"The idea that someone needs to be in charge of deciding what's true and false on behalf of the rank-and-file citizenry is becoming more and more widely accepted, and it's plainly irrational."
We've seen this idea brought in with the pandemic mania, and now being pushed regarding the escalating war in Ukraine, the climate hysteria, and whatever other narrative items they want us to believe.
Whatever the truth or otherwise of any of these things, the fact that we are not allowed to discuss them, or even openly consider contrary facts or alternative analysis, is deeply worrisome. It's an assault on science, rationality, freedom of speech and freedom of thought. It's an assault on every advance our Western civilisation has made since the Dark Ages, when heresy was banned and had to be punished, stomped out, and killed.
That so many people are not seeing this is itself a sign they are already captured.
And we are heading back fast to the exact same imposition of thought control.
It's unfortunate that the rank and file, or the citizenry of the US are rather easily manipulated, no doubt due in part to a media that no longer operates with any journalistic integrity, and a population that continues to believe they are. Most people are not interested in politics so few are left to question things. Most just go along. We've also been indoctrinated since the end of WW11 that America is good and Russia is bad, and there are many who are profiteering off that misconception. Americans for the most part supported all our middle eastern wars, of course there were protesters, but they constituted a small minority. I could go on, but unless you have a well informed and active citizenry someone will always take charge and too often with a very authoritarian hand.
We humans are herding animals after all, and our population is made up of followers in the largest proportion with just a few born to be leaders or loners (aka free thinkers). Unfortunately not all leaders have the best interests of the followers at heart, but most followers are blind to the motives of those who lead.
I think there is an element in the American version of liberal capitalism that has made the migration to fascist intolerance a manifest destiny. In 1963 a Columbia University professor, Richard Hofstadter wrote a seminal book, Anti-intellectualism in American Life. In it he argues that the democratization of education together with Protestant zealotry has turned “intellectual” and “elitism” into pejorative words. When these attitudes became part of the national discourse, and were regurgitated in government/media cynically manipulative narratives, the national commitment to vigorous education went the way of the Edsel. This is how a narcissist man-child can become president and sow discord throughout the land. To be clear, Trump did not fall out of a tree. He is the poster boy for the decline in values that are essential to a democratic state: competence, professionalism, expertise, intellectual depth, stewardship and respect for veracity.
A fake democracy, totally dependent on fooling the public into acquiescence, perhaps got its comeuppance by substituting rhetoric for substance. I don’t think there’s any going back.
The founding fathers designed the union to have a weak president because they knew that men are weak and the traits you prattle on about are exceedingly rare. Their solution and the failure of our nation is allowing the imperial presidency to rise. The failure is found in lack of constitutional fidelity
Men are especially weak when they are educated and socialized to fight and take orders from their “superiors.” The constitution was a document to make democracy improbable and practically unattainable.
I think ALL recent presidents are narcissistic men-children. Some just hid it better than others. But the results were, in some cases, much much worse.
"values that are essential to a democratic state: competence, professionalism, expertise, intellectual depth, stewardship and respect for veracity." - I cannot see that ANY recent president held to all of those values.
Trump derangement syndrome is a self inflicted ignorance that embodies the denial that all politicians are lying corrupt power hungry scum. You fantasize that there is a politician that embodies your list of boy scout values in the face of decades of evidence to the contrary.
Trump deranged? I don’t think I am. The man is an overt liar, a bully and clearly a narcissist that cannot abide criticism… even when it’s constructive. He willfully propagates stories he knows to be false, not least of which that he won the 2020 election. He has not a scintilla of humility. It isn’t that he’s “almost” as qualified as the other liars, he’s not fit to represent any public group. He’ll betray any and all for his own ends
It is a very low bar. Especially when I consider what the competence and professionalism and expertise and intellectual depth and stewardship and veracity were used for and/or against. War and Wall Street. All of them.
As long as $Money chooses the candidates and presents them to us, we do not have a democracy. IMO, the entire election process is corrupted. I am not talking about counting votes, no need to go there, but the selection process is totally taken over by, as the Democratic Party put it, a privately owned corporation that is actually empowered to use that "smoke-filled room", with no recourse for members of the party. The primaries are, again IMO, a sham; more like fund-raising pep rallies than an actual selection process for the voters.
