Category Archives: Sociology

The Warmongering U.S. Empire Is Crashing, the Lying Western Media’s Days Are Numbered

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The Western mainstream media have never been so blatant in their propaganda for the U.S. empire

By Finian Cunningham

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

The Western mainstream media have never been so blatant in their propaganda for the U.S. empire.

The pretensions are threadbare. As the warmongering U.S. government/regime and its Western/NATO imperialist lackeys are becoming more exposed and desperate to maintain credibility, so too are their media tools. The likes of the New York Times, BBC, CNN – and many more – are a contemptible joke on the public. They are an insult to common intelligence.

Fake news has been around for centuries, but it’s now becoming glaringly obvious and self-destructive. In the same way that the U.S. warmongering empire is becoming glaringly obvious and self-destructive.

The disconnect with reality and degradation of supposed independent journalism is reflected in record levels of distrust among the Western public toward the mainstream, corporate-controlled news media.

In this interview, U.S.-based writers Bruce Gagnon and Daniel Lazare demolish the pretensions of Western media.

The systematic cover-up of the Nord Stream sabotage by the United States and its NATO allies – an act of war and state terrorism – demonstrates the servile function of Western media outlets that claim to be pillars of independent news and freedom of information.

Media outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, and the British state-owned BBC, among many others, have been exposed as pathetic propaganda tools for the United States and other NATO imperialist regimes.

All Western media outlets have ignored credible investigative reporting by Seymour Hersh (and others) who have very plausibly implicated the sabotage of Nord Stream by the U.S., carried out under the instructions of American President Joe Biden.

Another touchstone subject is the vile persecution of Julian Assange. Western media have again covered up what are a shocking violation of Assange’s rights and principled publishing through the whistleblower organization Wikileaks. Julian Assange’s only “crime” is that he revealed the war crimes committed by the U.S. and its imperialist lackeys.

Assange’s appalling mistreatment, indeed torture – four years in British solitary confinement awaiting extradition to the U.S. over spurious “spying charges” – is a vicious attack on journalism and the public’s right to know. Yet supposed self-declared Western media defenders of “truth” and “fact-based” objective information – have conspired to be silent and permit Assange’s persecution. Western media are shown to be complicit in destroying the very principles of journalism that they claim to uphold.

As Bruce Gagnon and Daniel Lazare point out, it is a crime to tell the truth and Western media stand exposed in their odious dereliction of duty to report independently. They are seen more than ever as out-and-out tools of empire.

A proper understanding of the Nord Stream sabotage and the case of Julian Assange would give the Western public a critical insight into the imperialist nature of their governments – regimes that serve warmongering capitalist interests. Critical mass must be thwarted at all costs by the Empire’s media foot-servants.

From the point of view of U.S.-led Western imperialist power, it is imperative and absolutely vital to cover up the scandals of the Nord Stream attack and Julian Assange, among others. If the public were to become more widely cognizant then the whole edifice of Western governments implodes. This is why the Western media are more blatant than ever to cover up. But the truth will win out.

The war in Ukraine is becoming more evident as a war-racket and imperialist proxy war against Russia. That war is in desperate danger of spiraling into an all-out world war that could unleash a nuclear catastrophe.

The same Western media cover-up is at work with regard to the U.S.-led NATO aggression toward China. Again, the Western media are spinning imperialist propaganda of alleged Chinese menace in order to justify what is an insane warmongering agenda to confront China and prop up American hegemonic ambitions.

A tantalizing positive prospect is that critical, independent media are gradually and relentlessly breaking the monopoly of Western propaganda media. The internet and global communications are seeing to that – albeit against sinister censorship by Western regimes.

Nevertheless, the establishment Western media are increasingly held in distrust and contempt by the Western public and globally.

We are living in an exemplary time of the fabled Emperor With No Clothes. The false image of dominant Western regimes and their lying corporate media has never been so degraded but also never so fragile. The Western lie machine’s days are numbered. It only has itself to blame because of its abject disservice to the public interest.

Western state-complicit media claim to be “free”. Laughably, they are “free” to be slaves of lies and propaganda.

A crash is long overdue.

THE BATTLE AGAINST BEWITCHMENT: UPSETTING SETTLED MINDS

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By Gary Z McGee

Source: Waking Times

“Philosophical thinking that doesn’t do violence to one’s settled mind is no philosophical thinking at all.” ~Rebecca Goldstein

Comfort zones are a curious thing. So warm and secure. So safe and reassuring. So satisfying and certain. Beliefs have a similar effect on us. Especially the core beliefs that we take for granted. But beliefs are comfort zones with reinforced invulnerability; or, at least, the illusion of it.

Such reinforcements are like prison bars that most of us are not even aware of. We’re so completely indoctrinated, so utterly pre-programmed, that we don’t even know that we don’t know that we’ve been conditioned to blindly believe in something simply because enough people convinced us it was true.

The problem with reinforced comfort zones is that there is no growth. A regular comfort zone, you can stretch. A reinforced comfort zone, you’re usually not even aware it needs to be stretched. A regular comfort zone allows for trial and error, it allows for questioning, and so there is at least potential for self-improvement and self-overcoming. But a reinforced comfort zone does not allow for trial and error. It doesn’t allow for “blasphemous” questioning, because it is taken for granted as already perfect or “simply the way it is.”

