The deep state (loosely synonymous with the shadow government or permanent government) is in contrast to the public structures which appear to be directing individual nation states. The deep state is an intensely secretive, informal, fluid network of deep politicians who conspire to amplify their influence over national governments through a variety of deep state milieux. The term «deep state» derives from the Turkish »derin devlet», which emerged after the 1996Susurluk incident so dramatically unmasked the Turkish deep state.
(And, of course, that’s also the reason why this momentous study was ignored by America’s ‘news’ media, except for the
first news-report on it, mine at the obscure site Common Dreams, which
had 414 reader-comments within just its first four months, and then the UPI’s report on it,
which, like mine, was widely distributed to the major ‘news’ media and
rejected by them all — UPI’s report was published only by UPI itself,
and elicited only two reader-comments there. Then came the New Yorker’s pooh-poohing the study,
by alleging «the politicians all know this, and we know it, too. The
only debate is about how far this process has gone, and whether we
should refer to it as oligarchy or as something else.» Their
propagandist ignored the researchers’ having noted, in their paper, that
though their findings were extremely inconsistent with America’s being a
democracy, the problem was almost certainly being understated in their
findings: «The failure of theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy
is all the more striking because it goes against the likely effects of
the limitations of our data,» and, especially, «our ‘affluent’ proxy is
admittedly imperfect,» and so, «interest groups and economic elites
actually wield more policy influence than our estimates indicate.»
In
fact, their «elite» had consisted not of the top 0.1% as compared to
the bottom 50%, but instead of the top 10% as compared to the bottom
50%, and all empirical evidence shows that the more narrowly one defines
«the aristocracy,» the more lopsidedly dominant is the ‘elite’s
relative impact upon public policies. Then, a month after the
press-release on their study was issued, the co-authors were so
disappointed with the paltry coverage of it that had occurred in
America’s ‘news’ media, so that they submitted, to the Washington Post, a
reply to their study’s academic critics, «Critics argued with our analysis of U.S. political inequality. Here are 5 ways they’re wrong.» It
was promptly published online-only, as obscurely as possible, so that
there are also — as of the present date — only two reader-comments to
that public exposure. This is typical news-suppression in America:
essentially total suppression of samizdat information — not merely suppression
of the officially top-secret information, such as propagandists like
Ambinder focus upon. It’s deeper than the state: it is the deep state,
including far more than just the official government.)
theatlantic |The
recent unrest in Baltimore, Ferguson, and other cities is puzzling in
one important respect. Unlike in earlier eras, when African Americans’
political exclusion drove them to protest, blacks today are as likely
to vote as whites and are well represented at all levels of government.
The mayor of Baltimore and a majority of its city council are black. So
are forty-five
members of Congress—an all-time high. And, at the other end of
Pennsylvania Avenue, so is the current occupant of the White House. Why
all the turmoil, then, at a time when blacks—finally—seem to be enjoying
the fruits of American democracy?
One answer is that the appearance of
black political clout is deceiving. Despite their gains in participation
and representation, blacks continue to fare worse than whites in
converting their policy preferences into law. This poor performance is
more revealing than statistics on turnout or black electoral success.
And even though its causes remain mysterious, it is very much a
rationale for frustration with the status quo.
In a recent study, I analyzed group political power at the federal and state levels. At the federal level, I relied on a remarkable database
compiled by Princeton political scientist Martin Gilens. It includes
responses to thousands of survey questions from the last few decades.
Crucially, it also tracks whether each policy referred to by a question
was adopted by the federal government over the next four years. At the
state level, I measured people’s ideologies using exit polls that asked whether they are liberal, moderate, or conservative. And I assessed state laws using an index of overall policy liberalism created by another pair of scholars.
At both levels, I found that blacks hold much less sway
than whites. For example, a federal policy with no white support has
only a 10 percent chance of being enacted, while one with universal
white support has a 60 percent shot of adoption. But while a proposal
with no black support has a 40 percent chance of becoming law, one
enjoying unanimous approval has only a 30 percent probability of
enactment. In other words, as support for a policy rises within the
black community, the odds of it being achieved actually decline.
Likewise, whether most black voters are
conservative or liberal, state legislative outcomes barely budge. But
vary the views of white voters to an equivalent degree, and a state’s
policies go from looking like Alabama’s to resembling Michigan’s, even
controlling for black and white population size.