There is no going back for certain. The only way out of this is using the same tactics that they use against us against them! They use their enemies to fight their enemies! We need to find the means of doing the same! I believe (someone smarter than me) could find a way to do this based purely on the fact they are mass murdering bastards and would probably tear each other apart if given a reason to do so. Look how they have gone after Trump. Perhaps getting enough disagreement inside the administrations would be a start? I don't know but something has to happen to these criminals soon.
They all knew, facts are not the issue when you want war. But Biden's sly, snake-like attack on Ritter's self-esteem has to be the worst, most disgusting political event I have ever seen on TV.
Ritter, in comparison, was the model of cold dignity, and ethical/moral strength.
I think Doris might be referring to an angry exchange Biden, still in the Senate, had with Scott Ritter several years ago when Ritter was testifying against the Iraq war. The internet show "Redacted" plays the exchange in its half-hour daily introduction.
It's very easy to access on Youtube: Senate Foreign Relations Committee head Joseph Biden questions Scott Ritter on Iraqi weapons - or some variation of that. I don't have the direct link at the moment.
"We gave up paradise to make a few bastards rich." But we did and had, throughout history. This episode has reached the place where the focus must now lie in surviving and perhaps, finally acknowledging, nothing will ever stop the cycle without using the knowledge we now have, to interrupt out inherent irrationality, subject to bias and the manipulations which repeat it. But at the very least, it's time to put far more energy into mutual survival strategies, than wasting it on what psychopaths will collapse, before they will reform. They don't have a "Plan B for Decency." The decent better start working on surviving that.
There is no reason to expect humans to collectively act in their best interest. I appreciate the relentless emphasis on propaganda that Caitlin is churning out (see her June ‘22 essay titled: Imperial Narrative Control Has Five Distinct Elements, available on her website archives.), but a deeply propagandized culture is sleepwalking, and waking them up is but a first step. What then?
I think the lesson of how effective the imperial narrative messaging has been suggests that a non-predatory narrative would need to employ similar messaging in order to push the collective into acting in its best interest. To me, this would begin by facilitating group and communal solutions to challenges, that have heretofore been eschewed, indeed demonized, for the sake of individual profit. Ayn Rand would need to be demonized as Hitler has been.
A propaganda system espousing love and cooperation would “tolerate” a military that would have to operate in bright sunlight, with total transparency. Processed food would have its massive ad budget slashed. Home water and air filtration, solar energy capturing would get lots of emphasis. The exploitative funeral industry would need to be completely reformed.
Education and socialization would be where the core propaganda messaging would be initiated. Religion would have nothing to do with it. Ahh...
I don't think there is a "paradise through science" to be achieved. And whatever that "paradise" would look like, I'm sure it would be a horrific nightmare. We've been chasing the "paradise through science" for a century or more and look where it landed us.
Look where it landed is: longer life spans, lower infant mortality, instant worldwide communications and so much more. I'll take the results of science over superstition thanks.
This is not true. Science has been highjacked to serve the corporate interests! I will throw this out here knowing full well what some are saying (which I think you are confused at the very least!) Climate change is real the scientist who spent years doing studies have proven it! Their data has been twisted and blatantly lied about to people who just spew buzz words. They highjacked the crisis all for profit and since so many people will cut their own throats because of propaganda or just plain laziness they bought the lie and spew it out like it was reality. Question the source of your data and you will find the fossil fuel industry behind it. Or some vested interest in having you believe the lie! 8500 square miles of the Amazon Rain Forest has burned! Over 450 square miles in the first 3 months of this year alone! 43 million missing in Afghanistan after torrential down pours. This isn't natural or normal! Watch the weather report every day! What does "Record High" mean to you? Normal? Wake up people the house is on fire and instead of firemen you are spewing gas!
I don't doubt that human made climate change exists. So what made the kind of industrial production and fossil fuel extraction that is causing climate change even possible? Science did! Science and technology. Climate change is part of the horror show that they helped unleash and part of why I doubt we'll ever reach the paradise of science. Science gives us tools to do worse than ever before.
