Three and a half years ago, I anticipated and wrote about what's now unfolding in the presidential election. Over the next few weeks, there'll be a lot of mendacious talkabout everything on the periphery of what just happened. But let me spell out the truth of the matter very simply and directly here and now.
John McCain's campaign Policy and People-Centric Leadership Challenged DNC Corporate Elites have just dropped an immense turd into the American political punchbowl. (no offense intended to Sarah Palin Oprah Winfrey who is just being ruthlessly exploited for GOP DNC political gain) So how do I know this? Up until a couple days ago, McCain had only ever had one telephone conversation with Palin over the prior 18 months! It's not as if he even knows her or cares to - instead - Palin Oprah is merely a convenient cog in the bottom-scraping GOP DNC political calculus.
The McCain campaign is Corporate Elites and the Deep State are categorically NOT about issues anymore, at all. Instead, it is a desperate and impulsive fin d'siecle crapshoot rooted in pure identity politics. The writing has been on the wall for a minute concerning the GOP DNC endgame, starting with McCain's attack on Obama's "celebrity". Here now is the gist of what I wrote few years ago, and a couple of very important links that may serve to better illuminate EXACTLY what the GOP strategists Corporate Elites and Deep State are attempting to do with the selection of Palin as McCain's running mate Oprah for Celebrity Clash of the Titans 2020.
First, everyone should read A Guide to the White Trash Planet for Urban Liberals. It is an eye-opening view into the next big job for Americans of good faith. Not only must we Work hard on increasing and enriching the level of interpersonal engagement within our own communities, the next evolutionary push will have to involve education, outreach, and socialization - interpersonal communion - with and among the masses of the poor, white, and pissed. This will not be easy. But it is most definitely necessary.
Not only will this enrich both our respective communities, it will comprise a bulwark against the genuinely evil predations that the backers of the present administration have in store for America. Second, folks need to read The Full Blown Oprah Effect, Reflections on Color, Class, and New Age Racism. This article drives home the necessity of enlarged, renewed, and full engagement on multiple fronts for any genuinely interested in seeing America politically work its way back out of the regressive nosedive engineered by the GOP.
Bottomline - we have all GOT to Work toward being on the same side, or, we will all surely lose in ways and to an extent never previously imagined.
visioncircle | For the past couple weeks I've been indulging a guilty pleasure - no holds barred textual street fighting. It's what invariably happens when I go to visit a sleeply little listserve with an established pecking order and protectionist orthodoxy. Think Vin Diesel's character in Knockaround Guys, and you have a pretty clear picture of what I'm talking about. I'll watch the list flow for a minute, identify the toughest poster(s) - whose self-appointed job it is to enforce aggregate status quo by challenging and discouraging potentially upsetting ecclexia.
Posting something certain to draw a response from the local toughs, I then proceed to share with these hapless rubes (it's always doods too) the hard-earned monstrousness I've amassed over the course of the preceding 2000 textual brawls.
Just like your local divey tavern, listserves exist for socialization, validation, and transaction. Both lurkers and active posters alike are embarked on individual quests for *something*. Whether the urge to socialize, or, the basic shameful human primate propensity for rubbernecking gory altercations, the listserve ecology hosts no innocents - just experience and objective gradients running the gamut from newbie to seasoned regular.
My objective is twofold, first, I enjoy the mayhem. If I ever even attempt to say otherwise, I'm lying like a dog. Second, and more importantly, I long ago discovered the developmental value of friction. Basically, if you put somebody's beliefs and ego to the test, they'll either duck and fold, or, actually step up with their A-game and yield some deep thought you'd otherwise never hear in a thousand years of *civil* conversation. THATis the scarce and precious commodity I'm trawling lists to harvest in the first place.
Ideally, the fight isn't staged simply to wreak devastation. Rather, the goal is to call out the resident champion of an aggregate pov and elicit from that individual the ideative first fruits of the collective he exemplifies. Every Fallujah I've left in my wake is a zero-sum game both literally and figuratively. [and a superb illustration of the absurdity of neocon mentality and policy to boot]
Having temporarily abandoned my afrostocratic haunts in favor of a little good old red-state neocon slumming and brawling - I'll admit I've left a few Fallujah's scattered across the digital countryside. I thought I was embarked on yet another one until yesterday, when a pitched battle finally resulted in pacification of a sizeable enforcer clique and a tentative detente with its champion. Make no mistake, it wasn't "hail and well met" it was straight up ugly and savage until the bell rang and my adversary said "no mas".
After vetting my old school conservative credentials, this individual shared the following gem with me - A Guide to the White Trash Planet for Urban Liberals. It is an eye-opening view into the next big job for Americans of good faith.
Not only must we Work hard on increasing and enriching the level of interpersonal engagement within our own communities, the next evolutionary push will have to involve education, outreach, and socialization - interpersonal communion - with and among the masses of the poor, white, and pissed. This will not be easy. But it is most definitely necessary.
Not only will this enrich both our respective communities, it will comprise a bulwark against the genuinely evil predations that the backers of the present administration have in store for America.
The Full Blown Oprah Effect, Reflections on Color, Class, and New Age Racism really drove home to me the necessity of enlarged, renewed, and full engagement on multiple fronts for any genuinely interested in seeing America politically work its way back out of the regressive nosedive that the neocons have engineered. We have all GOT to Work toward being on the same side, or, we will all surely lose.
"Covert racism may actually be deepened by these civil rights victories and by related partial black upward mobility into the middle and upper classes insofar as those victories and achievements have served to encourage the illusion that racism has disappeared and that the only obstacles left to African-American success and equality are internal to individual blacks and their community – the idea that, in Derrick Bell’s phrase, “the indolence of blacks rather than the injustice of whites explains the socioeconomic gaps separating the races.”
babylonsbanksters | “Modern fiat money and reserve banking is indeed a manifestation of the transmutative ‘nothingness’ of the Philosophers’ Stone, for from the creation of credit out of nothing, gold is produced.” By nationalizing that money and credit-creating institution “and wresting it from private, secretive hands, and using it to fund the alchemical physics it was beginning to develop as the ultimate energy source, as the ultimate power to transport mankind, and as the ultimate power for destruction on a doomsday scale, the Nazis indicated that they had understood the nature of the (Philosophers’) Stone. They had seen, and fully understood, the connection between alchemical physics, and alchemical finance. And they were willing to put it to supremely evil uses.
“But that connection between alchemical physics and alchemical finance is, perhaps, a relationship that requires its own exposition….
The Philosophers’ Stone: Alchemy and the Secret Research for Exotic Matter. The reader may have inferred from these quoted remarks that there was much more of the story — both from the standpoint of physics and finance, and from that of history — to tell, and that it would require yet another study or book to do so. If the reader made such inferences, he is correct on both counts: there is much more of the story of the relationship between physics and finance to tell.
