Perhaps you are concerned that the United States in turning into some 1984-like authoritarian/fascist/totalitarian state where (1) history is routinely rewritten and (2) current events are manipulated by the Powers That Be.
Well, I'm here to ease your concerns. America is not turning into an Orwellian state; it already is one!
But you probably don't care or you're completely unaware that this Orwellian thing is happening. OK, then. As the old song goes, Don't Worry, Be Happy. When they eventually come for you through the media or at your front door, if I'm still around, I'll just pretend it didn't happen just like almost all of you are doing right now.
Rewriting history, which is called often gaslighting nowadays, is the subject of the first video below (Tim Pool). I've suitably modified the Encyclopedia Britannica definition to fit the usual case in 2019. Emphasis added.
Gaslighting — an elaborate and insidious technique of deception and psychological manipulation practiced by the mainstream corporate media (our corporate overlords) over an extended period.
Its effect is to gradually undermine the people's confidence in their own ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, right from wrong, or reality from appearance, thereby rendering them pathologically dependent on the gaslighters in their thinking or feelings.
And thus wrongthink is effectively quashed among the masses...
As part of the process, people's sense of reality is severely damaged, and they become additionally dependent on the gaslighters for emotional support and validation. In some cases the intended (and achieved) result is to rob the people of their sanity...
This next sentence is precious because according to my model of human nature, when there is something important at stake, when there are existential threats, as in this case, then it turns out that virtually everyone on Earth is "psychologically disordered" in the sense meant below.
Because the gaslighters are themselves typically psychologically disordered, they are often not fully aware of what they are doing or why they are doing it.
When existential threats are present, and if virtually everyone on Earth is not fully (or even partially) aware of what they are doing or why they are doing it in such cases—they are psychologically disordered in this sense—then in effect nobody is psychologically disordered. Being "psychologically disordered" in such cases is simply normal human behavior.
My name for that fucked up "psychologically disordered" human world is Flatland (follow the human nature link above). Are the people on The View or CNN or MSNBC psychologically disordered? Or are they normal human beings? (See below).
In the second case, where current events are routinely manipulated by the Powers That Be, we find out that in the crucial days after Tulsi Gabbard called out evil conspiracy theorist and warmonger Hillary Clinton, YouTube manipulated it's search results to suppress access to Tulsi's channel and videos. Instead they boosted videos from MSM corporate media, which those in the know understand to be their unofficial and secret official policy. The videos YouTube boosted were more likely than not gaslighting videos.
For instance, look at this video (Jimmy Dore quoting MSNBC). I mean, after all, Tulsi didn't explicitly deny that she's a Russian asset, right? Am I right? Case closed!
Anyway, we know YouTube suppressed Tulsi's content because using a VPN (virtual private network) allows us to see YouTube search results in various countries. It turns out that the suppression occurred only in the United States. A few days later, after the furor died down, the suppression was removed. Voila! It's like fucking magic.
This is the subject of the second video below (Jeremy at The Quartering).
The bottom line is that Alphabet (Google/YouTube) routinely manipulates elections in the United States. Gee, I thought only Russians and Russian puppets like Tulsi did that kind of thing
In 2016 I missed my opportunity to vote for Donald Trump. I didn't vote. That was a mistake. But I didn't know then what I know now. Lots of water under the bridge since then. The Big Reveal. Mea Culpa. And if Trump were to do some really bad thing, something that would bring this evil world to a screeching halt, then good for him. Good job!
But that's very unlikely. As the great comic Dave Chappelle said recently, the only way Trump has affected him was to give Chappelle a tax break.
The good news is that I will get another chance to vote for Trump next year. In so doing I will give our astonishingly corrupt Political/Media/Corporate/Deep State overlords the finger.
("Deep State" refers very specifically to the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA, and all the operatives currently working inside or outside those agencies who seek to overthrow an elected president, and most pertinently the ones like serial liar James Clapper who now work for or appear on CNN.)
Well, I will vote for Trump unless a miracle occurs and Tulsi Gabbard becomes the nominee. Miracles can't happen because most humans have their oblivious heads up their asses and totally corrupt (self-interested, power-obsessed, status-seeking) humans at the top of social hierarchies demand that all us low-status racists, Nazis, homophobic, misogynist, islamophobes submit to them.
(That last sentence contains some sarcasm and I only point that out because most humans are incapable of understanding irony.)
Regular people trying to live their pathetic, suffering-filled lives are scum, according to our morally superior overlords, and we know that because our high-status overlords keep telling us so. Let me be entirely clear about what I mean when I say I will vote for Trump. I have a message for our integrity-challenged overlords.
