Tag Archives: media

Trust No One

Posted on by
Reply

By Michael Krieger

Source: Liberty Blitzkrieg

The title of today’s post is not meant to be taken literally. I trust plenty of people. I trust friends who’ve demonstrated their trustworthiness over the years. I trust my family. Having people in my life I love and trust makes everything far more meaningful and pleasant. I hope people reading this likewise have a circle of trust they’ve built over the years.

On the other hand, you should never trust anyone or anything that hasn’t given you good reason to do so, and if someone or something gives you good reason not to trust them, you should never forget that. The more power a person or institution has in society, the less trustworthy they tend to be. I don’t say this because it’s fun to be cynical, I say this because my life experience has demonstrated its accuracy.

In the 21st century alone, I’ve been given good reason to distrust all sorts of things around me, including the U.S. government (all governments really), intelligence agencies, politicians, mass media, Wall Street and Silicon Valley, to name a few. These power centers make up “society” as we know it in 2020, which is really just massive concentrations of lawless financial and political power obfuscating rampant criminality behind the cover of various ostensibly venerable institutions. What’s most remarkable is how many people still maintain trust in so many of these provably untrustworthy organizations and industries, which speaks to the power of propaganda as well as the comfort of denial.

That said, the ground is clearly beginning to shift on this front. As more and more people recognize that the system’s designed to work against them, increased numbers will reject conventional wisdom and search for an alternative framework. Unfortunately, this next step can be equally treacherous and it’s important not to jump from the frying pan into the fire.

This is where social media comes into play. It offers an endless array of opinions and analysis that you don’t get from mass media, but it’s also filled with bad actors, professional propagandists and con artists. At this point, everyone knows that social media is the new information battleground, so every character or institution with malicious intent is aggressively playing in this arena and often with boatloads of money. The charlatans at MSNBC will have you believe it’s just the Russians or Chinese, but every government and every single special interest on the planet is now involved. They’re all on social media in one form or another, trying to push you in a specific direction that’s usually not in your best interests.

It took me a while, but I’ve finally recognized how unthoughtful and treacherous social media is whenever some big news event hits. Important arguments quickly lose all nuance and devolve into binary talking points and agendas. People split into teams in a way that feels very much akin to the traditional, and now largely discredited, red/blue political theater. For covid-19, it felt like half of Twitter thought it was an extinction-level event, while the other half was convinced the whole thing was a hoax. In the aftermath of George Floyd, you were either cheering on the civil unrest, or wanted to send in the military. Increasingly, if you aren’t in one of two manufactured camps on any issue you’ll be shouted down and ostracized.  That’s not the kind of discussion I’m here for.

As someone who’s found great value in Twitter over the years, I’ve become far more careful in how I use it and where to direct my attention and energy. It reminds me of Mos Eisley in Star Wars, a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but simultaneously a place you can connect with Han Solo and get a spaceship.

As we move forward, it’s going to feel like the world’s ending, and in some ways it will be. No the world isn’t literally ending, but a specific kind of world is ending, and it’ll be extremely difficult for many people to tell the difference as it’s happening. This will likely lead to many more episodes of mass insanity as professional manipulators take advantage of millions upon millions of disoriented people. Priority number one should be to stand guard at the gate of your mind during this time so as not to become a victim.

The best thing you can do from here on out is use your time and energy as productively as possible. We’re going to need builders, creators and inventors more than ever before, because we’re past the point of putting this thing back together. We’ll need to recreate, reimagine and rebuild, and all of this must spring from a point of consciousness in order to bring forth something that is both better and sustainable. Become more beautiful and resilient as others become ugly and unhinged. Focus on what’s within your capacity to control and always remember to resist the crazy.

Facebook using “fact-checkers” to censor dissent on Covid19

Posted on by
2

Familiar tactics of obfuscation and weasel-words deployed to block access to articles

By Off-Guardian.org

Facebook has flagged our article “It’s all bullshit”: 3 links sinking the Covid narrative” as ‘false information’, based on nothing but a single ‘fact check’ website, which does not even claim the information is ‘false’, but merely quibbles over terminologies to justify claiming the information is ‘misleading.’

This is what you see today if you try to access that article on Facebook:

And if you click on the ‘see why’ button you get taken here, to the website of Health Feedback, an “independent fact-checker”.

Of course, they’re not independent – they’re actually funded by Facebook. They are also funded by the “Credibility Coalition”, an NGO focused on “common standards for information credibility”.

The Credibility Coalition are also funded by Facebook. And twitter. And google. And a whole host of unsavoury sounding NGOs.

So, with the idea that “health feedback” are anywhere close to “independent” firmly debunked, let’s see what they have to say.

Firstly, it’s important to note what is actually being “fact-checked” here.

It is not that the three documents were leaked. It is not the accuracy of the quotes used. It is not the statistics cited. In fact, not a single factual claim is being called “false”.

In short, Facebook is well aware that 90% of the article is perfectly provably true.