Regular comfort zones can be healthy, giving us a safe haven, a place where we can heal and lick our wounds. But reinforced comfort zones are unnecessary safety nets based upon fear (of God, the Unknown, Death) placation, and self-pity. It’s a place where cognitive dissonance rules and any notion of attempting to think outside the box is met with: You simply need to have faith in the “box”.

The Battle Against Bewitchment:

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” ~Ludwig Wittgenstein

Self-Inflicted Philosophy is at the forefront of the battle against bewitchment. Self-inflicted philosophy is about upsetting settled minds. It’s about toppling the reinforced comfort zones of blind belief. It’s about flattening the “box” that everyone talks a big game about thinking outside of but when it really comes down to it, they cling to the “box” out of fear of the unknown or out of faith in what they believe they know.

Foremost, self-inflicted philosophy is about questioning the self to the nth degree through self-interrogation. But you can only get so far in such questioning before you are met with the reinforced comfort zone of a blind belief. So, self-inflicted philosophy is also about questioning the layer-upon-layer of cultural, political, and religious indoctrination that led to that reinforced comfort zone to begin with.

When you don the cloak of a self-inflicted philosopher, no belief, no matter how true it may seem, is off the hook for being questioned with ruthless skepticism and unwavering circumspection. In the battle against bewitchment, the destruction of a belief, no matter how powerful, is mere collateral damage to the Occam’s razor of universal truth. Hell, even “universal truth” is not beyond questioning.

When you don the cloak of a self-inflicted philosopher, the concept of belief is nixed from your interpretation of the universe. There is no place for belief here, only thought, only deep inquiry, only imaginative curiosity. You replace all usage of “belief” or “believe” with “thought” or “think”. You don’t believe that you certainly exist, you “think” that you “probably” exist. But you could be wrong. So you remain circumspect, for even your interpretation of your own existence could be an illusion, no matter how “true” it may feel.

There will be those who will say, “You are merely believing that you don’t believe.” But that is patently false, because you are not “believing” in non-belief, you are “thinking/inquiring/imagining” through non-belief, with the understanding, the flexibility that your thinking “could” be wrong. And that’s the rub: it is much easier to alter a thought than a belief. It is almost impossible to alter a belief. You are more likely to question a thought than you are a belief. And so, rather than get trapped in a reinforced comfort zone, you stay ahead of the curve by thinking rather than believing, and then by questioning what you think so that you don’t accidentally begin to believe it.

In the spirit of upsetting settled minds, you don’t believe in having an unsettled mind, you think that having an unsettled mind is more productive, more progressive, and more open-minded than having a settled mind (an unquestioning belief). You realize that belief in general is counterproductive, because you understand that the human mind is a delusion-generator rather than a truth-generator. It pumps out delusions like a spider pumps out webs. But, unlike the spider, it tends to get caught in them. Thereby, you understand that the only window to truth is through a questioning, circumspect, and a skeptical mindset, rather than through an unquestioning, dogmatic, and certain mindset.

The only solution to a delusion-generator is a question-generator. Luckily, the human brain is both. As a self-inflicted philosopher, you don’t believe that this is certainly true; rather, you think that this is probably true. And you’re willing to question everything to “prove” it. Indeed, you’ve transformed Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” into I think, therefore I question.

Tapping into the question-generator:

“It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.” ~Carl Sagan

The problem with the human brain is that is never knows when it has been duped by a delusion, so it is almost always better to not believe anything just in case it’s a delusion. A kind of reverse Pascal’s Wager. It’s almost always better to, as Aristotle suggested, “entertain a thought without accepting it.” Just take it all into consideration and let it pass through the sieve of probability. Then, whatever doesn’t insult your soul, think about it, dissect it, inquire about it. Be curious about it. Just don’t make the mistake of believing it.

You are more likely to grasp the universe “as it really is” by questioning it than by believing it. You don’t believe the universe is certainly a certain way; rather, you think the universe may be a certain way, but you’re willing to question further so as to get you closer to the way the universe “really is”. If you cling to a particular belief of how the universe is, then you block yourself from ever getting closer to the universe “as it really is.” Better to simply not have a belief in the first place. Better to simply think and keep the motor running on the question-generator so as to keep the delusion-generator in check.

The opposite of belief is neither disbelief nor doubt, but clarity of a thought. Without beliefs reinforcing the comfort zone, you are liberated to stretch it. You are clear enough to think outside it, you are courageous enough to question it. When the reinforcements fall away, the comfort zone becomes a sacred rather than stagnant place. It is free to grow through self-improvement rather than remain stuck in self-reassurance. Indeed, without beliefs cluttering the mindset, you’re finally able to drop the “set” and move into “mind.”

Free of the “mindset” of a settled mind, you move into the mindfulness of a questioning mind. You become a walking, talking, question-generator, able to consistently counter-balance the delusion-generator of the human condition. You’re ahead of the curve, surfing Aslam’s Infinite Circle on the surfboard of Occam’s razor. In absolute awe over the beautiful unfolding of an ultimately unknowable universe. On the edge of your own curiosity, questioning all “answers” countering all beliefs, elusive of all delusions. You’re a self-inflicted philosopher, and not even God is safe from your ruthless inquiry.

Matt Taibbi Discovers Democrats are Authoritarians

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There is nothing mysterious, arcane, or byzantine about what is happening in America.

By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Kurt Nimmo Substack

First, allow me to thank Mr. Taibbi for his work exposing the social media censorship agenda. The uniparty wanted to skin him alive and hang him out to dry. Taibbi didn’t back down despite ominous threats to his freedom. Thank you, Mr. Taibbi.

