Julian Assange left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK.

We must acknowledge the “dodgy nature” of the negotiations with the US DOJ: The deal reached on June 24, was that Assange:

“agrees to plead guilty to ONE felony related to the disclosure of national security information in exchange for his release from Belmarsh Prison in the United Kingdom” (Common Dreams, June 24, 2024)

Holding the Assange Court Case in a Remote “Territorial Court” in the Northern Mariana Islands. Why?

The Northern Mariana are remote islands of 50,000 inhabitants in the Pacific North of Guam which belong to the U.S. Commonwealth.

NOAA CoRIS - Regional Portal - Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands

Confirmed by media reports (CBS, BBC): Assange will not spend time in US custody. He will receive “credit for the time spent incarcerated in the UK”.

“Assange will return to Australia, according to a letter from the Justice Department”.

His guilty plea to only ONE charge is slated to be finalized in the “Remote” “District Court” of the Northern Mariana Islands on June 26.

The Criminalization of Justice? Threat to the First Amendment

What is the End-Game of Assange’s “guilty plea” to be decided upon at the hearings of the “Territorial Court’ of the Northern Mariana Islands?

Assange had agreed to plead guilty to “one felony for conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified information related to U.S. national defense”, as outlined in a DOJ Letter together with other documents (filed in U.S. District Court in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory in the Pacific)

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

The Dangerous Illusion of Scientific Consensus

June 22, 2024

The Dangerous Illusion of Scientific Consensus

Join Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Rav Arora in their new independent media project.

Science is the process by which we learn about the workings of material reality. Though modern innovations – built on the fruits of science – would look like magic to people living only decades ago, they result from the time-tested scientific method. Contrary perhaps to media portrayals of science, the scientific method depends not on the existence of a mythical consensus but rather on structured scientific debates. If there is a consensus, science challenges it with new hypotheses, experiments, logic, and critical thinking. Ironically, science advances because it believes it has never arrived; consensus is the hallmark of dead science.

One of us is a college student with an unpremeditated career in alternative indie journalism. The other is a professor of health policy at Stanford University School of Medicine with an MD, a Ph.D. in economics, and decades of experience writing on infectious disease epidemiology. Despite the wealth of differences in our backgrounds and experiences, we converge on foundational scientific and ethical principles that public health authorities abandoned during the Covid pandemic. Principles like evidence-based medicine, informed consent, and the necessity of scientific debate serve as the bedrock on which the public can have confidence that science and public health work for the benefit of the people rather than regardless of it.

The illusion of scientific consensus throughout the COVID-19 pandemic led to disastrous policies, with lockdowns the primary example. It was clear even on the eve of the lockdowns in 2020 that the economic dislocation caused by them would throw tens of millions worldwide into food insecurity and deep poverty, which has indeed come to pass. It was clear that school closures – in some places lasting two years or longer – would devastate children’s life opportunities and future health and well-being wherever they were implemented…

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

We Approach State Singularity

June 19, 2024

We Approach State Singularity

Many citizens of the West believe that they live in free societies, or something close. But as time goes on, public authorities increasingly insist on having a say in everything.

People cannot build things on their own land without permits. They cannot run businesses without approvals and inspections. They cannot give advice without professional designations. They cannot educate their children outside of state-mandated curricula. They cannot hire employees without triggering a myriad of workplace and tax requirements. They cannot produce and sell milk, cheese, or eggs without a license. They cannot earn money, spend money, or hold property without being taxed, and then taxed again.

Jeffrey Tucker recently described three layers of omnipotent managerial technocracy.

The deep state, he suggested, consists of powerful and secretive central government agencies in the security, intelligence, law enforcement, and financial sectors.

The middle state is a myriad of ubiquitous administrative bodies – agencies, regulators, commissions, departments, municipalities, and many more – run by a permanent bureaucracy.

The shallow state is a plethora of consumer-facing private or semi-private corporations, including banks, Big Media, and huge commercial retail companies, which governments support, protect, subsidize, and pervert. The three layers work together.