In fact, it’s not our article they’re allegedly fact-checking, it’s another article in the publication NewsPunch, which relies on one of the same sources we do.

The “fact-check” is entirely devoted to just one of three leaks we describe – the report from German Interior Ministry employee – and even then focuses solely on its provenance rather than its content. In essence, what is being “fact-checked” is not the report itself, but where it came from.

Nowhere in this ‘rebuttal’ does it claim the ‘German Ministry employee’ was lying or making provably false statements. Neither does it challenge the credentials, competence or honesty of the “independent scientists” who co-authored the report.

Instead, it uses diversionary language claiming the document’s main author, Stephan Kohn, was simply sharing his “private opinion” and was not authorised to speak for the government.

The author of the document is Stephan Kohn, a politologist and employee of Germany’s Interior Ministry in the KM 4 department for the Protection of Critical Infrastructures. However, Kohn’s analysis was not requested by the Interior Ministry, as the article claims. On 10 May, Germany’s Interior Ministry issued a press release stating that the employee had disseminated his “private opinion on the corona crisis management” and that the “elaboration was carried out outside the area of responsibility as well as without assignment and authorization”.

This approach should be hauntingly familiar to anyone who has been following the OPCW whistleblower story. Where expert witnesses contradicting the official narrative on Douma were claimed to merely be “disgruntled ex-employees” who were in Syria of their own accord and “never part of the fact-finding mission”.

All these claims have since been shown to be lies.

In addition to these irrelevant obfuscations, the article uses weasel words to construct a flimsy counter-argument:

According to EuroMOMO, the number of excess deaths coinciding with the COVID-19 pandemic was twice the number that occurred during the unusually deadly flu seasons of 2017, 2018, and 2019 (Figure 1).

Note that they only back three years in time, and not all the way to 2000 or 1998, both of which had very similar excess death numbers.

Note also they say “coinciding with”, and not “caused by”. This allows them to cite all the excess deaths in Europe, despite statistics showing that huge numbers of the excess deaths were due to other causes – including the lockdown limiting access to healthcare and increasing poverty.

They are using excess deaths caused by the lockdown, to argue against the accuracy of a report warning that the lockdown will cause excess deaths.

It is going full Orwell. And it is utterly disgusting.

This article simply does not offer any justification for dismissing our article reporting Kohn’s words as ‘false information’. The information is NOT demonstrably false, it is merely contentious, in that the data is open to multiple interpretations.

In fact, the article admits that itself – only able to label the claim as “misleading” or “unsupported”. Nowhere do they use the word “disinformation” or “misinformation” or “false information”. Not once.

And yet that is the label facebook has stuck on it.

Facebook is not suppressing this article because it contains false information at all, it is censoring it because it offers an interpretation of facts that does not support the current mainstream dogma.

This is censorship, pure and simple.

The War On Reality

Posted on by
1

By Wayne Janis

Source: OpEdNews

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden, (Publisher Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company). is recommended to anyone wishing to understand the world in which we live.

The most dangerous war currently being fought is the “war on reality”. Of course this was Orwell’s greatest fear as expressed in 1984 – that reality itself would be appropriated, manipulated and obliterated at will by powerful forces. His original title for 1984 was “The Last Man In Europe” – i.e., the last man connected to reality.

We live in a world in which spurious realities are being manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups, all of which are filtered through major media conglomerates that are attached to the globalist ether (let’s call it the “globalist cloud”). This globalist cloud is controlled and manipulated by a globalist Intelligence Community for political/economic/social purposes.

The bombardment of pseudo-realities will produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. We need to detach the now essential and probably irrevocable social media matrix from this globalist ether and reign it in to do the good work of humanity at large. Net neutrality is one major initiative that must be pursued and won.

Net neutrality is the concept that all traffic on the Internet should be given equal treatment by Internet providers with little to no censorship, manipulation, interference, prioritization, discrimination or preference given based on user, content, website, platform, application, type of equipment, source address, destination address, or method of communication. Any rules of conduct must be determined democratically and implemented equally.

In addition the globalist cloud has misappropriated, stored, monetized and misused the entirety of our personal digital data for corporate profit and social control. We will only reclaim our privacy by exerting the highest level political pressure.

“Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read…Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesn’t mean that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor or to the crowds of principled dissidents I was following on my phone who were protesting halfway across the planet, hoping to gain just a fraction of the freedoms that my country was busily dismantling.” – Snowden, Edward. Permanent Record (p. 208-209). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.

And we, the people, need a powerful reality motto. I have found no better one than:

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away..Philip K. Dick

Only the courage and implacable resistance of authentic human beings to powerful corruptors of truth and reality will save us from a world much like that depicted in 1984. It is unknown whether there are enough such authentic human beings or whether the battle can be won no matter the number.

As Reinhold Niebuhr said, it takes a “sublime madness of the soul” to fight against the “malignant powers of the world”.

