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The debate rages on over whether or not House progressives should force a floor vote on Medicare for All by threatening not to re-elect Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker, with one side arguing that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of “The Squad” were elected to advance progressive policies so that’s what they should do, and the other side arguing that AOC is cool so shut up and leave her alone.

As we discussed yesterday, Americans will not be given Medicare for All despite overwhelming public support because an immense amount of power depends on keeping them in a state of financial struggle so they don’t interfere in the affairs of a nation which serves as the hub of a global empire. The US political system does not exist to serve the interests of Americans, it exists to serve the interests of the empire. No part of that system is there to protect the people from the powerful; it’s there to protect the powerful from the people.

There’s a misconception which spans almost the entire US political spectrum, and that is the idea that some part of the system serves the people. Progressives believe they can use the electoral process to obtain economic justice for Americans. Trumpers believe the judicial system is going to overturn Biden’s win any minute now. Liberals believed Mueller was going to drag the entire Trump camp out of the White House in chains.

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

You Have No Obligation To Conform To A Wildly Sick Society

December 14, 2020

You Have No Obligation To Conform To A Wildly Sick Society

You have no obligation to conform to a society which brands you a Russian propagandist for criticizing the most powerful and destructive institutions on earth.

You have no obligation to conform to a society which brands you a Chinese propagandist for advocating peace and detente instead of loyalty to the continual unipolar domination of a sociopathic global empire at all cost.

You have no obligation to conform to a society which brands you a dictator apologist any time you oppose murderous interventionism and the lies which are universally used to manufacture support for it.

You have no obligation to conform to a society which brands you a crazy conspiracy theorist for believing the plutocratic media distorts the truth to protect the interests of the plutocratic class.

You have no obligation to conform to a society which brands you a deranged extremist for saying the system which has marched our species to the brink of extinction is not working.

You have no obligation to conform to a society which brands you a freak and an outcast for saying everyone should be given what they need in a world of plenty instead of letting people die while elite predators hoard far more than they need.

You have no obligation to conform to a society where you are branded a dangerous radical for saying that Black and Indigenous lives matter and that police funding should be re-routed to programs which actually work.

You have no obligation to conform to a society where you are branded a misandrist bitch for saying rape culture is a problem and more consciousness needs to be brought to the power dynamics of gender.

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

In An Insane World, Revolution Is The Moderate Position

December 8, 2020

In An Insane World, Revolution Is The Moderate Position

It should not be considered radical or extremist to oppose mass murder for profit and power.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to oppose the globe-spanning power alliance that is perpetrating most of that mass murder on the world stage today.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to oppose the existence of secretive government agencies which have extensive histories of committing horrific crimes.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to say that everyone ought to have a basic standard of living instead of being deprived of food, shelter and medicine if they have the wrong imaginary numbers in their bank account.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to oppose the existence of a small class of elites who use their vast fortunes to manipulate our entire society toward their advantage.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to want plutocrats and government agencies to stop deliberately manipulating people’s minds using mass media propaganda.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to want everyone to have an equal chance of getting their voice heard in our information ecosystem instead of a few select power-serving lackeys.

It should not be considered radical or extremist to want a society that is ruled by the many for the benefit of the many instead of one that is run by the few for the benefit of the few.

It is very normal, sane and healthy to want a world where everyone has what they need to live, where everyone is free to do, say and think whatever they like as long as it isn’t hurting anyone else, and where nobody is being murdered by powerful governments….

…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…

The Streetlight Effect: When People Look Within The System For Solutions To The System

December 3, 2020

The Streetlight Effect: When People Look Within The System For Solutions To The System

A policeman sees a drunk man crawling around on his hands and knees at night and asks what the problem is. The drunk man says he’s trying to find his keys, so the officer gets down and starts searching with him. For a few minutes they crawl around hunting for the missing key ring by the light of the street lamp before the policeman stands up frustrated.

“Are you sure this is where you lost them?” he asks.

“This isn’t where I lost them,” replies the drunk.

“Then why are we searching here??”

“It’s where the light is.”

This old joke is the source of the name for the streetlight effect, one of the many, many glitches in human cognition which cause us to tend toward misperception of our world and the way it’s happening. This one describes our tendency to only look for things where it’s easy to look for them, and it distorts our understanding of subjects from science to big data analysis to history to spirituality.

It’s like the scene from the children’s animated movie The Land Before Time where one of the young dinosaurs knows the way to the Great Valley but the others vote to travel a different direction to search for it, not because they have any reason to believe it’s the right way, but because it is easier. One dinosaur says “I’m going the easy way!” while the other yells out in exasperation “But it’s the wrong way!”

