Seems Like A Mistake To Me To Think That Taylor Swift Is An NPC

wired  |  Taylor Swift remains inescapable. Tales of her reign are legion, as are her fans. Next to Beyoncé, her power and influence have reached heights so unbridled it’s almost unfathomable. Her Eras Tour made nearly a billion dollars in 2023, and the concert film of that tour has brought in nearly $250 million worldwide. When rumors started swirling in the fall that she was dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, they upended American football. Still, when Time named her Person of the Year, conspiracy theorists saw only one explanation. They allege Swift is a psyop.

If you’ve lived on the internet long enough, you will have heard this kind of thing before. Back in 2016, when she was largely apolitical in her public life, Swift was a hero of the so-called alt-right who some believed was actually red-pilling America to further a racist, conservative agenda. When she piped up about politics in 2018, some people online (somewhat jokingly) theorized she’d been replaced by an NPC. The latest twist? “The regime has plans to weaponize her just in time for 2024,” the @EndWokeness account posted on X Wednesday, adding that if you didn’t find this plausible “you clearly have not been paying attention.”

@EndWokeness has 1.9 million followers, and, as of Monday morning, the post had more than 788,000 views. On Telegram, a QAnon influencer account posted that “we need to wake the next generation up to the occult forces colluding with their favorite celebrities.” Right-wing commentator Jack Posobiec posted on X that “the Taylor Swift girlboss psyop has been fully activated.”

Last week’s Person of the Year honor was also followed by resurfaced allegations that Swift is performing witchcraft to further her success and that the left is using her to influence the 2024 US presidential election. Stephen Miller, a senior adviser during Donald Trump’s presidency, posted a message on X saying that “what’s happening with Taylor Swift is not organic.”

All of this happened the same week WIRED reporter David Gilbert published an investigation into a pro-Russia campaign that used fake Swift quotes in a series of Facebook and X posts attempting to seed anti-Ukraine sentiment, reinforcing—in a totally different way—that celebrity is a powerful tool for manipulation. A few days later, Microsoft researchers revealed a similar effort by an unknown Russian group to alter Cameo videos by celebs like Elijah Wood and Mike Tyson to make it look like they were being critical of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

Swift exists as a unique example of the intersection of celebrity and politics, and how it operates globally, says Jonathan Dean, a professor of politics at the University of Leeds. “An important feature of culture and politics over the past 10 years, certainly in the UK and the US and I think probably more broadly as well, is that there’s been a significant convergence in the grammar and style and mode, if you like, of pop culture fandom and political citizenship,” he says, referencing the similar ways fandoms and political parties can operate. “Taylor Swift is interesting in that sense because I think she’s a real embodiment of those convergences.”

 

Assessing Memetic Weapons Capability Of Neoconservatism (REDUX 5/6/08)

Use of radio as a form of memetic warfare has long been known and exploited (Voice of America, Radio Free Europe). The early innovations of memetic warfare are evident in spam, now reaching 80% of internet traffic -- possible to justify future implementation of severely restrictive counter-measures. In contrast to the threat of viruses, spam has a cognitive component. The focus on sexually explicit imagery, together with performance improving drugs and devices, is clearly associated with evocation of lust as a memetic weapon. It is no coincidence that a high percentage of such spam originates in the USA -- where even the highest ranked hotels offer "adult movies". Only the naive would fail to recognize the offensive function of such memetic weapons against other cultures, such as Islam.

Whilst such spam may be understood as a memetic analogue to biological warfare, there is a case for anticipating the development and deployment of memetic analogues to tactical and strategic nuclear weapons. There is also a case for recognizing the probable nature and targets of such weaponry and the appropriate modes of defence.

 

Nuclear weapons -- with their emphasis on mass destruction -- have proven to be a fundamental revolution in warfare. They are destructive not only of mass in the physical sense but also of masses in the demographic sense -- as well as of ecosystems on which life depends. It is therefore useful to question whether any memetic analogue would be equally fundamental in its effect on the:

    "nuclear family", as it has come to be understood in its more restrictive sense
    "nuclear community", as it it is understood in the neighbourhood or quartier sense
    "nuclear culture", as it is increasingly understood, especially by threatened minorities and ethnic groups, and it is becoming framed in the case of "Christian civilization" or the "Muslim Umah"

What are the consequences on these "nuclear" bonds of the emergent possibilities of memetic nuclear warfare? Already the effects of "information warfare" are apparent and a feature of Psy-Ops. Censorship and the control of information on problematic issues can already be understood as "nuclear shields" (cf Missiles, Missives, Missions and Memetic Warfare: Navigation of strategic interfaces in multidimensional knowledge space, 2001). Intriguingly the manipumation of statements regarding "sins" and "virtues" seem to be used in such warfare rather like "binary weapons" -- composed of two ingredients that become lethal only when combined at the last minute before detonation. The art would appear to be ensure the implosive deployment of memetic components based on "sin" (its recognition, evocation of guilt, etc) in conjunction with deployment of "virtue" (occupying the vaccum created). This might be seen as analogous to the deployment of thermobaric weapons.

The challenge for fundamentalists in engaging in such memetic warfare is that even after such deployment, as is evident in Iraq, the population remains highly resistant to replacing Islamic virtues, framed as sinful by the crusading occupation forces, by Christian virtues. In memetic terms, destruction of nuclear bonds in order to reform a culture through "nation-building" processes (conceived as analogous to interrogation, brain-washing, indoctrination and re-education techniques) has proven to be far from successful -- despite the arrogance with which it was envisaged sending an army of missionaries into Iraq to follow the invasion by the Coalition of the Willing [more].