The thesis of this book is both simple to state, and difficult to understand, and that is that, since ancient times and with more or less uninterrupted constancy, there has existed an international money power which seeks by a variety of means — including fraud, deception, assassination, and war — to usurp the money- and credit-creating power of the various states it has sought to dominate, and to obfuscate and occult the profound connection between that money-creating power and the deep “alchemical physics” that such power implies.
Accordingly, I do not argue that case comprehensively in this book, since to do so would require an extended series of books, each devoted to a particular historical period, and each burying the reader in a blizzard of footnotes to the extent that the main thesis would itself become obscured. Rather, I assume this model as a given, as an interpretive paradigm by which to view certain events and data. In so doing, that case is indeed argued, but in synoptic form rather than comprehensively. In doing so, I hope to keep before the reader’s attention that deep and profound connection between physics and finance and to show why it is that the private and international money power must always seek to suppress not only certain types of state financial policy, but also certain types of physics, for both indeed spring from a common conceptual root.
Most of my books, as readers familiar with them already know, inhabit a strange region where alternative physics interfaces with history to reveal the latter’s hidden motivations, secrets, and players. This book is no different, save for the fact that I have obviously added a new conceptual player: finance and economics. And along the way, we shall encounter other major conceptual scenery that readers of my books have encountered before: alchemy, astrology, astronomy, torsion, Egypt, Babylon, Nazis, ancient texts and tomes and modern mathematical gurus speaking the arcane language of statistical and topological lore.
In fact, in one of those odd synchronicities that seem to increase in modern life, as this book was being researched and written, decades — if not centuries or even millennia — of corruption and intellectual flaccidity in the financial, banking, and corporate sectors of the world came to an ugly head with the collapse of the housing and derivatives bubble, and the appearance of some of those responsible for the meltdown before the United States House of Representatives, hands extended, asking for a bailout of their malfeasance and irresponsibility at the expense of the American taxpayer, and demanding no oversight to boot, as if they were being forced to pay some hidden blackmailer, and were afraid that oversight might disclose this fact.
But why call it “irresponsibility” and not simply “criminality”? In the answer to that question there lies a tale, and it is a tale I did not originally intend to go into when I conceived the plan for this series of books many years ago, much less the plan for this one. Recent financial events, however, have contrived to place the story I intended to tell after completing The Nazi International and The Philosophers’ Stone into a rather different context. As will become apparent to the reader in the main text, I do believe there is criminality and conspiracy involved in the story of the complex relationship of physics and finance throughout history. And paradoxically, the farther back one pursues this relationship, the closer together physics, finance, and all those other themes enunciated above as the conceptual scenery, draw together, and the more apparent the odor of a long-standing conspiracy becomes.
But in and of itself the contemporary financial meltdown is both a story of conspiracy as well as a case of galloping stupidity and colossal intellectual, political, and economic irresponsibility proportional to the aforesaid stupidity. It is nonetheless a story with its own deep connections to the story of the main text, and it is as good an entry into the subject as any.
So, as a way of entering into the discussion of the themes that preoccupy the main text, one may examine two salient modern examples that arose to challenge the reigning financial and physical assumptions of that money power.
Those examples are Communist China and Nazi Germany.
aeon | The price theory assumes that there exist fixed and independent
curves that describe supply and demand, but the reality is that these
forces are coupled and in flux – and the idea that they lead to a stable
and optimal equilibrium seems more than a little wobbly.
Even
stranger, though, is that in answering these basic questions money
hardly seems to be mentioned – despite the fact that one would think
money is at the heart of the subject. (Isn’t economics about money?
Aren’t prices set by using money?) If you look at those textbooks, you
will find that, while money is used as a metric, and there is some
discussion of basic monetary plumbing, money is not considered an
important subject in itself. And both money and the role of the
financial sector are usually completely missing from economic models,
nor do they get paid lip service. One reason central banks couldn’t
predict the banking crisis was because their models didn’t include
banks.
Economists, it seems, think about money less than most
people do: as Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England,
observed in 2001: ‘Most economists hold conversations in which the word
“money” hardly appears at all.’ For example, the key question of
money-creation by private banks, according
to the German economist Richard Werner, has been ‘a virtual taboo for
the thousands of researchers of the world’s central banks during the
past half century’. And then there is the mass of complex financial
derivatives, whose nominal value was estimated in 2010 at
$1.2 quadrillion, but which is nowhere to be found in conventional
models, even though it was at the root of the crisis.
To sum up,
the key tenets of mainstream or neoclassical economics – including such
things as ‘utility’ or ‘demand curves’ or ‘rational economic man’ – are
just made-up inventions, no more real than the crystalline spheres that
Medieval astronomers thought suspended the planets. But real things like
money are to a remarkable extent ignored.
In physics, the quantum
revolution was born when physicists found that at the subatomic level
energy was always exchanged in terms of discrete parcels, which they
called quanta, from the Latin for ‘how much’. Perhaps we need
to follow the quantum lead, and look at transactions between people. In
economics, the equivalent would be exchanges of money – like when you go
into a shop, point at something, and ask: How much? Or, if you’re in Italy, Quanto?, which makes the connection a little clearer.
aeon | Clearly, the causal motion swings both ways. Cultural questions can
popularise certain drugs; but sometimes popular drugs end up creating
our culture. From rave culture booming on the back of ecstasy to a
culture of hyper-productivity piggybacking on drugs initially meant to
help with cognitive and attention deficits, the symbiosis between
chemical and culture is evident.
But
while drugs can both answer cultural questions and create entirely new
cultures, there is no simple explanation for why one happens rather than
the other. If rave culture is created by ecstasy, does that mean
ecstasy is also ‘answering’ a cultural question; or was ecstasy simply there and rave culture blossomed around it? The line of causality is easily blurred.
A
corollary can be found in the human sciences where it is
extraordinarily difficult to categorise different types of people
because, as soon as one starts ascribing properties to groups, people
change and spill out of the parameters to which they were first
assigned. The philosopher of science Ian Hacking coined
the term for this: ‘the looping effect’. People ‘are moving targets
because our investigations interact with them, and change them,’ Hacking
wrote in the London Review of Books. ‘And since they are changed, they are not quite the same kind of people as before.’
This
holds true for the relationship between drugs and culture as well.
‘Every time a drug is invented that interacts with the brains and minds
of users, it changes the very object of the study: the people who are
using,’ says Henry Cowles, assistant professor of the history of
medicine at Yale. On this reading, the idea that drugs create culture is
true, to an extent, but it is likewise true that cultures can shift and
leave a vacuum of unresolved desires and questions that drugs are often
able to fill.