And Chris Hedges:

“There is nothing that’s going to rationally justify it. You can know that everything around you points to the fact that your struggle for justice, maybe your entire life, has been futile. But this knowledge doesn’t invalidate what you’ve done.”– Hedges, Chris. Unspeakable: Talks with David Talbot about the Most Forbidden Topics in America . Skyhorse Publishing. Kindle Edition.

People like Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Daniel Ellsberg, Chris Hedges, John Kiriakou and others are examples of these brave and implacable martyrs who have paid the price for what is at its core a battle for the soul of humanity.

Historically, Galileo is a martyr in the war on reality even though his trial ended with an abjuration which allowed him to avoid execution and remain under house arrest for life. But I personally like the raw testicularity of Bruno Giordano (PC police be damned). He defended his astronomical beliefs to the end and refused to recant his rejection of certain dogmas of the Catholic Church. Knowing he would be burned at the stake (he was first hung naked upside down in a public square in Rome) he made a disdainful gesture to the judges and said:

“You pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.”

Why are some respected alt-media embracing a police state?

Posted on by
1

By Catte Black

Source: Off-Guardian.org

It should be obvious by now to anyone that the covid19 pandemic, whatever its origins, is being used to fast forward a “new normal” world of unparalleled government power, surveillance and curtailment of individual liberty.

We are looking already at:

  • Compulsory DNRs for some elderly.
  • Biometric chips or bracelets to monitor whether or not you have permission to be outside your home or engage in work
  • Drone surveillance as normal.
  • Apps on your phone that can detect any breach of the self-isolation policy.
  • Huge new police powers of arrest and detention for anyone suspected of carrying the virus.
  • Suspension of elections for indefinite periods at government discretion

And this is only the starter course. We can be pretty sure they are currently just easing us in. The real stuff will be rolling along in the next months or maybe years (depending on how quickly they feel able to get this on)

This is the fabric of nightmare. A worst-case horror story that is the absolute quintessence of everything the alt-media is supposed to oppose.

Surely, you would think, any self-respecting alt-media person would be opposing this with everything they have while they still have a voice.

Well, some of us are of course. And we’re going to be posting links to other sites currently doing great work challenging this rollout.

But, weeks into this crisis, there are some very prominent voices still refusing to either question the official narrative of the pandemic or unequivocally condemn the fast dawn of the “new normal” Brave New World.

We’ve held off from confronting this for a while now. We figured people needed time to adjust or wake up to the reality of what was happening. It’s shocking after all, and deeply disorienting, and different individuals need different amounts of time to get their bearings when something that shakes their worldview comes along.

But adjustment time is long over by now.

Let’s also be clear, we’re not condemning people for simply disagreeing with us. We expect disagreement on some issues. It’s a source of strength for all of us.

But this is not about relatively minor differences of opinion or interpretation.

This is sophisticated analysts, with resources and experience, failing to condemn, and even supporting, what amounts to de facto international martial law.

This is Labour activists who mere weeks ago were calling Boris Johnson a murderer and psychopath, now cheering as he is handed total control of their lives and their children’s lives.

This is respected journalists, commentators and academics who loudly condemned the cynical lies about WMDs or ‘chemical attacks’ in Douma, the fake videos and fake White Helmets, suddenly and uncritically accepting the veracity of every government virus narrative, every unsourced video and media meme that has #covid19 as a hashtag.

This is people who have campaigned against the Patriot Act for 19 years, signing off on the new US anti-covid19 legislation without a murmur; who know that governments always abuse their powers, thinking they somehow just won’t abuse these.

This is people who know about Guantanamo and who have seen Julian Assange humiliated and abused, somehow thinking the people who did these things won’t use the new post-covid police state to do them even more.

This is something more than simple denial. It’s – what?

Are they simply paralysed with fear, either of the hyped-up virus, or the scary dystopia we are all suddenly inhabiting? Is it Stockholm Syndrome? Is it still possible some of them will wake up or unfreeze and see what is going on?

Are some of them gatekeepers, sleeper assets being activated in this extreme situation specifically to divert and delude the questioning and sceptical people who tend to follow them?

Well, I guess we can’t completely rule that out, can we, though I wouldn’t want to make that claim about anyone.

Are some just being self-serving and shallow, playing at being dissident while the price was low enough? Did they think writing a popular alt media blog was an easy way to be cool, but never had any intention of standing by any of it once it got a bit risky to do so?

I mean you are not gonna get that coveted slot on RT or Buzzfeed by taking on this major ‘new normal’ narrative are you? So that’s a factor potentially.

You can see the appeal of just sitting on the fence and talking in vague terms about how this fascism malarkey is a bit worrying, but stopping short of actually condemning it. That way you keep the option open to be ‘radical’ again once it looks safe enough to do so, but also don’t risk your comfy and lucrative relationship with the Establishment Left, who are all eagerly embracing the new age of mass incarceration and really want you to do the same.

Are some, as has been unkindly suggested, just too stupid to see what’s going on? Do epidemiology stats hurt their brains? Does thinking too much take up valuable psychobabble time? Is it hard to see the black clouds of tyranny rolling in when your head is too firmly planted in your own delightfully quirky posterior?

