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The frenetic mass media propaganda campaign against Julian Assange was easily the creepiest and most Orwellian thing I’ve ever witnessed. And now it is silent. It did its job and then disappeared, before the public could really notice what was happening. It’s absolutely stunning.

You wouldn’t know it now, but between late 2016 and Assange’s arrest social media was full of blue-checkmarked narrative managers falling all over each other to be the first to come up with the day’s hottest smear painting a heroic journalist as a villain. Day after day after day. Smearing Assange was one of the easiest ways for an aspiring journalist to show current and prospective employers that you’re on the side of the empire. He was a soft target you could kick to signal that you’ll say whatever the Pentagon wants so you can climb the media ladder.

The smear campaign pervaded every political faction in every part of the US-centralized power alliance. Where they couldn’t get away with openly smearing him they circulated rightist psyops about Trump and Assange secretly working together and the extradition actually helping Assange, which was effectively the same as smearing him. The overwhelming majority of mainstream opinions about Assange are the result not of his work or the life he’s lived, but of a concerted propaganda campaign the majority of which took place between late 2016 and Assange’s arrest in April 2019. People just aren’t aware they’ve been propagandized.

The smear campaign went silent so quickly because it is now impossible to paint yourself as a brave up-punching journalist while smearing someone who is being openly prosecuted for journalism. So they’ve slinked off into the shadows, hoping we’ll forget what they did. Let’s not.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Mass Media Propaganda Is Enemy #1: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

December 27, 2020

Mass Media Propaganda Is Enemy #1: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

The most Orwellian tool of our rulers which does the most damage and affects the most lives is not surveillance, nor police militarization, nor government secrecy, but domestic mass media propaganda. It’s also the most overlooked. It’s good to protest the other mechanisms of authoritarian control, but propaganda is enemy number one.

You don’t need the ability to spy on dissident groups if you can control public thought enough to prevent those groups from forming in the first place. You don’t need the ability to quash public uprisings if you can propagandize people away from rising up at all. And they can. And they do.

The ability of the plutocratic class to manipulate public thought at mass scale is the single most overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of our society. It warps the entirety of our political spectrum, all our thinking, all our discourse, and what we perceive as normal. And you just don’t see people fighting it. The ACLU isn’t protecting people’s mental sovereignty from the manipulations of sociopathic government-aligned oligarchs. People aren’t taking the media-owning class to the Supreme Court for brazen election interference. People aren’t taking to the streets protesting it. But they could.

In terms of the effect it has on society, no control tool comes remotely close to advancing as many interests of the powerful against the interests of the people as domestic plutocrat-sponsored propaganda. Nothing will change until people start noticing and resisting this.

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Theories about elite conspiracies to shore up more control over the population tend to greatly underestimate how much control they already have.

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Wanting the US government to have a “competent leader” is like wanting a serial killer to be skilled at evading detection.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Hydrogen Hoax: Confessions of a Former Hydrogenist

December 25, 2020

The Hydrogen Hoax: Confessions of a Former Hydrogenist

The “hydrogen economy” is like a zombie: no matter how many times it is slain, it keeps coming at you. Like a Hollywood zombie movie, hydrogen seems to exert a tremendous fascination because it is being sold to people as a way to keep doing everything we have been doing without any need for sacrifices or for changing our ways. Unfortunately, reality is not a movie, and the reverse is also true. Hydrogen is a pie in the sky that delays the real innovation that would make it possible to phase out fossil fuels from the world’s energy mix. (image source)

This is a re-worked and updated version of a post that I published in 2007, in Italian, during one more of the periodic returns of the “hydrogen economy,” a fashionable idea that leads nowhere. For more technical information on the hydrogen scam, see the exhaustive treatment by Antonio Turiel in three posts on his blog “Crash Oil”, in Spanish, “The Hydrogen Fever” One, two, and Three, all written by “Beamspot.”

Confessions of a Former Hydrogenist

I think it was in 2004 when an Italian company based in Tuscany developed a hydrogen car and organized a presentation for the president of the Tuscan regional government. I was invited to attend the demonstration as the local fuel cell expert.