Take the example of American housewives addicted
to barbiturates and other drugs. The standard and aforementioned causal
argument is that they were culturally repressed, had few freedoms, and
so sought out the drugs as a way to overcome their anomie: LSD and later
antidepressants were ‘answer drugs’ to the strict cultural codes, as
well as a means to self-medicate emotional pain. But, Cowles argues, one
might just as easily say that ‘these drugs were created with various
sub-populations in mind and they end up making available a new kind of housewife or a new
kind of working woman, who is medicated in order to enable this kind of
lifestyle’. In short, Cowles says: ‘The very image of the depressed
housewife emerges only as a result of the possibility of medicating
that.’
Such an explanation puts drugs at the centre of the past
century of cultural history for a simple reason: if drugs can create and
underscore cultural limitations, then drugs and their makers can
tailor-make entire socio-cultural demographics (eg, ‘the depressed
housewife’ or ‘the hedonistic, cocaine-snorting Wall Street trader’).
Crucially, this creation of cultural categories applies to everyone,
meaning that even those not using the popularised drugs of a
given era are beholden to their cultural effects. The causality is
muddy, but what is clear is that it swings back and forth: drugs both
‘answer’ cultural questions and allow for cultures to be created around
themselves.
Looking at the culture of today, perhaps the biggest
question answered by drugs are issues of focus and productivity – a
consequence of the modern ‘attention economy’, as termed by the Nobel
Prize-winning economist Herbert Alexander Simon.
DallasObserver | Robert Jeffress, pastor at First Baptist Dallas, committed himself to
Donald Trump and his presidency in 2016, positioning himself as the
evangelical face of Trumpism. This year, for better and worse, Jeffress
has reaped the consequences of that commitment, repeatedly finding
himself at the center of the Trump universe because of his words,
decisions or sheer proximity to the president. He has more access to the
president and the White House than any other religious leader in the
country.
As the first installment of America: The Trump Years winds down, let's take a look at all the fun Jeffress had in 2017.
RightWingWatch | Robert Jeffress, a faith adviser to and staunch supporter of
President Trump, told Religious Right radio host Janet Mefferd
yesterday that Trump’s presidency has exposed a divide among
evangelicals between those “who take the Bible seriously and those who
don’t,” saying that Trump’s critics among the “evangelical elite” don’t
embrace the true values of the faith.
During yesterday’s episode of “Janet Mefferd Live” on American Family
Radio, Mefferd spoke with Jeffress about articles that have documented
how the “evangelical divide”
has intensified under Trump. Jeffress denied that Trump created the
schisms in the evangelical community, saying that the “evangelical
elite” had already been distancing itself from biblical values.
“Look, poor President Trump gets blamed for everything from the
melting of the polar ice caps to now the evangelical crisis. And you
know, that word ‘crisis’ means ‘divide.’ And I will admit there is a
divide going on among evangelicals. President Trump didn’t cause the
divide, but he has exposed it,” Jeffress said. “It’s been a growing
divide, Janet, between evangelicals who take the Bible seriously and
those who don’t. I call them the ‘evangelical elite’—the ‘Christianity
of the day’ crowd.”
Jeffress continued, “And here’s where it comes down to—think about
this. President Trump is the most pro-life, pro-religious liberty,
pro-Israel president in history. So why do we have this resistance among
the evangelical elite while the mass of evangelicals in the pews
support him? And what it comes down to is the evangelical elite really
don’t embrace these values.”
WaPo | Author Michael Wolff bolstered President Trump's effort to discredit the new book “Fire and Fury”
on Friday when he acknowledged in a “Today” show interview that he had
been willing to say whatever was “necessary” to gain access at the White
House.
Wolff's admission does not directly undermine the
veracity of his reporting, but it creates the appearance that he might
have approached some members of the president's team under false
pretenses, leading sources to believe that when they opened up they were
speaking to a sympathetic ear. That's a bad look — one which the White
House can use to impugn Wolff's integrity and, perhaps unfairly, cast
doubt on whichever elements of his work the president doesn't like.
Here's Wolff's exchange with “Today” show co-host Savannah Guthrie:
GUTHRIE:
Your former editor at Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter, said he wasn't
surprised you'd written this explosive book; he was surprised they let
you in the door at the White House. Are you surprised?
WOLFF: You know, um, no. I'm a nice guy. I go in . . .
GUTHRIE: Did you flatter your way in?
WOLFF: I certainly said what was ever necessary to get the story.
It's
easy to find examples of Wolff saying things that would please Trump
and his team — a theme being that other journalists are unfair.
On the morning after Trump's election, Wolff wrote in the Hollywood Reporter
that “the media turned itself into the opposition and, accordingly, was
voted down as the new political reality emerged.” He scolded New Yorker
editor David Remnick for calling Trump's win an “American tragedy” and wrote that “awe might have been in order.”
A short time later, Wolff addressed fellow reporters in an interview with Digiday. “Let me send the message: stenographer is what you're supposed to be,” he said.
After
Trump's inauguration, Wolff accused the press of waging a campaign to
take down the president. “The media's holy grail is, as it's been for
much of the campaign, about what will stick,” he wrote in Newsweek.
“Of the myriad likely damaging possibilities, which one will be so
prima facie damaging (pay no attention to the many instances that many
people already thought were, or would be) or so shocking and insulting
to the body politic that it will be the end, or at least the beginning
of the end, of Trump? Nothing counts but delivering a mortal wound, so
everything is delivered as though it is a mortal wound.”
WaPo | Jeff Sessions hates marijuana. Hates it, with a passion that has animated almost nothing else in his career. “Good people don’t smoke marijuana,” he has said. He even once said about the Ku Klux Klan, “I thought those guys were okay until I learned they smoked pot.”
He says that was a joke, but even so, it still says something about where he’s coming from.
So
if you’re wondering why Sessions has endured the humiliation of being
demeaned and abused by President Trump and stayed on as attorney
general, one big answer is the policy change he announced this week,
that he is rescinding an Obama-era directive that instructed federal
prosecutors not to prioritize prosecuting businesses like dispensaries
in states that had legalized cannabis. Sessions is finally getting the
chance to lock up all those hippies, with their pot-smoking and their
free love and their wah-wah pedals and everything immoral they
represent. He’ll show them.
WaPo | Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Thursday that he will rescind a Justice Department memorandum
— known as the Cole Memo — that granted protection to state-legal and
regulated marijuana companies. In doing so, Sessions has not only
brushed aside science, logic and the prevailing public opinion, but he
has also contradicted the opinion of the president he serves and his own
party’s governing values.
Sessions’s decision empowers U.S.
attorneys to begin prosecuting an industry that has complied with state
laws and regulations and has, since 2013, been granted an effective
waiver from federal intervention. During this time, the legal marijuana industry has become a multibillion-dollar venture, employing tens of thousands of Americans from coast to coast.