Now the tough part. Prior to his wake-up call before the House, Matt was fuzzy on uniparty careerists, for instance, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who thinks she’s a socialist.

Taibbi writes:

Not long ago I was writing in defense of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. When she first entered Congress as an inner-city kid who’d knocked off longtime insider Joe Crowley with a Sandersian policy profile, her own party’s establishment ridiculed her as a lefty Trump. Nancy Pelosi scoffed that her win just meant voters “made a choice in one district,” so “let’s not get carried away.” Ben Ritz, director of the Progressive Policy Institute, an offshoot of the old Democratic Leadership Council, groused, “Oh, please, she just promised everyone a bunch of free stuff.”

But like aggressive, competitive, and often sociopathic government careerists worldwide, Ocasio-Cortez naturally strives for the most powerful and dictatorial seat in Congress, that of Speaker. Taibbi and others are alarmed by Ocasio-Cortez’s demand the state censor Fox News.

“We have very real issues with what is permissible on air,” she said [during an interview with Jen Psaki], adding people like Tucker Carlson are “very clearly” guilty of “incitement to violence,” a problem in light of “federal regulation in terms of what’s allowed on air and what isn’t.”

It is a common mistake to not fully comprehend that the political class is deeply Machiavellian. A Machiavellian state will impose “tyrannical methods of rule,” according to the dictionary. The state and its political class are “destitute of political morality; cunning in political management; habitually using duplicity and bad faith; astutely crafty.” This is a standard operating procedure in Congress, the Executive, and across government. It is not difficult to see, that is if one is not “inculcated” with false, misleading, and harmfully deceptive propaganda broadcast daily by the state’s media conduits, which claim to be independent.

Prior to his roasting at the hands of uniparty “democrats,” Taibbi was “attracted to liberalism as a young person precisely because it didn’t want to ban things… liberalism celebrated the belief that truth, tolerance, and forgiveness are the way to reach closed minds.”

Rank and file democrat normies may still believe democrat politicians are all about truth and forgiveness, but that is an optical illusion. Consider President Wilson, a democrat. His administration, with the blessing of Congress, censored and prosecuted speech in opposition to America’s involvement in the “Great War,” WWI. The uniparty of the day considered any such speech sedition.

The liberal icon, FDR, forced “Radio Priest” Charles Coughlin off the air for the sin of not following the Nazi demonization narrative in the lead-up to WWII. Granted, Coughlin overlooked the totalitarian policies of Nazi Germany, and its racist ideology, but the point here is that the state decided to censor and strip Coughlin of his natural right to speech.

Then there was Truman, the man who dropped two atom bombs, incinerating more than 100,000 Japanese civilians. During this democrat’s time in office, the administration and Congress used the Alien Registration Act or Smith Act of 1940 to prosecute not only communists, but folks like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and defense attorneys during the McCarthy hearings (run by republicans) were cited for contempt of court and imprisoned.

Clinton pushed through the Child Online Protection Act of 1998, legislation designed to throttle speech on the then-new world wide web.  Obama blocked access to government, despite a pledge to support transparency. The Obama administration used the Espionage Act to go after journalists critical of the state.

The uniparty is united on the effort to vilify, intimidate, indict, and prosecute all in opposition to the crony capitalist state, its rigged economics, endless wars, rigged elections, and unwavering service to corporations, banks, and billionaires, while the people are expected to pay for corporate gambling losses and clean up their environmental messes while the commoners slowly sink into poverty.

Unfortunately, it took a fair degree of abuse heaped on Taibbi during a House hearing on the “Twitter Files,” and the threat of perjury, before he finally disinvested himself from democrats, the uniparty faction that likes to pretend it works for “the people,” when in fact it works for a corporatist state, the “defense” (endless war) industry, Big Pharma, the insurance cartel, and, above all, the “financial sector,” that is to say bankers and their enablers at the Federal Reserve and the USG Treasury.

There is nothing mysterious, arcane, and byzantine about what is happening in America. The destruction of the Middle Class, economic warfare, violent regime change, arms shipments to neo-Nazis, bailouts of corrupt and parasitical banks and corporations—all of it plain to see, if one looks—these are not “weaponized” conspiracy theories.

Don’t get me wrong. I am thankful Matt Taibbi has finally seen beyond the facade, the window dressing and propaganda in regard to democrats and the state. As I have said for a couple of decades on crucial issues—economics, war, and peace, the attack on natural rights—there is little difference between the two factions of the corporate uniparty.

The Impending Economic Collapse – A Cause of Current Conflict

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By Phil Butler

Source: New Eastern Outlook

Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has called on BRICS nations to create an alternative to replace the dollar in foreign trade. Other experts suggest President Joe Biden’s policies will destroy America’s middle class for good. The news comes when China and Russia strengthen ties with Brazil and Latin America. Brazil’s leader questioned the institution of the U.S. dollar as the world’s trade currency in the first place and asked why each country could not trade in its currency.

This brings to the forefront the historical moment when the gold standard was abolished in favor of the current system. When President Richard Nixon moved to abolish the gold standard as a commitment mechanism, his administration ushered in decades of relative volatility and made hard currency.

The exchange of gold was severely curtailed through the Bretton Woods international monetary agreement of 1944. When the International Monetary Fund was established, the U.S. Dollar became the most potent currency in the world. Initially, the role of the IMF was only to assist with international transactions, but as we see today, that institution has far overstepped its original purpose. Today, the IMF is a leverage arm for the United States and a few European nations to fund countries/regimes that align with its policy. The U.S., for instance, has an almost 20% share of contributions to the fund.