Edit: And also, I find it annoying how you assume a whole (stupid) worldview for me, that I mentioned with not one word. Argue with the things people are actually saying please, not with the imbecile in your head.
The part of "Climate Change" was not directed directly towards you I was using it as an example overall as all the science deniers I have had to listen to bring this up along with charts produced by the oil companies! They still deny men went to the moon. It appeared you were a denier from your original point. But I will throw this into the fray, where do you go without science? Rubbing 2 sticks together? Backwards, stagnation, howling at the moon? I say again "Science has been highjacked by greed!"
The current war is always tomorrow's "mistake, bumbling into, the result of faulty CIA info, just a human misunderstanding, if we had only known, event". As in Iraq: who wouldn't take the word of an informant, code name, I believe , "curve ball," over Scott Ritter's expert testimony?
Concerning which Joe Biden's grilling and belittling of Ritter in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing is an example of the most evil political obfuscation and side-stepping it is possible to witness. Takes your faith in humanity away - as well as your appetite. Maybe permanently.
Biden was chair of the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate before the Iraq war and did everything in his power to encourage his fellow democrats to vote for it. Even in the late1990's he was pushing it. Biden himself never served in the military and had 5 draft deferments, and one of them for high blood pressure when he was 26. There's a video clip of Pelosi who said she was working on the Intel committee and she knew there were no weapons of mass destruction so she voted against the war. You would think she would have told Joe.
That's what some people fail to remember Biden has been at this a long time! He is responsible for a great many bad things such as filling up the prisons. Who profits the most from that? Haliburton! So Bush's war is fully supported by a Democrat! All criminals making a profit! All Mass Murdering Bastards!
"Takes your faith in humanity away" - by reading books like "Doctors from Hell" by Vivien Spitz and observing degree of obliviousness and willful ignorance currently prevalent in western society I question having such faith to begin with.
What you are describing is the American historical penchant for being ahistorical. With the help of a lapdog media, the various administrations change, but the lying, illegal activities, the covering up go on and on and on. 1975, the criminal Vietnam War ends and The Church Committee documents routine violations of American and international law by clandestine operators. 1985, Iran Contra exposes the contempt that elected conservatives have for laws they don’t like. The 90’s featured the criminal bombing of Yugoslavia by the good ol’ boy, Bill who wanted us to see his “humanitarian”motives.
In 1979, after the Iranian Revolution, Ted Koppel turned the chronicling of the days that hostages were being held into a late night daily news program where he played his pseudo-dour, pseudo-intellectual self. His authoritative reports never connected the taking of hostages with the removal (1952) of a democratically elected Muslim and the installment of a puppet, the Shah, who used CIA-imparted torture tactics on clerics and activists who wanted the puppet gone. Weeks and weeks of vitriol building, the misinformed, apolitical American public don’t understand why Iran hates them. This is a classic example of how an information void can be as manipulative as fabrication.
Very true, and I wish you would have included our many middle eastern that we were lied into, and predicated on a neocon agenda, long planed before Bush got in the White house, etc, Well, no one expects you to write a book.
As Caitlin has often said, there is no more important issue at present than preventing nuclear war with Russia. As Americans options are few, it is imperative that the pro-war democrats (100% are with Biden) lose their majority in Congress in the midterms. Sure, the Repubs aren't much better, but at least they could tie-up the Biden Regime in investigations and prevent him from carrying out his war agenda. It's not much to hang our hats on, but I don't see any alternative. Sixty or so Repubs in Congress voted against funding Biden's war and that number is bound to grow if they win a majority. A vote for democrats means that you have no problem with nuclear war.
I hate the very taste of this but I have to agree with you. Once again we are stuck with the lesser of 2 evils! They would need to tie up the administration with investigations but they are Warmongering whores too so it wouldn't stop the war but possibly dial down the use of the Big Red Button!
What frustrates me the most is how people who actually see through the war propaganda still are so driven by ego and competition or fear that they can't get into a collaborative space. Collaboration requires honest and difficult conversations and I don't think many people have the tools for that.
