High on your own supply

Posted on December 9, 2022 by camelotkidd

Reality consists of the stories we tell each other.

While this is not a new observation it goes a long way towards explaining the behavior of our feral elite who have bought into their own narrative to such a large degree that they literally live in a fantasyland.

And if you inhabit a fantasyland truth is the mortal enemy hence the frantic efforts at censoring any counter narratives.

The revelations on how Twitter suppressed the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” is a case in point. It’s now been proven that executives at Twitter worked in concert with the Biden campaign to suppress the scandal in the run up to the 2020 election. However, it’s pretty fucking obvious that attempts to address the contents of the laptop will never go anywhere, because the entire liberal political/media class believes any and all actions to hurt Trump’s re-election odds were justified. After 2016 a consensus was formed among liberal US media that they should have actively worked to manipulate the public into voting for Hillary Clinton, rather than reporting on her numerous scandals at the time. Killing the laptop story was the manifestation of that consensus.

Here’s how Glenn Greenwald describes what our famous Forth Estate has become. “Liberal media employees operate as a hive mind, an in-group pack, reciting the same phrases on cue. They have no novel thoughts. They’re Democratic Party activists who unite as pack animals. These people – who demand the power to censor the internet to protect you from disinformation – are the most frequent and casual liars…Twitter lied when saying they censored this story because the docs were hacked by Russia. They know there was no evidence of this! The more big stories you break, the more these frauds – who just repeat what CIA and Google tell them to say – hate you.”

Essentially, to cover-up past crimes against the country by President Biden and other public officials, Twitter, pre-Musk, was a major accomplice and enabler of all that, and suddenly it’s not–to the horror of all of the deep state denizens who make up the administration. 

Then there’s the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. In what is likely to be seen in retrospect as the most egregious strategic intelligence failure of this era US intelligence and political elites promulgated a hubristic assessment that Russia was a backward, failing state. With such an erroneous claim, they created a genuinely-held conviction that massive sanctions on Russia and unrestrained psy-ops would unleash economic turmoil, followed by political upheaval in the Kremlin followed by regime change.

The magical thinking has continued unabated. The other day Avril Haines, Joe Biden’s Director of National Intelligence made the claim that Ukraine may have brighter future as Russia struggles to resupply fighting forces.

I want to know what she is smoking.

Apparently Ms. Haines is so deluded that she is unaware that it is Ukraine, not Russia, begging for more weapons and ammunition and most NATO countries are pleading poverty, with no more to send. Haines must also be unaware that Russia is in the process of sending more than 300,000 fresh troops to the frontlines at the very time that Ukraine is suffering catastrophic losses. You would think that the head of U.S. intelligence might know about that development. The reality is that Ukraine is exhausting its weapons and ammunition stockpiles and the United States and NATO lack the industrial base to produce new supplies to fulfill Ukrainian needs and restore their own stockpiles.

There’s also the inconvenient fact that Russia continues to destroy Ukraine’s electrical power transmission system daily even as we are lectured that Russia is running out of precision missiles. That mantra is being repeated almost every week by wistful Western intelligence analysts and pundits.

Greenwald made another point that’s worth pondering. “While it was once controversial for the CIA to attempt to manipulate what Americans consume in the mainstream media, nowadays these outlets openly hire “former” US intelligence leaders and officers as news analysts. CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and the rest of them all bring on “former” members of the intelligence services to tell Americans what to think. “Big tech censorship is a critical tool of the national security state. Whenever anyone tries to do anything about it these former people from the CIA and the Pentagon and the rest jump up and say ‘we cannot allow you to restore free speech.’”

In an ironic twist that George Orwell would appreciate, the greatest purveyors of “disinformation” turned out to be these former intelligence officers who formed a chorus to label the Hunter Biden laptop disclosures–“Russian disinformation”.

What all this demonstrates is that the moneyed interests behind the politicians and deep state operatives, take great interest in the outcome of this struggle. There has always been a significant group of elites in America who believe that individual freedom must be sacrificed to create a more orderly society. This dynamic helps explain why agents of the state have infiltrated the various platforms in order to use their coercive powers to shape a narrative that garners public support for unpopular, elitist objectives, like war and tax cuts for the wealthy.

Since the election of Donald Trump and the explosion of populism, censorship and propaganda have gone into overdrive. Elites have never been more determined to quash the free exchange of ideas on the social media sites and to transform the Internet into another rancid institution that reiterates the same false narratives and propaganda one hears daily on the cables news channels.