The primary purpose of remaining off the gold standard is that the government can print money endlessly, with two primary goals. First, a massive defense budget and needless proxy wars would not be possible if the United States were on the gold standard. Secondly, the people who control the central banks cannot extract interest on national debts that are currently out of control. So, the fiat currency supposedly backed by the “full faith and credit” of the government, the dollar, is worth what lying politicians and finance ministers say it is.

One look at the worldwide bond market reveals a disturbing imbalance. The U.S., which now has over $51 trillion in outstanding debt, has borrowed more to finance wars and programs than China, Japan, Germany, Italy, France, the U.K., and Canada combined. The American taxpayer is responsible for almost 40% of all the foreign debt in the world. And the outlook for the short and long-term future could be better.

President Joe Biden wants to borrow even more when his administration conducts a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. With billions flowing into Europe’s most corrupt country, Americans are on the precipice of an economic catastrophe not seen since the Great Depression.

According to the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington and the Congressional Budget Office, the government will no longer be able to pay everyone — including bondholders, Social Security recipients, and federal employees — sometime this summer or early this fall. A New York Times report from late March outlines the situation. But the problem is far worse than many experts suggest. No matter which way lawmakers move, the U.S. has almost insurmountable fiscal issues. The ramifications will be dire whether or not they raise the debt limit. And if the BRICS countries go off the dollar as a trade currency… Well.

Many experts predict that American greenbacks won’t be worth the printed paper if the world stops using the U.S. dollar as its world currency reserve. Moreover, if the dollar loses its value significantly, every American who owes a credit card loan or a home mortgage will find it ten times harder to pay off those debts.

To make matters worse, millions of jobs will be sacrificed for the Federal Reserve to get any financial stability. Analysis from RSM International shows that the central banks must “induce” a recession to get America’s economic situation in check. And the dollar being made useless by the larger world community was not a factor in their analysis.

The bottom line is if we were still on the gold standard, this would be fine. The gold standard reduced the risks of such economic crises and recessions. Income levels were higher when we were on the bullion-backed system. More importantly, the gold standard created hard limits on printing money and limiting military spending. For more intuition on this, this Barron’s report reveals how our current failing system came into being. The information also serves as a crystal ball for what will happen.

As confidence in the dollar wanes and U.S. policy overseas gets more aggressive toward BRICS nations and others, the tipping point of the American hegemony draws closer.

Democracy Rising 28: AI, Gossip, and Our Epistemological Crisis

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By Tom Prugh

Source: resilience

The other day I joined the rush to explore ChatGPT, signing up at the OpenAI website. I gave it my full legal name and correct birth date, and asked it to pretend I had died and to write my obituary. The result was 300 words describing a somewhat boring paragon of a man.

Except maybe for the boring part, I am not that man, much less that paragon.

The obit wasn’t completely wrong, but it did nothing to undermine ChatGPT’s reputation for “uneven factual accuracy.” It said I was born in Ohio (true), but in Cleveland (false) in 1957 (false). It said I was a “committed environmentalist” (true; I worked for the late lamented Worldwatch Institute for the best part of my career), and that I was an active member of “several environmental organizations” (somewhat true, off and on). It described me as an “avid cyclist” (kind of true, but the last time I did a century ride was 1987).

So much for the hits. The misses include accounts of me as:

  • A “devoted husband” to my wife of 40 years, Mary (my marriage, to a fine woman not named Mary, lasted 26 years) and a “loving father” to two children (one, in fact)
  • A “brilliant engineer” with a degree in electrical engineering from Ohio State University who worked for Boeing, General Electric, and SpaceX (wrong on all counts)
  • Someone who “was instrumental in the development of several renewable energy projects” (my wife and I put a few solar panels on our garage roof, but that’s it)
  • An “active member” of a church who spent “many hours volunteering at the food bank” (I am neither very religious nor, it shames me to admit, very generous with my personal time)

The obituary proclaimed that my “death” had “left a deep void in the lives of his family, friends, and colleagues” and that I would be “deeply missed by all who knew him.” Well, that would be gratifying—if there is a me to be gratified—but I’ll settle for a drunken wake where somebody plays “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”

Maybe everyone should try this. You too might be amused and/or appalled by the plausible distortions and lies a quasi-intelligent computer program can gin up by accessing the petabytes of data (“data”?) on the Internet—accounts of people and events that are bogus but increasingly, and seamlessly, hard to tell  from reality.

I am not a tech nerd and my grasp of what ChatGPT does is rudimentary. But I find it disturbing that this expression of artificial intelligence will instantly fabricate a profile and populate it with—not questions, or blanks to be filled in—but invented factoids tailored to fit a particular format. And this reservation isn’t just me being PO’d about my obit (I’m actually grateful my Internet footprint isn’t bigger); prominent tech geeks also have misgivings. Here’s Farhad Manjoo, for instance:

ChatGPT and other chatbots are known to make stuff up or otherwise spew out incorrect information. They’re also black boxes. Not even ChatGPT’s creators fully know why it suggests some ideas over others, or which way its biases run, or the myriad other ways it may screw up.  …[T]hink of ChatGPT as a semi-reliable source.

Likewise Twitter and other social media, whose flaws and dangers are well known by now, and feared by some of the experts who know them best. The most recent book from revered tech guru and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier is called Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Chapter titles include “Quitting Social Media Is the Most Finely Targeted Way to Resist the Insanity of Our Time,” “Social Media Is Making You into an Asshole,” “Social Media Is Undermining Truth,” and “Social Media Is Making Politics Impossible.”