The story is similar for several other groups. The more that women, the poor, or Hispanics support a federal policy, the less
likely the policy is to be enacted. Strikingly, as women move from
universal opposition to a proposal to universal support, its odds of
adoption plummet from 75 percent to 10 percent. Changes in the ideology
of female or poor voters also have no effect on state legislative
outcomes (although shifts in the views of Hispanic voters do). In
contrast, both federal and state laws are acutely sensitive to the
preferences of whites, men, and the rich.
norberthaering |Microsoft’s Bill Gates is one of the richest and
most influential people on earth. He announced in 2015 that his Bill
& Melinda Gates Foundation was aiming at achieving full
digitalization of the payment systems of India and other populous
developing countries by 2018. This “financial
inclusion” program for India dates back to well before Narendra Modi
came to power. It was elevated to official US policy by Executive Order
in 2012, because the President saw vital US security interests are at
stake.
Speaking for the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation at the “Financial Inclusion Forum” in Washington, organized
by the Treasury Department and USAID on December 1, 2015, Bill Gates said (min 17):
“Full digitalization
of the economy may happen in developing countries faster than anywhere
else. It is certainly our goal to make it happen in the next three years
in the large developing countries. We have very significant efforts in
Nigeria, Pakistan and India, (and) a dozen other countries, where we
work with the central banks to make sure that the right kind of
transaction switch is available…(min 20)…We worked directly with the central bank
there (India) over the last three years and they created a new type of
authorization called the payments bank, and those customers will be able
to use their mobile phones to perform basic financial transactions. And
11 entities applied, including all the mobile phone providers, and were
granted that payment bank status.”
"Financial Inclusion" was defined by PayPal-CEO Dan Schulman in an interview during the forum as:
“Financial Inclusion is a buzz word for bringing people into the system.”
The cooperation of the Gates foundation and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is and has been a very tight one. Nachiket Mor, a “Yale World Fellow”, is head of the Gates Foundation India. He is also a board member of the RBI, with responsibility for financial supervision. He
chaired the RBI Committee on the Licensing of Payment Banks and a
financial inclusion committee that the RBI convened in 2013.
+++Note: Since this text puts forward a conspiracy theory, I want to let the actors and their documents speak for themselves as much as possible.
Where my own judgement and additional information figure in
significantly, as in the following lines, it will be in italics and
clearly marked. If you are skeptical, you may want to jump over
those sections in italics in a first round, to not be unduly influenced
in your interpretation of the quotes from the main actors and their
documents.
If the cooperation of Gates Foundation and RBI
had been ongoing already for three years in early December 2015, this
implies a start in late 2012 or early 2013. This would be more than a
year before Narendra Modi became Prime Minister of India. It would also
have been almost two years, before Modi visited Barack Obama, told him
about his plans to do something for financial inclusion and receive the
happy message that the US was willing to help. It would have started
three years before the partnership of USAID and the Indian Finance
Ministry on financial inclusion was officially announced at that
same forum and five years before the RBI and Narendra Modi performed the
great and brutal experiment of starving the whole of India of cash for
months. All this time, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was
quietly working closely and directly with the RBI towards Gates’
declared goal of making the Indian payment system totally cashless by
the end of 2018. He did so with backing and involvement of the
US-government and with help of allies such as the World Economic
Forum.+++
Gates' quotes stood in a context where he stressed
that a government’s assistance to the poor and needy should not be
delivered by the “incredibly inefficient” method of providing cash or
grain to the recipient. “Digitalization helps targeting”, he said, if
payments are done via mobile banking. He praised Mexico (min 18), whose Finance Minister, Luis Videgaray Caso, was present, announcing:
“We are going to use government income support programs as financial inclusion tools”,
as tools to bring everybody into the system. The
idea endorsed by Gates and the financial inclusion “community” at the
forum was to steer poor people into participating in the digital payment
system by making it a condition for receiving any or certain forms of
support.
rutherford | Here’s a truth few Americans want to acknowledge: nothing has changed
(at least, not for the better) since Barack Obama passed the reins of
the police state to Donald Trump.
The police state is still winning. We the people are still losing.
In fact, the American police state has continued to advance at the
same costly, intrusive, privacy-sapping, Constitution-defying,
relentless pace under President Trump as it did under President Obama.
Police haven’t stopped disregarding the rights of citizens.
Having been given the green light to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search,
seize, strip, shoot and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in
almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts,
America’s law enforcement officials are no longer mere servants of the
people entrusted with keeping the peace. Indeed, they continue to keep
the masses corralled, under control, and treated like suspects and
enemies rather than citizens.
SWAT teams haven’t stopped crashing through doors and terrorizing families.
Nationwide, SWAT teams continue to be employed to address an
astonishingly trivial array of criminal activities or mere community
nuisances including angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork
filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession. With
more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year on unsuspecting
Americans for relatively routine police matters and federal agencies
laying claim to their own law enforcement divisions, the incidence of botched raids and related casualties continue to rise.