The belief that there are magical answers to real problems in the world is not new, but it has become much more powerful in recent years, as control and influence over issues of war and peace have passed increasingly into the hands of those who know little about either. We want our leader to be noble and international crises and conflicts to finish the way that Hollywood movies do, with the good guys winning, and we will go to extremes to suspend our disbelief, so to avoid facing up to reality. We want to believe that there are powers that will make things turn out as we want, whether they are super-weapons or superheroes. 

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Behind the curtain

Posted on December 2, 2022 by camelotkidd

Is it better to know the depressing reality or happily marinate in a warm bath of partisan propaganda?

I hate to break it to you, but we live in what political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called “inverted totalitarianism.”  Although I do understand why some cling to the “we live in a democracy” fantasy. Reality can be a real bummer.

What I’ve surmised is that most Americans prefer propaganda over reality because confronting the possibility that your whole life is a lie is almost impossible. The Matrix got it right with its portrayal of a simulation of reality that the average person welcomes. Of course it’s a different story for the professional/managerial/class who’ve internalized their own narratives to a point where where stupidity now defines much of US elite culture and ideology.

The corporate media shares much of the blame for this sad state of affairs. Our founders envisioned a Forth Estate role where the press would hold the powerful accountable. Instead the corporate media has embraced a new business model where partisan propaganda is the product. This dynamic became turbo-charged after the election of Donald Trump and the efforts to defenestrate him that morphed into Russia-gate when the corporate media and secretive intelligence agencies realized they could lie about everything and suffer zero consequences.

Sometimes it seems like the only option is to wait for the Ponzi scheme to collapse. The anarchist side of me would enjoy watching this thing burn to the ground. However, I recognize that scenario means incredible suffering and a huge loss of life because these sorts of affairs don’t usually result in a Hollywood happy ending.

One clear advantage of being fully appraised of our dim situation is that you can tune out advertisements for products or political candidates that will solve your problems. “Hope and Change”, “Have it your way” and “fine Corinthian leather” are all empty, cynical advertising slogans that will not make your life better.

You are poor because since about 1980, the predominant policy in the US has been to immiserate workers, especially wage workers. This was possible because the New Deal and post-war eras had made workers well enough off that they had some surplus which could then be stolen from them.

We spend all of our resources on war because our leaders are sociopaths who seek to maintain the US empire in order to rule the world. Here’s a thought. Maybe the reason why the entire political/media/deep-state establishment was so obsessed with getting rid of Trump was because if Trump was still President, then he would never have given the go ahead for the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine? 

Global weirding is accelerating because it’s profitable to regard the natural world as a resource that is inexhaustible.

Etc.

I have a feeling that we’re getting close to the point where they are going to cease with the psych-ops and go full on authoritarian. Lately you can see that’s where we’re headed. It’s like Frank Zappa said: “The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”

It will certainly be the end of the happy American shopping simulation as well as a bunch of other unhealthy illusions. There’s also a good chance radical events will force us to be citizens again instead of consumers. To put it into perspective–it’s evolution. Every species eventually hits a point where it either adapts to extreme situations or goes extinct, and as we accelerate toward nuclear war and the destruction of our biosphere it’s clear that that crucial juncture is right now.

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Pattern Recognition

Posted on November 25, 2022 by camelotkidd

I just finished reading One Nation Under Blackmail, by Whitney Webb, and the whole FTX thing is making my my spider sense tingle. As an author and internet sleuth I’ve come to recognize patterns of behavior over time. When you investigate a topic, you usually start by identifying these patterns and recognizing names and organizations and dynamics that you’ve seen before in a different context. 

Webb’s book uses the Jeffery Epstein child-sex scandal as a takeoff but is ultimately about the intersection of intelligence, organized crime and finance, with an emphasis on how the US deep state is able to carry out covert operations around the world by using hidden funds derived from the sale of drugs while blackmailing elites. Epstein, a prolific pedophile who was, by all appearances, running a “honeypot” operation on prominent men, was found dead in his US jail cell in 2019. The honeypot operation involved filming these prominent individuals having sex with minors.

Since WWII the US has carried out hundreds of covert operations using terror groups and criminals and paying them with money from drug sales, all largely without the knowledge of the American public, thereby keeping the whole messy business off the books. Drugs and US intelligence are intertwined to such a degree that it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. The War on Drugs was always a dark comedy since the biggest drug lord is the CIA, who infiltrated federal drug law enforcement agencies and commandeered their executive management, intelligence and foreign operations staffs in order to ensure that the flow of drugs continues unimpeded to traffickers and foreign officials in its employ.