About those politics: ChatGPT and its successors and rivals, whatever their virtues, are the latest agents in the corruption of the public sphere by digital technology, threatening to extend and deepen the misinformation, fabulism, and division stoked by Twitter and other digital media. Once again, a powerful new technology is out the door and running wild while society and regulators struggle to understand and tame it.

It’s hard to see how this can end well.

An earlier post in this series (DR5) looked at recent archaeological evidence suggesting that humans have explored lots of different means of governing ourselves over the last several thousand years. Eventually, for several reasons, we seem to have ended up with large, top-down, hierarchical organizations. These have lots of problems that won’t be reviewed here, but neuroscientist and philosopher Eric Hoel argues that at least they freed us from the “gossip trap.”

Hoel thinks the main reason small prehistoric human groups didn’t evolve hierarchical governing systems is because of “raw social power,” i.e., gossip:

[Y]ou don’t need a formal chief, nor an official council, nor laws or judges. You just need popular people and unpopular people.

After all, who sits with who is something that comes incredibly naturally to humans—it is our point of greatest anxiety and subject to our constant management. This is extremely similar to the grooming hierarchies of primates, and, presumably, our hominid ancestors.

“So,” Hoel says, “50,000 BC might be a little more like a high school than anything else.”

Hoel believes that raw social power was a major obstacle to cultural development for tens of thousands of years. When civilization did finally arise, it created “a superstructure that levels leveling mechanisms, freeing us from the gossip trap.”

But now, Hoel says, the explosion of digital media and their functions have resurrected it:

[I]f we lived in a gossip trap for the majority of our existence as humans, then what would it be, mentally, to atavistically return to that gossip trap?

Well, it sure would look a lot like Twitter.

I’m serious. It would look a lot like Twitter. For it’s on social media that gossip and social manipulation are unbounded, infinitely transmittable.

…Of course we gravitate to cancel culture—it’s our innate evolved form of government.

Allowing the gossip trap to resume its influence on human affairs—and turbocharging it the way digital media are doing—seems like a terrible way to run a PTA or a garden club, let alone a community or a nation.

The industrialization of made-to-order opinions, “facts,” and “data” via AI and social media, despite efforts to harness them for constructive ends, is plunging us into an epistemological crisis: “How do you know?” is becoming the most fraught question of our time. T.S. Eliot said that “humankind cannot bear very much reality,” but now we are well into an era when we can’t even tell what it is—or in which we simply make it up to please ourselves. The more convincing these applications become, the less anchored we are to the “fact-based” world.

We’ve struggled with this for centuries. Deception is built into nature as an evolutionary strategy, and humans are pretty good at it, both individually and at scale by means of propaganda, advertising, public relations, and spin. These all prey on human social and cognitive vulnerabilities (see DR4).

Humans can only perceive the world partially and indirectly. It starts with our senses, which ignore all but a tiny fraction of the vast amount of data that’s out there. (Sight, for instance, captures only a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum.) In addition, we’re social creatures and our perceptions of what’s real are powerfully shaped by other people. And now comes the digital mediation of inputs, in which information and data come from the ether via often faceless and anonymous sources and are cloaked or manipulated in ways we may never detect or suspect.

Digital media curate our information about reality, like all media do. But things have changed in the last few decades, and especially in the last few years. It’s been only a generation or so since the old days when Walter, or Chet and David, or any of hundreds of daily newspapers told us what was going on in the world. In those days the curation was handled by a relatively small number of individuals with high profiles. We knew, or could learn, something about who they were and where their biases lay. They were professionals, which also counted for something. There’s no perfect system and this one wasn’t either, but its chain of information custody was a far cry from the distant, anonymized, chat-botted, and algorithm-driven inputs flooding the public sphere now.

One liberal pundit recently noted that the increasing ideological specialization of media outlets “compels customers who care about getting a full and nuanced picture not to buy from just one merchant … .” That’s good advice. But you don’t have to force yourself, teeth clenched, to watch Fox News or MSNBC to get a different point of view; just sit down with your neighbors for a civil chat. In fact, getting away from our TVs and into a room with other people now and then would be good for all of us.

This being a blog about deliberative democracy, I default to deliberation in response to many of our political ills. Deliberation can’t fix everything, and no doubt we will get fooled again—but the tools of democratic deliberation can be used to mitigate the seemingly ubiquitous attempts at manipulation and deceit that surround us. Humans have struggled for a long time to build institutions to check our worst tendencies and have had some success. Digitally mediated information poses a fresh threat and we need institutions to meet these new circumstances.

Deliberative settings built for shaping community action should be among those new institutions. At the very least, they will outperform the social processes seen in high school cafeterias. The methods and structures of deliberative democracy can shorten the chain of information custody as well as restore and nurture the direct human presence of neighbors and fellow citizens: they’re sitting around the same table, and you will see them later at the local school or grocery store. Like them or not (or vice versa), they remain a potent element of our daily lives—a source of influence that can work for good or ill. Deliberation channels normal human interactions in ways that can benefit the community, help check the kinds of fantasist catastrophes so prevalent in digital media, and ground our perceptions of reality in the shared concerns of a community of people who may be less than friends but far more than strangers.

America’s Social Contract Is Broken

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Design by Robomega

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

I do not claim any expertise in social contract theory, but in broad brush we can delineate two implicit contracts: one between the citizenry and the state (government) and another between citizens.