What would seem to be required in relation to community building, nation building, and building a viable planetary culture, is a memetic analogue to nuclear "fusion technology" -- rather than the "fission technology" through which the bonds of the "pattern that connects" are broken. This would call for investment in a degree of imaginative "memetic innovation" analogous to that currently deployed internationally in relation to nuclear fusion [more]. In this light the "clash of civilizations" would be designed into a framework capable of holding their interaction so as to reinvigorate humanity through the rich pattern of energetic relationships the "clash" engendered. Can humanity control its own functions as a memetic nuclear fusion reactor? Is the design challenge analogous to that of avoiding plasma "quenching" in order to ensure sustained fusion? Perhaps "sin" is best to be understood in terms of "quenching" the spirit?

This approach is to be contrasted with fundamentalist efforts to eliminate the difference which enables that memetic energy release in order to create a homogeneous hegemony in which everyone sings from the same hymn sheet -- composed in Washington. Is it possible that models deriving from fusion technology would point to radically new approaches to fusion at a far more fundamental level between contrasting faith perspectives -- a level respectful of both the differences (that are otherwise expressed so violently) and the inspiration that sustains them?

It is the memetic technology required to work with requisite difference that would enable civilization to enegage more effectively with questions of a higher order (Engaging with Questions of Higher Order: cognitive vigilance required for higher degrees of twistedness, 2004).

From Anthony Judge's Seven Deadly Sins of Fundamentalism

Do You Find It Odd That The Pentagram Gaslights Congress About Drones?

wikipedia  |  Rep. André Carson (D-IN), chairman of the subcommittee, opened the hearing. He raised the concern that unexplained aerial phenomena posed a potential threat to national security and should be treated as such, and that the "stigma associated with UAPs has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis." He criticized the Pentagon for failing to name a director to head the newly established Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group and for failing to provide any updates. Carson pledged to "bring the organization out of the shadows.”^[5]

The hearings included testimony from Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald S. Moultrie, the Pentagon's top intelligence official, and Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray. Bray stated that the number of "frequent and continuing" reported sightings had grown to about 400 since last year's mandated report.^[6][7][8] He cast out the notion that the UFOs had extraterrestrial origins, testifying that no organic/inorganic material or unexplainable wreckage indicated so.^[5][9] Bray added that there had been no attempts at communication with the objects, and that despite at least 11 "near-misses", no collisions between unidentified aircraft and U.S. aircraft had been reported so far.^[10][11]

It was revealed that other countries had similar reports on UFOs, and that a number of them communicated with U.S. intelligence agencies, although Moultrie told lawmakers that they did want "potential adversaries to know exactly what we see or understand."^[5] He also mentioned the need for cooperation with the Federal Aviation Administration as well as other government agencies.^[8] Moultrie stated that most UFOs could be identified through "rigorous" analysis and investigation, but pointed out a number of incidents that defied explanation, such as a 2004 sighting where aircraft carrier pilots in the Pacific came across a hovering unidentified object that appeared to have descended tens of thousands of feet.^[6][12][13]

Lawmakers were shown declassified images and footage of UFOs, including a video of a UFO observed by a Navy fighter-jet pilot in 2021, a "spherical object" that "quickly passes by the cockpit of the aircraft." Another video captured triangular objects (speculated to be drones) floating off the coast as seen through night-vision goggles.^[5][6][14]

A number of lawmakers, including Rick Crawford (R-AR), expressed concerns about potential Russian or Chinese hypersonic weapons programs.^[5][15] He warned that a failure to identify such threats was "tantamount to intelligence failure that we certainly want to avoid".^[15]

The standardization of the civilian reporting process was also discussed, as the majority of reports in the military's database are from military officers.

The public portion of the hearing, held in the morning and lasting less than 90 minutes, was followed by private classified session in the afternoon.^[15][5]

Disinformation Label Used To Marginalize Crucial Facts About NATO's Instigation Of WW-III

Fair  |  These “disinformation” claims also ignore the more contemporary evidence that Western officials have an explicit agenda of weakening Russia and even ending the Putin regime. According to Ukrainska Pravda (5/5/22; Intercept, 5/10/22), in his recent trip to Kyiv, UK prime minister Boris Johnson told Volodymyr Zelensky that regardless of a peace agreement being reached between Ukraine and Russia, the United States would remain intent on confronting Russia.

 

The evidence doesn’t stop there. In the past months, Joe Biden let slip his desire that Putin “cannot remain in power,” and US officials’ have become more open about their objectives to weaken Russia (Democracy Now!, 5/9/22; Wall Street Journal, 4/25/22). Corporate media have cheered on these developments, running op-eds in support of policies that go beyond a defense of Ukraine to an attack on Russia (Foreign Policy, 5/4/22; Washington Post, 4/28/22), even expressing hope for a “palace coup” there (The Lead, 4/19/22; CNN Newsroom, 3/4/22).

As famed dissident Noam Chomsky said in a discussion with the Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill (4/14/22):

We can see that our explicit policy—explicit—is rejection of any form of negotiations. The explicit policy goes way back, but it was given a definitive form in September 2021 in the September 1 joint policy statement that was then reiterated and expanded in the November 10 charter of agreement….

What it says is it calls for Ukraine to move towards what they called an enhanced program for entering NATO, which kills negotiations.

When the media denies NATO’s culpability in stoking the flames of war in Ukraine, Americans are left unaware of their most effective tool in preventing further catastrophe: pressuring their own government to stop undermining negotiations and to join the negotiating table. Dismissing these realities threatens to prolong the war in Ukraine indefinitely.

Squelching dissent

As the Biden administration launches a new Disinformation Governance Board aimed at policing online discourse, it is clear that the trend of silencing those who speak out against official US narratives is going to get worse.

Outlets like Russia Today, MintPress News and Consortium News have been banned or demonetized by platforms like Google and its subsidiary YouTube, or services like PayPal. MintPress News (4/25/22) reported YouTube had “permanently banned more than a thousand channels and 15,000 videos,” on the grounds that they were “denying, minimizing or trivializing well-documented violent events.” At the same time, platforms are loosening the restrictions on praising Ukraine’s far right or calling for the death of Russians (Reuters, 3/11/22). These policies of asymmetric censorship aid US propaganda and squelch dissent.