To utilize the drug money there has to be ways in which to “launder” it and move it into legitimate banks and businesses, and this is where the intersection of finance comes in. The dirty little secret is that many respectable banks, hedge funds and other financial institutions depend on money derived from criminal activities. For instance after the Wall Street Crash in 2008 many of the most respected financial firms stayed solvent through drug and other criminal proceeds.

It appears that the crash of FTX is exposing another angle in the deep state’s  ongoing operations–where crypto currencies are the tool of choice to fund US backed terror groups. Crypto currencies have also become a favorite of drug cartels, which, according to some journalists, are deeply intertwined with U.S. three-letter agencies, including the CIA. The reason is pretty simple. Crypto allows easy money laundering. Banks keep track of everyone who has an account and where they send their money, allowing law enforcement agencies to track transactions by criminals. Crypto’s like Tether Holdings checks the identity of people who buy coins directly from the company, but once the currency is out in the world, it can be transferred anonymously, just by sending a code. An intelligence agency or drug lord can hold millions of crypto in a digital wallet and send it to a terrorist without anyone knowing.

While mainstream media pored over the details of Bankman-Fried’s gargantuan crypto scam, not one single major outlet has investigated or even acknowledged FTX’s relationship with the government of Ukraine. There has been considerable speculation that the unregulated and unmonitored flow of billions of dollars of US taxpayer provided money through Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt government provided a perfect mechanism for large scale money laundering. 

Were client holdings unaccountably and illegally funneled into the West’s proxy war? Or did the supposed aid FTX sent to Kiev find its way into the hands of Ukrainian scammers, corrupt warlords and illicit actors? The corporate media’s failure to explore these questions appears all the more perverse given Bankman-Fried’s flamboyant promotion of his intimate financial relationship with the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Then there’s the fact that in 2022 alone, Bankman-Fried lavished almost $40 million on Democratic candidates, campaigns, and PACs. The giving spree made him the second-largest individual donor to Democratic causes, behind liberal venture capitalist George Soros. 

So now, a politically connected crypto-billionaire who used a secret financial “back door” to fleece customers of ungodly sums of money has become the latest character in the saga of shady US aid to Ukraine. And though the collapse of his FTX firm is front page news, mainstream outlets are studiously avoiding the Ukraine angle. How does this scenario sound? Democrats vote to send funds to Ukraine, Ukraine invests in FTX, FTX cryptocurrency was funneled back to the same Democrats. Profit.

If FTX was indeed laundering funds for the proxy war in Ukraine, the slightest indication that regulators were investigating its operations would have triggered alarm bells throughout Washington – and by extension, Kiev. This may be why the Ukrainian government switched the Aid for Ukraine webpage with a dedicated website, and scrubbed the original entirely from the internet just days after the announcement.

The US maintains a textbook deep state, where intelligence, organized crime and finance freely commingle. This dynamic is why the whole Jeffery Epstein saga had to be about a pair of rogue sex fiends rather than a larger story about Epstein and Maxwell’s ties to intelligence. And why, ultimately, the FTX saga will turn out to be nothing more than some 20 year old drug-addled business incompetents who ran a Ponzi scheme.

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Impunity

Posted on November 18, 2022 by camelotkidd

One of the most widespread and stubbornly pervasive myths told about US multi-party “representative democracy” is that the elected officials are accountable to the people. 

After the criminal invasion of Iraq we were told that the public will pass judgment on each of them. That the people who started the Iraq war have paid and will pay a political price. The US White House and Congress concocted and promulgated hundreds of enormous lies to justify the invasion and destruction of an innocent country, killing perhaps a million civilians–most of whom were women and children–while formally establishing the most evil torture regime in our history.

How did that whole accountability thing turn out?

Bush and his merry band have been rehabilitated thanks in large part to the election of Donald Trump where subsequently W. became a hero of the Resistance because he expressed misgivings about the interloper. And now war criminal George W Bush and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will be appearing at an event next week at the George W. Bush Presidential Center, in partnership with US government-funded narrative management operations Freedom House and National Endowment for Democracy.

Then there’s the Great Wall Street rip-off. With the 2008 financial collapse, the US government conspired with domestic and foreign bankers to perpetrate what was surely one of the greatest and most fraudulent thefts in history, and all members of both groups remained in power and were handsomely rewarded for their crimes while fully half of the nation’s middle class evaporated into the lower class and is now living on food stamps in a van down by the river.

Isn’t it wonderful how we hold our elite accountable?

Still, grifters gotta grift.