For instance, in the financial sector, as Tucker illustrates, the deep state’s Federal Reserve pulls the powerful strings, the middle state’s financial and monetary regulators enforce myriad rules and policies, and the shallow state’s “private” titans like BlackRock and Goldman Sachs dominate commercial activity. It’s a system, Tucker writes, “designed to be impenetrable, permanent, and ever more invasive.”

We are approaching state singularity: the moment when state and society become indistinguishable.

In physics, a “singularity” is a single point in space-time. Inside black holes, gravity crushes volume to zero and mass density is infinite. In computer science, “technological singularity” is unitary artificial superintelligence. At the singularity, everything becomes one thing. Data points converge. Normal laws do not apply.

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

The Biden Construct Exhorts Spineless Press Corps: ‘Play By the Rules’

June 18, 2024

The Biden Construct Exhorts Spineless Press Corps: ‘Play By the Rules’

In this, Our Sacred Democracy™, reporters don’t ask questions they are not granted permission to ask beforehand so that the correct response can be printed in bold 72-point font on a notecard for the alleged president to try to read.

So sayeth the Savior of Democracy™, Keeper of the Faith, the Holy Brandon Construct.

Via The Deadline (emphasis added):

“The White House Correspondents’ Association is objecting to the notion that reporters agreed to any restrictions on the types of questions they could ask of President Joe Biden at a press conference earlier today at the G7 summit in Italy.

Appearing at the press conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Biden took a question from Bloomberg’s Josh Wingrove.

Wingrove asked the president if he would give his assessment of Hamas’ response to the latest ceasefire proposal. ‘Do you believe that they are trying to work towards a deal or is this response against a deal?’ Wingrove asked.

Biden responded, ‘I wish you guys would play by the rules a little bit. I’m here to talk about a critical situation in Ukraine and you asked me about another subject.’”

Recognizing that I’m probably preaching to the Armageddon Prose choir here, I would hope that we’ve long moved past the mythology of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” — the honest truth-teller with a spine who goes to Washington and sets everything right with his forthright devotion to public service or whatever.

This is nonsense; the politician has always been and will always be, with very few exceptions (like Ron Paul), a finger-in-the-wind sleazeball willing to do or say whatever he thinks will advance his personal interests (fame and money and invitations to cocktail parties, mainly).

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

US Targets Journalists Who Criticize Administration’s Foreign Policy

June 9, 2024

US Targets Journalists Who Criticize Administration’s Foreign Policy

State-ordered Purge of Truth-Tellers in Time of War. Scott Ritter Passport Seized, WaPo Smears Indy Journalists

Scott Ritter was pulled off a NY-to-Istanbul flight yesterday by US officials and his passport confiscated in a startling new development in the government’s open drive to censor and silence critics of the Administration’s foreign policies at a time when the United States is supplying billions of dollars in arms to foment wider war in Russia, accelerate the attacks on Gazans and set the stage for war with China over Taiwan.

A Marine veteran and true American patriot, Mr. Ritter is also a noted former Chief UN weapons inspector, author and journalist. He was enroute to Russia to attend an international conference in St. Petersburg.

Mr. Ritter first came to my attention when he testified at a Capitol hearing I sponsored to inquire into the Bush Administration’s plans to attack Iraq. Ritter warned in August of 2002 that a case had not been made for attacking Iraq.

Had Congress listened to Mr. Ritter, the US would have been spared the loss of thousands of our soldiers and the waste of trillions of tax dollars. Over one million Iraqis died as a result of the US attack on their country. America’s financial and moral debt will never be able to be repaid, but would not exist if we had simply looked at the evidence he presented.

Mr. Ritter’s passport was confiscated yesterday by U.S. authorities without explanation.

There are several Constitutional issues at stake here:

The taking of his passport was an illegal seizure, prohibited by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Mr. Ritter asked for, but did not receive a receipt, for the seized passport.

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

Will the Revolution Be Televised?

June 9, 2024

Will the Revolution Be Televised?

That depends. Will we have water? Electricity? Who will revolt and over what?

Helmeted cop with automatic weapon in the air stands in the middle of an intersection as smoke from arson fills the sky. — The Detroit Rebellion of 1967. In the course of five days, 43 were killed, 33 black and 10 white. 1,189 were injured and 7,200 people arrested. National Guardsmen fired over 150,000 bullets during the riot.