After receiving a barrage of complaints from the outlet’s supporters, PayPal seemingly reversed its ban of Consortium News’ account, only to state later on that this reversal was “mistaken,” and that Consortium was in fact permanently banned. The outlet’s editor-in-chief Joe Lauria (5/4/22) responded to PayPal’s ban:

Given the political climate it is reasonable to conclude that PayPal was reacting to Consortium News’ coverage of the war in Ukraine, which is not in line with the dominant narrative that is being increasingly enforced.

As Western outlets embrace the framing of a new Cold War, so too have they embraced the Cold War’s McCarthyite tactics that rooted out dissent in the United States. With great-power conflict on the rise, it is all the more important that US audiences understand the media’s increasing repression of debate in defense of the “dominant narrative.” In the words of Chomsky:

There’s a long record in the United States of censorship, not official censorship, just devices, to make sure that, what intellectuals call the “bewildered herd,” the “rabble,” the population, don’t get misled. You have to control them. And that’s happening right now.

Dripping With "Permitted Narrative" DIA Analyst Grudgingly Admits Military Truth

newsweek |  Russia's conduct in the brutal war tells a different story than the widely accepted view that Vladimir Putin is intent on demolishing Ukraine and inflicting maximum civilian damage—and it reveals the Russian leader's strategic balancing act. If Russia were more intentionally destructive, the clamoring for U.S. and NATO intervention would be louder. And if Russia were all-in, Putin might find himself with no way out. Instead, his goal is to take enough territory on the ground to have something to negotiate with, while putting the government of Ukraine in a position where they have to negotiate.

Understanding the thinking behind Russia's limited attacks could help map a path towards peace, experts say.

In nearly a month since Russia invaded, dozens of Ukrainian cities and towns have fallen, and the fight over the country's largest cities continues. United Nations human rights specialists say that some 900 civilians have died in the fighting (U.S. intelligence puts that number at least five times UN estimates). About 6.5 million Ukrainians have also become internally displaced (15 percent of the entire population), half of them leaving the country to find safety.

"The destruction is massive," a senior analyst working at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) tells Newsweek, "especially when compared with what Europeans and Americans are used to seeing."

But, the analyst says, the damage associated with a contested ground war involving peer opponents shouldn't blind people to what is really happening. (The analyst requested anonymity in order to speak about classified matters.) "The heart of Kyiv has barely been touched. And almost all of the long-range strikes have been aimed at military targets."

In the capital, most observable to the west, Kyiv city authorities say that some 55 buildings have been damaged and that 222 people have died since February 24. It is a city of 2.8 million people.

"We need to understand Russia's actual conduct," says a retired Air Force officer, a lawyer by training who has been involved in approving targets for U.S. fights in Iraq and Afghanistan. The officer currently works as an analyst with a large military contractor advising the Pentagon and was granted anonymity in order to speak candidly.

"If we merely convince ourselves that Russia is bombing indiscriminately, or [that] it is failing to inflict more harm because its personnel are not up to the task or because it is technically inept, then we are not seeing the real conflict."

In the analyst's view, though the war has led to unprecedented destruction in the south and east, the Russian military has actually been showing restraint in its long-range attacks.

As of the past weekend, in 24 days of conflict, Russia has flown some 1,400 strike sorties and delivered almost 1,000 missiles (by contrast, the United States flew more sorties and delivered more weapons in the first day of the 2003 Iraq war). The vast majority of the airstrikes are over the battlefield, with Russian aircraft providing "close air support" to ground forces. The remainder—less than 20 percent, according to U.S. experts—has been aimed at military airfields, barracks and supporting depots.

 

 

Russia Promises More Disclosures On Ukrainian Biolabs

RT  |  The Russian Defense Ministry said on Thursday it will soon release additional documents pertaining to the operation of Pentagon-funded biolabs in Ukraine. Moscow believes they have been involved in bioweapons research.

Russian military specialists in weapons of mass destruction are analyzing documents obtained from staff members of the Ukrainian labs, ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said in a daily briefing. He claimed they detailed “implementation by the US in Ukraine of a secret project to study the ways humans can be infected from bats,” which was done in Kharkov.

The official said the same Institute of Experimental and Clinical Veterinary Medicine in the Ukrainian city worked for years to study under which conditions wild birds carrying flu could cause an epidemic in humans and to assess the damage that would result.

Konashenkov didn’t explain why such research should be considered military in nature, as assessed by the defense ministry.

The spokesman further said more Ukrainian documents will soon be released on the transfer of human samples from Ukraine to the UK and other European nations. The materials will be accompanied by Russian military assessments of the work they detail, he said.

The Pentagon sponsors dozens of labs around the world under the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). The work they do, the US government claims, is benign and is meant to monitor emergence of new dangerous infections. Countries like Russia and China believe they may be more sinister in nature.

US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland said under oath that labs in Ukraine have been destroying research materials to prevent Russia from seizing them. It was not clear why Washington saw the scenario as dangerous. US officials claimed that the pathogens in question were remnants of Soviet bioweapons programs, which Moscow would presumably already have access to.

Some American public figures, such as Fox News host Tucker Carlson and former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, were attacked for asking questions about the Ukrainian labs, which supposedly amounts to repeating “Russian propaganda.” 

Utah Senator Mitt Romney accused Gabbard of spreading “treasonous lies” with her concerns about the safety of pathogen samples in Ukraine. The hosts of The View television show suggested people asking such questions should be arrested and investigated as possible Russian agents.

 

If You Believed Something Different...,

caitlinjohnstone  |  It sure is interesting how stuff keeps happening that makes free speech on the internet something dangerous which must be curtailed. Covid, the Capitol riot, Russian propaganda, all of which just happen to require tightening restrictions on our single best tool against the powerful.

Had online platforms not agreed to curtail speech in alignment with the US empire, they would with 100 percent certainty have been broken up by antitrust cases and been replaced by other monopolistic companies that would censor in alignment with imperial interests.

You’re not permitted to ascend to power within the system unless you cooperate with existing power structures. If you don’t, you’ll be stopped in your tracks and replaced with someone who will.