This decision to reignite the drug war comes as little surprise. Sessions once said
that “good people don’t smoke marijuana.” He has shown a deep ignorance
of the realities of the drug war, which has been ineffective and costly
and has disproportionately affected minority communities. And he has
committed to numerous claims that have been dispelled by science, such
as cannabis’s gateway effect and the idea that marijuana is “only slightly less awful” than heroin.
Many costly drugs need to be purchased year after year. But gene
therapies are given only once, with potentially permanent effects.
Mark Trusheim, who directs MIT’s New Drug Development Paradigms
program, says gene therapies are moving medicine from a model of
“renting” treatments to one of “buying” long-term health improvements.
“The challenge is like going from being an apartment renter to a
condo buyer and being shocked at [the] purchase price,” he says.
Philadelphia-based Spark Therapeutics said yesterday that it
planned to charge $425,000 per eye for Luxturna, the first gene therapy
for an inherited disease to reach the U.S. market.
David Mitchell, founder and president of the advocacy group Patients for
Affordable Drugs, is concerned that the treatment will be out of reach
for people with high-deductible health plans and would bankrupt those
without insurance.
atlasobscura | The phrase limpieza, “purity of
blood,” came into common use in the sixteenth century. The phrase was
understood literally, not metaphorically: Medical belief held that blood
was the principal of four humors in the body, because it circulated the
other humors. Blood therefore played an essential role in establishing a
person’s character.
The most important conflict over limpieza discrimination came in the mid-16th century. The Toledo archbishop, Juan MartÃnez SilÃceo, limpieza’s strongest proponent, recommended imposing purity-of-blood restrictions in his archdiocese.
The most prominent cleric to resist this was Ignacio de Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order. Loyola befriended Spanish conversos at the University of Paris, who eventually became some of the founding members of the Jesuits. Diego Lainez, a converso, succeeded Loyola as the order’s superior general.
The prominence of conversos
within the Jesuits meant it was inevitable that the order would come
into conflict with Archbishop SilÃceo. SilÃceo banned members of the
order from acting as priests without first being personally examined by
him. Jesuits could only win SilÃceo’s favor by adopting limpieza, and Loyola refused to comply. This significantly impeded the growth of the order in Spain.
But the resonances of Spanish limpieza restrictions
went far beyond their effect on the Jesuit order. Iberian
initiatives—African race slavery, the discovery of America, the
development of plantation agriculture—made limpieza a force in the development of anti-black racism.
Beginning in the 1440s, Spain and
Portugal entered the African slave trade, formerly dominated by Islamic
countries. The discovery of America and the development of plantation
agriculture considerably expanded African slavery. Between 1500 and 1580
Spain shipped approximately 74,000 African people to America; this
number increased to approximately 714,000 between 1580 and 1640.
Along with slavery, Spain exported limpieza. In 1552, the Spanish Crown decreed that emigrants to America must furnish proof of limpieza. The Spanish deployed limpieza throughout Spanish America and the Portuguese adopted it in Brazil. In its new environment, limpieza began to mutate, beginning to refer to an absence of black blood as well as an absence of Jewish blood.
In both cases, the idea was that “impure”
blood could taint a person’s character. In 1604, historian Fray
Prudencio de Sandoval compared the impure natures of blacks and Jews:
“Who can deny that in descendants of Jews there persists and endures the
evil inclination of their ancient ingratitude and lack of
understanding, just as in the Negroes [there persists] the
inseparability of their blackness. For if the latter should unite
themselves a thousand times with white women, the children are born with
the dark color of the father. Similarly, it is not enough for the Jew
to be three parts aristocrat or Old Christian, for one Jewish ancestor
alone defiles and corrupts him.”
The main target of limpieza in the Americas was black blood. Limpieza
was used to discriminate against Africans both to justify race slavery
and to enforce the distinctions that a race slave system required.
Haaretz | Washington gave Israel a green light to assassinate Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, the overseas arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida reported on Monday.
TheAmericanConservative |Speaking at the annual Reagan National
Defense Forum, CIA Director Mike Pompeo recently disclosed that he sent
a direct communication to Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani, the
longtime commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force
division responsible for Iran’s overseas paramilitary and intelligence
activity. “What we were communicating to him in that letter was that we
will hold he and Iran accountable for any attacks on American interests
in Iraq by forces that are under their control,” Pompeo told the audience. “We wanted to make sure he and the leadership in Iran understood that in a way that was crystal clear.”
To some who have operated in the
clandestine and murky world of intelligence tradecraft,
Pompeo’s maneuver was a surprise. Former CIA director Mike Hayden told Newsweek that
he couldn’t recall ever doing such a thing during his tenure, while
others labeled Pompeo’s move a too-clever-by-half strategy to signal
toughness to Soleimani, who retains enormous power and influence within
the Iranian political system.
Breitbart | “The President of the United States is a great man,” said Breitbart
News’s Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon on Wednesday’s edition of
SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight.
Bannon’s comments came in response to Justin from California, a caller-in to Breitbart News Tonight noting President Donald Trump’s recent criticisms of Bannon.
Partial transcript below.
JUSTIN: First of all, I
think [Donald Trump] made a huge mistake, Steve, bashing you like he did
today on Twitter. That was devastating to me. I hope in the future you
can forgive him for that when we come to 2020, because I’m sure he’s
going to need your help. BANNON: The President of the United
States is a great man. You know I support him day in and day out,
whether going through the country giving the Trump Miracle speech or on the show or on the website, so I don’t you have to worry about that. But I appreciate the kind words. JUSTIN: Yeah, that just made me sick to my stomach, though.
“[Donald Trump] got sucked in by fake news, or trolled,” said Gayle
in Alabama, another caller-in toe Breitbart News Tonight, framing the
president as being fooled by cultivated drama via the Hollywood Reporter’s Michael Wolff.
Guardian | Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon
has described the Trump Tower meeting between the president’s son and a
group of Russians during the 2016 election campaign as “treasonous” and
“unpatriotic”, according to an explosive new book seen by the Guardian.
Bannon,
speaking to author Michael Wolff, warned that the investigation into
alleged collusion with the Kremlin will focus on money laundering and
predicted: “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national
TV.”
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, reportedly based on more
than 200 interviews with the president, his inner circle and players in
and around the administration, is one of the most eagerly awaited
political books of the year. In it, Wolff lifts the lid on a White House
lurching from crisis to crisis amid internecine warfare, with even some
of Trump’s closest allies expressing contempt for him.
Bannon, who was chief executive of the Trump campaign in its final
three months, then White House chief strategist for seven months before
returning to the rightwing Breitbart News, is a central figure in the
nasty, cutthroat drama, quoted extensively, often in salty language.