The sad truth of it is that in the US elected representatives are accountable to no one except their campaign funders. But certainly not to you and I. Our dear leaders have grown accustomed to being unaccountable and their main concern is grifting, as the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine demonstrates. The US seems to be waging war in the way that it has become accustomed to as well. Make sure everything happens a long way from home, propagandize like crazy that this is all about “democracy” and peace, get other people to do most of the the dying, send awesome high tech weapons and bully everyone else in the world to be your ally. Create support by throwing money at local “client” leaders, enable the military/industrial/complex to get even richer from open-ended contracts and provide new career opportunities for the officer corps, think tank denizens and politicians. Then let the whole thing go on for ever until you are ready to move on to the next pork barrel opportunity.

Sorry, I meant the next crusade to preserve democracy. 

Let’s not forget the elite response to Covid 19. This YouTube video–How to Hide a Plague: How Elite Capture and Individualism Made Covid Normal, should be required viewing. “The US has experienced among the highest cumulative mortality rates from Covid-19 in the Global North. This lecture will argue that the failures of the US pandemic response were mainly driven by economic elites who used their influence to undermine public health protections. The initial phase of the Covid response was collective, including a massive temporary expansion of the welfare state, but this approach threatened the power of the capitalist class. In response, there was an abandonment of economic interventions followed by a wholesale reframing of the virus as an issue of personal responsibility and individual choice. This lecture will explore how the exertion of elite influence went far beyond lobbying politicians, extending to government bureaucracies and civil society institutions such as news media and schools of public health. This process of constructing a new, deadlier normal holds lessons that can be transferred to climate change and other collective crises of the 21st century.”

All of these calamities have a back story: elites being feted for epic fuck-ups instead of being held accountable, largely due to ideology. For the last 40 years, under the rubric of neoliberalism, both Republicans and Democrats have held this very same theory: regulations and laws only apply to the little people, while the innovators and entrepreneurs that create wealth should be free from such nuisances because their honor and reputation would keep their animal spirits in check.

In An Economic Theory of the Criminal Law, 7th Circuit Judge Richard Posner states that the poor require criminal law to keep them within the confines of the “market.” “The major function of criminal law in a capitalist society is to prevent people from bypassing the system of voluntary, compensated exchange-the “market,” explicit or implicit-in situations where, because transaction costs are low, the market is a more efficient method of allocating resources than forced exchange.”

The flip-side of Posner’s theory was that unlike the poor, the wealthy required only tort law to ensure their proper behavior. “This means that criminal law is designed primarily for the non-affluent; the affluent are kept in line, for the most part, by tort law.” 

What’s become manifestly clear is that the managerial elite of our country are no longer trustworthy. The crimes they’ve gotten away with has only made them bolder and more reckless.

Update: Wow! Even I can’t even make this shit up.

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Remembrance Day

Posted on November 11, 2022 by camelotkidd

On Veterans Day we’re supposed to support the troops and wave the flag but as a veteran I say fuck that.

It’s the anniversary of the end of WWI, the supposed war to end war, commemorated on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. WWI brought modern industrial warfare from the Third World colonies to Europe and the shock and horror animated a generation of writers and artists who vowed never again. Of course, twenty years later the outbreak of WWII made a mockery of the sentiment.

In the US we celebrate it as Veterans Day but Remembrance Day is observed in the British Commonwealth of Nations. Celebrated since the end of WWI, Remembrance Day actually marks Armistice Day–the day on which the hostilities between the Allies and Germany ceased on the Western Front.

I actually like Remembrance Day. Veterans Day is another one of those PR constructs where instead of remembering the horrors of war and vowing not to repeat our predecessors mistakes we promote more war by pimping out members of our armed forces as useful props. And, as we saw with W. Bush’s administration–support the troops means support for American imperialism.

The American economy revolves around war, with endless conflict being seen as a lucrative business model for weapons manufacturers. Of course, they can’t just come right out and say that they need to slaughter a bunch of people in order to create value for shareholders, hence the need for advertising, PR and propaganda.

Since February 2022, we have been living through the worst propaganda campaign in my lifetime over the conflict in Ukraine. You can see this dynamic where in the post Russia-gate era, MSNBC-watching Democrats have been conditioned to promote confrontation with the Kremlin and dismiss political opponents as “pro-Putin” traitors. There is no room for even the mildest of dissent. For American imperialists, the answer is clear: a call for diplomacy with Russia is “appeasement” (Bill Kristol) and “appalling” (Max Boot). Taking these neoconservative naysayers’ side was none other than the former Democratic “Revolution” leader Bernie Sanders, who declared his opposition to any resolution to the conflict in Ukraine.