I'm assuming the Democratic nominee will be Elizabeth Warren. Fuck all the others except for Tulsi. I will never vote for Pocahontas Elizabeth Warren. She's Pure Evil 2.0. (Watch any Jimmy Dore video about Warren. Here's another one. He's got her pegged.)
But let's hear from Pure Evil 1.0., the 2016 version. That's what prompted this post. I'm still waiting for her head to spin around Exorcist-style. My source is The Washington Post, an exemplary news organization owned by Jeff Bezos. (That was sarcasm again.)
Gabbard won’t be happy to hear Hillary Clinton’s latest interview. Nor will President Trump or another of Clinton’s 2016 opponents, whom Clinton has now lodged similar accusations about.
In a conversation on former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe’s podcast, “Campaign HQ,” Clinton suggested the Russians are leveraging a number of top U.S. politicians. She suggested Russia had kompromat, or compromising information, on Trump. She accused 2016 Green Party nominee Jill Stein of being a “Russian asset.”
That's all bad enough, but...
And she suggested Russia might back Gabbard as a third-party candidate.
“They’re also going to do third-party again,” Clinton said. “I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on someone who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.”
Clinton did not provide any evidence for her claim, though a spokesman later insisted to CNN, “This is not some outlandish claim; this is reality.” Gabbard, though, has previously ruled out an independent campaign.
The “again” in Clinton’s quote referred to Stein, whom some Clinton supporters have accused (rather baselessly) of serving as a spoiler for Clinton in 2016. Stein got around 1 percent of the vote in the three decisive states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — but exit polls showed most of her voters wouldn’t have supported either Clinton or Trump if Stein weren’t running.
Clinton then flat-out labeled Stein a “Russian asset.”
“And that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she’s also a Russian asset,” Clinton said. “Yeah, she’s a Russian asset — I mean, totally. They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate. So I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most needed.”
At another point in the interview, Clinton wagered that Russia does in fact have some compromising material on Trump, suggesting that’s why so many of Trump’s decisions have erred in a pro-Russian direction.
“I don’t know what Putin has on him, whether it’s both personal and financial,” Clinton said. “I assume it is.”She then switched gears: “But more than that, there is this bizarre adulation Trump has for dictators and authoritarians. He dreams of being able to order people to do things and make them do it. He has no democratic instincts, really.”
Tulsi's Response
Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton.
You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain.
From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know — it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose.
It’s now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don’t cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly.
In a since-deleted tweet on Oct. 4, Morey shared an image with this slogan: "Fight for Freedom, Stand with Hong Kong."
(standwithhk.org)
Fight for Freedom, Stand with Hong Kong
'We too love money more than freedom and democracy': Creators of 'South Park brutally mock NBA's China apology
BEIJING – The creators of “South Park” have issued a mock apology to China after censors scrubbed their popular animation from the Chinese web.
The tongue-in-cheek statement, skewering Beijing’s demands that Western brands conform to its world view, came with officials apparently annoyed about an episode that crossed several of the Communist Party’s red lines.
The episode — called “Band in China” — depicted forced labor at a Chinese prison and parodied companies that cave in to censorship for commercial gain.
“I can’t sell my soul like this,” says one character, who was under pressure from Chinese censors to rewrite his music.
“It’s not worth living in a world where China controls my country’s art,” he added.
The incident comes as the NBA and its Houston Rockets franchise are facing fierce criticism and financial punishment in China over a tweet supporting Hong Kong’s democracy protesters.
Both the league and the team have scrambled to apologize over the tweet by Rockets’ General Manager Daryl Morey, as calls for a boycott gather steam in one of the NBA’s most lucrative markets.
But the apologies have sparked derision in the United States, where critics said the league is sacrificing morals for money.
Writing on Twitter, “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone offered spoof contrition over any offense they had caused in China with their satirical show.
“Like the NBA, we welcome the Chinese censors into our homes and into our hearts,” they wrote.
“We too love money more than freedom and democracy. Xi doesn’t look just like Winnie the Pooh at all,” the statement added, a reference to banned memes comparing Chinese President Xi Jinping with the portly bear.
“Long live the Great Communist Party of China! May this autumn’s sorghum harvest be bountiful! We good now China?” the statement read.
On Tuesday, searches for “South Park” on China’s Twitter-like social media platform Weibo and popular film review site Douban did not return any results.
And while information on “South Park” was still available on a few video streaming sites, episodes could not be played.
Parker and Stone’s response to China stands in stark contrast to that of major Western brands who have quickly beaten a retreat when faced with potential losses in China’s huge — and fiercely nationalistic — consumer market.