A rookie journalist who doesn’t advance narratives favorable to US imperialism will keep getting called to the editor’s desk until they get the message. When rookie social media sites first showed up it was the same thing, except instead of the editor’s desk, it was US congressional hearings.

Contrary To Caitlin's Essay, Elites Still Control Your Narrative Addiction Mechanisms...,

caitlinjohnstone |  This year has marked the first time ever that trust in news media dropped below fifty percent in the United States, continuing a trend of decline that's been ongoing for years.

Mass media punditry is divided on where to assign the blame for the plummet in public opinion of their work, with some blaming it on Russia and others blaming it on Donald Trump. Others, like a recent Forbes article titled "Restoring Public Trust In Technology And Media Is Infrastructure Investment" blame it on the internet. Still others, like a Washington Post article earlier this month titled "Bad news for journalists: The public doesn’t share our values" blame it on the people themselves.

The one thing they all seem to agree on is that it's definitely not because the billionaire-controlled media are propaganda outlets which manipulate us constantly in conjunction with sociopathic government agencies to protect the oligarchic, imperialist status quo upon which the members of the billionaire class have built their respective kingdoms. It cannot possibly be because people sense that they are being lied to and are fed up with it.

And actually it doesn't ultimately matter what mainstream pundits and reporters believe is the cause of the public's growing disgust with them, because there's nothing they can do to fix it anyway. The mass media will never regain the public's trust.

They'll never regain the public's trust for a couple of reasons, the first of which is because they'll never be able to become trustworthy. At no point will the mass media ever begin wowing the public with its journalistic integrity and causing people to re-evaluate their opinion of mainstream news reporters. At no point will people's disdain for these outlets ever cease to be reinforced and confirmed by the manipulative and deceitful behaviors which caused that disdain in the first place.

A propaganda outlet will never be anything other than a propaganda outlet. A lot of half-awake people with one eye open and one eye closed will notice how the news media don't practice journalism and don't report the facts, and they'll assume that something went wrong at some point. "Just do your jobs and report the news!" they'll shout in frustration.

But nothing has gone wrong, and they are doing their jobs. They are doing their jobs extremely well.

 

Internet Researcher And Conspiracy Investigator Matt Gertz Took The Contract On Naomi Wolf

mediamatters |  The feminist writer Naomi Wolf garnered fame during the 1990s for her book The Beauty Myth and her work as an adviser to the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore. But in recent years, she’s been better known for promoting an array of unhinged conspiracy theories, most recently regarding the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. This combination has made her a perfect guest for Fox News.

Fox is far more interested in turning coronavirus into a political cudgel than in giving users accurate health information. And so the network’s hosts lean on Wolf’s liberal credentials while giving her a platform to claim that the Democratic response to the pandemic is aimed at dissolving society and enacting a totalitarian state comparable to Nazi Germany.

Since mid-February, she appeared at least seven times on Fox to discuss her views on the pandemic: twice apiece on Tucker Carlson Tonight and The Revolution with Steve Hilton, and three times on Fox News Primetime, the most recent of which came Monday night. Wolf cited the notorious anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during that interview to argue that Dr. Anthony Fauci, Bill and Melinda Gates, the state of Israel, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were engaged in some sort of nebulous but sinister vaccine conspiracy.

It is irresponsible for a news outlet to give Wolf that sort of credulous attention. Her social media channels are littered with absurd claims about the virus and its vaccines. Between her first and second Fox appearances alone, she tweeted that a new technology allowed the delivery of “vaccines w nanopatticles that let you travel back in time”; that the Moderna vaccine is a “software platform” that allows “uploads”; and that due to face masks, children now lack “the human reflex that they when you smile at them they smile back” and have “dark circles under [their] eyes from low oxygen.” 

On Sunday night, Wolf cited purported reports of women who “bleed oddly [from] being AROUND vaccinated women,” pointing her followers to a Facebook group which at one point had been titled “All Vaccines are Fake.”

What Must Be Covered And What Must Be Revealed..,

sovereignman |  Even when we aren’t sick, we should cover our faces in public, just to make the mask-wearers feel better.

Masks Forever

“It no longer signals that a person is sick, or that a person is strange… It is no longer scary or felt to be an imposition on our rights. Mask-wearing can simply signal that we care about others’ health, and about our own.”

Let’s keep an uncomfortable, dehumanizing, air-restricting custom of masking in public, just as a little signal of our empathy. And conversely, if you aren’t willing to mask up for no good reason, you’re a selfish aggressor.

But there’s one more benefit that Dr. Ranney adds in case you’re not sold.

“[Masks have] become a form of self-expression or a marker of being part of the in-group.”

University locks students out for missing weekly Covid test

The University of Michigan announced to students that 718 of them would have their access cards deactivated for all non-residential campus buildings.

These students had failed to take the required WEEKLY Covid-19 test. So now they cannot access cafeterias, classrooms, gyms, and other campus amenities.

Evacuation from deadly volcano eruption is only for the vaccinated

The Prime Minister of St. Vincent ordered an emergency evacuation from areas of the Caribbean island last week as a deadly volcano began erupting.

Cruise ships responded to the emergency to help evacuate residents, and neighboring countries like St. Lucia, Grenada, and Barbados agreed to give shelter to those in need.

But according to the Prime Minister, there was one condition.

Only those already vaccinated against Covid-19 would be eligible for the emergency cruise ship evacuation, and relocation to other islands.

Australian government could require ID for social media use

The Australian parliament released a report called “Inquiry into family, domestic and sexual violence.”

In it, the government recommends forcing social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, and even dating apps like Tinder to require government ID in order to use the services.

YouTube censors panel of medical experts over Covid-19 “misinformation”

The Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis recently held a panel discussion to discuss recent research findings related to Covid-19.

The expert panel included four professors of medicine from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford Universities, who are all PhDs and experts in a field of disease research. And that just scratches the surface of their credentials relevant to being considered Covid-19 experts.