Give peace a chance? Hardly.

Republicans have historically been the more bellicose party but since the 2016 election of Donald Trump, Democrats have embraced fantasies about anything to do with Russia: a Manchurian, Kompromat-compromised president and the hope that Robert Mueller will prove it; Russian bots swinging elections and fueling anti-racism protests; Russia bounties on US troops in Afghanistan; Russian microwave weapons injuring US officials; Russia fabricating Hunter Biden’s laptop. Accordingly, Democrats have also embraced the national security state officials behind these deceptions, and the Cold Warrior outlook that guides them.

However, if you think Republicans, if they take over the House or Senate, will be anti-war, despite presumed new Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy statements about oversight in Ukraine, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.

Instead, what members of both parties are going to do is to push for more weapons and more provocations, while talking about prosecuting President Putin at the ICC. They’re pushing policy recommendations that would plainly necessitate regime change in Russia but won’t admit it because the insanity of the proposition is self-evident. The wishes of the American people have nothing to do with such foreign policy decisions and their needs are routinely dismissed. The wisdom of spending trillions of dollars to overturn elections, invade foreign countries, kill disfavored people abroad, and build a police and surveillance state at home is rarely discussed.

The end of the Cold War gave hope that America could come home and we could be at peace. Rather than war we could put the vast resources to use on health care, education and public infrastructure. But for the military/industrial/complex (MIC) the idea of peace was horrifying and instead we got a war on drugs, a war on terror and now a new and improved Cold War against Russia and China.

The real problem for our country is that both parties are controlled to a large extent by the MIC, and to continue to prosper they and their financiers depended on a steady supply of enemies, existential threats and fear. Meanwhile, the MIC and their political sock-puppets have become diabolically gifted at selling war. The RAND Corporation, an influential member of the military industrial complex, published a report in 2008 advocating war against a major power as a way to stimulate the U.S. economy. The report did not specify the target, but at the time the main candidates were thought to be Iran, Russia, or China. Accordingly, the media and public relations industry close to the MIC launched a subtle marketing campaign to generate public consent for this new and improved idea.

Sometimes it’s not particularly subtle.

On this Remembrance Day we ought to remember how it is that the war to end war was just the beginning.

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Musical Chairs

Posted on November 4, 2022 by camelotkidd

There’s a new book out that helps explain the behavior of liberals since Trump’s surprise election in 2016.

Virtue Hoarders, by Catherine Liu, examines the professional managerial class (PMC), which is predominated by liberals, and finds that they are shameless about hording all forms of “secular virtue”. White-collar, upper-class in terms of education and income, and often ideologically on the Left, she describes the PMC as engaged in class warfare against the lower classes. The PMC sees itself as vastly superior to working-class Americans who they ignore, or treat like children as they try to save them from various sins and pitfalls. The PMC defines virtues and then attempts to “hoard” them through “virtue signaling.” Its members create “moral panics” over violations of these virtues. They turn politics and policy battles into “individual passion plays”

Sound familiar?

The PMC’s didn’t set out to dominate politics, it just happened. Initially, the aim was to foster progressive values. But instead, these professional technocrats, who both had gained considerable wealth and were tightly concentrated in cities on both coasts, came to dominate the Democratic Party that formerly was a vehicle for the working class. In the process the PMC’s abandoned class based politics and focused instead on utopian ideals of diversity, identity and racial justice.

Since Carter, neoliberalism has been akin to musical chairs, as entire industries and jobs have disappeared, never to be seen again. The PMC’s have played no small part in this process except that now there’s no chair for them and they are lashing out in desperation and guilt. There appears to be a dull awareness that what is happening to the professional middle class has long since happened to the blue-collar working class. Those of us who have college and higher degrees have proved to be no more indispensable, as a group, to the masters of capital than those who have attained competency on assembly lines or in warehouses of foundries.

