaccine has been fast-tracked from Day 1. So, the question is: Do the benefits outweigh the risks. And, in this case, they clearly don’t. The chances of getting violently sick or dying from Covid are very slight, (IFR is 1 in 400) while the (potential) adverse effects from the vaccine are spelled out above. Why would anyone roll the dice on a vaccine that does not prevent one from contracting Covid, does not protect one from hospitalization, and will not prevent one from dying? That’s just not a good tradeoff. Here’s more from an article at Forbes:

“Prevention of infection must be a critical endpoint…(But) Prevention of infection is not a criterion for success for any of these vaccines. In fact, their endpoints all require confirmed infections and all those they will include in the analysis for success, the only difference being the severity of symptoms between the vaccinated and unvaccinated. Measuring differences amongst only those infected by SARS-CoV-2 underscores the implicit conclusion that the vaccines are not expected to prevent infection, only modify symptoms of those infected“…

“We all expect an effective vaccine to prevent serious illness if infected. Three of the vaccine protocols…do not require that their vaccine prevent serious disease only that they prevent moderate symptoms which may be as mild as cough, or headache.” (“Covid-19 Vaccine Protocols Reveal That Trials Are Designed To Succeed”, Forbes)

Can you see what’s going on? “Prevention” is not even a primary objective. The standard for success in these trials is whether the vaccine mitigates Covid symptoms in people who test positive. But who cares about symptoms? What people care about is dying. That’s why people are so eager to get vaccinated, because they think it will eliminate the threat of dying.

This is a critical point, and one that is well worth mulling over.

Why?

Because it helps to illustrate how the vaccine campaign is built on a foundation of lies and deception. For example, when the drug companies boast that their product is “95% effective”, it does NOT mean that– if you get vaccinated– you will be immune to Covid. It doesn’t even mean that you won’t get violently ill and die. All it means is that the vaccine reduced the symptoms of some of the people in the trials who tested positive.

Did you know that?

Of course, you didn’t. You thought that if you took the vaccine, you’d be protected from Covid, because that is the logical assumption that anyone would make. Most people equate vaccines with immunity. The drug companies know that which is why they’re exploiting people’s ignorance and deliberately obfuscating the truth. They want people to continue to believe that vaccination is a protective shield that will save them from sickness and death. But it’s not. It’s a bunch of baloney.

Bottom line: Vaccine “effectiveness” is not measured in terms of “preventing infection”. It relates to the vaccine’s impact on symptoms. Here’s more from Forbes:

“One of the more immediate questions a trial needs to answer is whether a vaccine prevents infection. If someone takes this vaccine, are they far less likely to become infected with the virus? These trials all clearly focus on eliminating symptoms of Covid-19, and not infections themselves….

It appears that all the pharmaceutical companies assume that the vaccine will never prevent infection. Their criteria for approval is the difference in symptoms between an infected control group and an infected vaccine group. …

A greater concern for the millions of older people and those with preexisting conditions is whether these trials test the vaccine’s ability to prevent severe illness and death. Again, we find that severe illness and death are only secondary objectives in these trials. None list the prevention of death and hospitalization as a critically important barrier….

These protocols do not emphasize the most important ramifications of Covid-19 that people are most interested in preventing: overall infection, hospitalization, and death. It boggles the mind and defies common sense that the National Institute of Health, the Center for Disease Control, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, and the rest would consider the approval of a vaccine that would be distributed to hundreds of millions on such slender threads of success.

It appears that these trials are intended to pass the lowest possible barrier of success.” (“Covid-19 Vaccine Protocols Reveal That Trials Are Designed To Succeed“, Forbes)

The author is right, isn’t he? If the vaccine doesn’t prevent infection, it’s not worth taking. Period. And yet, all these high-falutin organizations are on-board with this farce. It’s a disgrace. We’re not even talking about a “low bar” for success here. We’re talking about “no bar”. If people are concerned about symptoms, they’d be better off taking an aspirin and leaving it at that. There’s no need to inject themselves with some hybrid cocktail that no one has the slightest idea of what the long-term effects might be. That’s just reckless.