We can distinguish between the two by considering a rural county fair. Most of the labor to stage the fair is volunteered by the citizenry for the good of their community and fellow citizens; they are not coerced to do so by the government, nor does the government levy taxes to pay its employees or contractors to stage the fair.

The social contract between citizens implicitly binds people to obeying traffic laws as a public good all benefit from, not because a police officer is on every street corner enforcing the letter of the law.

The social contract between the citizens and the state binds the government to maintaining civil liberties, equal enforcement of the rule of law, defending the nation, and in the 20th century, providing social welfare for the disadvantaged, disabled and low-income elderly.

Critiques of “trickle down economics” focus on income inequality as a key metric of the Social Contract: rising income inequality is de facto evidence that the Social Contract is broken.

I think this misses the key distinction in the Social Contract between citizens and the state, which is the legitimacy of the process of wealth creation and the fairness of the playing field and the referees, i.e. that no one is above the law.

Few people begrudge legitimately earned wealth, for example, the top athlete, the pop star, the tech innovator, the canny entrepreneur, the best-selling author, etc. The source of these individual’s wealth is transparent, and any citizen can decline to support this wealth creation by not paying money to see the athlete, not buying the author’s books, not shopping at the entrepreneur’s stores, etc.

The Social Contract is broken not just by wealth inequality per se but by the illegitimate process of wealth acquisition, i.e. the state has tipped the scales in favor of the few behind closed doors and routinely ignores or bypasses the intent of the law even as the state claims to be following the narrower letter of the law.

By this definition, the Social Contract in America has been completely smashed. One sector after another is dominated by cartel-state partnerships that are forged and enforced in obscure legislation written by lobbyists. Once the laws have been riddled with loopholes and the regulators have been corrupted, “no one is above the law” has lost all meaning.

Those who violate the intent of the law while managing to conjure an apparent compliance with the letter of the law are shysters, scammers and thieves who exploit the intricate loopholes of the system, all the while parading their compliance as evidence the system is fair and just. In this way, the judicial system becomes part of the illegitimate process of wealth accumulation.

In America, political and financial Elites are above the intent of the law. Is bribery of politicos illegal? Supposedly it is, but in practice it is entirely and openly legal.

This is the norm in banana republics, whose ledgers are loaded with thousands of codes and regulations that are routinely ignored by those in power. In the Banana Republic of America, financial crimes go uninvestigated, unindicted and unpunished: banks and their management are essentially immune to prosecution because the crimes are complex (tsk, tsk, it’s really too much trouble to investigate) and they’re “too big to prosecute.”

The rot has seeped from the financial-political Aristocracy to the lower reaches of the social order. The fury of those still working legitimate jobs and paying their taxes is grounded in a simple, obvious truth: America is now dominated by scammers, cheaters, grifters and those gaming the system, large and small, to increase their share of the swag.

The honest taxpayer is a chump, a mark who foolishly ponies up the swag that’s looted by the smart operators. Everyone knows that the vast majority of wealth accumulation in America flows not from transparent effort on a level playing field, but from persuading the Central State (the Federal government and the Federal Reserve) to enforce cartels and grant monopolistic favors such as tax shelters designed for a handful of firms and unlimited credit to private banks.

When scammers large and small live better than those creating value in the real economy, the Social Contract has ceased to exist. When the illegitimate process of wealth acquisition–a rigged playing field, a bought-off referee, and an Elite that’s above the law by every practical measure–dominates the economy and the political structure, the Social Contract has been shattered, regardless of how much welfare largesse is distributed to buy the complicity of state dependents.

Once the chumps and marks realize there is no way they can ever escape their exploited banana-republic status as neofeudal debt-serfs, the scammers, cheats and grifters large and small will be at risk of losing their perquisites. The fantasy in America is that legitimate wealth creation is still possible despite the visible dominance of a corrupt, venal, self-absorbed, parasitic, predatory Aristocracy. Once that fantasy dies, so will the marks’ support of the Aristocracy.

As Voltaire observed, “No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible”: every claim, every game of the system, every political favor purchased is “fair and legal,” of course. This is precisely how empires collapse.

In broad brush, we can trace the transition from feudalism to capitalism to the present financialized, globalized cartel-state neofeudalism and next, to a synthesis built on the opposite of neofeudalism, which is decentralization, transparency, accountability, legitimacy and the adaptive churn of competing ideas and proposals.

China, Russia and India Versus USA, EU and Japan: Axis Powers of a New Global Cold War?

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By Gilbert Mercier

Source: New Junkie Post

The birth of a bipolar world order?

Since 2014, which marked the first Russian intervention in Ukraine, a new global geopolitical dynamic has amplified under conflicting impulses. The areas of direct, or more often proxy conflicts, have been in many senses contained with some sort of cynical pressure-cooker mechanism. If empires always seek hegemony, sane geopolitics imply balance to avoid slipping into World War scenarios. We have presently reached a Cold War-like balance between two blocks: the West and their satellites on one side, against BRICS nations and their affiliates on the other side. In the best case scenario, this new cold war could give birth to a lasting bipolar world order: curiously enough, following pretty closely Orwell’s cartography of Oceania & Eurasia.

The West is defined by the US empire and its vassals

The two axes of powers must be explained more precisely. On one side “the West” includes US, UK, EU, Canada, Japan, South Korea and Australia. The command headquarters of this imperial structure are of course located in the United States of America. The empire’s military muscle is NATO. As for the junior members such as the UK, European Union and Japan, they are, despite some claims of the contrary the vassals of big Uncle Sam.