Hence the PMC anger at MAGA Republicans and urge to censor and silence and to curb speech they consider dangerous. From the beginning, the PMC was the intermediary and enforcer between the owners of the means of production, whether these were individual capitalists or large corporations, and the working class.  As Liu says, “The politics of virtue-hoarding is anti-universalist. Rather than pursue shared public goods, its function is to fortify the class’s dominant position by morally distinguishing it from the underclass”

What’s crazy but not all that surprising, is that liberals have turned into war and empire cheerleaders, thanks to the Russia-gate pys-op that equated Trump with Putin. And now, with the US proxy war on Russia in Ukraine and upcoming midterm elections, they’ve doubled down. If one really believes, as millions of American liberals do, that the U.S. faces two and only two choices: either elect Democrats and ensure they rule or live under a white nationalist fascist dictatorship, then of course such people will believe that media disinformation campaigns, censorship, and other forms of authoritarianism are necessary to ensure Democrats win and their opponents are vanquished. It’s like they’ve embraced an eliminationist mindset where their adversaries do not just disagree with them but seek to do them harm, hence the propaganda, censorship and suppression is fully justified. And that is exactly what is happening now.

But, remember, it’s virtuous.

As Liu writes.  If PMC “politics amount to little more than virtue signaling, it loves nothing more than moral panics to incite its members to ever more pointless forms of pseudo-politics and hyper-vigilance…PMC virtue hoarding is the insult added to injury when white-collar managers, having downsized their blue-collar workforce, then disparage them for their bad taste in literature, bad diets, unstable families, etc.” PMC champion Hillary Clinton gave voice to this sentiment with her “deplorable”comment. What really galls the PMC is that “their original dream – of a society ruled by reason and led by public-spirited professionals – has been discredited,” and the lament that the people just won’t listen to reason remains unheard by their subjects.

The only problem with this line of reasoning is that it’s flat out wrong. The status quo political establishment has failed as spectacularly as anything could possibly fail. And the PMC’s sure doubled down on the failure by vigorously promoting a new censorship regime in every American institution, shutting down free speech and, more crucially, the necessary debate for aligning our politics with reality. The idea that the PMC is doing “God’s work” has no current resonance with anyone outside their own echo chamber, which is amplified by the usual sources–MSNBC, NPR, NYT, etc.

American’s without college degrees have rejected PMC technocracy in favor of populist authoritarianism because they no longer believe it’s in their best interest. They don’t trust that the elites have their best interests in mind and otherwise find them somewhere between annoying, blind, and despicable.

Meanwhile, the chairs are disappearing and the music is slowing again.

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How-to manual

Posted on October 27, 2022 by camelotkidd

George Orwell’s 1984 wasn’t supposed to be a how-to manual, yet here we are.

The corporate media coverage of the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine demonstrates the extent to which government and media have merged to become a sort of thought police to persecute individuality and independent thinking. There’s no discernible difference now between the corporate media talking-heads and the retired CIA spooks the networks bring on as guests. It’s hard to envision any difference from Orwell’s state-controlled media and our corporate one.

Meanwhile, the 2 minute hate is alive and well as the reaction to calls for diplomacy by the Congressional Progressive Caucus demonstrates. The CPC retracted the meek letter its members had written to President Biden politely asking him to consider attempting to try a little diplomacy to help end the conflict in Ukraine. The retraction followed a wave of public outrage against their slight deviation from the official belligerent narrative. The letter received backlash from warmongers in both parties, including from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It was personally slammed by Bernie Sanders, the supposed figurehead of the American left. Trolls and warmongers swarmed the social media notifications of every account which posted the letter in an official capacity, mindlessly bleating the words “appeasement” and “Chamberlain” in unison.

It really says so much about where we’re at and where we’re headed that the most incendiary and outrageous thing you can say in our society is that we should probably attempt to diplomatically de-escalate hostilities.

I guess we’ll always be at war with Eastasia.

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Alienation

Posted on October 21, 2022 by camelotkidd

Terence McKenna well describes the costs of being an apostate. “The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation”

And once you get past the propaganda it’s alienation-city because we live in a mean country where greed and war are the dominant themes. But in America we dress it up in religious and patriotic garb because we’re the “bright shining beacon on the hill”, or something.

Many years ago, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles claimed, “There are two kinds of people in the world: Christians who believe in free enterprise and the other kind”. That says it all. Americans are expected to adhere to the capitalist mantra of big business and of the elites whose only aim was to eviscerate the middle class and gather all wealth to itself. Americans have been so brainwashed by generations of commercial propaganda that they now almost unanimously support their own headlong rush into poverty, because to object to it is to be anti-American.

I mean when you really think about it, the whole point of the anti-communist hysteria following WWII, was capitalism putting that whole New Deal thing behind them.

Decades of “free enterprise” propaganda have deemed any government involvement in any segment of society or industry where big business and the elites could make a profit as either socialism or communism and therefore treasonous to the basic religion of multi-party political Christianity. The propaganda was so powerful that it became virtually impossible for an average American to be a Christian socialist or a believer in both democracy and social security, or to be any of these and simultaneously against big business.