Like we said earlier, the real issues are being cleverly concealed by the people in charge who are hyping the “95% effective” nonsense to hoodwink people into cooperating. It’s blatantly dishonest.

And here’s something else to think over: What do we really know about these miraculous vaccines that are supposed to lead us out of our “public health crisis”?

Not much. We know that they’re being rushed to market. We know that they were delayed for political reasons. We know the science is being shaped by the politics. We know that vaccine development typically takes 10 years, and that “rushed” vaccine development takes 3 years, and that the upcoming batch of dubious vaccines will have taken roughly 8 months.

8 months!

Do you find that reassuring? Does that make you want to push your way to the front of the line on Vaccine Day? And are you surprised that a large sampling of medical professionals has decided they aren’t going to take the vaccine until it’s been out for at least a year??

And here’s another thing: The pharmaceutical giants don’t even know if their vaccines will stop transmission or not. I’m not kidding, they really don’t know. So– along with the fact that the vaccine will not provide immunity– it also will not stop the spread of the infection which means, the pandemic will continue.

Don’t you think the public is entitled to know this?

And let’s not forget that these so called “vaccines” don’t really fit the traditional definition of vaccine at all. The CDC defines a vaccine as: “A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease.”

And the CDC defines “immunization” as:

“A process by which a person becomes protected against a disease through vaccination. This term is often used interchangeably with vaccination or inoculation.”

Well, we’ve already shown that the new vaccines do not necessarily provide immunity, so the question is whether they actually “stimulate a person’s immune system” or if the “vaccine” moniker was simply preserved as a promotional device to dupe the public? Here’s some background from an article at RT:

“The type of vaccine being developed against Covid-19 has never been used before, outside of Ebola. Some people feel that they should not really be called vaccines, because they are completely different from anything that has gone before.

Up to now, vaccination has meant injecting a dead virus (or bacteria), or one that has been weakened and can only poorly replicate, or parts of the virus, or suchlike. Once inside the body, the immune system spots this ‘alien’ material, and creates a response against it, which will hopefully be remembered for years and years. The next time the dangerous virus appears, the body will use the immune memory of something very similar, to wipe out the virus (or bacteria) at high speed, giving it no chance to do damage

Now, we have a thing called a messenger RNA vaccine (mRNA). RNA is, effectively, a single strand of DNA – the double helix that sits within our cells and makes up our genetic code. Many viruses are made up of a single strand of RNA, surrounded by a protein sphere. They enter the cell, take over the replication systems, make thousands of copies of themselves, then exit the cell. Sometimes killing the cell as they do so, sometimes exiting more gently. Covid19 (Sars-Cov2) is an RNA virus.

Knowing this, rather than attempting to create a weakened virus, which can take years, or break the virus into bits, the v accine researchers decided to use Sars-Cov2’s RNA against itself. To do this, they isolated the section of RNA which codes for the ‘spike’ protein – which is the thing the virus uses as a ‘key’ to enter cells…

These spike proteins then leave the cell – somehow or other, this bit is unclear. The immune system comes across them, recognizes them as ‘alien’ and attacks. In doing so, antibodies are created, and the immune memory system kicks into action. If, later on, a Sars-Cov2 virus gets into the body, the immune system fires up and attacks the remembered spike protein. Hopefully killing the entire virus.” (“As a doctor, people ask me if it’s safe to take a new Covid vaccine“, RT)

It’s all very complicated and cutting-edge, but what’s clear is that “Messenger RNA” and “spike’ protein” are a far-cry from plain-old dead virus which has worked just fine for decades. It’s hard to understand why the drug companies decided to reinvent the wheel in trying to settle on an antidote for Covid. Even so, this new state-of-the-art technology does have its drawbacks as was pointed out in the letter by the researchers in the Medical Freedom Alliance. Here’s what they said:

“Several Covid Vaccines involve the use of a completely new technology -mRNA vaccination -whose large-scale use in healthy human subjects is unprecedented and long-term effects unknown. Exogenous mRNA is inherently immunostimulatory, and this feature of mRNA could be beneficial or detrimental. In addition, a study found evidence of molecular mimicry …