The electorate is constantly divide by social wedge issues, the propaganda machine is fined tuned to divide and conquer. If we want collaboration we all have to be willing to give up our pet social topics
I really liked the first half of this article, which is brilliant in explaining that the "fact checkers" are all part of the status quo. No wonder we get stupid regime change wars, fake vaccines, fake elections, fake democracies, etc.
I strongly believe that the powers that be, like the WEF, want you: fat, sick, depressed, and isolated. They want you estranged from everything from your community to your own body. They want to extract as much money as possible from you, and then they want you dead.
Seeing through their propaganda and knowing what they want is the first step toward helping others and yourself.
I do like your observations.This quote seems to fit today's.
"When you control opinion, as corporate America controls opinion in the United States by owning the media, you can make the masses believe almost anything you want, and guide them as you please."
Without quoting his exact words on this subject, of media control and lies, there was a fellow in Germany in the 1930's who subscribed to the same philosophy as you have stated above. His name was Joseph Goebbels and he made a career out of doing just that and he only controlled the Germany media at the time.
Through pressure, the US and its compliant little social media puppets and major network sponsors together with those 12 or so Jewish investors who are now able to control over 90% of mainstream media (a well known fact) it's a simple task to paint Biden as a strong leader and Putin as a failure when the opposite is true.
But a quote from Goebbels as a finale..."Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will."
So it is not a well known fact. What is your evidence and even if it were true what does it matter? Most billionaires are probably Anglo Saxons? It sounds so racist and Nazi-ish to single out Jewish people who are not all the same, BTW.
Your well known fact is completely false! I just took the time to do the research and checked out the 25 or so major media owners of TV and newspapers, etc. Here are some of the owners: Murdoch, Jobs, Henry, Roberts, Buffet, Newhouse, Grahams, Hearst, Sook, Forbes, Redstone, Soon-Shiong, Bloomberg, Bezos, Google, AT&T, New Media Investment Group, Apollo Global Management and Red Ventures. Please do some research before making outrageous claims.
From the writing of Philip Giraldi, Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest on 25th October, 2002
Israel routinely uses the Jewish diaspora and its vast wealth to buy up or leverage the media, to corrupt politicians at all levels, and to propagate a narrative that always depicts Jews sympathetically as perpetual victims.
When nations and companies actually compete, all may be ok. But instead, we see that science becomes the tool of power; power needs crises, to spur fear and flow of funds, and so we have the manufactured crises of global warming and Covid. Gov and sociopathic monopoly funded foundations provide grant to universities and buy off politicians, to feed fear and crisis.
There is no evidence that science should be the most collaborative endeavor in the world. Our entire scientific history has been competitive not collaborative even as far back as Plato competitive theories and ideas have been the foundation of knowledge.
Collaborative study results in echo chambers that focus on consensus not innovation.
That isn’t actually accurate. Science is inherently the study of antagonisms. That doesn’t suggest that subjective efforts to reach solutions cannot or shouldn’t be cooperative. The Manhattan Project is a classic example. The field of infectious disease is critically dependent on collaboration.
Oh so right! This is what I have felt for many years! If only investments were made in creativity INSTEAD OF DESTRUCTION! The world would be a paradise!
THIS Is the most important take-away:
"The idea that someone needs to be in charge of deciding what's true and false on behalf of the rank-and-file citizenry is becoming more and more widely accepted, and it's plainly irrational."
We've seen this idea brought in with the pandemic mania, and now being pushed regarding the escalating war in Ukraine, the climate hysteria, and whatever other narrative items they want us to believe.
Whatever the truth or otherwise of any of these things, the fact that we are not allowed to discuss them, or even openly consider contrary facts or alternative analysis, is deeply worrisome. It's an assault on science, rationality, freedom of speech and freedom of thought. It's an assault on every advance our Western civilisation has made since the Dark Ages, when heresy was banned and had to be punished, stomped out, and killed.
That so many people are not seeing this is itself a sign they are already captured.
And we are heading back fast to the exact same imposition of thought control.
Maybe worse...