Meanwhile, American imperialism can be best described as–the dollar goes abroad to seek a better return on investment and the flag follows. We’ve been at war ever since, involved in one kind of expeditionary skirmish or another. These are hybrid wars America has been waging against any country that chooses an economic path other than subordination to the United States. The recent historical record shows how every nation trying to develop outside the Washington Consensus is terrorized at myriad hybrid war levels. This nation becomes a target of color revolutions, regime change, illegal sanctions, economic blockade, NATO sabotage or outright bombing and/invasion. 

History, of course, has been one of the casualties of this generations-long domestic propaganda war, since the Americans freely excised the often-barbaric unpleasantness of their actions and reduced historic events to simplistic, Disney-fied caricatures, creating countless popular myths to captivate their domestic audience and shield Americans forever from the truth of their own history.

Michael Parenti expressed the situation perfectly when he wrote “The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology.” This lack of history and perspective is the result of the result of a century of mass manipulation and programming. One of the natural and planned results of the incessant programmed propagation of these totally false historical mythologies was the destruction of intellectual independence. Americans have been propagandized and programmed to see the world through the same pair of eyes – the pair the owners wanted them to look through. Contrary to American claims of free and independent thinking, ideological uniformity became paramount, where independent thinkers, dissidents and those with dissenting opinions most often found themselves immediately ostracized.

Their understanding of the word is controlled by CNN, MSNBC, NPR, NY Times. They live in a Matrix. They have no awareness and no control over their existence. Freedom of speech in America means staying within the prescribed narrative. Stray from that, and you will quickly find yourself ostracised, unemployed and unemployable. 

I can attest to the blinkered thinking of friends and family and marvel at the power of the propaganda system which has brought about a sort of Mass Formation Psychosis that is peculiar to Americans. And since the start of the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine the propaganda has gotten worse. A lot worse.

By the way, you’re not that crazy. I see it too and constantly remind myself that it’s no measure of health to be deemed sane in a profoundly insane society.

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Me, myself and I

Posted on October 14, 2022 by camelotkidd

Identity politics is the perfect embodiment of neoliberalism. Arch-neoliberal Margaret Thatcher articulated it when she proclaimed that “there is no society, only individuals…”

Moreover, identity politics is designed to divide and rule.

They’re not even being subtle about it. In an astonishing clip from the Cato Institute, economist, Adam Posen, head of the Peterson Institute, says a focus on domestic manufacturing is simply a “fetish for keeping white males with low education in the powerful positions they are in.”

I can’t think of a more effective divide and rule strategy than having neoliberal economists financed by Wall Street pushing offshoring and then saying that anyone who opposes having their community and livelihood destroyed is racist.

I love it when influential elites are so arrogant that they say what they really mean without all the usual nuance. Too bad we can’t offshore Posen’s job but that will never happen. Sociopaths like Posen are payed princely sums and rewarded with prestigious positions precisely because the policies they’ve promoted have allowed the 1% to Hoover up $50 trillion from middle-class Americans over the last 40 odd years as the American economy went into financial hyper-drive

This kind of open disdain for maintaining American manufacturing and decent, middle-class jobs is discrediting neoliberal Democrats and libertarian Republicans alike and has led directly to the type of populism that Trump’s emergence represented. I mean what’s the point of these political parties if they both support policies that empower the wealthy and crush everyone else? Indeed, it seems governing has become performative, rather than actual. Of course, we’re not supposed to talk about this, hence the maniacal focus on identity politics and the cultural war domestically.

Meanwhile, the neocons have gotten religion on identity politics. Which makes sense. The neocons prefer to scheme from the shadows while infesting influential US think tanks. They move between political parties while utilizing prevalent cultural trends to craft fresh justifications for American exceptionalism. Meanwhile they’ve assigned themselves license to lie and defame anyone who dissent from neocon orthodoxy as “Russian agents” or “Kremlin assets.” In this way id-pol help’s obscure the US’s ruthless foreign policies, like the recent sabotage of the Nordstream pipelines. The only conclusion we are left to draw is that the only justification for such pitiless aggression is that the US is maneuvering to avoid the collapse of its post-war global dominance, the end of its military and economic empire. The destruction of the pipelines would have to be understood as an act of desperation: a last-ditch preemption by Washington of the loss of its hegemony as Russia, China and others find common cause to challenge the American empire, and a ferocious warning for Europe to hammer home the message that it must not stray from the fold.