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You will not be able to stay home, brother
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and
Skip out for beer during commercials
Because the revolution will not be televised

In 1971, Gil Scott-Heron released the song The Revolution Will Not Be Televised from his album Pieces of Man. It was a ground-breaking song, a precursor to rap backed by the great jazz bassist Ron Carter, but more importantly it was a politically charged protest with relevance today, a cry against oppression, and an expression of anger against the mass media which was co-opting the civil rights movement while the Vietnam War raged on.

Gil’s sarcastic indictment of commercial culture at a time when the oppression of systemic racism blew up, rings true today, in the age of 24/7 brainwashing. The commercial-industrial entertainment complex races on, if anything more pernicious than 53 years ago, with journalism weaker than ever, and a proliferation of malevolent outlets of outright lies and propaganda, pioneered by FOX “news.” AM radio is filled with fringe lunatics. I occasionally turn it on during long car drives to get a pulse on crazy, and the internet is littered with similarly unhinged outlets.

Aerial view of four blocks of destroyed Detroit, one block roofless rubble, the rest smoldering. — Aftermath of Detroit riots.

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

They Can’t Control the Gaza Narrative Because Too Much Has Been Seen

June 9, 2024

They Can’t Control the Gaza Narrative Because Too Much Has Been Seen

A lot of mainstream-adjacent progressives act like Gaza is some radical deviation from normal US behavior, which is infantile nonsense.

The US inflicts similar horrors on the world all the time; the only major difference is

(A) this one’s being live-streamed and

(B) there was a pro-Palestine movement in place before it began.

With regard to (B), Gaza is really illustrating how much the US empire benefits from moving through its foreign military violence relatively quickly.

When it can move from propagandizing the population about Evil Dictatorship X to destroying the country in question to moving on to its next war in the span of a few short years, there’s not enough time for public awareness to grow of exactly how evil the empire is being. It was years before a mainstream consensus developed that the invasion of Iraq was wrong, and it will probably be decades before there’s mainstream consensus about the evil shit the empire did in Syria from 2011 onwards.

With Gaza, people saw this one coming and were calling it what it is from the moment it began, because there was already a widespread political understanding — at least on the left — that Israel is a murderous settler-colonialist project and that the Palestinians are a colonized people. This widespread understanding occurred because the Israel-Palestine debate has been raging for generations, so the collective has had enough time to really examine the facts and circulate its arguments through public consciousness. Those facts and arguments were there ready to be picked up and understood and used — even by young people who are new to the situation — after October 7.

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

How Might We Undermine the PMC?

May 23, 2024

How Might We Undermine the PMC?

Fourteen years ago, I wrote a very long article that became the lion’s share of Chapter Two of Keith Farnish’s book Underminers. My article was about the Tools of Disconnection — the cultural mechanisms by which we became disconnected from each other and the more-than-human world, and hence willing and able to endure civilization and all the atrocities that it has perpetrated. The image from the article is reproduced above.

I think the article still holds up, though if I were to rewrite it today it would be a lot less strident and blame-y. We have conditioned each other, the only way we could have, and with the best of intentions, to live in a way that no wild creature would ever tolerate. In so doing, we have created, with civilization, a pressure cooker culture that, tragically, seems to bring out the worst in us.

The tools of our disconnection — our education system, the media, propaganda, marketing, political indoctrination, and just our well-intended conditioning of each other from childhood and throughout our lives (“If you want to succeed in this world, you have to do this“) — have, I would assert, led to behaviours that have made us physically unhealthy, chronically frightened, angry, distrustful, dissatisfied, and traumatized, so that we have been cowed into accepting a culture that has, in just a few millennia, horrifically overpopulated and desolated the planet.

The “management” of this utterly unsustainable culture, which is now rapidly falling apart, has required the evolution of a caste system, much like the horrific system that arises in groups of rats in similar conditions of ghastly overcrowding and scarcity. The top caste has been labeled (by Barbara Ehrenreich in the 1970s) the Professional Managerial Caste, or PMC.