It's unfortunate that the rank and file, or the citizenry of the US are rather easily manipulated, no doubt due in part to a media that no longer operates with any journalistic integrity, and a population that continues to believe they are. Most people are not interested in politics so few are left to question things. Most just go along. We've also been indoctrinated since the end of WW11 that America is good and Russia is bad, and there are many who are profiteering off that misconception. Americans for the most part supported all our middle eastern wars, of course there were protesters, but they constituted a small minority. I could go on, but unless you have a well informed and active citizenry someone will always take charge and too often with a very authoritarian hand.
We humans are herding animals after all, and our population is made up of followers in the largest proportion with just a few born to be leaders or loners (aka free thinkers). Unfortunately not all leaders have the best interests of the followers at heart, but most followers are blind to the motives of those who lead.
I think there is an element in the American version of liberal capitalism that has made the migration to fascist intolerance a manifest destiny. In 1963 a Columbia University professor, Richard Hofstadter wrote a seminal book, Anti-intellectualism in American Life. In it he argues that the democratization of education together with Protestant zealotry has turned “intellectual” and “elitism” into pejorative words. When these attitudes became part of the national discourse, and were regurgitated in government/media cynically manipulative narratives, the national commitment to vigorous education went the way of the Edsel. This is how a narcissist man-child can become president and sow discord throughout the land. To be clear, Trump did not fall out of a tree. He is the poster boy for the decline in values that are essential to a democratic state: competence, professionalism, expertise, intellectual depth, stewardship and respect for veracity.
A fake democracy, totally dependent on fooling the public into acquiescence, perhaps got its comeuppance by substituting rhetoric for substance. I don’t think there’s any going back.
The founding fathers designed the union to have a weak president because they knew that men are weak and the traits you prattle on about are exceedingly rare. Their solution and the failure of our nation is allowing the imperial presidency to rise. The failure is found in lack of constitutional fidelity
Men are especially weak when they are educated and socialized to fight and take orders from their “superiors.” The constitution was a document to make democracy improbable and practically unattainable.
https://mronline.org/2022/10/21/of-by-and-for-the-elite/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=of-by-and-for-the-elite&mc_cid=de0340119d&mc_eid=0938a33a17
I think ALL recent presidents are narcissistic men-children. Some just hid it better than others. But the results were, in some cases, much much worse.
"values that are essential to a democratic state: competence, professionalism, expertise, intellectual depth, stewardship and respect for veracity." - I cannot see that ANY recent president held to all of those values.
The one I cited had NONE.
Trump derangement syndrome is a self inflicted ignorance that embodies the denial that all politicians are lying corrupt power hungry scum. You fantasize that there is a politician that embodies your list of boy scout values in the face of decades of evidence to the contrary.
Trump deranged? I don’t think I am. The man is an overt liar, a bully and clearly a narcissist that cannot abide criticism… even when it’s constructive. He willfully propagates stories he knows to be false, not least of which that he won the 2020 election. He has not a scintilla of humility. It isn’t that he’s “almost” as qualified as the other liars, he’s not fit to represent any public group. He’ll betray any and all for his own ends
It is a very low bar. Especially when I consider what the competence and professionalism and expertise and intellectual depth and stewardship and veracity were used for and/or against. War and Wall Street. All of them.
Veracity is the big miss for all of them. We’ve never achieved democracy, but for a time we were moving in the right direction.
As long as $Money chooses the candidates and presents them to us, we do not have a democracy. IMO, the entire election process is corrupted. I am not talking about counting votes, no need to go there, but the selection process is totally taken over by, as the Democratic Party put it, a privately owned corporation that is actually empowered to use that "smoke-filled room", with no recourse for members of the party. The primaries are, again IMO, a sham; more like fund-raising pep rallies than an actual selection process for the voters.
There is no going back for certain. The only way out of this is using the same tactics that they use against us against them! They use their enemies to fight their enemies! We need to find the means of doing the same! I believe (someone smarter than me) could find a way to do this based purely on the fact they are mass murdering bastards and would probably tear each other apart if given a reason to do so. Look how they have gone after Trump. Perhaps getting enough disagreement inside the administrations would be a start? I don't know but something has to happen to these criminals soon.