Or – we have to ask this – are a number of them simply, well, fascists? Do they actually support tyrannical top-down authoritarianism? Has their beef with the PTB merely been that they themselves are not currently high enough up that hierarchy? And do they see the covid19 rollout as some sort of revolution that will launch them and their chums into the positions of sweet supremacy they always knew they deserved?

Easy to preach permanent lockdown and biometric implant slavery when you figure none of it will apply to you and your family, I suppose.

All of these potential explanations may be the answer in some cases. And there could be a hundred other reasons besides.

But, in the end, do the explanations really matter? Do they change anything? Excuse anything?

The fact is these people stood at the barricades cheering and rallying the masses until the tanks could be seen rolling down the street – when they promptly upped and went over to join them.

Is there anything else to be said about that?

And where do we go from here?

Freedom Rider: The Internet Does Washington’s Dirty Work

Posted on by
Reply

By Margaret Kimberly

Source: Black Agenda Report

As long as the internet is in private hands it should be seen as a “frenemy” — a useful resource that can also be wielded as a weapon.

“Black people are routinely sent to “facebook jail” if their words anger racist white people.”

In its early days the internet seemed to be an undisputed good, a means of communication open to all. It was hoped that these new platforms would level the playing field and give smaller outlets like Black Agenda Report access to a worldwide audience. The internet has done that but it is also a weapon that is used against the left in this country and against nations and movements declared enemies by this government.

In the rush of enthusiasm one important fact was forgotten. The internet is in the hands of private corporations. They decide who gets service, where they get it and at what speed. The growth of social media only exacerbated the problems of corporate control.

This columnist uses Facebook and Twitter and other platforms by necessity. They are sources of information and important means of communication. But they are controlled by powerful corporate entities who work hand in hand with the government. Ultimately they decide who can be seen and who cannot.

“Private corporations decide who gets service, where they get it and at what speed.”

When the U.S. government speaks, Facebook and Twitter listen and then do as they are told. When foreign governments are declared adversaries their representatives and advocates are censored. In the past year, the Syrian government and the Venezuelan government have been temporarily blocked on Twitter. Sites such as Telesur have been repeatedly removed from Facebook. Numerous Palestinian advocacy sites have been removed from Facebook at the behest of the Israeli government.

Facebook decides if “community standards” have been violated and restrict anyone who violates their opaque rules. Black people are routinely sent to “facebook jail” if their words anger racist white people.

But the loss of access is not the biggest problem. When the United States government killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani they also wanted to kill off his memory. Facebook posts which spoke of him in any favorable light were removed. Facebook isn’t alone in joining the governmental directive. The Iranian English language service, Presstv, was removed from Youtube, which is owned by Google. Years of reporting and interviews, including some given by this columnist, disappeared into the black hole of cyberspace. When the U.S. began ratcheting up its maximum pressure, the corporate sector went right along and Presstv was sent down the memory hole.

“Presstv was removed from Youtube, which is owned by Google.”

Censorship has gotten worse because of liberals, not conservatives, and they have used the Russiagate fraud to accelerate the deplatforming process. Immediately after the 2016 election we were told that the Russian government was responsible for Trump’s victory and that censorship was the only thing standing between us and living under the control of Vladimir Putin.

The infamous Proporornot  list declared that Black Agenda Report and other sites were under Russian influence. Ever since that list was published in late 2016 many left sites lost visibility on Google and other search engines.

Now Trump administration sanctions are impacting our ability to communicate in a variety of ways. Not only were references to Soleimani removed, but the use of the word “Iran” can result in censorship and the inability to complete financial transactions. The Grayzone project  reported that Paypal restricted donations from anyone who mentioned the word Iran.

It must be repeated that Trump has plenty of help from Democrats and liberals in this regard. Pleas for Facebook “fact checking” will result in more censorship of black people and of anyone who happens to voice opinions that run counter to the imperialist narrative.

“The use of the word “Iran” can result in censorship.”

Already Russia is being blamed for election interference, yet Russia is not the target. The left is the target and Democrats are leading the charge. Their goal is to narrow discourse and to make war propaganda acceptable. It is an irony and a contradiction that while Trump is falsely accused of being under Russian influence, his policy goals are furthered with help from liberals. U.S. imperialism is a thoroughly bipartisan project.

This collusion between the wings of the duopoly must be kept in mind during the farcical impeachment. The Democrats could have added the war crime of the Soleimani assassination to their articles of impeachment. But they are complicit in this regard and will mention nothing of substance. Instead they have only one flimsy charge that is a cynical get out the vote effort and a source of anti-Russian propaganda.

As long as the internet is in private hands it should be seen as a “frenemy,” a useful resource that can also be wielded as a weapon. These platforms cannot be trusted unless or until they are publicly regulated. In the meantime, our reliance on them comes at a price.