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

Weekend reads: Slowing down the news

May 19, 2024

Weekend reads: Slowing down the news

A Q&A with Jeremy Klaszus, founder of the Calgary outlet The Sprawl

At Lean Out, we often write about what’s not working in Canadian media — but we also want to highlight what is working, particularly when it comes to local news. As such, we have an ongoing series on independent outlets, featuring discussions with entrepreneurs that are dreaming up innovative solutions to our industry’s most pressing problems. We have profiled Village Media and kawarthaNOW, and interviewed the authors of What Works in Community News? on the podcast.

Today, we bring you a conversation with the founder of an online outlet in Calgary, The Sprawl. This hyperlocal site focuses on slowing down the news cycle, publishing one in-depth, reported podcast a month, along with a weekly newsletter. It’s a refreshing formula, and The Sprawl produces the kind of calm, thoughtful journalism that we most admire.

In this edited and condensed interview, editor-in-chief Jeremy Klaszus shares his thoughts on the current crises in media — from the fragmented information ecosphere and news fatigue, to lost trust and failing business models — and why thinking small might just be the solution.

TH: Jeremy, you and I met at a recent news forum in Ottawa. Since then, I’ve enjoyed exploring your work. You have been a journalist for close to 20 years. In 2017, you launched The Sprawl, a hyperlocal journalism site in Calgary, and then the Sprawlcast, a monthly podcast that does a deep-dive into civic affairs topics, such as housing. What made you decide to found an independent outlet?

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

Managing Chaos: Adventures in Alternative Media. Greg Guma

May 17, 2024

Managing Chaos: Adventures in Alternative Media. Greg Guma

An eye-witness account that explores the unique, tumultuous history of Pacifica radio and alternative media in America.

After an eclectic career, Greg Guma discusses the evolution of radio and television, the impacts of concentrated media ownership, the rise of the alternative press, his own work in Vermont — before and during a progressive revolution that changed the state’s power structure, and decades later, how he managed the original listener-supported radio network.

Weaving together an intimate chronicle of what he saw as Pacifica Radio’s first post-revolution CEO and episodes from his earlier life as a reporter, editor and activist, Guma explores the challenges of maintaining democratic institutions in a culture of distrust and polarization, of striking the delicate balance between truth and advocacy, observation and participation, and of managing conflicts with persuasion instead of force.

Managing Chaos is a media saga, a personal story, and a cautionary tale.

…a skilled writer who has immersed himself in Vermont life and politics for decades. — Sasha Abramsky

…the first executive in Pacifica who has been willing, and able, to share his experiences…. They ought to be required reading for all PNB and LSB members. — Nalini Lasiewicz

Excerpts from the Book

“The deeper I looked the more convoluted and intractable the problems appeared: Charges and counter-charges of secrecy, waste, racism, sexism, harassment and violence, turf battles over local fiefdoms, manipulation, and alleged fraud. It seemed like a fratricidal war with no end in sight.

“It reminded me of how easily reality can be blurred by misinformation. That July, Jeff Ruch, the director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, had issued a relevant assessment of a much larger and even more dysfunctional organization. ‘The federal government,’ he concluded, ‘is suffering from a severe disinformation syndrome.’

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

Leaked New York Times Gaza Memo Tells Journalists to Avoid Words “Genocide,” “Ethnic Cleansing,” and “Occupied Territory”

April 30, 2024

Leaked New York Times Gaza Memo Tells Journalists to Avoid Words “Genocide,” “Ethnic Cleansing,” and “Occupied Territory”

Amid the internal battle over the New York Times’s coverage of Israel’s war, top editors handed down a set of directives.

The New York Times instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.

The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” and to steer clear of the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars. The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.

The memo — written by Times standards editor Susan Wessling, international editor Philip Pan, and their deputies — “offers guidance about some terms and other issues we have grappled with since the start of the conflict in October.”

While the document is presented as an outline for maintaining objective journalistic principles in reporting on the Gaza war, several Times staffers told The Intercept that some of its contents show evidence of the paper’s deference to Israeli narratives.

“I think it’s the kind of thing that looks professional and logical if you have no knowledge of the historical context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” said a Times newsroom source, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, of the Gaza memo. “But if you do know, it will be clear how apologetic it is to Israel.”

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

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