It’s also like the way people keep trying to fight oppressive political systems by working within those systems, arguing that it will be much easier to defeat the oppression machine using the tools the machine gave them.

…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…

To Be A Rich And Famous Journalist: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

November 19, 2020

To Be A Rich And Famous Journalist: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Americans: healthcare please

US government: Sorry did you say more war ships in the South China Sea?

Americans: no, healthcare

US government: Alright, you drive a hard bargain. Here are more war ships in the South China Sea.

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Hi I’m Sleazy McPundit with WMD News. To explain why more internet censorship is needed to fight disinformation, here’s a panel of millionaires who are paid to lie to you.

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Biden in 2020 is just Obama in 2008 if you aged him 30 years, made him white, and replaced all the hope and change talk with “Fuck you. No.”

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Biden’s presidency looks set to be worse than Obama’s in every way. There will be a backlash against this. It is absolutely imperative that the US left fight like never before to make sure it’s more of a leftist backlash than a rightist one, or things will get very ugly. If you don’t take the fight to the libs, the right will. If you don’t seize control of the dominant narrative, the right will. This is 100 percent guaranteed. You need to start dealing with this now unless you want something far uglier than Trump down the road in the near term.

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The longer they can keep you fixated on Trump’s impotent post-election tantrum the longer they can keep you from noticing the incoming administration full of warmongers, corporate cronies and authoritarians currently setting up shop under the next president.

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A full withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan would have been something. A partial withdrawal is just PR. If you’re not making it difficult to simply put the troops back when you’re gone, you’re not doing anything.

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

From Propaganda To Ego, All Our Major Problems Are Due To Misperception

November 14, 2020

From Propaganda To Ego, All Our Major Problems Are Due To Misperception

The Biden transition team responsible for ushering in the nation’s Return to Decency™️ is as packed full of military-industrial complex lackeys and imperialist sociopaths as you’d expect, with one such manipulator being the Obama administration’s “chief propagandist” Richard Stengel.

The Grayzone‘s Ben Norton has a new write-up on TIME Magazine editor-turned State Department spinmeister-turned MSNBC pundit-turned Biden transition team official Stengel, documenting the political insider’s calls to “rethink” the First Amendment in the name of practicality and his support for the use of propaganda both at home and abroad by the US government.

“There’s another word for master narratives: it’s called history,” Stengel said at a 2018 event organized by the immensely influential think tank Council on Foreign Relations. “Basically every country creates their own narrative story. My old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the chief propagandist. 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.”

“Having once been almost a First Amendment absolutist, I have really moved my position on it, because I just think for practical reasons in society, we have to kind of rethink some of those things,” Stengel said at the same event of the difficulties posed by people freely sharing information on the internet.

Think tank conferences are great, because it’s the best opportunity for ordinary people to see the thought streams of power at their most honest. Think tank denizens love showing off how much they know in front of such audiences, so they’ll often get baited into revealing a lot more than they normally would.

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

Americans Didn’t Vote Against Trump, They Voted Against More Media Psychological Abuse

November 11, 2020

Americans Didn’t Vote Against Trump, They Voted Against More Media Psychological Abuse

The word “coup” is being thrown about in American liberal media today, not because US liberals suddenly became uncomfortable with the fact that their nation constantly stages coups and topples governments around the world as a matter of routine policy, but because they are all talking about (you guessed it) Donald Trump.

To be clear, none of the high-powered influencers who have been promoting the use of this word actually believe there is any possibility that Donald Trump will somehow remain in office after January of next year when he loses his legal appeals against the official results of the election, which would be the thing that a coup is. There is no means or institutional support through which the sitting president could accomplish such a thing. This is not a coup, it’s a glorified temper tantrum. Trump will leave office at the appointed time.

The establishment narrative managers are not terrifying their audiences with this word because they believe there is any danger of a coup actually happening. They are doing it because it’s their last chance to use Trump to psychologically abuse their audiences for clicks.

Last year the Pacific Standard published a report on “Trump Anxiety Disorder” or “Trump Hypersensitive Unexplained Disorder,” which it describes as follows:

As the possibility of a Hillary Clinton victory began to slip away—and the possibility of a Donald Trump presidency became more and more certain—the contours of the new age of American anxiety began to take shape. In a 2017 column, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank described this phenomenon as “Trump Hypertensive Unexplained Disorder”: Overeating…

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

No Matter Who Wins, The War Machine Wins

October 24, 2020

No Matter Who Wins, The War Machine Wins

The US government is pushing yet another unproven election meddling narrative about yet another disobedient government, this time targeting Iran and Russia.