Companies ranging from airlines to fashion houses have issued fulsome apologies, often after being charged with “hurting the feelings of the Chinese people.”
As well as any indication of support for protests in Hong Kong, common crimes include labeling Taiwan as a separate country — China believes it is a renegade province — or discussing Xinjiang, where rights groups say a million mostly-Muslim minorities are being held in prison camps.
China Is Treating Islam Like a Mental Illness
August 28, 2018 — One million Muslims are being held right now in Chinese internment camps, according to estimates cited by the UN and U.S. officials. Former inmates—most of whom are Uighurs, a largely Muslim ethnic minority—have told reporters that over the course of an indoctrination process lasting several months, they were forced to renounce Islam, criticize their own Islamic beliefs and those of fellow inmates, and recite Communist Party propaganda songs for hours each day. There are media reports of inmates being forced to eat pork and drink alcohol, which are forbidden to Muslims, as well asreports oftorture and death.
The sheer scale of the internment camp system, which according to The Wall Street Journal has doubled in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region just within the last year, is mindboggling. The U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China describes it as “the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.” Beijing began by targeting Uighur extremists, but now even benign manifestations of Muslim identity—like growing a long beard—can get a Uighur sent to a camp, the Journal noted. Earlier this month, when a UN panel confronted a senior Chinese official about the camps, he said there are “no such things as reeducation centers,” even though government documents refer to the facilities that way. Instead, he claimed they’re just vocational schools for criminals.
China has been selling a very different narrative to its own population. Although the authorities frequently describe the internment camps as schools, they also liken them to another type of institution: hospitals. Here’s an excerpt from an official Communist Party audio recording, which was transmitted last year to Uighurs via WeChat, a social-media platform, and which was transcribed and translated by Radio Free Asia:
Members of the public who have been chosen for reeducation have been infected by an ideological illness. They have been infected with religious extremism and violent terrorist ideology, and therefore they must seek treatment from a hospital as an inpatient. … The religious extremist ideology is a type of poisonous medicine, which confuses the mind of the people. … If we do not eradicate religious extremism at its roots, the violent terrorist incidents will grow and spread all over like an incurable malignant tumor.
“Religious belief is seen as a pathology” in China, explained James Millward, a professor of Chinese history at Georgetown University, adding that Beijing often claims religion fuels extremism and separatism. “So now they’re calling reeducation camps ‘hospitals’ meant to cure thinking. It’s like an inoculation, a search-and-destroy medical procedure that they want to apply to the whole Uighur population, to kill the germs of extremism. But it’s not just giving someone a shot—it’s locking them up for months in bad conditions.”
LeBron James says NBA exec was 'misinformed' in his tweet supporting Hong Kong protests
But on Monday night, the vocal NBA star sided with silence as he criticized Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey as "misinformed" over Morey's tweet supporting Hong Kong protesters. "I just think that when you're misinformed or you're not educated about something -- and I'm just talking about the tweet itself -- you never know the ramifications that can happen. We all see what that did -- not only for our league but for all of us in America, for people in China as well," he told reporters on Monday.
James' comments threatened to undermine his reputation as perhaps the foremost social justice advocate in popular culture. Amid that criticism from sports columnists and politicians, James tried to clarify his position on Twitter. He said he was "not discussing the substance" of the tweet and added that Morey "could have waited a week" to tweet what he did.
James' criticism came while the NBA is embroiled in a standoff with China after Morey tweeted his support for the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. Morey quickly apologized and deleted his original tweet, but the league's Chinese partners suspended ties, state broadcaster CCTV halted all broadcasts of preseason matches, and the Chinesegovernment said the NBA needed to show "mutual respect."
The rift, and the NBA's rapid attempts to salvage its massive Chinese market, have sparked broader questions about the influence of China on free speech in corporate America. Speaking to reporters before a game in Los Angeles Monday, James called it "a very delicate situation, a very sensitive situation."
When asked whether Morey should be reprimanded for his tweet, James responded, "I think when we all sit back and learn from the situation that happened, understand that what you could tweet or could say, and we all talk about this freedom of speech -- yes, we do all have freedom of speech, but at times there are ramifications for the negative that can happen when you're not thinking about others and you're only thinking about yourself."
"I don't want to get into a word or sentence feud with Daryl Morey, but I believe he wasn't educated on the situation at hand and he spoke. So many people could have been harmed, not just financially but physically, emotionally, spiritually. So just be careful what we tweet and what we say and what we do, even though yes, we do have freedom of speech, but there can be a lot of negative that comes with that too."