Yes. The "truth" has been replaced with "the official propaganda line".
The Chinese, so much ahead of us on the socialist-facist totalitarianism, call themselves now "the walking dead".
That corporate evolutionary form only benefits CEO'S and their boards of interlocking directors. Imo.
Www.movetoamend.org
Not exactly a Foxworthy fan but one could change the words to one of his comedy sketches...
You might be a sheeple if you oppose the last war but not the current one.
You might be a sheeple if you still blame the unvaxxed for the pandemic.
You might be a sheeple if you still think we live in a democracy.
You might be a sheeple if you play for the blue or the red team.
You probably are a sheeple if you don't question everything.
Absolutely on point !
They all knew, facts are not the issue when you want war. But Biden's sly, snake-like attack on Ritter's self-esteem has to be the worst, most disgusting political event I have ever seen on TV.
Ritter, in comparison, was the model of cold dignity, and ethical/moral strength.
hi Doris, I missed the exchange to which you refer. Could you please link to it here? thanks!
I think Doris might be referring to an angry exchange Biden, still in the Senate, had with Scott Ritter several years ago when Ritter was testifying against the Iraq war. The internet show "Redacted" plays the exchange in its half-hour daily introduction.
It's very easy to access on Youtube: Senate Foreign Relations Committee head Joseph Biden questions Scott Ritter on Iraqi weapons - or some variation of that. I don't have the direct link at the moment.
Boris.
Natasha?
Doris.
"We gave up paradise to make a few bastards rich." But we did and had, throughout history. This episode has reached the place where the focus must now lie in surviving and perhaps, finally acknowledging, nothing will ever stop the cycle without using the knowledge we now have, to interrupt out inherent irrationality, subject to bias and the manipulations which repeat it. But at the very least, it's time to put far more energy into mutual survival strategies, than wasting it on what psychopaths will collapse, before they will reform. They don't have a "Plan B for Decency." The decent better start working on surviving that.
There is no reason to expect humans to collectively act in their best interest. I appreciate the relentless emphasis on propaganda that Caitlin is churning out (see her June ‘22 essay titled: Imperial Narrative Control Has Five Distinct Elements, available on her website archives.), but a deeply propagandized culture is sleepwalking, and waking them up is but a first step. What then?
I think the lesson of how effective the imperial narrative messaging has been suggests that a non-predatory narrative would need to employ similar messaging in order to push the collective into acting in its best interest. To me, this would begin by facilitating group and communal solutions to challenges, that have heretofore been eschewed, indeed demonized, for the sake of individual profit. Ayn Rand would need to be demonized as Hitler has been.
A propaganda system espousing love and cooperation would “tolerate” a military that would have to operate in bright sunlight, with total transparency. Processed food would have its massive ad budget slashed. Home water and air filtration, solar energy capturing would get lots of emphasis. The exploitative funeral industry would need to be completely reformed.
Education and socialization would be where the core propaganda messaging would be initiated. Religion would have nothing to do with it. Ahh...
I don't think there is a "paradise through science" to be achieved. And whatever that "paradise" would look like, I'm sure it would be a horrific nightmare. We've been chasing the "paradise through science" for a century or more and look where it landed us.
Look where it landed is: longer life spans, lower infant mortality, instant worldwide communications and so much more. I'll take the results of science over superstition thanks.
This is not true. Science has been highjacked to serve the corporate interests! I will throw this out here knowing full well what some are saying (which I think you are confused at the very least!) Climate change is real the scientist who spent years doing studies have proven it! Their data has been twisted and blatantly lied about to people who just spew buzz words. They highjacked the crisis all for profit and since so many people will cut their own throats because of propaganda or just plain laziness they bought the lie and spew it out like it was reality. Question the source of your data and you will find the fossil fuel industry behind it. Or some vested interest in having you believe the lie! 8500 square miles of the Amazon Rain Forest has burned! Over 450 square miles in the first 3 months of this year alone! 43 million missing in Afghanistan after torrential down pours. This isn't natural or normal! Watch the weather report every day! What does "Record High" mean to you? Normal? Wake up people the house is on fire and instead of firemen you are spewing gas!