He is particularly scathing about a June 2016 meeting involving
Trump’s son Donald Jr, son-in-law Jared Kushner, then campaign chairman
Paul Manafort and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya
at Trump Tower in New York. A trusted intermediary had promised
documents that would “incriminate” rival Hillary Clinton but instead of
alerting the FBI to a potential assault on American democracy by a
foreign power, Trump Jr replied in an email: “I love it.”
NYTimes | He is known as the Dark Prince or Ayatollah Mike, nicknames he earned as the Central Intelligence Agency officer who oversaw the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the American drone strike campaign that killed thousands of Islamist militants and hundreds of civilians.
Now the official, Michael D’Andrea, has a new job. He is running the C.I.A.’s Iran operations, according to current and former intelligence officials, an appointment that is the first major sign that the Trump administration is invoking the hard line the president took against Iran during his campaign.
Mr. D’Andrea’s new role is one of a number of moves inside the spy agency that signal a more muscular approach to covert operations under the leadership of Mike Pompeo, the conservative Republican and former congressman, the officials said. The agency also recently named a new chief of counterterrorism, who has begun pushing for greater latitude to strike militants.
Iran has been one of the hardest targets for the C.I.A. The agency has extremely limited access to the country — no American embassy is open to provide diplomatic cover — and Iran’s intelligence services have spent nearly four decades trying to counter American espionage and covert operations.
The challenge to start carrying out President Trump’s views falls to Mr. D’Andrea, a chain-smoking convert to Islam, who comes with an outsize reputation and the track record to back it up: Perhaps no single C.I.A. official is more responsible for weakening Al Qaeda.
“He can run a very aggressive program, but very smartly,” said Robert Eatinger, a former C.I.A. lawyer who was deeply involved in the agency’s drone program. The C.I.A. declined to comment on Mr. D’Andrea’s role, saying it does not discuss the identities or work of clandestine officials.
aljazeera | The Islamic Republic of Iran is the platypus of humanity's political evolution.
Episodic Iranian unrest, from the focused, reformist uprising of 2009
(led by middle-class protesters of Tehran) to the current, wildly
rejectionist riots (spearheaded by the underclass and the unemployed in
the poor neighborhoods of provincial towns) cannot be understood in
isolation from that melange of procedural democracy and obscurantist
theocracy that was crammed into the constitution of revolutionary Iran, four decades ago.
Deep within Iran's authoritarian system there is a tiny democratic
heart, complete with elective, presidential and parliamentary chambers,
desperately beating against an unyielding, theocratic exoskeleton. That
palpitating democratic heart has prolonged the life of the system -
despite massive mismanagement of the domestic and international affairs
by the revolutionary elites.
But it has failed to soften the authoritarian carapace. The reform
movement has failed in its mission because the constitution grants three
quarters of the political power to the office of the "Supreme Leader":
an unelected, permanent appointment whereby a "religious jurist" gains
enormous powers, including command of the armed forces and foreign
policy, veto power over presidential cabinets and parliamentary
initiatives, and the world's most formidable Pretorian Guard (IRGC),
with military, paramilitary, intelligence, judicial and extrajudicial
powers to enforce the will of its master.
The democratically-elected president and parliament (let alone the
media and ordinary citizens) have no prayer of checking the powers of
the Supreme Leader. As a result, the system has remained opaque, blind
to its own flaws, resistant to growth and incapable of adaptation to its
evolving internal and external environments.
theverge | Nearly every web browser now comes with a password
manager tool, a lightweight version of the same service offered by
plugins like LastPass and 1Password. But according to new research from Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, those same managers are being exploited as a way to track users from site to site.
The researchers examined two different scripts — AdThink
and OnAudience — both of are designed to get identifiable information
out of browser-based password managers. The scripts work by injecting
invisible login forms in the background of the webpage and scooping up
whatever the browsers autofill into the available slots. That
information can then be used as a persistent ID to track users from page
to page, a potentially valuable tool in targeting advertising.
The plugins focus largely on the usernames, but according
to the researchers, there’s no technical measure to stop scripts from
collecting passwords the same way. The only robust fix would be to
change how password managers work, requiring more explicit approval
before submitting information. “It won't be easy to fix, but it's worth
doing,” says Arvind Narayanan, a Princeton computer science professor
who worked on the project.
fox4kc | A man has died Tuesday night after being shot in the parking lot of the Independence Center, police say.
Independence Police spokesman John Syme confirmed officers were
dispatched to the homicide at 18801 E. 39th St. around 8:30 p.m. Syme
said the man's body was found outside a vehicle in the parking lot.
The man's identity has not yet been released, and suspect information
was not immediately available, Syme said. Police do not have a suspect
in custody yet and are asking anyone with information about the shooting
to call police.
Syme said it's too early to determine if the shooting was a targeted incident or not.
This is a developing story. Fox 4 will update as more information is available.
therealnews | Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Gregory Wilpert coming to you from Quito, Ecuador. The year 2017 is turning out to be another banner year for the centralization of capital, that is, according to an article in the Financial Times this week, “Global mergers and acquisitions exceeds three trillion dollars for the fourth straight year.” The article goes on to point out the following: Faced with the prospect of Amazon's entry into the pharmacy business, the US's biggest drugstore chain, CVS Health, agreed to acquire health insurer, Aetna for about $69 billion. Encroachment by Facebook and Netflix into sports, media and film production led Rupert Murdoch to sell most of his 21st Century Fox empire to Disney in a $66 billion deal.
The US remained the most active region for mergers and acquisitions with $1.4 trillion in deals. The numbers of US deals struck in 2017 combined climbed above 12,400 for a record figure. The largest deal in 2017 has yet to be resolved as Broadcom pursues a hostile $130 billion bid for rival chip maker, Qualcomm. Joining me to analyze the causes and consequences of this massive centralization of capital in 2017 is Michael Hudson. Michael is a distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. He's author of several books. The most recent among them is J is for Junk Economics. Welcome back, Michael.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Good to be back here.
GREGORY WILPERT: So, what at heart is causing all of this frenetic activity for companies to gobble up one another and thereby creating and ever greater centralization of capital?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, it's part of the neoliberal strategy to inflate the wealth of the 1%, basically by inflating the stock market and the real estate and the bond prices. At the same time, the central banks are pursuing quantitative easing that offer money at almost zero interest rates. You have the tax system, tax giveaways, to the... sector, which are encouraging these mergers and acquisitions by, essentially, dismantling the antitrust legislation that has been in place since the New Deal, and the tax giveaways that make it possible for all of this huge, hundreds of billions of dollar tax giveaways in the Republican tax law of two weeks ago that enables companies that have kept hundreds of billions of their earnings tax-free in offshore banking enclaves and tax avoidance centers.