Virus-vectored and genetically engineered vaccines could undergo recombination or hybridisation with unpredictable outcomes….Previous attempts to develop coronavirus and other vaccines e.g., RSV and dengue, have been hampered by the problem of ‘antibody dependent enhanced immunity’(ADEI), which has led to severe illness and deaths in the animals and human subjects involved in the trials. This phenomenon only becomes apparent after vaccination, when the subject is exposed to wild virus at some point in the future. Worryingly, the Covid Vaccine trials have not been conducted in a way to exclude the possibility of this serious sequalae occurring months or years after vaccination.” (“Open Letter From: UK Medical Freedom Alliance To: The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization… for COVID-19 in the UK.”)

The point is, the effects of injecting a hybrid concoction into one’s body could be quite serious. We just don’t know what the long-term effects will be, and we probably won’t know because the vaccine is going to be rushed into distribution before those trials can be conducted. This is not a sensible strategy for dealing with the virus. It is needlessly reckless and, perhaps, lethal. Here’s more from an article at the Jerusalem Post:

“There is a race to get the public vaccinated, so we are willing to take more risks,” Tal Brosh, head of the Infectious Disease Unit at Samson Assuta Ashdod Hospital, told The Jerusalem Post…..

“We will have a safety profile for only a certain number of months, so if there is a long-term effect after two years, we cannot know,” Brosh said, adding that we could wait two years to discover them, “but then we would have the coronavirus for two more years.”…

(Brosh) acknowledged that there are unique and unknown risks to messenger RNA vaccines, including local and systemic inflammatory responses that could lead to autoimmune conditions….. An article published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, a division of the National Institutes of Health, said other risks include the bio-distribution and persistence of the induced immunogen expression; possible development of auto-reactive antibodies; and toxic effects of any non-native nucleotides and delivery system components…

(Michal) Linial ( a professor of biological chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, ) expressed similar sentiments: “Classical vaccines were designed to take 10 years to develop. I don’t think the world can wait for a classical vaccine.”….But when asked if she would take the vaccine right away, she responded: “I won’t be taking it immediately – probably not for at least the coming year,” she told the Post. “We have to wait and see whether it really works.” (“Could mRNA COVID-19 vaccines be dangerous in the long-term?“, The Jerusalem Post)

Great, so the “professor of biological chemistry” isn’t going to take the vaccine, but it’s okay for ordinary people like you and me??

Give me a break. Professor Linial’s reluctance is a tacit admission that the vaccine is not safe. What else could it mean? Here’s more from the same article:

“In order to receive Food and Drug Administration approval, the companies will have to prove there are no immediate or short-term negative health effects from taking the vaccines. But when the world begins inoculating itself with these completely new and revolutionary vaccines, it will know virtually nothing about their long-term effects.” (The Jerusalem Post)

Well, that’s just dandy. We know the vaccines won’t prevent infection, hospitalization or death. We also know they are “are completely different from anything that has gone before”. We also know they won’t stop transmission, and that their long-term safety is very much in doubt. Even so, our leaders– who lie to us about virtually everything– want us to click our heels and submissively take “the jab” whether we want to or not.

In my opinion, the risks of vaccination far outweigh the benefits. I would rather trust my own auto-immune system (and the new treatments, medications and therapies) then be guinea pig in Big Pharma’s sinister lab experiment.

“Thanks, but no thanks”.

Biden Appointee Spread Russian Hacker Conspiracy

Posted on December 14, 2020 by Reid Mukai

Neera Tanden, who President-elect Joe Biden nominated to serve as Director of the Office of Management and Budget, speaks at The Queen theater, Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2020, in Wilmington, Del. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

How can Democrats oppose unhinged conspiracy theories while empowering its worst purveyors?