One factor could be viewed as a miscalculation by Vladimir Putin. In many ways his decision last year to start a military operation in Ukraine had a paradoxical effect. The intervention was an attempt by Russia to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO & the EU, but this has failed as Western military gears as well as direct assistance have poured in. Just like in Afghanistan in the 1980’s Russia was effectively sucked into a West proxy war. Meanwhile, NATO has found a new raison d’etre with Finland now officially a member and Sweden soon also to become one. The general paranoia used in Western media to depict Putin as the ultimate bogeyman has worked wonders on Europe’s public opinion.

BRICS & affiliates

On the other side it is more complex as China’s dominance is more subdued than that of the US. Besides the BRICS nations of Brazil, Russia, India, China & South-Africa, other nations are gravitating into the same geopolitical orbit: notably Iran, Venezuela and African countries such as Mali and Burkina Faso. While China is clearly the biggest power within BRICS, the other two major players, which are Russia and India, also are heavyweights on an overall geopolitical and economic scale.

Russia holds vast reserves of energy products, such as gas and oil, and since the European sanctions has quickly worked on redirecting its energy production both towards China and India. India, which has become the most populous country on Earth, has just like China a considerable manufacturing power as well as a huge internal market for products and services. In other words, neither China nor India have to rely mainly on exports to sustain their respective economic growth.

Non-alignment is dead

The concept of non-alignment in a multipolar world, dear to the likes of Tito and de Gaulle, has unfortunately become a geopolitical faux pas at best, or a risky behavior for a small state wanting to stay independent at worst. Because of a lack of political will and leadership, the European Union has basically capitulated from asserting itself as a third block to become a provincial entity of the US empire. The notion of true non-alignment might have run its course in this new bipolar order.

As matter of fact, one of the Ukraine war’s major side effects has been to speed up the process of obedient realignment of the EU to the US. European leaders with their respective media propaganda divisions (either state or corporate controlled) have managed to convince the bulk of their public opinion that the ogre Vladimir Putin and Russia had to be defeated in Ukraine as if the hordes from a memory of the Red Army were about to invade Europe. The Ukraine war has been sold in Europe as a war of necessity to counter an existential threat that was never really there. Public opinion largely bought it, and the financial rewards are pouring into the coffers of the military-industrial complex, as well as US and Qatari energy businesses of natural gas liquefaction, to replace the well-organized Russian gas supply Europe used to get before the sanctions against Russia.

Ukraine war cannot be won on the battle fields

Despite what most people are lead to believe in the West, a military victory by Ukrainian forces, even with full logistic support from NATO in equipment and training is quasi impossible. After all, a lesson should be learned from Afghanistan where the Taliban managed to defeat the mighty alliance. If the EU and the United States cared for the welfare of Ukrainians, they would come to the realization that only a diplomatic solution can resolve the crisis. A sine qua non condition of diplomacy is that it requires concessions on all sides.

For example, let’s take the case of Crimea. It has a complex history. During the 15th century Crimea was under control of the Ottoman Empire. In 1783, the Russian Empire of Tsarina Catherine the Great annexed Crimea after a conflict with Turkey. Lastly, under the authority of Nikita Khrushchev, the USSR gave Crimea to Ukraine in 1954. Therefore, Crimea was Russian for 171 years while it was Ukrainian for only 60 years. The weight of history, in this case, should tilt the balance in favor of Russia.

Military-industrial complex Uber Alles

Wars have always been capitalism‘s best friend. Ultimately they are seldom about the lofty notions of patriotism but systematically about profits. Ukraine’s Western proxy adventure is no exception. As matter of fact, it has been a gargantuan bonanza for the global military-industrial complex and its stockholder war profiteers. Case in point: since Russia started its military operation in Ukraine in February 2022, the United States has spent $30 billion in military equipment which was shipped to Ukraine. This is according to the US Department of Defense.

For its part the European Union is planning a 74 billion Euros increase in military spending within three years. This trend of huge increase in military spending affects all the EU 27 members, as they are allocating bigger shares of their respective GDPs to this weapons race. In December 2022, the European Defense Agency proudly announced that EU defense spending had surpassed 200 billion Euros for the first time in the union’s history. What an accomplishment!

Needless to say, military-industrial consortium and their unscrupulous stockholders have collected huge dividends from the death and destruction business. Stocks in the so-called aerospace & defense area of the market have been incredibly profitable for investors and are therefore in high demand. On average, most defense-company stocks have seen their values increase by 25 to 30 percent since February 2022.

Naturally, in terms of military spending, the United States represents the lions’ share with a whopping 38 percent of the global military spending. It is an astronomical $800 billion a year or 3.1 percent of the US GDP. Unfortunately other major powers are catching up. In second place comes China with $293 billion or 1.7 percent of its GDP; then India with $76.6 billion; the UK with 68.4 billion; Russia with $65.9 billion or 3.1 percent of GDP; France and Germany with $56 billion each; and Japan with $54 billion. In France, despite a very concerning debt, the Macron administration has announced that 413 billion Euros will be spent on the military between 2024 and 2030.

Taiwan: the Ukraine of the far-east?