Since 2004, all this money can now be replaced under the name of the head companies instead of their just-pretend foreign affiliates in these tax avoidance centers. So, the companies are going to be very tax rich. They've anticipated most of this and essentially, you can look at these mergers and acquisitions as part of an arbitrage operation. If you can get money at about 1%, if you're a hedge fund, a bank or a large corporation, if you can borrow at 1%, then you can borrow stocks that are yielding 10% or even more. Or, for that matter, even less and you can make up all the difference between the 1% you pay and the stocks whose dividends pay a higher rate of return, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9%.
Counterpunch | I wrote an Op-Ed for The Washington Post[1]about
the Thomas Hill case in which Thomas was accused of accosting Anita
Hill with ugly sexist language. I suggested that it would be a boon for
corporate feminists who had co-opted the feminist movement. Instead of
exposing the hands-on assaults against them by their employers upon whom
they depended for their prosperity, they could blame Black guys for
sexism in the workplace. It was Maureen Dowd who pointed to the
hypocrisy of some of Hill’s White feminist supporters. When Bill
Clinton’s hands-on sexism came to light, she noted that some of those
liberal and progressive feminists who condemned Clarence Thomas defended
Clinton’s offenses against women.
Clarence Thomas has been ridiculed for years for pleading that he was
subjected to a “hi-tech lynching.” But now that powerful corporate
White men, among them predators, who, for decades, have been shielded by
corporate feminists, their defenders are insisting upon due process,
which is what Thomas was demanding. To cross examine his accusers.
Timesman Bret Stephens complains about hi-tech lynchings now that the
shoe is on the other foot and outfits like NPR, The New Republic, MSNBC, The New York Times
and other media outlets, which have competed for revenue from what
could be called “The Black Boogeyman” racket, have uncovered predators
among their personnel. Now that they’re feeling the heat from feminists
they’ve come up with something called “a spectrum of behavior.”
In the Post article, I also pointed out that regardless of
Thomas’s right-wing views, in the Anita Hill vs. Thomas case, Blacks
supported Thomas. White progressives didn’t pay attention to this fact.
For them, Blacks are to be interpreted. Not listened too. Maybe they
agree with Jeffrey Toobin, who has made a fortune from a slipshod
examination of the Simpson case. Toobin says that Blacks can’t deal with
reality and shouldn’t be patted on the head,[4] like the reward that a dog receives after retrieving a ball for his owner.
endgadget | The new replay tools offered in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds
are so much more than standard video-capture technology. In fact, it
isn't video capture at all -- it's data capture. The 3D replay tools
allow players to zoom around the map after a match, tracking their own
character, following enemies' movements, slowing down time and setting
up cinematic shots of their favorite kills, all within a 1-kilometer
radius of their avatar. It's filled with statistics, fresh perspectives
and infinite data points to dissect. This isn't just a visual replay;
it's a slice of the actual game, perfectly preserved, inviting
combatants to play God.
PUBG is an ideal test case. It's a massively popular online
game where up to 100 players parachute onto a map, scavenge for
supplies, upgrade weapons and attempt to be the last person standing.
Even though it technically came out in December, PUBG has been
available in early access since March and it's picked up a considerable
number of accolades -- and players -- in the process. Just last week, SteamDB reported PUBG hit 3 million concurrent players on PC, vastly outstripping its closest competitor, Dota 2, which has a record of 1.29 million simultaneous players.
Part of PUBG's
success stems from developers' relentless focus on making the game fun
to watch. Live streaming is now a major part of the video-game world,
with sites like Twitch and YouTube Gaming growing in prominence and
eSports bursting into the mainstream.
Kim says PUBG
creator Brendan Greene and CEO Chang Han Kim built the idea of
data-capture into the game from the beginning, and Minkonet's tech is a
natural evolution of this focus. Minkonet and PUBG developers connected in late 2016 and started working together on the actual software earlier this year.
"One of their first visions was to have PUBG
as not just a great game to play, but a great game to watch," Kim says.
"So they were already from the very beginning focused on having PUBG as a great live streaming game; esports was also one of their sort of long-term visions."
The first step in this direction of technology imitating ideology was
taken a couple of years ago by Pranav Mistry, a member of the Fluid
Interfaces Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab,
who developed a wearable “gestural interface” called “SixthSense.”**
The hardware—a small webcam that dangles from one’s neck, a pocket
projector, and a mirror, all connected wirelessly to a smartphone in
one’s pocket—forms a wearable mobile device. The user begins by handling
objects and making gestures; the camera recognizes and tracks the
user’s hand gestures and the physical objects using computer
vision-based techniques. The software processes the video stream data,
reading it as a series of instructions, and retrieves the appropriate
information (texts, images, etc.) from the Internet; the device then
projects this information onto any physical surface available—all
surfaces, walls, and physical objects around the wearer can serve as
interfaces. Here are some examples of how it works: In a bookstore, I
pick up a book and hold it in front of me; immediately, I see projected
onto the book’s cover its reviews and ratings. I can navigate a map
displayed on a nearby surface, zoom in, zoom out, or pan across, using
intuitive hand movements. I make a sign of @ with my fingers and a
virtual PC screen with my email account is projected onto any surface in
front of me; I can then write messages by typing on a virtual keyboard.
And one could go much further here—just think how such a device could
transform sexual interaction. (It suffices to concoct, along these
lines, a sexist male dream: Just look at a woman, make the appropriate
gesture, and the device will project a description of her relevant
characteristics—divorced, easy to seduce, likes jazz and Dostoyevsky,
good at fellatio, etc., etc.) In this way, the entire world becomes a
“multi-touch surface,” while the whole Internet is constantly mobilized
to supply additional data allowing me to orient myself.
Mistry emphasized the physical aspect of this interaction: Until now,
the Internet and computers have isolated the user from the surrounding
environment; the archetypal Internet user is a geek sitting alone in
front of a screen, oblivious to the reality around him. With SixthSense,
I remain engaged in physical interaction with objects: The alternative
“either physical reality or the virtual screen world” is replaced by a
direct interpenetration of the two. The projection of information
directly onto the real objects with which I interact creates an almost
magical and mystifying effect: Things appear to continuously reveal—or,
rather, emanate—their own interpretation. This quasi-animist effect is a
crucial component of the IoT: “Internet of things? These are nonliving
things that talk to us, although they really shouldn’t talk. A rose, for
example, which tells us that it needs water.”1 (Note the
irony of this statement. It misses the obvious fact: a rose is alive.)
But, of course, this unfortunate rose does not do what it “shouldn’t”
do: It is merely connected with measuring apparatuses that let us know
that it needs water (or they just pass this message directly to a
watering machine). The rose itself knows nothing about it; everything
happens in the digital big Other, so the appearance of animism (we
communicate with a rose) is a mechanically generated illusion.
nautil.us | Considerable evidence suggests that dividing the world into Us and Them
is deeply hard-wired in our brains, with an ancient evolutionary legacy.