So, I showed up in the courtyard of the Tuscan government building where a truck had unloaded the car. It turned out to be a modified Fiat Multipla that you may know as having been awarded the 2014 prize for the ugliest car ever made. Of course, the ugliness of the car was not a problem, but the whole idea was. It was not a fuel cell car, but simply an ordinary car fitted with two compressed hydrogen cylinders under the body. The hydrogen went directly to the carburetor to operate the internal combustion engine.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Big Media: Selling the Narrative and Crushing Dissent for Fun and Profit

December 21, 2020

Big Media: Selling the Narrative and Crushing Dissent for Fun and Profit

The profit-maximizing Big Tech / Big Media Totalitarian regime hasn’t just strangled free speech and civil liberties; it’s also strangled democracy.

The U.S. has entered an extremely dangerous time, and the danger has nothing to do with the Covid virus. Indeed, the danger long preceded the pandemic, which has served to highlight how far down the road to ruin we have come.

The danger we are ill-prepared to deal with is the consolidation of the private-sector media and its unification of content into one Approved Narrative which is for sale to the highest bidders. This is the perfection of for-profit Totalitarianism in which dissent is crushed, dissenters punished and billions of dollars are reaped in managing the data and content flow of the one Approved Narrative.

So don’t post content containing the words (censored), (censored) or (censored), or you’ll be banned, shadow-banned, demonetized, demonized and marginalized. Your voice will be erased from public access via the Big Media platforms and you will effectively be disappeared but without any visible mess or evidence–or recourse in the courts.

That’s the competitive advantage of for-profit Totalitarianism–no legal recourse against the suppression of free speech and dissent. And if you’re shadow-banned as I was, you won’t even know just how severely your free speech has been suppressed because the Big Tech platforms are black boxes: no one outside the profit-maximizing corporation knows what its algorithms and filters actually do or exactly what happens to the disappeared / shadow-banned.

Shadow-banning is an invisible toxin to free speech: if you’re shadow-banned, you won’t even know that the audience for your posts, tweets, etc. has plummeted to near-zero and others can no longer retweet your content…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Washington Post Can’t Stop Babbling About Russians ‘Hacking Our Minds’

December 19, 2020

The Washington Post Can’t Stop Babbling About Russians ‘Hacking Our Minds’

The Washington Post has published another article warning its readers that the Russians are “hacking our minds”, this one authored by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.

“Russia hasn’t just hacked our computer systems. It’s hacked our minds.” blares the ridiculous, propagandistic headline for an article about “the Russian model” of propaganda which “rests on the principle that people get convinced when they hear the same message many times from a variety of sources, no matter how biased.”

Which is funny, since this is not the first time WaPo itself has repeated this cartoonish narrative about Russian mind-hackers.

Just two months ago the Washington Post editorial board published an article titled “The U.S. may be safe from foreign interference in this election. But what about perception hacking?“, which opens with the line “Russia and other adversaries may not need to hack the election if they can hack something else: our minds.”

The paranoid screed unironically argued that Russia is using its super powerful propaganda engine to make people paranoid and doubtful of US electoral systems, which could actually have an adverse effect on the US election. As though telling people their mental and perceptual faculties are being hacked by a hostile foreign enemy with the goal of influencing the election would not make them paranoid and doubtful of US electoral systems.

Zakaria’s piece builds on this already established theme by parroting the still completely evidence-free claim that Russia was responsible for the far-reaching cyber intrusion into the IT company SolarWinds, whose cybersecurity we recently learned was left so unprotected that its update server’s password was literally “solarwinds123”.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Instagram is Using False “Fact-Checking” to Protect Joe Biden’s Crime Record From Criticisms

December 17, 2020

Instagram is Using False “Fact-Checking” to Protect Joe Biden’s Crime Record From Criticisms

The Facebook-owned platform’s denunciation of a well-established view of Biden shows the dangers of internet censorship and the fraudulent use of “fact-checking.”

Presidential candidates former vice president Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) during the Democratic presidential debate at Tyler Perry Studios on Wednesday, November 20, 2019, in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

A long-standing and vehement criticism of Joe Biden is that legislation he championed as a Senator in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly his crime bill of 1994, contributed to the mass incarceration of Americans generally and African-Americans specifically.

Among the many on the left and libertarian right who have voiced this criticism (along with President Trump) is then-Senator Kamala Harris, who said during the 2020 Democratic primary race that Biden’s “crime bill — that 1994 crime bill — it did contribute to mass incarceration in our country.” When Hillary Clinton was running for President in 2015, Bill Clinton, who as president signed Biden’s bill into law, told the NAACP: “I signed a bill that made the problem worse. And I want to admit it.”