Hovering in Cyberspace

Posted on by
Reply

By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

We live in a fabricated reality where the visible world became nearly meaningless once the screen world became people’s “window on the world.”  An electronic nothingness replaced reality as people gleefully embraced digital wraparound apparitions.  These days people still move about in the physical world but live in the electronic one.  The result is mass hallucination.

This is the fundamental seismic shift of our era. There is a lot of bitching and joking about it, but when all is said and done, it is accepted as inevitable. Digital devices are embraced as phantom lovers. Technological “advances” are accepted as human destiny.  We now inhabit a technological nightmare (that seems like a paradise to so many) in which technology and technique – the standardized means for realizing a predetermined end most efficiently – dominate the world. In such a world, not only does the end justify the means, but to consider such a moral issue is beside the point. We are speeding ahead to nowhere in the most “efficient” way possible.  No questioning allowed!  Unless you wish to ask your phone.

These days there is much political talk and commentary about fascism, tyranny, a police state, etc., while the totalitarianism of technocracy and technology continues apace.  It is not just the ecological (in the human/natural sense) impact of digital technology where one change generates many others in an endless spiral, but the fact that technical efficiency dominates all aspects of life and, as Jacques Ellul wrote long ago, “transforms everything it touches into a machine,” including humans.  For every problem caused by technology, there is always a technological “solution” that creates further technological problems ad infinitum.  The goal is always to find the most efficient (power) technique to apply as rapidly as possible to all human problems.

Writing nearly fifty years ago in Medical Nemesis, Ivan Illich, explained how in medical care the human touch was being replaced by this technical mindset.  He said,

In all countries, doctors work increasingly with two groups of addicts: those for whom they prescribe drugs, and those who suffer from their consequences. The richer the community, the larger the percentage of patients who belong to both…In such a society, people come to believe that in health care, as in all fields of endeavor, technology can be used to change the human condition according to almost any design.

We are of course living with the ongoing results of such medical technical efficiency.  The U.S.A. is a country where the majority of people are drugged in one way or another, legally or illegally, since the human problems of living are considered to have only technological solutions, whether those remedies are effective or anodyne.  The “accidents” and risks built into the technological fixes are never considered since the ideological grip of the religion of technology is all-encompassing and infallible.  We are caught in its web.

Marshall McLuhan, the media guru of the 1960s – whether he was applauding or bemoaning the fact – was right when he claimed that the medium is the message.

Cell phones, being the current omnipresent form of the electronification of life, are today’s message, a sign that one is always in touch with the void.  To be without this small machine is to be rendered an idiot in the ancient Greek sense of the word – a private person.  Translation: one who is out of it, detached, at least temporarily, from the screens that separate us from reality, from the incessant noise and pinging messages that destroy reflection and create reflex reactions.

But to be out of it is the only way to understand it.  And to understand it is terrifying, for it means one knows that the religion of technology has replaced nature as the source of what for eons has been considered sacred. It means one grasps how reality is now defined by technology. It means realizing that people are merging with the machines they are attached to by invisible manacles as they replace the human body with abstractions and interact with machines.  It means recognizing that the internet, despite its positive aspects and usage by dissenters intent on human liberation, is controlled by private corporation and government forces intent on using it as a weapon to control people. It means seeing the truth that most people have never considered the price to be paid for the speed and efficiency of a high-tech world.

But the price is very, very high.

One price, perhaps the most important, is the fragmentation of consciousness, which prevents people from grasping the present from within – which, as Frederic Jameson has noted, is so crucial and yet one of the mind’s most problematic tasks – because so many suffer from digital dementia as their attention hops from input to output in a never-ending flow of mediated, disembodied data.  As a result, a vicious circle has been created that prevents people from the crucial epistemological task of grasping the double-bind that is the ultimate propaganda.  Data is Dada by another name, and we are in Dada land, pissing, not into Marcel Duchamp’s ridiculous work of Dada “art,” a urinal, but into the wind.  And data piled on data equals a heap of data without knowledge or understanding.  There is no time or space for grasping context or to connect the dots. It is a pointillist painting in the form of inert facts that few can understand or even realize that they don’t.

I am typing these words on a Hermes 3000 manual typewriter, a beautiful piece of technology whose sound and movement creates a rhythmic sanctuary where my hands, head, and heart work in unison. It allows me to think slowly, to make mistakes that will necessitate retyping, to do second and third rereadings and revisions, to roll the paper out of the machine and sit quietly as I review it.  My eyes rest on the paper, not a blue-lit screen.

Technology as such is not the problem, for my typewriter is a very useful and endurable machine, a useful technology that has enhanced life. It does not break or need to be replaced every few years, as computers do. It does not contain coltan, tantalum, or other minerals mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and other places by poor people working under oppressive conditions created by international consumer greed that is devouring the world.  It does not allow anyone to spy on me as I type.  I am alone and unplugged, disconnected, off-line and out of line, a sine qua non for thinking, and thinking about deep matters.  The typewriter is mine, and mine alone, unlike the connected digital devices that have destroyed aloneness, for to be alone is to contemplate one’s fate and that of all humanity.  It is to confront essential things and not feel the loneliness induced and exacerbated by the illusion of always being in touch.