But it’s ok because we use the proper pronouns and perpetuate liberal-woke, activist-driven, social justice-oriented identity politics and Putin is a monstrous autocrat who persecutes gay people. Since the Russia-gate psy-op the neocons have realized that linking Donald Trump to Putin and Russia and demonizing the alleged intolerance towards homosexuals, provides a massive payoff with liberals now the most fervent Russia-phobes.

By the way, I’m not criticizing anti-racism, feminism, or other movements for social equality, but the way in which id-pol emphasizes social constructs like race or gender, rather than on material conditions and class. Identity politics is what we get after neoliberal capitalism has cleared away states, governments, borders, trade unions and other moderating forces, and this is why there’s such a frantic emphasis on being “woke”, with the accompanying censorship and propaganda. Empires and nations don’t fall because of external forces, usually, even when those get assigned as the proximate cause in history books. Rather the failures are due to inability to manage internal contradictions.

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We’ve got to stop there

Posted on October 7, 2022 by camelotkidd

The US corporate media more and more resembles the Soviet media. The censorship, propaganda and conformity are startling.

For example, when Professor Jeffery Sachs observed that it was probably the US that sabotaged the Nordstream pipelines, the Bloomberg host interrupted him, “Uh, Jeff, we’ve got to stop there”. 

Actually I think the US corporate media environment more resembles Orwell’s 1984, with it’s emphasis on group-think and avoidance of wrong-think. We can look no further than the treatment of Ukrainian neo-Nazi’s for evidence of this Orwellian dynamic. The US corporate media continue to denazify Ukraine by pretending that the Nazi formations in that country, which they had long decried, are now brave warriors resisting Russian tyranny. What was once “a Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitary organization” which even the FBI said is notorious for its “association with neo-Nazi ideology” was first relabeled as merely “far right” before it became a normal “unit in the Ukrainian military”.

The other day the New York Times finished the progression by turning a Ukrainian government press release into a tear dripping story about the reunion of freed Azov neo-Nazi’s with their families: Released Azov commanders have an emotional reunion with family members in Turkey.

I guess we have always been at war with Eastasia.

Meanwhile, here in the homeland, liberals hate them some Nazis, especially if they’re only Trump supporters sporting a Confederate flag patch.

It’s simply remarkable.

Actually the war against Russia is not about values or a rule based liberal order or any other nonsense you might hear or read about, it is about the United States maintaining global dominance. That’s all it’s about. However, our political elites apparently assume that their tight media control will ensure that their ignorant citizenry could be made to believe–or at least pretend to believe–almost anything, even that the Russians had destroyed their own pipelines. Remember, everything bad that can’t be attributed to Trump must be due to Putin.

It just says so much about the overwhelming success of Russia-gate as a PSY-OP that the most surefire way to enrage a liberal is to say that nuclear escalation with Russia is probably a bad idea but here we are. Since 2016 progressive Democrats have been worse than useless on the single most important issue in the world, namely de-escalating tensions between the US and Russia. Because of Russia-gate they’ve been feeding into the Russia hysteria and passionately backing proxy warfare in Ukraine.

Other heretics have noticed the trend. Journalist Glenn Greenwald says that talks to de-escalate or end the conflict in Ukraine are virtually nonexistent because the corporate media and political elites have nurtured an atmosphere where to do so is considered unpatriotic. “Because everyone knows that the minute you step up and step out of line, there’s a hoard of people ready to call you unpatriotic, or a traitor, or an admirer of Vladimir Putin”. “It’s a really repressive atmosphere and squashing a debate that we absolutely have to have,” Greenwald further urged.

Strong, confident countries don’t engage in propaganda, censorship and conformity, but that’s not the US in 2022. The corporate media is telling us what to say and what we cannot say. In this way they are destroying public discourse and a vibrant public discourse conducted in public space ranks among the important sources of strength. They are also destroying people’s abilities to discern, to think, and to judge for themselves–another source of a nation’s strength.

Update: Too funny.

FT MYERS, FL — In a desperate attempt to get help for its citizens and deal with the growing humanitarian crisis in the area, a Florida town devastated by Hurricane Ian has taken the unusual step of raising the Ukrainian flag, hoping to convince Congress to send aid.

“The Ukrainian government flies this flag, and they’re just swimming in billions and billions of dollars in support from the United States. We’re just swimming in sewage,” said Ray Valdivia, the Response Coordinator working to assess the damage in the town. “We tried going through the normal channels to get help from the government, but Biden just sent us a letter of “best wishes” that looks like it may have been written in crayon.”

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