 And you can watch the follow up conference here (on YouTube alternative Rumble).

 

 

Soldiers Understand "Our" Political Elites And Their Masters Aren't Good Stewards Of Society

military  |  Those conducting the sessions wanted "to make sure that military members understand the difference between Seattle and [the Jan. 6 riot in] Washington, D.C.," Colón-López said. "But some of our younger members are confused about this, so that's what we need to go ahead and talk to them about and educate them on, to make sure that they know exactly what they can and cannot do."

Colón-López also noted the military was called to respond after the Capitol attacks, but was not called up to support law enforcement during the Seattle protests.

And he drew a distinction between those who lawfully exercised their First Amendment rights to protest during last summer's protests in support of racial justice and the Black Lives Matter movement, and those who "latched on" to the protests to loot, destroy property and commit other crimes.

But sometimes, he said, younger troops see messages on TV that blur the lines between the two, and "we needed to educate them" on the difference.

"No, that's not what that meant," Colón-López said. "There were people advocating [against] social injustice, racial injustice and everything else, and it is the right of citizens."

When asked about networks or television personalities popular among service members who have drawn those equivalencies, Colón-López said, "Those are very, very tough conversations to have with people, because sometimes they're emotional about the subject."

While those TV personalities are exercising the right to free speech troops have fought for, he said, "make sure that you're well-educated and don't be an automatic mouthpiece for something unless you understand the issue."

Colón-López acknowledged that the "information overload" troops today face -- not just traditional media and memos from service leaders, but also a panoply of social media amplifying different messages -- can leave troops feeling confused and uncertain where to go to get reliable information.

"What I am committed to is to make sure that our people understand right from wrong," he said. "That our people ... are well-educated to be able to carry on, in an honorable fashion. And if they hear somebody saying the wrong things, that they're quick to go ahead and correct them ... without being confrontational."

Colón-López stressed the refrain commonly heard from top military leaders that the vast majority of troops do not share extremist views.

And the military isn't interested in monitoring troops' online activities at home, he said. A service member who Googles QAnon, for example, may just want to become educated on the online conspiracy theory movement, he explained. That wouldn't mean someone necessarily believes in that ideology.

But, he noted, the military needs to be watchful of how service members carry themselves while on duty, and what troops' friends say they are doing.

Not Even The FBI Director Can Play Along With The Atlanta Anti-Asian Racism Trope...,

npr  |  So obviously, it's a heartbreaking incident, and it hits particularly close to home for me since I consider Atlanta home. And so I certainly grieve for the victims and their families. The FBI is supporting state and local law enforcement, specifically APD, the Atlanta Police Department, and the [Cherokee County] Sheriff's Office. So we're actively involved but in a support role.

And while the motive remains still under investigation at the moment, it does not appear that the motive was racially motivated. But I really would defer to the state and local investigation on that for now.

I elevated racially motivated violent extremism to our top threat priority level about a year and a half ago or so. And I've been trying to call out this threat for a number of years now since I've been in this job.

We have doubled the number of domestic violent extremist investigations we've had since where they were when I started as director, and we were up to about 2,000. And that was before the Jan. 6 siege. So I expect the numbers to be even higher this year. And arrests likewise went up dramatically from 2019 to '20.

And so at the same time, the international terrorism threat — especially international terrorist organizations that inspire homegrown violent extremists here in the U.S. — hasn't gone away by any stretch of the imagination. So we clearly are making do right now with what we have. But we need and will need more resources to tackle that problem.

The sprawling investigation into Jan. 6

You know, I was appalled that something like that could happen in this country and determined to make sure that it doesn't happen ever again. ...

We intend to see this to its conclusion, no matter how many people it takes us to devote to it, no matter how long it takes us to do it, we're going to see it to the end. ... If we have the evidence to charge somebody and they committed a crime on that day, I expect them to be charged. ...

We've arrested people all over the country. I think we have ... open investigations specifically related to the Jan. 6 siege in all but one of our 56 field offices, which gives you a sense of the national sprawl of the investigation. And in some of those instances, there have already been conspiracy charges — small, I would call them — sort of small cells of individuals working together, coordinating their travel, etc. I don't think we've seen some national conspiracy, but we're going to keep digging.

 

Blue-Anon Infinitely More Dangerous And Destructive Than Q-Anon...,

greenwald |  Journalists with the largest and most influential media outlets disseminated an outright and quite significant lie on Tuesday to hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, on Twitter. While some of them were shamed into acknowledging the falsity of their claim, many refused to, causing it to continue to spread up until this very moment. It is well worth examining how they function because this is how they deceive the public again and again, and it is why public trust in their pronouncements has justifiably plummeted.

The lie they told involved claims of Russian involvement in the procurement of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, The New York Post obtained that laptop and published a series of articles about the Biden family’s business dealings in Ukraine, China and elsewhere. In response, Twitter banned the posting of any links to that reporting and locked The Post out of its Twitter account for close to two weeks, while Facebook, through a long-time Democratic operative, announced that it would algorithmically suppress the reporting.

The excuse used by those social media companies for censoring this reporting was the same invoked by media outlets to justify their refusal to report the contents of these documents: namely, that the materials were “Russian disinformation.” That claim of “Russian disinformation” was concocted by a group of several dozen former CIA officials and other operatives of the intelligence community devoted to defeating Trump. Immediately after The Post published its first story about Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine that traded on his influence with his father, these career spies and propagandists, led by Obama CIA Director and serial liar John Brennan, published a letter asserting that the appearance of these Biden documents “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

News outlets uncritically hyped this claim as fact even though these security state operatives themselves admitted: “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails…are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement -- just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” Even though this claim came from trained liars who, with uncharacteristic candor, acknowledged that they did not “have evidence” for their claim, media outlets uncritically ratified this assertion.