But while this typing machine allows me to write in peace, I am in no way suggesting that I have escaped the technological condition that we all find ourselves in.  There are little ways to step outside the closing circle, but even then, one is still in it.  I will eventually have to take my paper and type it into a computer document if I wish to publish it in the form you will be reading it.  There is no other way. The technocrats have decreed it so. We are all, as George Orwell once wrote in a different context and meaning, “inside the whale,” the whale in this case being a high-tech digital world controlled by technocrats, and we have only small ways to shield ourselves from it. Sitting in a quiet room, working on a typewriter, taking a walk in the woods without a cell phone, or not owning a cell phone, are but small individual acts that have no effect on the structural realty of what Neil Postman calls technopoly in his masterful book, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.  And even in the woods one may look up to admire a tree only to find that it is a cell phone tower.

Humans have always created and used technology, but for a very long time that technology was subject to cultural and religious rules that circumscribed limits to its use.  Today there are no limits, no rules to constrain it.  The prohibition to prohibit is our motto.  In our acceptance of technical efficiency, we have handed over our freedom and lost control of the means to ends we can’t fathom but unconsciously fear.  Where are we heading? many probably wonder, as they check the latest news ping, no doubt about something to fear, as a thousand pieces of “news” flash through their devices without pause, like wisps of fleeting dreams one vaguely remembers but cannot pin down or understand.  Incoherence is the result.  Speed is king.

Of course, this kaleidoscopic flood of data confuses people who desire some coherence and explanation.  This is provided by what Jacques Ellul, in Presence in the Modern World, calls “the explanatory myth.”  He writes,

This brings us to the other pole of our bizarre intellectual situation today: the explanatory myth.  In addition to its political and its mystical and spiritual function, the explanatory myth is the veritable spinal column of our whole intellectual system…Given that appearances produce confusion and coherence is needed, a new appearance unifies them all in the viewer’s mind and enables everything to be explained.  This appearance has a spiritual root and is accepted only by completely blind credulity.  It becomes the intellectual key for opening all secrets, interpreting every fact, and recognizing oneself in the whirl of phenomena…this myth [is] their one stable point of thought and consciousness…enables everyone to avoid the trouble of thinking for themselves, the worry of doubt, the questioning, the uncertainty of understanding, and the torture of a bad conscience.  What prodigious savings of time and means, which can be put usefully to work manufacturing some more missiles…[they] have a good conscience because they have an answer for everything; and whatever happens and whatever they do, they can rely on the explanation that myth provides.  This process places them within the most complete unreality possible.  They live in a permanent dream, but a realistic dream, constructed from the countless facts and theories that they believe in with all the power of ‘mass persons’ who cannot detach themselves from the mass without dying.

Today that myth is the religion of technology.

So if you have any questions you want answered, you can ask your phone.

Ask your phone why we are living with endless wars on the edge of using our most astounding technological invention: nuclear weapons.

Ask your computer why “nice” Americans will sit behind computer screens and send missiles to kill people half-way around the world whom they are told they are at war with.

Ask your smart device why so many have become little Eichmanns, carrying out their dutiful little tasks at Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and all the other war manufacturers, or not caring what stocks they own.

Ask your phone what really happened to the Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752 in Iran.  See if your phone will say anything about cyber warfare, electronic jamming, or why the plane’s transponder was turned off preventing a signal to be sent indicating it was a civilian aircraft.

Ask who is behind the push to deploy 5 G wireless technology.

Ask that smart phone who is providing the non-answers.

Ask and it won’t be given to you; seek and you will not find. The true answers to your questions will remain hidden.  This is the technological society, set up and controlled by the rulers.  It is a scam.

Google it!

God may respond.

Iraqi PM reveals Soleimani was on peace mission when assassinated, exploding Trump’s lie of ‘imminent attacks’

Posted on by
1

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

The Trump administration claimed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani was planning “imminent attacks” on US interests when it assassinated him. That lie was just destroyed, but not before countless corporate media outlets transmitted it to the public.

By Max Blumenthal

Source: The Grayzone

Desperate to justify the US drone assassination of Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo insisted that Washington had made an “intelligence-based assessment” that Soleimani was “actively planning in the region” to attack American interests before he was killed.

President Donald Trump justified his fateful decision to kill the Iranian general in even more explicit language, declaring that Soleimani was planning “imminent attacks” on US diplomatic facilities and personnel across the Middle East.

“We took action last night to stop a war,” Trump claimed. “We did not take action to start a war.”

Trump’s dubious rationale for an indisputably criminal assassination has been repeated widely across corporate media networks, and often without any skepticism or debate.

At a January 3 State Department briefing, where reporters finally got the chance to demand evidence for the claim of an “imminent” threat, one US official erupted in anger.

“Jesus, do we have to explain why we do these things?” he barked at the press.