With Russia sucked into what can be called a military quagmire in Ukraine, one has to wonder if the Oceania empire, with its Washington nevralgic center, would not indeed want to take advantage or even provoke a Chinese move to take over Taiwan, in accordance to the One-China precept. This could create a Ukrainian-like situation for China in Taiwan. Instead of having the obedient EU to absorb part of the cost in the West, in the Pacific it could be US vassals such as Japan, South-Korea and Australia that could get involved into a proxy war with China, and therefore increase their military spending in US equipment. Trillion of dollars would be wasted in resources to allow the chess masters of geopolitics to keep playing their mindless criminal games. Everywhere, the brutal Russian roulette folly of capitalism, either state or corporate, would thrive while all populations suffer.

Earth’s Ultimate War: A Battle to Control the Noosphere

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By Phil Butler

Source: New Eastern Outlook

You feel it, don’t you? There’s something deeply wrong with our world. And I don’t refer to the planet’s geosphere. I mean, there’s something deadly wrong with society overall, and the ways in which we interact and react. Something is coming, and many understand what it is.

“We are like people under [a] sentence of death, waiting for the date to be set. We sense that something is about to happen. We know that things cannot go on as they are. History has reached an impasse. We are now on a collision course. Something is about to give.” – Reverend Billy Graham

A few years ago, I wrote a report on NEO entitled “Vladimir Putin’s Third Way: As Seen Through the Nooscope.” The piece covered Mr. Putin’s “Third Way” of governance, and a stunning invention by his now chief of staff Anton Vaino. The invention, the Nooscope was reportedly a device capable of measuring the noosphere, or the highest stage of biospheric development, that of humankind’s rational activities. And through the measurement of humanity’s activities, along with the use of advanced artificial intelligence (AI), the Russian leadership seemed to be seeking a new order not simply of which countries have a say so, but a system that could elevate humanity to its next logical level.

At first, the western academic and journalistic communities exhibited acute curiosity mixed with tongue in cheek skepticism such as is always leveled at Russian ideas. Then, of course, a maze of misinterpretations and distractive propaganda campaigns buried Putin’s ideas, and the probability that our collective conscious and energy can be measured for good. Sure, Google, Amazon, and a hundred other entities powered by Big and Minute data operate such measurements for profit, day in and day out. But those pesky Russians using advanced thinking and algorithms to fix humanity’s woes! This kind of idea had to be branded ridiculous propaganda. But is it?

Let’s remember that it was Plato who predicted that Noocracy was humanity’s future political system. The philosopher also claimed that Democracy (“the authority of the crowd”) and other forms of governance would eventually be replaced by a system such as that Vladimir Putin has suggested. So-called “Russia experts” scoff at the noosphere as a part of Russian Cosmism. However, a Rand Corporation report in 2020 acknowledge the developing noosphere, and made recommendations for the United States to considered adapting U.S. grand strategy to the information age—noopolitik, which favors the use of “soft power”—as a successor to realpolitik, with its emphasis on “hard power.” So, the bastardization of Mr. Putin’s “Third Way” concepts by the likes of the Brookings Institute and authors Clifford G. Gaddy and Barry W. Ickes (2009),

The theories of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Édouard Le Roy, who were the practical co-founders of the noosphere, in the early 1900s dealt with a noosphere wrapping Earth as a progression of the teleological character of evolution. Or, for lack of a better description, a result of an overarching “goal-directed evolution.”

Another report I completed that was never published deals with what I believe Putin has been working on. His “Third Way” and nooscope experiments having been put on hold by a new Cold War these days, is for purpose, I believe. There are those in the west who would welcome a new and more successful way of governance. And, there are those who are terrified that the Nooscope/Noosphere project will put an end to their engine of power. The latter group are certainly not attempting to halt the development of the noosphere, but they are trying to ensure it is the west that harnesses it for their purposes. This is one reason you see the western tech giants “all in” to try and censor the opposing side. Anyone who disagrees with the liberal order now, is an enemy of “the state.” As evidence, consider, that NASA and Cisco are currently collaborating on something called the Planetary Skin Insitute, a cousin or competitor to the Nooscope.

Putin’s “Third Way,” what an intriguing and potentially game changing thing! After having written about Russia’s emergence for a decade now, I continually recall what a speech V.V. Putin wrote an editorial for a German newspaper concerning his much-maligned Lisbon to Vladivostok proposed unified market. The quote below is from Putin’s editorial:

“We propose the creation of a harmonious economic community stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok. In the future, we could even consider a free trade zone or even more advanced forms of economic integration. The result would be a unified continental market with a capacity worth trillions of euros.”

This was 2010, and the notion scared the hell out of everybody at the World Economic Forum, including the janitor. It was at about this time that the hierarchy decided that Putin and Russia as the boy from Leningrad envisioned it, must go. And here we are, witnessing a proxy war with one purpose, to tear a deep crevice in between Europe and Asia. The situation is a bit like the space race back in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Washington and the old gang in London cannot have the Russians controlling this evolved human potential. If anyone is going to take advantage of this noosphere, it’s going to be the same elites who dumbed our schoolchildren down to iPhone troglodytes.

Read the chapter Getting Back on Track Through Noopolitik, in the Rand report. It’s not a recommendation for the planet, but one for the deep state that currently has a former US president on trial to keep him out of office. You see, the liberal order is already manipulating the noosphere through owned media, academia, and government. To these people the sphere of human consciousness hugging our globe needs to be seeded with the “right” ideas. They seek to transform us, to evolve earth into the same slave planet it’s always been, only more efficient. It’s evil. A modern version of the worst parts of the Bible. The Matrix movie or 1984, take your pick.

We have to stop them. Or, wait until Jesus comes back.