This was a topic I discussed extensively in October when I announced my resignation from The Intercept after senior editors — for the first time in seven years — violated the contractual prohibition on editorial interference in my journalism by demanding I significantly alter my reporting about these documents by removing the sections that reflected negatively on Biden. What I found particularly galling about their pretense that they have such high-level and rigorous editorial standards — standards they claimed, for the first time ever, that my article failed to meet — was that a mere week prior to their censorship of my article, they published an article by a different journalist which, at a media outlet we created with the explicit purpose of treating government claims with skepticism, instead treated the CIA’s claims of “Russian disinformation” as fact. Even worse, when they quoted the CIA’s letter, they omitted the part where even those intelligence agents acknowledged that they had no evidence for their assertion.

 

The Revolt Of The Public: Trouble Seeing Things That Erupt From Below

taibbi  |  The thesis of The Revolt of the Public is that traditional centralized powers are losing — have lost — authority, in large part because of the demystifying effect of the Internet. The information explosion undermined the elite monopoly on truth, exposing long-concealed flaws. Many analysts had noted the disruptive power of the Internet, but what made Gurri unique is that he also predicted with depressingly humorous accuracy how traditional hierarchies would respond to this challenge: in a delusional, ham-fisted, authoritarian manner that would only confirm the worst suspicions of the public, accelerating the inevitable throw-the-bums-out campaigns. This assessment of the motive for rising public intransigence was not exactly welcomed, but either way, as Kling wrote, “Martin Gurri saw it coming.”

Gurri also noted that public revolts would likely arrive unattached to coherent plans, pushing society into interminable cycles of zero-sum clashes between myopic authorities and their increasingly furious subjects. He called this a “paralysis of distrust,” where outsiders can “neutralize but not replace the center” and “networks can protest and overthrow, but never govern.” With a nod to Yeats, Gurri summed up: “The center cannot hold, and the border has no clue what to do about it.”

The Revolt of the Public became a cult classic in the Trump years for a variety of reasons, resonating with audiences spanning the political spectrum, from left to right to in between, everywhere except the traditional media consensus. It describes a basic problem of authority in the digital age and for that reason will continue to have relevance into the future. But its most striking feature is how completely it nailed the coming Trump era.

Published in 2014, The Revolt of the Public may be alone among the countless books about the Trump years to correctly peg its core destabilizing problem. While conventional pundits blame everyone from Russians to white nationalists to “fake news” for all that currently ails us, Gurri focused on the inherent problem of authority in the digital age. If you follow his thinking, the specific forms that recent revolts have taken — Brexit, Trump, etc. — have been far less important than what he describes as the “nihilist impulse” behind them, “the wish to smash down whatever stands.” In America, this impulse found Trump, not the other way around. It also could have (and has, in other countries) come from the left instead of the right. The relentless focus on Trump as the center of all evil on earth has mostly served to deflect from a broader narrative about distrust of institutional authority that far pre-dates Trump.

Through a series of case studies ranging from Egypt to Tunisia to Italy to the campaign of Barack Obama, Gurri lays out how snowballing disgust with the blundering arrogance of ruling parties was everywhere leading to upheavals. In the Italian general elections of February 2013, a new party called the “Five Star” movement won 25% of the vote. Inspired by a comedian-blogger named Beppe Grillo, named after the Jiminy Cricket character in Pinocchio, the party, Gurri wrote, “lacked a coherent program. The single unifying principle was a deep loathing of the Italian political establishment.”

Gurri saw such outbursts everywhere, even in the election of Barack Obama, since “the U.S. presidential elections of 2008 [were] an early instance of the public on the move against the established order.” The political scientists and pundits who puzzle over the fact that a great many people voted for both Obama and Trump, shouldn’t. Both men positioned themselves as outsiders, both were aided by a lack of a track record and a deliberately vague platform, making both effective vehicles for expressing popular discontent.

 

If The Uniparty Doesn't Restore Narrative Hegemony, Vetted Obama-ite Politicians Will Be In Trouble

 CJR  |  You recently tweeted, “Stockton is the miner’s canary for the impact of disinformation,” describing the 209 Times as “an example of racism and disinfo that is able to thrive in news deserts.” So I’d like to open the floor for you to talk about news media coverage in Stockton, how it has changed over the years, and how this media landscape has allowed for disinformation to not only spread, but really thrive in your hometown.

So Stockton, California, is what’s called a news desert. Even before the layoffs and the cuts, we had one newspaper: the Stockton Record. In addition to that, despite being the twelfth-largest city in the state, sixty-second largest in the country, we weren’t our own media market. So all of our digital, broadcast media was homed in Sacramento, so they’d have to drive an hour to Stockton to shoot things. 

During my years as mayor, the Record had to lay off employees and stopped running as many articles. When the Record didn’t have as much staff to cover things, and subscriptions declined, at the same time, this fake-news site went up. Even when I was on city council, that was the play, just attacking the Record’s credibility all the time. “The Record’s corrupt,” “The Record’s elite,” “No one reads the Record”—and using elected officials to do that and to just question the legitimacy of an imperfect but also the only local press that we had in the city. Then when I became mayor, and after the success of former president Trump’s 2016 campaign utilizing social media and algorithms and weaponized information, these same folks got together and, in my first month as mayor, created what’s now known as the 209 Times. 

People saw 209 Times and thought, Well, it’s a news site. Why would anyone purposely and deliberately go out and deceive people? So a lot of people took it at face value, like this is just an alternative news site because the Record doesn’t run as much, the Record’s not as quick, etc. And what we saw was that they started with just blatantly false articles, like articles that were literally lies and disinformation. It was really about weaponizing information and playing on people’s biases and racism. 

The stories would all follow a similar thread. Either (a) Michael Tubbs was stealing money from the city, because Black people are criminals—and I think for a lot of people it played on their bias and orientation towards, Who are Black people really? And (b) the second one was, Michael Tubbs doesn’t work, or Michael Tubbs is lazy, which is another racist trope—that Black people, particularly Black men, loiter, that they’re criminals, that they don’t work, that they’re lazy. And (c) the third was, again, Michael Tubbs is just corrupt. It’s just a corrupt administration. There’s no way he could win legitimately. He doesn’t live in the city. It’s corrupt, it’s corrupt; he’s under investigation; he’s corrupt. And for four years, leveraging social media and leveraging algorithms, they fed that poison. 