Two days later, when Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi addressed his country’s parliament, Trump’s justification for killing Soleimani was exposed as a cynical lie.

According to Abdul-Mahdi, he had planned to meet Soleimani on the morning the general was killed to discuss a diplomatic rapproachment that Iraq was brokering between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Abdul-Mahdi said that Trump personally thanked him for the efforts, even as he was planning the hit on Soleimani – thus creating the impression that the Iranian general was safe to travel to Baghdad.

Soleimani had arrived in Baghdad not to plan attacks on American targets, but to coordinate de-escalation with Saudi Arabia. Indeed, he was killed while on an actual peace mission that could have created political distance between the Gulf monarchy and members of the US-led anti-Iran axis like Israel.

The catastrophic results of Soleimani’s killing recall the Obama administration’s 2016 assassination of Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansur, a Taliban leader who was eager to negotiate a peaceful end to the US occupation of Afghanistan. Mansur’s death wound up empowering hardline figures in the Taliban who favored a total military victory over the US and triggered an uptick in violence across the country, dooming hopes for a negotiated exit.

Since Soleimani’s assassination, Iraq’s parliament has voted to expel all US troops from the country and Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has sworn to exact a “severe revenge” on the “the criminals who have stained their hands with [Soleimani’s] and the other martyrs’ blood…”

Trump, for his part, tweeted a litany of gangster-like threats, promising to destroy Iranian cultural sites if it retaliated and pledging to sanction Iraq “like they’ve never been before” if it ousted US troops.

Trump’s treacherous assassination has brought the US closer to war than ever before against a country more militarily potent than any adversary it has faced since the Korean War. And as with the failed US invasion of Iraq, Washington’s casus belli for triggering this conflict was based on falsified intelligence sold to Americans by administration officials, and on a pliant Beltway media acting as their megaphone.

With its claim of “imminent attacks,” the Trump administration has essentially re-mixed Condoleeza Rice’s 2003 warning that “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Back then, the US attacked a sovereign state to rid it of WMD that did not exist. This time, it killed the second-most important Iranian official to prevent a killing spree that was not on the way. And Trump administration officials knew they were lying.

In fact, Pompeo pitched assassinating Soleimani to Trump several months ago, well before any attacks were “imminent.” And in the wake of the general’s killing, a US official revealed to the New York Times that the NSA had intercepted “communications the United States had between Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and General Suleimani showing that the ayatollah had not yet approved any plans by the general for an attack.”

But the preponderance of evidence exposing Trump’s basis for killing Soleimani as a titanic lie has not generated the same level of media interest as the lie itself.

On January 3, CNN assigned three reporters to disseminate the Trump administration’s disinformation about Soleimani, claiming without a hint of critical detachment that he was “planning specific attacks on US interests, including US personnel.”

After the story went live, CNN’s lead reporter, Jim Sciutto, reached out to another official US source to “confirm” his now-discredited piece of war propaganda. In Sciutto’s mind, if more than one US official says a thing, it must be true.

Sciutto is not just any run-of-the-mill national security reporter. During the Obama era, he accepted a job as chief of staff at the US Embassy in Beijing, placing himself at the center of Washington’s gathering Cold War with China. Now back behind CNN’s anchor desk, Sciutto poses as a ferocious critic of Trump while providing the Pentagon and State Department with reliable stenographic services.

No president in recent history has been despised more viscerally by the Beltway press corps than Trump. Nearly everything he says is met with disdain and suspicion, even when he is telling the truth.

But when Trump and his administration attempt to lie the public into war against a designated evildoer, a swath of the corporate media responds with reflexive trust, then shrugs when the lie is exposed in broad daylight.

On The Idiotic Partisan Debate Over Regime Change In Iran Or Syria

Posted on by
Reply

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

I love my job. Really, I do. But writing about US military agendas for a living often brings one into contact with such staggering stupidity that all you can do is pause and wonder how our species survived past the invention of the pointy stick.

By far the dumbest thing in all of US politics is the fact that Democrats tend to support regime change in Syria, while Republicans tend to support it more in Iran. I am not talking about the elected officials in those parties; I’m talking about the ordinary rank-and-file Joes and Janets who stand absolutely nothing to gain from toppling either Damascus or Tehran, but who have been brainwashed by lifelong media consumption into supporting one or the other anyway.

Whenever I write against the US government’s longstanding agenda to replace the leadership of Tehran with a compliant puppet regime, I know with absolute certainty that I’m going to spend the rest of my time online arguing with Trump supporters and lifelong Republicans. Whenever I write against the US government’s longstanding agenda to do the same in Syria, I know with absolute certainty that I’m going to be arguing predominantly with so-called centrist liberals.

At no time has this ever failed to occur.

I’ve spent the last few days arguing with Trump supporters who are telling me I’m crazy for not celebrating the death of an Iranian general they had no idea existed one week ago, and many of these pro bono State Department propagandists began following my work because they liked what I’ve been saying about Syria.