I don't doubt that human made climate change exists. So what made the kind of industrial production and fossil fuel extraction that is causing climate change even possible? Science did! Science and technology. Climate change is part of the horror show that they helped unleash and part of why I doubt we'll ever reach the paradise of science. Science gives us tools to do worse than ever before.
Edit: And also, I find it annoying how you assume a whole (stupid) worldview for me, that I mentioned with not one word. Argue with the things people are actually saying please, not with the imbecile in your head.
You would most likely not be alive if not for the horror show science has wrought. Your very existence is due to the sciences
The part of "Climate Change" was not directed directly towards you I was using it as an example overall as all the science deniers I have had to listen to bring this up along with charts produced by the oil companies! They still deny men went to the moon. It appeared you were a denier from your original point. But I will throw this into the fray, where do you go without science? Rubbing 2 sticks together? Backwards, stagnation, howling at the moon? I say again "Science has been highjacked by greed!"
The current war is always tomorrow's "mistake, bumbling into, the result of faulty CIA info, just a human misunderstanding, if we had only known, event". As in Iraq: who wouldn't take the word of an informant, code name, I believe , "curve ball," over Scott Ritter's expert testimony?
Concerning which Joe Biden's grilling and belittling of Ritter in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing is an example of the most evil political obfuscation and side-stepping it is possible to witness. Takes your faith in humanity away - as well as your appetite. Maybe permanently.
Biden was chair of the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate before the Iraq war and did everything in his power to encourage his fellow democrats to vote for it. Even in the late1990's he was pushing it. Biden himself never served in the military and had 5 draft deferments, and one of them for high blood pressure when he was 26. There's a video clip of Pelosi who said she was working on the Intel committee and she knew there were no weapons of mass destruction so she voted against the war. You would think she would have told Joe.
That's what some people fail to remember Biden has been at this a long time! He is responsible for a great many bad things such as filling up the prisons. Who profits the most from that? Haliburton! So Bush's war is fully supported by a Democrat! All criminals making a profit! All Mass Murdering Bastards!
"Takes your faith in humanity away" - by reading books like "Doctors from Hell" by Vivien Spitz and observing degree of obliviousness and willful ignorance currently prevalent in western society I question having such faith to begin with.
What you are describing is the American historical penchant for being ahistorical. With the help of a lapdog media, the various administrations change, but the lying, illegal activities, the covering up go on and on and on. 1975, the criminal Vietnam War ends and The Church Committee documents routine violations of American and international law by clandestine operators. 1985, Iran Contra exposes the contempt that elected conservatives have for laws they don’t like. The 90’s featured the criminal bombing of Yugoslavia by the good ol’ boy, Bill who wanted us to see his “humanitarian”motives.
In 1979, after the Iranian Revolution, Ted Koppel turned the chronicling of the days that hostages were being held into a late night daily news program where he played his pseudo-dour, pseudo-intellectual self. His authoritative reports never connected the taking of hostages with the removal (1952) of a democratically elected Muslim and the installment of a puppet, the Shah, who used CIA-imparted torture tactics on clerics and activists who wanted the puppet gone. Weeks and weeks of vitriol building, the misinformed, apolitical American public don’t understand why Iran hates them. This is a classic example of how an information void can be as manipulative as fabrication.
Very true, and I wish you would have included our many middle eastern that we were lied into, and predicated on a neocon agenda, long planed before Bush got in the White house, etc, Well, no one expects you to write a book.
This is the most important article I can recall reading. Period.
As Caitlin has often said, there is no more important issue at present than preventing nuclear war with Russia. As Americans options are few, it is imperative that the pro-war democrats (100% are with Biden) lose their majority in Congress in the midterms. Sure, the Repubs aren't much better, but at least they could tie-up the Biden Regime in investigations and prevent him from carrying out his war agenda. It's not much to hang our hats on, but I don't see any alternative. Sixty or so Repubs in Congress voted against funding Biden's war and that number is bound to grow if they win a majority. A vote for democrats means that you have no problem with nuclear war.