And in the course of that, they just created a different reality. I left office with a thirteen-million-dollar surplus. We were named as the fourth most fiscally healthy city in this country. But for a lot of folks, it was, No, he’s stealing money. It’s just a different reality. And that’s what I recognized, that no, this disinformation wasn’t just about an election campaign, but indeed, it was a four-year campaign that only works in a news desert. It only works when the algorithm rewards racism and bigotry and bias. It only works when there’s no check, there’s no certification. We know that brain research tells us that we look for news that confirms our bias; we look for facts that confirm our bias. And that, if I’m biased to be racist, or if I’m biased to think that the government is corrupt, I’ll find something, whether it’s the Epoch Times or the 209 Times or OAN or Fox News, that’s going to create the reality.

The New York Times - Thinking - So You Don't Have To...,

NYTimes |  It’s often counterproductive to engage directly with content from an unknown source, and people can be led astray by false information. Influenced by the research of Sam Wineburg, a professor at Stanford, and Sarah McGrew, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, Mr. Caulfield argued that the best way to learn about a source of information is to leave it and look elsewhere, a concept called lateral reading.

For instance, imagine you were to visit Stormfront, a white supremacist message board, to try to understand racist claims in order to debunk them. “Even if you see through the horrible rhetoric, at the end of the day you gave that place however many minutes of your time,” Mr. Caulfield said. “Even with good intentions, you run the risk of misunderstanding something, because Stormfront users are way better at propaganda than you. You won’t get less racist reading Stormfront critically, but you might be overloaded by information and overwhelmed.”

One way to combat this dynamic is to change how we teach media literacy: Internet users need to learn

In 2016, Mr. Caulfield met Mr. Wineburg, who suggested modeling the process after the way professional fact checkers assess information. Mr. Caulfield refined the practice into four simple principles:

1. Stop.

2. Investigate the source.

3. Find better coverage.

4. Trace claims, quotes and media to the original context.

Otherwise known as SIFT.

Mr. Caulfield walked me through the process using an Instagram post from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent anti-vaccine activist, falsely alleging a link between the human papillomavirus vaccine and cancer. “If this is not a claim where I have a depth of understanding, then I want to stop for a second and, before going further, just investigate the source,” Mr. Caulfield said. He copied Mr. Kennedy’s name in the Instagram post and popped it into Google. “Look how fast this is,” he told me as he counted the seconds out loud. In 15 seconds, he navigated to Wikipedia and scrolled through the introductory section of the page, highlighting with his cursor the last sentence, which reads that Mr. Kennedy is an anti-vaccine activist and a conspiracy theorist.

“Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the best, unbiased source on information about a vaccine? I’d argue no. And that’s good enough to know we should probably just move on,” he said.

that our attention is a scarce commodity that is to be spent wisely.

Be Good Citizens Now And Get Your Genetic Modification Jab - Or Else....,

consentfactory |  So, good news, folks! It appears that GloboCap’s Genetic Modification Division has come up with a miracle vaccine for Covid! It’s an absolutely safe, non-experimental, messenger-RNA vaccine that teaches your cells to produce a protein that triggers an immune response, just like your body’s immune-system response, only better, because it’s made by corporations!

OK, technically, it hasn’t been approved for use — that process normally takes several years — so I guess it’s slightly “experimental,” but the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency have issued “Emergency Use Authorizations,” and it has been “tested extensively for safety and effectiveness,” according to Facebook’s anonymous “fact checkers,” so there’s absolutely nothing to worry about.

This non-experimental experimental vaccine is truly a historic development, because apart from saving the world from a virus that causes mild to moderate flu-like symptoms (or, more commonly, no symptoms whatsoever) in roughly 95% of those infected, and that over 99% of those infected survive, the possibilities for future applications of messenger-RNA technology, and the genetic modification of humans, generally, is virtually unlimited at this point.

Imagine all the diseases we can cure, and all the genetic “mistakes” we can fix, now that we can reprogram people’s genes to do whatever we want … cancer, heart disease, dementia, blindness, not to mention the common cold! We could even cure psychiatric disorders, like “antisocial personality disorder,” “oppositional defiant disorder,” and other “conduct disorders” and “personality disorders.” Who knows? In another hundred years, we will probably be able to genetically cleanse the human species of age-old scourges, like racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, etcetera, by reprogramming everyone’s defective alleles, or implanting some kind of nanotechnological neurosynaptic chips into our brains. The only thing standing in our way is people’s totally irrational resistance to letting corporations redesign the human organism, which, clearly, was rather poorly designed, and thus is vulnerable to all these horrible diseases, and emotional and behavioral disorders.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. The important thing at the moment is to defeat this common-flu-like pestilence that has no significant effect on age-adjusted death rates, and the mortality profile of which is more or less identical to the normal mortality profile, but which has nonetheless left the global corporatocracy no choice but to “lock down” the entire planet, plunge millions into desperate poverty, order everyone to wear medical-looking masks, unleash armed goon squads to raid people’s homes, and otherwise transform society into a pathologized-totalitarian nightmare. And, of course, the only way to do that (i.e., save humanity from a flu-like bug) is to coercively vaccinate every single human being on the planet Earth!

OK, you’re probably thinking that doesn’t make much sense, this crusade to vaccinate the entire species against a relatively standard respiratory virus, but that’s just because you are still thinking critically. You really need to stop thinking like that. As The New York Times just pointed out, “critical thinking isn’t helping.” In fact, it might be symptomatic of one of those “disorders” I just mentioned above. Critical thinking leads to “vaccine hesitancy,” which is why corporations are working with governments to immediately censor any and all content that deviates from the official Covid-19 narrative and deplatform the authors of such content, or discredit them as “anti-vax disinformationists.”