Conversely, all the fauxgressives and liberal interventionists who spent all last month telling me I’m a monster for writing about leaked OPCW documents showing we were lied to about an alleged 2018 chemical weapons incident have been staying out of my social media notifications completely these past four days.

It is truly bizarre. And it is truly, deeply, profoundly stupid.

It is truly, deeply and profoundly stupid because the agenda to topple Iran’s government and the agenda to topple Syria’s government are not two separate agendas. They are the same. Supporting one while opposing the other is like wanting to shoot someone in the head but being morally opposed to shooting them in the heart.

Syria and Iran are allies. Eliminating one government necessarily hurts the other. Iran has been helping Syria to win the war against foreign-backed extremist proxy fighters who nearly succeeded in toppling Damascus before its allies stepped in, and should Syria succeed in rebuilding itself (something the Trump administration is actively preventing it from doing) we can be sure it would return the favor when called upon.

The US government’s agenda to “take out” all noncompliant governments in the Middle East is completely removed from any consideration for American party politics. It’s one unified agenda, and the more the imperial blob succeeds in weakening any of the remaining unabsorbed nations, the easier it gets to absorb the others.

Supporting regime change in Iran but not Syria, or vice-versa, is for this reason an inherently absurd position to take. If you opposed Obama’s attempt to topple Damascus via Timber Sycamore-armed proxies, it’s absurd for you to support any maneuvers which could lead to the elimination of Syria’s key ally in that fight. If you oppose Trump’s current warmongering toward Iran, it’s absurd for you to support the elimination of one of Iran’s remaining friends in the region.

If Iran falls you may be sure that Syria will fall next, and vice versa. It’s the same box being ticked; you’re just arguing over whether it should be a left-handed or right-handed check mark.

But such is the strength of propaganda. The perception managers of the US war machine have successfully manipulated the voting public into a debate not about whether regime change interventionism should happen, but which regime change intervention should happen first.

In a sense it’s quite brilliant; we may be quite sure that government agency departments responsible for domestic perception management on US foreign policy have discussed this precise dynamic at length. But in another sense it’s quite mundane: the recent Republican presidents have pursued regime change in Iran, while Obama pursued it in Syria, so Republicans support Republican interventions while Democrats support Democratic ones.

This has nothing to do with any substantial difference in these agendas (again, it’s actually one agenda) and everything to do with what each faction can be more easily propagandized toward. Liberal hearts are easier to grab with horror stories about a monster who gasses babies for no reason and less concerned about refugee crises and the persecution of Syrian Christians, while Republicans are much easier to manipulate into despising a theocracy run by Muslims.

And of course there’s overlap; people who prioritize mass murder above all else like John Bolton and Lindsey Graham will cheer enthusiastically for as much military interventionism as they can get in either country (or any country, really). But by and large, especially among the rank-and-file, people tend to support the interventions their respective presidents propagandized them into supporting. Propaganda is pretty much the only thing the presidential “bully pulpit” is used for.

Because Iraq has poisoned the idea, each mainstream faction may deny actually wanting the US to oust the government of Iran or Syria. Trump supporters who still stand by the anti-interventionist platform he falsely campaigned on may say “I don’t want war with Iran, I just want Iranians to get their freedom and I think it’s awesome they killed Solamumi or however you spell it.” Liberals might say “I don’t want interventionism! I just support the Freedom Fighters™️ in Idlib and want Assad to stop murdering civilians for fun and sexual gratification.” But circulating propaganda narratives about governments targeted for regime change is supporting regime change. You’re participating in it as surely as if you’d deployed the Tomahawk missiles yourself.

Yesterday someone told me that everyone at Qassem Soleimani’s incredibly massive funeral procession was attending because they were forced to. When I asked him if he was claiming that every single one of those millions of people were publicly mourning because they’d been literally forced at gunpoint, he told me no: many were forced in the sense that state propaganda was all they’d ever known, so they were psychologically coerced into grieving Soleimani.

“I don’t accept that your ‘state propaganda their whole lives’ model is any more coercive or fascistic than the kind that causes Americans to turn up to pro- and anti-Trump rallies,” I said. “Americans are no less propagandized than Iranians. If anything it’s worse, since Americans don’t know they’re being propagandized.”

“You’ve got it backwards,” he said. “Iranians don’t know they’re being propagandized because they only have one source of information. The U.S. knows it because we have sides screaming it to other sides all the time and the freedom of information and thought to come to our own conclusions.”

“Nonsense,” I replied. “Nearly all Americans are propagandized to the gills. They’re probably the most aggressively propagandized population on earth, just because so much depends on their swallowing propaganda. It’s just a more scientific sort.”

“And yet here we are, talking about it freely without worrying about swallowing a bullet,” he said.

“Here I am arguing with a man who just so happens to be striving very, very hard to convince me to swallow the exact same narrative that Mike Pompeo is trying to convince me to swallow,” I replied.

The greatest asset of the propagandists is the belief that we haven’t been propagandized.