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) told Biden during a 2019 presidential debate: “There are people right now in prison for life for drug offenses because you stood up and used that tough-on-crime phony rhetoric that got a lot of people elected but destroyed communities like mine.” Booker then said in an interview with The Huffington Post that that Biden’s “crime bill was shameful, what it did to black and brown communities like mine [and] low-income communities from Appalachia to rural Iowa,” also denouncing it for “overwhelmingly putting people in prison for nonviolent drug offenses that members of Congress and the Senate admit to breaking now.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bravery Is…

December 13, 2020

Bravery Is…

Having trouble interpreting what’s really going on in the world? JP Sears and his fellow ‘thinkers’ explain what the media would like you to think…

Of course you can always trust the media to lead the way to the promised land of truth.

War and Censorship — Difficult Times in Italy

December 5, 2020

War and Censorship — Difficult Times in Italy

A post by Miguel Martinez, originally published in Italian on his blog on 23/11/2020. Italy was the first European country to be struck by the COVID-19 pandemic and the first to implement a national lockdown. At that time, Italians would display the flag on their balconies and sing aloud in a show of national unity. That time is past and gone.

The media gives the alarm: news of danger and a call to arms, together. When the message is inseparable from mobilization, it becomes propaganda. Since “propaganda” today has a bad name, let us immediately specify: propaganda can say absolutely true things and defend right causes, but it remains always propaganda.

The state of mobilization puts an end to disputes: in war, everyone must be in solidarity around a human figure, the leader, able to embody all passions.

Young people run to enlist volunteers. Fear, excitement, optimism. It’s Gonna Be Okay!

We grit our teeth, citizens cleanse themselves gel and unmask the traitors, actually mask them – but we will win soon!

People who, until the night before were ready to file a complaint because they were not served the cocktail they had requested, or because the plane left five minutes late, meekly lock themselves in their homes, place the tricolor flag out of the window, and prepares to see the enemy fall to the ground.

Above: “I stay home — checkmate to the coronavirus”

The first deaths are celebrated: both as innocent victims of the wickedness of the enemy, and as brave fighters.

“A nurse dies of coronavirus refuses to see her husband for the last time and saves his life”

But there are also the first victories, a united people, let’s open the windows, it’s spring!

Our leader is leading us to triumph and we will dance in Sardinia all summer!

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Obama Is An Asshole, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

December 4, 2020

Obama Is An Asshole, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

US empire: Assassinates scientists, invades countries, topples governments, circles the planet with military bases, deliberately starves civilians to death with sanctions, threatens the world with nuclear weapons.

Also the US empire: “Iran must begin acting like a normal country.”

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Obama’s job is to tell you that the ruling establishment which murders, oppresses and exploits people all day every day is quite progressive actually and the people who oppose it are immature lunatics who should be scoffed at.

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If you killed someone that’s all you’d be known for. When a US president kills thousands upon thousands of people all mainstream discourse is about his sound fiscal policy and ability to sink a three-pointer.

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Nice guy fascism: A murderous and tyrannical political ideology whose iron-fisted agendas of oppression, exploitation and violent domination are hidden behind lip service to progressivism, diverse cabinet picks, and nice tweets.

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The powerful are screwing us and there are more of us than there are of them. An entire culture and information ecosystem has been deliberately constructed around keeping a critical mass of us from awakening to this one basic fact.

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Any issue of international conflict involving the US-centralized empire is going to be awash with western media propaganda marketed to western audiences. No one who ignores this indisputable reality is able to understand any major international news story.

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It’s so weird how rich and powerful people are pouring massive amounts of wealth and manpower into manipulating our minds every single day and it’s not the main thing we talk about all the time.

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Biden is like if everyone suddenly started gushing poetically about how wonderful and refreshing and inclusive the Chevron logo is.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Oligarchic Imperialism Is The New Dominant World Religion

November 27, 2020

Oligarchic Imperialism Is The New Dominant World Religion

I was just watching a gaggle of blue-checkmarked narrative managers attack progressive commentators Katie Halper and Briahna Joy Gray on Twitter for platforming antiwar journalist Rania Khalek on the grounds that Khalek is an “Assadist”, which is imperialist for “someone who opposes western imperialism in Syria”.