David A. Martin PhD Does Some Helladocious Slick-Talking - As Do His Censors And Critics...,

westonaprice |  Dr. David Martin, founder and chairman of M-CAM Inc, challenges our presuppositions about the new mRNA Covid-19 vaccines. Quoting the pharmaceutical companies themselves, David suggests that these are not vaccines, but, in actuality, gene therapy. He explains what the vaccines may do to us, what they are promising they can do for us, and how to distinguish the difference. Fist tap Dale.

 

factcheck |  If Event 201 is the backbone of the conspiracy theory in “Plandemic,” then David Martin is the central character. He’s featured throughout the video, making claims primarily about patents.

Martin runs a company called M-CAM, which analyzes patents and intellectual property to estimate the investment value of companies.

M-CAM has five investment companies as clients, managing assets of $1.1 million, according to a recent statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“Not big in investments, seems more like another guy using predictive modeling as a selling tool for many types of information,” Suzanne Lynch told FactCheck.org in an email, after looking through M-CAM’s SEC filings. Lynch has worked on Wall Street and is now a professor of economic crime at Utica College.

Samuel Rosen, an assistant professor of finance at Temple University’s Fox School of Business, similarly described M-CAM, broadly, as an investment research company and noted in an email to FactCheck.org that it appears Martin manages a small hedge fund, too.

But Martin has also peddled conspiracy theories over the years. He published a novel in 2011, which he claimed was based on real events, alleging a rigged 2008 presidential election that was somehow tied to the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Since the pandemic began, he has used his YouTube channel to promote COVID-19 conspiracy theories. He repeats many of those claims in “Plandemic: Indoctornation.”

In one video from April, Martin referred to Event 201, saying: “COVID-19 is a branded campaign … that is funded by people in the software, data sciences and social media industry. That’s who built COVID-19.”

The gist of Martin’s video was that wealthy philanthropists like Bill Gates, technology companies, pharmaceutical companies and global health organizations colluded to create a virus that would force governments to fund research and development of vaccines and therapies in order to enrich themselves.

For “Plandemic,” though, Martin shifts his focus away from “the software, data sciences and social media industry.” Instead, he takes aim largely at government entities.

Martin claims that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saw “the possibility of a gold strike” when the SARS epidemic arose in 2003.

“They saw that a virus they knew could be easily manipulated was something that was very valuable,” he says, pointing to a patent filed by the CDC that year. The patent covered the isolated virus that causes SARS and ways to detect it.

Skimming across the screen while Martin makes that claim is a headline for a November 2003 news story about the race to patent the virus. However, that story doesn’t support his argument. It actually explains that the CDC wasn’t pursuing the patent for profit. Rather, it was doing so to keep others from monopolizing research.

“The whole purpose of the patent is to prevent folks from controlling the technology,” the story quotes CDC spokesman Llelwyn Grant as saying. “This is being done to give the industry and other researchers reasonable access to the samples.”

Similarly, the director of the CDC at the time, Dr. Julie Gerberding, told reporters that filing for the patent was “a protective measure to make sure that the access to the virus remains open for everyone.”

“The concern that the federal government is looking at right now is that we could be locked out of this opportunity to work with this virus if it’s patented by someone else, and so by initiating steps to secure patent rights, we assure that we will be able to continue to make the virus and the products from the virus available in the public domain, and that we can continue to promote the rapid technological transfer of this biomedical information into tools and products that are useful to patients,” Gerberding said in a May 2003 telebriefing.

So, Martin’s claim is at odds with the CDC’s publicly stated motivation, and he offers no evidence to support his argument.

Next, Martin claims that federal law wouldn’t have allowed for a patent on that isolated virus.

Again, he’s wrong.

Instead of reading from U.S. patent law, as he says he is in the video, Martin reads from a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision. That’s an important distinction since the decision, which changed one aspect of patent law that’s relevant here, came 10 years after the CDC filed for a patent related to the virus that causes SARS.

“Nature is prohibited from being patented,” Martin says, claiming that he was quoting from a section of patent law. Building on that, he claims, “either SARS, coronavirus, was manufactured, therefore making a patent on it legal, or it was natural, therefore making a patent on it illegal.”

But that’s a false dichotomy.

While the Supreme Court did find that “[a] naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated,” that decision came a decade after the CDC sought the patent.

“Isolated genes (that is, genes extracted from a longer DNA sequence) used to be patentable in the past because the courts decided that just the act of extracting them and removing the non-coding segments caused enough of a modification to turn them into patent-eligible things,” Mario Biagioli, a professor at UCLA School of Law, told FactCheck.org in an email. “No more.  A few years ago the Supreme Court decided that simply isolating a gene did not change it enough. It remained a ‘product of nature’ and therefore unpatentable.”

So, claiming that the patent is either illegal or the virus was “manufactured” is wrong.

Childish Public Meltdown Between Developmentally Arrested Nerds?

 BBC  | Do you think that Google would have treated you differently if you were a white man?

I have definitely been treated differently.

In all of the cases that I've seen in the past, they [Google] try so hard not to make it a headline.

They try so hard to make it smooth.

When it's some other person who is toxic, there are always these conversations about: "Oh, but you know, they're so valuable to the company, they're a genius, they're just socially awkward, et cetera."

My entire team is completely behind me and they're taking risks.

They're taking actual risks to stand behind me.

My manager is standing behind me.

And even still, they decided to treat me in this way.

So definitely, I feel like I've been treated differently.

I suppose if you think that, the next obvious question is do you think Google itself is institutionally racist?

Yes, Google itself is institutionally racist.

That's quite a thing to say - you were a Google employee until a short while ago.

I feel like most if not all tech companies are institutionally racist.

I mean, how can I not say that they are not institutionally racist?

The Congressional Black Caucus is the one who's forcing them to publish their diversity numbers.

It's not by accident that black women have one of the lowest retention rates[, in the technology industry].

So for sure Google and all of the other tech companies are institutionally racist.