For starters, we detect Us/Them differences with stunning speed. Stick
someone in a “functional MRI”—a brain scanner that indicates activity in
various brain regions under particular circumstances. Flash up pictures
of faces for 50 milliseconds—a 20th of a second—barely at the level of
detection. And remarkably, with even such minimal exposure, the brain
processes faces of Thems differently than Us-es.
This has been studied extensively with the inflammatory Us/Them of
race. Briefly flash up the face of someone of a different race (compared
with a same-race face) and, on average, there is preferential
activation of the amygdala, a brain region associated with fear,
anxiety, and aggression. Moreover, other-race faces cause less
activation than do same-race faces in the fusiform cortex, a region
specializing in facial recognition; along with that comes less accuracy
at remembering other-race faces. Watching a film of a hand being poked
with a needle causes an “isomorphic reflex,” where the part of the motor
cortex corresponding to your own hand activates, and your hand
clenches—unless the hand is of another race, in which case less of this
effect is produced.
The brain’s fault lines dividing Us from Them
are also shown with the hormone oxytocin. It’s famed for its pro-social
effects—oxytocin prompts people to be more trusting, cooperative, and
generous. But, crucially, this is how oxytocin influences behavior
toward members of your own group. When it comes to outgroup members, it does the opposite.
The
automatic, unconscious nature of Us/Them-ing attests to its depth. This
can be demonstrated with the fiendishly clever Implicit Association
Test. Suppose you’re deeply prejudiced against trolls, consider them
inferior to humans. To simplify, this can be revealed with the Implicit
Association Test, where subjects look at pictures of humans or trolls,
coupled with words with positive or negative connotations. The couplings
can support the direction of your biases (e.g., a human face and the
word “honest,” a troll face and the word “deceitful”), or can run
counter to your biases. And people take slightly longer, a fraction of a
second, to process discordant pairings. It’s automatic—you’re not
fuming about clannish troll business practices or troll brutality in the
Battle of Somewhere in 1523. You’re processing words and pictures, and
your anti-troll bias makes you unconsciously pause, stopped by the
dissonance linking troll with “lovely,” or human with “malodorous.”
We’re
not alone in Us/Them-ing. It’s no news that other primates can make
violent Us/Them distinctions; after all, chimps band together and
systematically kill the males in a neighboring group. Recent work,
adapting the Implicit Association Test to another species, suggests that
even other primates have implicit negative associations with Others.
Rhesus monkeys would look at pictures either of members of their own
group or strangers, coupled with pictures of things with positive or
negative connotations. And monkeys would look longer at pairings
discordant with their biases (e.g., pictures of members of their own
group with pictures of spiders). These monkeys don’t just fight
neighbors over resources. They have negative associations about
them—“Those guys are like yucky spiders, but us, us, we’re like luscious
fruit.”
Thus, the strength of Us/Them-ing is shown by the: speed
and minimal sensory stimuli required for the brain to process group
differences; tendency to group according to arbitrary differences, and
then imbue those differences with supposedly rational power; unconscious
automaticity of such processes; and rudiments of it in other primates.
As we’ll see now, we tend to think of Us, but not Thems, fairly
straightforwardly.
motherjones | On election night, Anthony was shocked to see Trump carry Wisconsin
by nearly 23,000 votes. The state, which ranked second in the nation in
voter participation in 2008 and 2012, saw its lowest turnout since 2000.
More than half the state’s decline in turnout occurred in Milwaukee,
which Clinton carried by a 77-18 margin, but where almost 41,000 fewer
people voted in 2016 than in 2012. Turnout fell only slightly in white
middle-class areas of the city but plunged in black ones. In Anthony’s
old district, where aging houses on quiet tree-lined streets are
interspersed with boarded-up buildings and vacant lots, turnout dropped
by 23 percent from 2012. This is where Clinton lost the state and, with
it, the larger narrative about the election.
Clinton’s stunning loss in Wisconsin was blamed on her failure to
campaign in the state, and the depressed turnout was attributed to a
lack of enthusiasm for either candidate. “Perhaps the biggest drags on
voter turnout in Milwaukee, as in the rest of the country, were the
candidates themselves,” Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times wrote in a post-election dispatch that typified this line of analysis. “To some, it was like having to choose between broccoli and liver.”
The impact of Wisconsin’s voter ID law received almost no attention.
When it did, it was often dismissive. Two days after the election, Talking Points Memo
ran a piece by University of California-Irvine law professor Rick Hasen
under the headline “Democrats Blame ‘Voter Suppression’ for Clinton
Loss at Their Peril.” Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said it was “a load of crap” to claim that the voter ID law had led to lower turnout. When Clinton, in an interview with New York magazine, said her loss was “aided and abetted by the suppression of the vote, particularly in Wisconsin,” the Washington Examiner
responded, “Hillary Clinton Blames Voter Suppression for Losing a State
She Didn’t Visit Once During the Election.” As the months went on,
pundits on the right and left turned Clinton’s loss into a case study
for her campaign’s incompetence and the Democratic Party’s broader
abandonment of the white working class. Voter suppression efforts were
practically ignored, when they weren’t mocked.
Stories like Anthony’s went largely unreported. An analysis by Media Matters for America
found that only 8.9 percent of TV news segments on voting rights from
July 2016 to June 2017 “discussed the impact voter suppression laws had
on the 2016 election,” while more than 70 percent “were about Trump’s
false claims of voter fraud and noncitizen voting.” During the 2016
campaign, there were 25 presidential debates but not a single question
about voter suppression. The media has spent countless hours
interviewing Trump voters but almost no time reporting on
disenfranchised voters like Anthony.
Three years after Wisconsin passed its voter ID law in 2011, a federal judge blocked it,
noting that 9 percent of all registered voters did not have the
required forms of ID. Black voters were about 50 percent likelier than
whites to lack these IDs because they were less likely to drive or to be
able to afford the documents required to get a current ID, and more
likely to have moved from out of state. There is, of course, no one
thing that swung the election. Clinton’s failings, James Comey’s
11th-hour letter, Russian interference, fake news, sexism, racism, and a
struggling economy in key swing states all contributed to Trump’s
victory. We will never be able to assign exact proportions to all the
factors at play. But a year later, interviews with voters, organizers,
and election officials reveal that, in Wisconsin and beyond, voter
suppression played a much larger role than is commonly understood.
WaPo | On the Internet, the logic of road rage reigns supreme: Alone before
your screen, without trusted friends and other social mediators to
provide context or perspective, and with no relationship between
yourself and the offender, vastly disproportionate responses to
perceived slights begin to make sense. In daily life, you might respond
to an obnoxious joke or snide remark with an eye-roll or a barb of your
own, but online, the temptation to retaliate in much stronger terms
looms.