James, who plays for the Los Angeles Lakers,added that he and his teammates had stayed silent about the situation because they were "not informed enough" about it, and that "I'm not here to judge how the League handles the situation."
George Monbiot opens the video below by talking about his occasional feelings of despair. After all, there is lots to be despairing about. The climate is rapidly transitioning to a hostile state, though it is happening far too slowly for humans to grasp what's going on. The world's top soil is disappearing, again rapidly on any time-scale longer than the human one. On the global scale, a relative handful of humans own most of the wealth and are accumulating even more wealth as I write this. George even talks about humans as storytelling animals.
Ironically, the title of the video is How to Really Take Back Control. Take back control? I say "ironically" because nothing can be done about anything George talks about. Nothing. Not the climate, not the topsoil, not the global wealth inequality. These problems can not be fixed and therefore will not be fixed. Human nature itself created these problems. Human nature did not allow for solutions to them.
Stop reading for a moment. Let that sink in for a while.
But Monbiot believes these problems can be fixed. We Shall Overcome and all that. He thinks that if we just replace one narrative with another, a miracle will occur. So Monbiot's "despair" is really hope in disguise. That's always true in Flatland. Evolution guaranteed humans would feel that way to keep the game going (to get your gene spellings into the next generation).
That's why Monbiot has bothered to get up in front of an attentive crowd and tell them a story. Because he thinks there's some point to doing so. And for George himself, of course there is a point because it must be very satisfying for him to get up in front of an audience of spellbound people and tell them a hopeful story, however delusional it is.
So Monbiot has no idea what despair is. I'll tell you what despair is. A person feels despair when he able see the ineluctable working out of humankind's tragic fate. When he can see some (if not all) of the flawed qualities which make that self-destructive outcome unavoidable. When he can see that every effort he might conceivably make to reverse that outcome is utterly futile.
That's the despair I feel every day. I would never get up in front of roomful of people to talk about humanity's problems. What would be the fucking point? I wouldn't get anything out of it and neither would they.
Outside of evolution's wicked game, all this serves to underscore the utter pointlessness of human existence, even as humans everywhere desperately try ever harder to create meaning & purpose by clinging to one type of delusion or some other one.
I never feel such despair all the day long. Those feelings are fleeting. Most days I compose or arrange music because it makes me happy, even as the inevitable aches and pains of aging rob me of precious vitality over time (I am now 66).
So George Monbiot has no clue what real despair is. Fuck off, George.
Well, what do you do when you realize that the very powerful turd-flinging monkeys elite journalists working for our corporate-owned media are bat-shit crazy? What do you do when you see them getting worse every day? When you see them going down some unhinged Alex Jones conspiracy rabbit-hole? When you finally understand the meaning of the phrase divorced from reality and can easily apply it to what you're seeing? When Trump Derangement Syndrome goes infinite?
Tim Pool doesn't know what to do. He's at the end of his rope now—he sees the double standards, the moral hypocrisy, the lies, deceptions and conspiracy delusions repeated endlessly. Count how many times he uses the word "insane" or some variant in this video.
I could get all serious here and talk about existential threats, social status & power, filtering, projections, tribalism, confirmation bias, innate feelings of moral superiority leading to inevitable immoral behavior and hypocrisy, etc. Human Nature stuff. But hardly anyone would be able to figure out what the fuck I was talking about. I've learned that lesson. Perhaps you've heard the phrase "falling on deaf ears"? Hmm....
Or I could say "Hey, Tim, come over to the Dark Side. Read my Flatland essays." But there's no chance of that. Still, there is a dilemma. At what extreme point does a person with integrity, a person like Tim Pool, say to himself—
"Oh, man. The human condition really is a crock of shit. I'm outta here."
So what do you do if you're not the suicidal type? Or don't want to stay numb all the time?
Well, kids, the answer is obvious, whether it's the Atom Bomb as it was in the 1950's, or CNN, Buzzfeed, Vox, The Daily Beast and The New York Times today. You must Duck and Cover.
Very powerful elites are really pissed off about the usurper Trump. They do not control the him and the levers of power, which has deranged them. First, they're coming for #OrangeManBad, and in so doing they will attempt to destroy what's left of our democracy. What was the heinous crime committed by 62,979,879 people in November, 2016? They did the only thing the elites still let them do—they voted. This kind of "wrongthink" must destroyed. The hopes & aspirations of those who committed this vote crime must be crushed.
As you watch this, and I hope you will watch the whole thing, try to view it as encapsulating the unassailable absurdity of the Human Condition.