This is exhausting. Do I really need to type this bullshit out?

Fine. Okay. Here we go again:

At a press conference with Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and FBI Director Christopher Wray it was announced that Iran and Russia have separately obtained some voter registration information, and that Iran has been using its information to send bizarre threatening emails to Democratic voters with the goal of swaying the election.

As usual, no evidence of these allegations has been provided. Democrats are saying this completely unsubstantiated claim proves the Iranians want to help Trump, Republicans are saying it proves they’re trying to help Biden. Both are ridiculous.

The Reuters write-up on the allegations cites one source who says it’s unclear who was actually behind the threatening emails, and that “the evidence remains inconclusive” that Iran had anything to do with them. Washington Post‘s report notes that the allegation against Iran “was leveled without specific evidence”, and that metadata gathered from the emails points to “the use of servers in Saudi Arabia, Estonia, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, according to numerous analysts.” No attempt is made to address this discrepancy.

If the US government held a press conference announcing that Iran is in the Middle East I’d have to check a map just to make sure it’s not an island in the South Pacific or something, that’s how much constant, shameless lying they’ve been doing about that nation lately. There is no reason whatsoever to believe unproven assertions by opaque government agencies who have an extensive and well-documented history of lying about governments they want to target.

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

‘The Emails Are Russian’ Will Be The Narrative, Regardless Of Facts Or Evidence

October 19, 2020

‘The Emails Are Russian’ Will Be The Narrative, Regardless Of Facts Or Evidence

Fight it all you want, but there’s nothing you can do. “The emails are Russian” is going to be the official dominant narrative in mainstream political discourse, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Resistance is futile.

Like the Russian hacking narrative, the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, the Russian bounties in Afghanistan narrative, and any other evidence-free framing of events that simultaneously advances pre-planned cold war agendas, is politically convenient for the Democratic party and generates clicks and ratings, the narrative that the New York Post publication of Hunter Biden’s emails is a Russian operation is going to be hammered and hammered and hammered until it becomes the mainstream consensus. This will happen regardless of facts and evidence, up to and including rock solid evidence that Hunter Biden’s emails were not published as a result of a Russian operation.

This is happening. It’s following the same formula all the other fact-free Russia hysteria narratives have followed. The same media tour by pundits and political operatives saying with no evidence but very assertive voices that Russia is most certainly behind this occurrence and we should all be very upset about it.

“To me, this is just classic textbook Soviet Russian tradecraft at work,” Russiagate founder and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is heard assuring CNN’s audience.

“Joe Biden – and all of us – SHOULD be furious that media outlets are spreading what is very likely Russian propaganda,” begins and eight-part thread by Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, who claims the emails are “Kremlin constructed anti-Biden propaganda.”

“It’s not really surprising at all, this was always the play, but still kind of head-spinning to watch all the players from 2016 run exactly the same hack-leak-smear op in 2020. Even with everyone knowing exactly what’s happening this time,” tweets MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.

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

Imagine If MSM Consistently Applied The Evidentiary Standards It’s Applying To Hunter Biden’s Emails

October 15, 2020

Imagine If MSM Consistently Applied The Evidentiary Standards It’s Applying To Hunter Biden’s Emails

Mainstream media and social media platforms are actively blacking out an October surprise published by The New York Post which purports to show “smoking gun” emails from the laptop of Hunter Biden, son of Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

Both Twitter and Facebook have censored the story on their platforms, the first time we’ve seen the powerful social media giants deplatform a mainstream news media article, both citing concerns about the origins of the emails and an uncertainty about the veracity of the claims.

“Facebook was limiting distribution of the story while its outside fact-checkers reviewed the story’s claims, spokesman Andy Stone said,” reports NPR, adding that “Twitter said it decided to block the story because it couldn’t be sure about the origins of the emails.”

Twitter claims it found the emails to be in violation of its policies banning content which contained private information and its rules against “hacked materials”, both of which would have forbidden all articles sharing the contents of the 2016 WikiLeaks drops if those rules had existed back then. As I warned could happen back in August, these rules have set the stage for the cross-platform censorship of a 2020 October surprise.

There’s a good thread going around Twitter compiling posts that mainstream media reporters have been making in objection to the circulation of Hunter Biden’s emails alongside posts made by those same reporters promoting far more ridiculous and insubstantial allegations, like MSNBC’s virulent Russia conspiracy theorist Kyle Griffin saying nobody should link to the New York Post report because if they do they’ll be “amplifying disinformation”.