By Glenn Greenwald

Source: Scheerpost

The announcement that Joe Biden intends to nominate Neera Tanden as his Director of the Office of Management and Budget — a critical position overseeing U.S. economic and regulatory policy — triggered a wide range of mockery, indignation and disgust from both the left and the right. That should not be surprising: though a thoroughly mediocre and ordinary D.C. swamp creature from the perspective of both ideology and competence, Tanden’s uniquely unhinged, venomous, corrupt and pathologically dishonest conduct as a Clinton Family and DNC apparatchik and President of the corporatist-and-despot-funded Center for American Progress (CAP) has earned her a list of enemies far longer and more impressive than her accomplishments.

When news of her appointment broke, many of the journalists and activists she has spent years abusing, slandering, and lying about instantly stepped forward to compile just some of her worst political and behavioral lowlights. And some preliminary signs emerged that she might encounter difficulty in obtaining the Senate confirmation needed for her to assume this position. The Communications Director for GOP Senator John Cornyn of Texas announced that “Tanden stands zero chance of being confirmed” by the Senate.

Former Sanders campaign aide David Sirota hypothesized that “it is not a coincidence that they are putting Neera Tanden — the single biggest, most aggressive Bernie Sanders critic in the United States of America — specifically at OMB while Sanders is Senate Budget Committee ranking/chair.” Sirota’s statement suggests Biden’s nomination of Tanden was intended as yet more humiliation doled out to the Democratic-loyal Sanders left by cucking the Vermont Senator even further by forcing him to shepherd the confirmation of one of his most vicious and amoral attackers (who Sanders himself in 2019 vehemently denounced). But Sirota’s point also raises the prospect that Tanden’s nomination could even encounter trouble from that side of the aisle as well (given Sanders’ compliant and disciplined conduct over the last six months, it’s more likely we will see him roll out a literal red carpet for Tanden to walk on, gently toss red roses on it before she passes, and then serve her a glass of Chardonnay rather than meaningfully obstruct her confirmation).

The list of sociopathic and even monstrous acts from Tanden is too long to list comprehensively. She punched one of her own employees, a reporter for CAP’s now-abolished blog ThinkProgress, after he had the temerity to ask Hillary Clinton in 2008 about her support for the Iraq War (Tanden claimed she “merely” had “pushed,” not punched, her undeferential reporter). In 2011, as the Obama administration was participating in the NATO bombing of Libya, Tanden suggested in internal CAP discussions that the U.S. steal Libya’s oil as a way of reducing the U.S. deficit (a story I was able to report only because Tanden had abused and alienated so many of her employees that they worked together to leak her incriminating emails to me).

During her tenure as CAP’s President, Tanden accepted millions of dollars from the regime of the United Arab Emirates, which built Dubai and Abu Dhabi using slave labor, along with massive donations from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, J.P. Morgan, the Walton Family and Michael Bloomberg, while hiding the identity of some of her think tank’s largest donors. A huge chapter on the NYPD’s abusive policies toward Muslims under Mayor Michael Bloomberg was removed from a CAP report after Boomberg donated more than $1 million to Tanden’s organization, and he continued to donate even more after that courteous gesture.

She ordered the supposedly independent journalists of the ThinkProgress blog, including Muslim writers, to stop writing critically about Israel after key CAP donors, including Barney Frank’s sister Ann Lewis and long-time Clinton advisor Howard Wolfson, complained. She and Wolfson plotted in 2016 how to weaponize female journalists and people of color against Hillary’s critics as well to use their identity to stigmatize and thus stop undesirable coverage from The New York Times. In 2018, she outed a CAP employee at a staff-wide meeting who had filed an anonymous complaint of sexual harassment and retaliation against one of Tanden’s male allies. Secure with her UAE-and-corporate-funded large salary, she has long urged cuts to Social Security. The list goes on and on.

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Category Archives: society

Tears in Rain: ‘Blade Runner’ and Philip K. Dick’s Legacy in Film

Blade Runner, and the work of Philip K. Dick, continues to find its way into our cinemas and minds. How did the visions of a paranoid loner become the most relevant science fiction of our time?

Paranoia Runs Through Blade Runner Like a Knife Edge