I hate the very taste of this but I have to agree with you. Once again we are stuck with the lesser of 2 evils! They would need to tie up the administration with investigations but they are Warmongering whores too so it wouldn't stop the war but possibly dial down the use of the Big Red Button!
What frustrates me the most is how people who actually see through the war propaganda still are so driven by ego and competition or fear that they can't get into a collaborative space. Collaboration requires honest and difficult conversations and I don't think many people have the tools for that.
The electorate is constantly divide by social wedge issues, the propaganda machine is fined tuned to divide and conquer. If we want collaboration we all have to be willing to give up our pet social topics
Agreed.
The MSM doesn't even oppose the last war; rather, they drop the subject as if it were an embarrassing but ultimately minor faux pas.
Caitlin left out one key driver of the competition that destroys cooperation: capitalism.
I really liked the first half of this article, which is brilliant in explaining that the "fact checkers" are all part of the status quo. No wonder we get stupid regime change wars, fake vaccines, fake elections, fake democracies, etc.
I strongly believe that the powers that be, like the WEF, want you: fat, sick, depressed, and isolated. They want you estranged from everything from your community to your own body. They want to extract as much money as possible from you, and then they want you dead.
Seeing through their propaganda and knowing what they want is the first step toward helping others and yourself.
I do like your observations.This quote seems to fit today's.
"When you control opinion, as corporate America controls opinion in the United States by owning the media, you can make the masses believe almost anything you want, and guide them as you please."
Gore Vidal
This echos propaganda model of communication as introduced in "Manufacturing Consent" by Herman/Chomsky.
Right.
Stephen
Without quoting his exact words on this subject, of media control and lies, there was a fellow in Germany in the 1930's who subscribed to the same philosophy as you have stated above. His name was Joseph Goebbels and he made a career out of doing just that and he only controlled the Germany media at the time.
Through pressure, the US and its compliant little social media puppets and major network sponsors together with those 12 or so Jewish investors who are now able to control over 90% of mainstream media (a well known fact) it's a simple task to paint Biden as a strong leader and Putin as a failure when the opposite is true.
But a quote from Goebbels as a finale..."Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will."
So it is not a well known fact. What is your evidence and even if it were true what does it matter? Most billionaires are probably Anglo Saxons? It sounds so racist and Nazi-ish to single out Jewish people who are not all the same, BTW.
Your well known fact is completely false! I just took the time to do the research and checked out the 25 or so major media owners of TV and newspapers, etc. Here are some of the owners: Murdoch, Jobs, Henry, Roberts, Buffet, Newhouse, Grahams, Hearst, Sook, Forbes, Redstone, Soon-Shiong, Bloomberg, Bezos, Google, AT&T, New Media Investment Group, Apollo Global Management and Red Ventures. Please do some research before making outrageous claims.
From the writing of Philip Giraldi, Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest on 25th October, 2002
Israel routinely uses the Jewish diaspora and its vast wealth to buy up or leverage the media, to corrupt politicians at all levels, and to propagate a narrative that always depicts Jews sympathetically as perpetual victims.
Like me, he is probably wrong as well.
You are definitely wrong and Giraldi probably is also since he was CIA and has been accused of being antisemitic and a holocaust denier.
When nations and companies actually compete, all may be ok. But instead, we see that science becomes the tool of power; power needs crises, to spur fear and flow of funds, and so we have the manufactured crises of global warming and Covid. Gov and sociopathic monopoly funded foundations provide grant to universities and buy off politicians, to feed fear and crisis.
There is no evidence that science should be the most collaborative endeavor in the world. Our entire scientific history has been competitive not collaborative even as far back as Plato competitive theories and ideas have been the foundation of knowledge.
Collaborative study results in echo chambers that focus on consensus not innovation.
That isn’t actually accurate. Science is inherently the study of antagonisms. That doesn’t suggest that subjective efforts to reach solutions cannot or shouldn’t be cooperative. The Manhattan Project is a classic example. The field of infectious disease is critically dependent on collaboration.
Well said.
Oh so right! This is what I have felt for many years! If only investments were made in creativity INSTEAD OF DESTRUCTION! The world would be a paradise!