At no point do any of these narrative managers bother to address the actual things these women were discussing together or why anything Khalek was saying in their video conference was wrong. They do not feel the need to do such a thing, because they have this label, “Assadist”, which they can pin on one of the speakers and thereby reject one hundred percent of her work and one hundred percent of the people who give her a platform from which to speak. They feel no need to address the arguments, because they have a label which they all agree means they can completely un-person someone who opposes western regime change agendas in a specific region.

There are many such labels that are used to exclude people from positions of influence and power for simply disagreeing with the official doctrine of status quo oligarchic imperialism in any way. “Assadist” is one of them; it allows someone to be completely marginalized from platforms of significant influence without anyone ever needing to admit that they’re simply depriving anyone of a platform who criticized the way the US power alliance used proxy armies and propaganda campaigns in a campaign to topple Damascus. “Kremlin asset” is another, as are “conspiracy theorist”, “tankie”, or “[insert imperialism-targeted leader] apologist”.

In reality, these labels are interchangeable with the word “heretic”. They mean “Someone who disagrees with the mainstream consensus religion of oligarchic imperialism”.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Demanding Silicon Valley Suppress “Hyper-Partisan Sites” in Favor of “Mainstream News” (The NYT) is a Fraud

November 27, 2020

Demanding Silicon Valley Suppress “Hyper-Partisan Sites” in Favor of “Mainstream News” (The NYT) is a Fraud

The corporate news organizations masquerading as reliable and non-partisan are, in fact, as hyper-partisan as any sites on the internet, and spread as much misinformation.

The most prolific activism demanding more Silicon Valley censorship is found in the nation’s largest news outlets: the media reporters of CNN, the “disinformation” unit of NBC News, and especially the tech reporters of The New York Times. That is where the most aggressive and sustained pro-internet-censorship campaigns are waged.

Due in part to a self-interested desire to re-establish their monopoly on discourse by crushing any independent or dissenting voices, and in part by a censorious and arrogant mindset which convinces them that only those of their worldview and pedigree have a right to be heard, they largely devote themselves to complaining that Facebook, Google and Twitter are not suppressing enough speech. It is hall-monitor tattletale whining masquerading as journalism: petulantly complaining that tech platforms are permitting speech that, in their view, ought instead be silenced.

In Tuesday’s New York Times, three of those censorious tech reporters — Kevin Roose, Mike Isaac, and Sheera Frenkel — published an article on Facebook’s post-election deliberations over how to alter its algorithms to prevent the spread of what they deem “misinformation” regarding the election. The most consequential change they implemented, The New York Times explained, was one in which “hyperpartisan pages” are repressed in favor of promoting “a spike in visibility for big, mainstream publishers like CNN, The New York Times and NPR” — a change the Paper of Record heralded as having fostered “a calmer, less divisive Facebook.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Uncertainty and the Future

November 27, 2020

Uncertainty and the Future

QUESTION: I would imagine that if Trump is able to prevail in the courts and earn a second term social unrest would be profound but what would be the effects on the markets?

ANSWER: There is still a shot that Trump can prevail if he can stop Biden from reaching 270 votes and that would throw it into the House of Representatives where each state would get one vote and Trump would win in that scenario as took place during the election of 1824. But PA has certified Biden as the winner and then a state judge ruled against the governor. Then lawsuits against Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin raise the stakes of perhaps preventing Biden from getting 270 sending it into the House of Representatives.

What is clear from Socrates is that civil unrest will rise no matter what. If Trump can prevail or the Republicans can keep the Senate, then the Great Reset agenda will be stalled. But Biden can still use executive orders if he takes the White House to try to impose lockdowns etc overriding Congress. In Theory, Trump could have used executive orders ordering the State to end lockdowns but that would have been used against him and the Democrats argued he lacked that power. With Biden, they would say he has it.

My OPINION is just an OPINION. This year has been off the charts and it is still not over. Socrates just follows the markets and that is the only tool we have that is not subject to personal opinion which I seriously doubt anyone will be correct in this mess other than sheer luck. Nobody has lived through this type of market. The press attributes the rally to the vaccine. Let’s be honest here, that is propaganda. The Dow took the lead only because of international capital flows.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

New York Times Job Listing Shows How Western Propaganda Operates

November 21, 2020

New York Times Job Listing Shows How Western Propaganda Operates

People who are only just beginning to research what’s wrong with the world often hold an assumption that mainstream news reporters are just knowingly propagandizing people all the time. That they sit around scheming up ways to deceive their audiences into supporting war, oligarchy and oppression for the benefit of their plutocratic masters.