Often — too often — it takes the form of campaigns to get people fired.
Last
week, Vanity Fair released short video features of several of its
staffers providing New Year’s resolution ideas to various politicians,
among them Hillary Clinton.
Their suggestions for Clinton essentially amounted to don’t run again.
The tone of the video struck many, including our own Erik Wemple, as “snotty and condescending,” and some felt the content of some suggestions (one writer quipped that Clinton should take up knitting, for instance) was sexist. Backlash came swiftly, Vanity Fair apologized, and an infuriated twitter mob has been demanding that the editors and writers involved in the video be summarily fired ever since.
Firing the Vanity Fair staff responsible for the video wouldn’t make
the video go away, nor would it do anything for the candidate’s low favorables.
The urge to drive people who have said or done offensive things out of
their jobs isn’t about pragmatism; it’s punitive, and remarkably
unprincipled.
WaPo | the centerpiece addiction of this year, widespread and growing, is to
outrage itself — to the state of being perpetually offended, to the
need not only to be angry at someone or something, or many people and
issues, but also to always and everywhere be, well, hating. We are all
trapped in this ongoing carnival of venom, a national gathering of
unpleasant souls like that assembled in C.S. Lewis’s 1959 essay “Screwtape Proposes a Toast”
in the Saturday Evening Post (written two decades after Lewis’s famed
“Screwtape Letters”). Google and read it. It is remarkably resonant with
the times.
This
outrage isn’t a current that is always on full strength, like Boston’s
Citgo sign. But it never quite turns off either, as once upon a time the
television stations did with a ritual playing of the national anthem.
(Quaint, especially this year.)
Outrage, rather, pulses,
sometimes quicker and sometimes slower, like the human pulse. And like
the human pulse, it is nowadays a sign of life. Not to be outraged is to
be almost disqualified in the eyes of many from being a participant in
politics, even though the perpetually outraged fall across the political
spectrum. Not only can they not imagine anyone not being outraged, but
also they can’t imagine any kind of outrage save their own.
This
may be the fault of Silicon Valley’s algorithms, which provide us with
near-constant friendly echoes of what we already believe and a steady
stream of bias-confirming stories from bias-bent sources that further
bend our biases along the arc they were already traveling (and it isn’t,
believe me, some preordained arc of history). All very convenient,
these self-congratulatory seances with the unseen millions who agree
with us about our own particular outrage.
Wait
a bit after this column posts online, then check the comments. It will
be a cut and paste of every other comment section of every other column,
left, right and center. Just as cable news talking heads are beginning
to blur into one long declarative sentence of certainty surrounded by
nodding heads.
The amplification of the incendiary and the
extreme in the comments section has broken through into podcasts and
some into talk radio, cable and network news. Outrage is the kudzu of
all media platforms. It will cover us all completely soon enough.
theburningplatform |The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized
habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic
society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society
constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our
country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our
ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a
logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized.
Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are
to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act
of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in
our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the
relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes
and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which
control the public mind.
– Edward Bernays, “Propaganda”
Edward Bernays (1891 – 1995) was a famous pioneer in the field of public relations and is, today, often referred to as the Father of Propaganda.
Perhaps Bernays became thus known because he authored the above quoted
1928 book titled with that very term. He was actually the nephew of the
famed psychopathologist Sigmund Freud and was very proud of his uncle’s
work. More than that, however, Bernays accepted the basic premises of
Freud towards the use of emotional manipulation of the masses through
advertising. It was, in fact, Bernays, who changed the term propaganda
into “public relations”.
If the excerpt above from Bernays’ book “Propaganda” is true, then it
would imply there are men of great power who utilize psychology in
order to message and manipulate the minds of the masses. Are these the
men that Thomas Jefferson, supposedly, once warned about?
Indeed. They are the ones who control the issue of currency; the ones
who first by inflation, then by deflation, caused the banks and
corporations to grow up around the people thus depriving them of all
property until the people’s children woke up homeless on the continent
their fathers conquered.
These are the men who financially and politically manage sovereign governments as well as the handful of corporations
that control 90% of the media today. It is not hard to imagine,
therefore, why it would be in the best interests of these men to
mentally maneuver the masses into complacency. But how is this
psychological manipulation implemented?
Through lies, of course.
Adolf Hitler’s Reich Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, once asserted that:
A lie told once remains a lie but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.
In like manner, I now question if this sentence could be modified as follows:
A lie told to a few people is still a lie but a lie told to thousands, even millions, of people becomes the truth.
Yet, it is those who question the lies today that are labeled the conspiracy theorists. What irony.
Carroll Quigley in his book “Tragedy and Hope: The History of the World in Our Time” exposed the takeover of the world’s financial system by these few, powerful men when he wrote on page 51:
In time the (the “Order”) brought into their
financial network the provincial banking centers, organized as
commercial banks and savings banks, as well as insurance companies, to
form all of these into a single financial system on an international
scale which manipulated the quantity and flow of money so that they were
able to influence, if not control, governments on one side and
industries on the other.
It appears control is the result of money equaling power
as both give rise to an alternative reality which, paradoxically, is
subsidized by the vanquished; by those who want to believe. Yes, it is
the masses of people who finance their own dreams via various monthly
installment plans while their own eyes rely upon what they see on any
number of electronic screens before them. The people pay their taxes,
they borrow, they consume, they believe.
Toward a Biophysics of Poetry
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My long-term interest in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” (KK) is shadowed by an
interest in “This Line-Tree Bower My Prison,” (LTB) which is one of the
so-calle...
Celebrating 113 years of Mama Rosa McCauley Parks
-
*February 4, 1913 -- February 4, 2026*
*Some notes: The life of the courageous activist Mama Rosa McCauley Parks*
Mama Rosa's grandfather Sylvester Ed...
Monsters are people too
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Comet 3I/Atlas is on its way out on a hyberbolic course to, I don't know
where. I do know that 1I/Oumuamua is heading for the constellation Pegasus,
and ...
Remembering the Spanish Civil War
-
This year marks the 90th anniversary of the launch of the Spanish Civil
War, an epoch-defining event for the international working class, whose
close study...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
-
(Damn, has it been THAT long? I don't even know which prompts to use to
post this)
SeeNew
Can't get on your site because you've gone 'invite only'?
Man, ...
First Member of Chumph Cartel Goes to Jail
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With the profligate racism of the Chumph Cartel, I don’t imagine any of
them convicted and jailed is going to do too much better than your run of
the mill ...
Three and a half years ago, I anticipated and wrote about what's now unfolding in the presidential election. Over the next few weeks, there'll be a lot of mendacious talk about everything on the periphery of what just happened. But let me spell out the truth of the matter very simply and directly here and now.