A new Reason article discusses how the mass media are not just avoiding the story but actively discouraging it:

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

How Did People Have Conversations Back Before Tech Oligarchs Were There To Police Them?

October 11, 2020

How Did People Have Conversations Back Before Tech Oligarchs Were There To Police Them?

Twitter has announced the rollout of even more censorship policies in the lead-up to the November US presidential election.

“Starting next week, when people attempt to Retweet a Tweet with a misleading information label, they will see a prompt directing them to credible information about the topic before they can amplify it,” Twitter informs us, with “credible information” of course meaning information from the same mass media outlets who’ve lied to us about every American war throughout their entire existence.

“We’re taking more steps to encourage thoughtful amplification by preventing Tweets that have been ‘followed by’ and ‘liked by’ accounts you don’t follow from showing up in your timeline,” adds Twitter, as though the social media echo chamber that is turning us all into idiots wasn’t bad enough.

This is just the latest in the stack of additional censorship measures that Silicon Valley tech corporations have been rolling out in open coordination with the US government under the banner of protecting American democracy. We may be certain that none of these measures will be rolled back when the election is over.

As my regular readers are no doubt tired of hearing me repeat by now, when you have monopolistic tech corporations which attract the bulk of online communication coordinating with governments to censor speech, what you have is government censorship. As Matt Taibbi recently wrote after the irrational Facebook purge of QAnon cultists, this censorship regime is continually expanding and this expansion is likely to continue, especially in the direction of those who oppose these same establishment power structures that are promoting this censorship.

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

Truth Is The First Casualty In Cold War: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

October 5, 2020

Truth Is The First Casualty In Cold War: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Governments make evidence-free claims which the mass media report uncritically, with ordinary citizens expected to either prove them wrong or shut up and believe. The burden of proof is fallaciously placed on members of the public and tiny indie media outlets with no resources to disprove the claims, instead of on massive news media outlets with abundant wealth and resources. It should be the exact opposite: with unproven government claims ignored until hard proof is provided, and with mass media reporters doing their goddamn jobs.

No institutional changes were made to ensure that the evils of the Iraq invasion wouldn’t be repeated. It’s one of those big, glaring problems people just decided to pretend is resolved, like racism.

Whenever someone says “I oppose Assange’s extradition, but,” everything before the “but” is a lie, and it’s a safe bet that everything after it will be too.

Truth is the first casualty in war. This adage is especially true of cold war, where the absence of hot firepower makes an emphasis on mass-scale psychological operations necessary.

People who tell you that now is not the time for truthful criticisms of Joe Biden are telling you they only like the truth when it’s politically convenient. Do you know what people who only like the truth when it’s politically convenient are called? They’re called liars.

The main thing that will change if Biden wins the election is that when the president does something evil Democrats will shift from saying “I hope you Jill Stein voters are happy” to saying nothing at all.

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

MSM Promotes Yet Another CIA Press Release As News

September 23, 2020

MSM Promotes Yet Another CIA Press Release As News

The Washington Post, whose sole owner is a CIA contractor, has published yet another anonymously sourced CIA press release disguised as a news report which just so happens to facilitate longstanding CIA foreign policy.

In an article titled “Secret CIA assessment: Putin ‘probably directing’ influence operation to denigrate Biden“, WaPo’s virulent neoconservative war pig Josh Rogin describes what was told to him by unnamed sources about the contents of a “secret” CIA document which alleges that Vladimir Putin is “probably” overseeing an interference operation in America’s presidential election.

True to form, at no point does WaPo follow standard journalistic protocol and disclose its blatant financial conflict of interest with the CIA when promoting an unproven CIA narrative which happens to serve the consent-manufacturing agendas of the CIA for its new cold war with Russia.

And somehow in our crazy, propaganda-addled society, this is accepted as “news”.

The CIA has had a hard-on for the collapse of the Russian Federation for many years, and preventing the rise of another multipolar world at all cost has been an open agenda of US imperialism since the fall of the Soviet Union. Indeed it is clear that the escalations we’ve been watching unfold against Russia were in fact planned well in advance of 2016, and it is only by propaganda narratives like this one that consent has been manufactured for a new cold war which imperils the life of every organism on this planet.

There is no excuse for a prominent news outlet publishing a CIA press release disguised as news in facilitation of these CIA agendas. It is still more inexcusable to merely publish anonymous assertions about the contents of that CIA press release.

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

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