Once you’ve learned a bit more you realize it’s not quite happening that way. Most mainstream news reporters are not really witting propagandists–those are to be found more in plutocrat-funded think tanks and other narrative management firms, and in the opaque government agencies which feed news media outlets information designed to advance their interests. The predominant reason mainstream news reporters say things that aren’t true is because in order to be hired by mainstream news outlets, you need to jack your mind into a power-serving worldview that is not based in truth.

A recent job listing for a New York Times Russia Correspondent which was flagged by Russia-based journalist Bryan MacDonald illustrates this dynamic perfectly. The listing reads as follows:

Vladimir Putin’s Russia remains one of the biggest stories in the world.

It sends out hit squads armed with nerve agents against its enemies, most recently the opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. It has its cyber agents sow chaos and disharmony in the West to tarnish its democratic systems, while promoting its faux version of democracy. It has deployed private military contractors around the globe to secretly spread its influence. At home, its hospitals are filling up fast with Covid patients as its president hides out in his villa.

If that sounds like a place you want to cover, then we have good news: We will have an opening for a new correspondent as Andy Higgins takes over as our next Eastern Europe Bureau Chief early next year.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Investigation: How Pesticide Companies Are Marketing Themselves as a Solution to Climate Change

November 20, 2020

Investigation: How Pesticide Companies Are Marketing Themselves as a Solution to Climate Change

This article was published as part of the launch of DeSmog’s Agribusiness Database, where you can find a record of companies and organisations’ current messaging on climate change, lobbying around climate action, and histories of climate science denial.

“Like a pandemic, climate change is an inevitable threat that we must address before it is too late,” reads a June 2020 statement. “As the economy and agriculture begin to build back with the gradual easing of the COVID-19 restrictions, we need to support a recovery for farmers that puts the fight against climate change and biodiversity loss at its core.”

The speaker? Not Greta Thunberg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Al Gore. Not, in fact, any environmentalist you might care to imagine. Instead, it was Erik Fyrwald, Chief Executive Officer of Syngenta Group — one of the world’s five largest pesticides manufacturers, a major consumer of fossil fuels, and now a company marketing its products as a solution to climate change.

Syngenta’s messaging — alongside similar campaigns from the other “big five” global pesticides producers Bayer, BASF, Corteva and FMC — reflects a sudden transformation within the agricultural world.

After decades of denial and delay by big agribusiness, the pesticides industry now appears to have become a climate champion.

‘Waking up on climate change’

The pesticides market is dominated by a small handful of companies — Bayer (which acquired Monsanto in 2018), Corteva (formerly Dow and DuPont), Syngenta, BASF and FMC — whose hazardous products a United Nations report said have “catastrophic impacts on the environment, human health, and society as a whole” amid a global insect die-off and legal battles over carcinogenic effects of products once marketed as harmless.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Biden state media appointee advocated using propaganda against Americans and ‘rethinking’ First Amendment

November 17, 2020

Richard Stengel propaganda censorship Biden

Biden state media appointee advocated using propaganda against Americans and ‘rethinking’ First Amendment

The head of the Joe Biden transition team for the US Agency for Global Media, Richard Stengel, has branded himself the “chief propagandist,” urged the government to use propaganda against its “own population,” and called to “rethink” the First Amendment.

Richard Stengel, the top state media appointee for US President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team, has enthusiastically defended the use of propaganda against Americans.

“My old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the chief propagandist,” Stengel said in 2018. “I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population. And I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.”

Richard “Rick” Stengel was the longest serving under-secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs in US history.

At the State Department under President Barack Obama, Stengel boasted that he “started the only entity in government, non-classified entity, that combated Russian disinformation.” That institution was known as the Global Engagement Center, and it amounted to a massive vehicle for advancing US government propaganda around the world.

A committed crusader in what he openly describes as a global “information war,” Stengel has proudly proclaimed his dedication to the carefully management of the public’s access to information.

Stengel outlined his worldview in a book he published this June, entitled “Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It.”

Stengel has proposed “rethinking” the First Amendment that guarantees the freedom of speech and press. ..

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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