The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security haven’t stopped militarizing and federalizing local police.Police forces continue to be transformed into heavily armed extensions of the military,
complete with jackboots, helmets, shields, batons, pepper-spray, stun
guns, assault rifles, body armor, miniature tanks and weaponized drones.
In training police to look and act like the military and use the
weapons and tactics of war against American citizens, the government
continues to turn the United States into a battlefield.
Schools haven’t stopped treating young people like hard-core prisoners. School
districts continue to team up with law enforcement to create a
“schoolhouse to jailhouse track” by imposing a “double dose” of
punishment for childish infractions: suspension or expulsion from
school, accompanied by an arrest by the police and a trip to juvenile
court. In this way, the paradigm of abject compliance to the state
continues to be taught by example in the schools, through school
lockdowns where police and drug-sniffing dogs enter the classroom, and zero tolerance policies that punish all offenses equally and result in young people being expelled for childish behavior.
For-profit private prisons haven’t stopped locking up Americans and immigrants alike at taxpayer expense.
States continue to outsource prison management to private corporations
out to make a profit at taxpayer expense. And how do you make a profit
in the prison industry? Have the legislatures pass laws that impose
harsh penalties for the slightest noncompliance in order keep the prison
cells full and corporate investors happy.
Censorship hasn’t stopped. First Amendment activities continue to be pummeled, punched, kicked, choked, chained and generally gagged
all across the country. The reasons for such censorship vary widely
from political correctness, safety concerns and bullying to national
security and hate crimes but the end result remained the same: the
complete eradication of what Benjamin Franklin referred to as the
“principal pillar of a free government.”
The courts haven’t stopped marching in lockstep with the police state.
The courts continue to be dominated by technicians and statists who are
deferential to authority, whether government or business. Indeed, the
Supreme Court’s decisions in recent years have most often been
characterized by an abject deference to government authority, military
and corporate interests. They have run the gamut from suppressing free
speech activities and justifying suspicionless strip searches to
warrantless home invasions and conferring constitutional rights on
corporations, while denying them to citizens.
Government bureaucrats haven’t stopped turning American citizens into criminals.
The average American now unknowingly commits three felonies a day,
thanks to an overabundance of vague laws that render otherwise innocent
activity illegal, while reinforcing the power of the police state and
its corporate allies.
The surveillance state hasn’t stopped spying on Americans’ communications, transactions or movements. On
any given day, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your
car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you
can be sure that some government agency, whether it’s your local police,
a fusion center, the National Security Agency or one of the
government’s many corporate partners, is still monitoring and tracking
you.
The TSA hasn’t stopped groping or ogling travelers. Under
the pretext of protecting the nation’s infrastructure (roads, mass
transit systems, water and power supplies, telecommunications systems
and so on) against criminal or terrorist attacks, TSA task forces
(comprised of federal air marshals, surface transportation security
inspectors, transportation security officers, behavior detection
officers and explosive detection canine teams) continue to do random
security sweeps of nexuses of transportation, including ports, railway
and bus stations, airports, ferries and subways, as well as political
conventions, baseball games and music concerts. Sweep tactics include
the use of x-ray technology, pat-downs and drug-sniffing dogs, among
other things.
Congress hasn’t stopped enacting draconian laws such as the USA Patriot Act and the NDAA. These
laws—which completely circumvent the rule of law and the constitutional
rights of American citizens, continue to re-orient our legal landscape
in such a way as to ensure that martial law, rather than the rule of
law, our U.S. Constitution, becomes the map by which we navigate life in
the United States.
The Department of Homeland Security hasn’t stopped being a “wasteful, growing, fear-mongering beast.” Is the DHS capable of plotting and planning to turn the national guard into a federalized, immigration police force?
No doubt about it. Remember, this is the agency that is notorious for
militarizing the police and SWAT teams; spying on activists, dissidents
and veterans; stockpiling ammunition; distributing license plate
readers; contracting to build detention camps; tracking cell-phones with
Stingray devices; carrying out military drills and lockdowns in
American cities; using the TSA as an advance guard; conducting virtual
strip searches with full-body scanners; carrying out soft target
checkpoints; directing government workers to spy on Americans;
conducting widespread spying networks using fusion centers; carrying out
Constitution-free border control searches; funding city-wide
surveillance cameras; and utilizing drones and other spybots.
The military industrial complex hasn’t stopped profiting from endless wars abroad. America’s
expanding military empire continues to bleed the country dry at a rate
of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour). The Pentagon
spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health,
education, welfare, and safety. Yet what most Americans fail to
recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the
country safe and everything to do with enriching the military industrial
complex at taxpayer expense.
The Deep State’s shadow government hasn’t stopped calling the shots behind the scenes.
Comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations,
contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling
the shots behind the scenes, this government within a government continues
to be the real reason “we the people” have no real control over our
so-called representatives. It’s every facet of a government that is no
longer friendly to freedom and is working overtime to trample the
Constitution underfoot and render the citizenry powerless in the face of
the government’s power grabs, corruption and abusive tactics.
And the American people haven’t stopped acting like gullible sheep. In fact, many Americans have been so carried away by their blind rank-and-file partisan devotion to their respective political gods that they have lost sight of the one thing that has remained constant in recent years: our freedoms are steadily declining.
strategic-culture | Ironically, the connection to Watergate is more than it might appear to be. That scandal is commonly thought of as a «high point» of American journalism, in which intrepid reporters from theWashington Postdared to help bring down a Republican president for involvement in «dirty tricks» against Democrats hatched in 1972. A more nuanced account is given by author Russ Baker, in his book Family of Secrets about the Bush dynasty and the CIA. Baker provides evidence that the Washington Post was actually led by intelligence agencies to stitch up Richard Nixon whom they had come to oppose over his shady self-serving politics. Watergate and the demise of Nixon was thus less a triumph of democracy and media righteousness and more a coup by the Deep State against Nixon in which theWashington Postserved as the conduit.
The nature of today’s shenanigans with Trump may be different in the precise details. But the modus operandi appears to be the same. A sitting president is out of favor with the Deep State and the latter is orchestrating a media campaign of leaks to dislodge him. Appropriately, the Washington Post is again at the forefront of the Deep State operation to thwart the president, this time Trump, as with Nixon before.
The story of Trump being a potentially treasonous pawn being manipulated by Russia is impossibly far-fetched to be credible. Trump denies it, and Moscow denies it. Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn appears indeed to have had contact with the Russian ambassador during Trump’s transition to the White House. But the content of the conversation has been blown out of all proportion by US intelligence and media to contrive the narrative that Trump is in cahoots with Moscow.
The upshot is that Trump’s avowed policy of restoring friendlier relations with Russia is being hampered at every turn. The president is being goaded into having to deny he is a Russian stooge and to prove that he is not soft on Moscow – by, for example, stating this week through his White House spokesman Sean Spicer that «Russian must hand back Crimea to Ukraine».
Evidently, the big purpose here is to direct Trump to adopt a harder line on Russia and to abandon any notion of developing cordial relations. Either he must tow the line, or he will be hounded by leaks, media speculation and Congressional probes until he is impeached. This is because the Deep State – primarily the military-industrial complex that is the permanent government of the US – is predicated on a strategic policy of adversity towards Russia and any other designated geopolitical rival.
Meanwhile, amid the raging war between the Trump White House and the US intelligence network, which includes sections of the media, Russia said this week that relations between the two countries were suffering.
Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for President Vladimir Putin, lamented that the turmoil in Washington was turning into a lost opportunity for the US and Russia to normalize relations and get on with bigger, far more urgent tasks of cooperation in world affairs.
And that impasse between the US and Russia, it would seem, is the whole object lesson from Trump’s war with powerful elements within his own state.
Trump may have been elected president. But other darker forces in America’s power structure are intent on over-ruling him when it comes to policy on Russia. Trump’s Watergate is all about drowning out a genuine reset with Russia.
mondoweiss | Israel
tried to interfere in that 2012 election, as Chris Matthews sensibly
reminded his audience recently: Benjamin Netanyahu tried to help Mitt
Romney beat Obama. Sheldon Adelson held a fundraiser in Jerusalem for
Romney.
Netanyahu didn’t stop there. After Romney lost,
Netanyahu came to Congress to tell the Congress to reject President
Obama’s nuclear deal. That was an unprecedented interference of a
foreign leader in our policy-making, enabled by the Israel lobby; but
there were never any investigations about that. Subsequently Chuck
Schumer said he was torn between a Jewish interest
and the American interest, before voting against the president, and he
paid no political/reputational price for it; while President Obama said
that it would be an “abrogation” of his constitutional duty if he
considered Israel’s interest ahead of the U.S.; for which Obama was
called an anti-semite.
Throughout those negotiations, Obama could never
address the fact that Israel has nukes. This lie is honored by the
press, in a way that it would never honor Trump’s lies. And the manner
in which Israel got nukes, including thefts from an American company with the complicity of the White House, is only investigated by peripheral figures.
The Israeli interference in our politics is
the conspiracy in plain sight that no one in the media talks about
because they’re too implicated themselves. The two top executives at the
largest media company, Comcast, are pro-Israel; one of them, David
Cohen, raised money for the Israeli army. Netanyahu’s speeches to Congress were written by Gary Ginsberg, an executive at another media company, Time Warner,
but hey, that’s not an issue. Four New York Times reporters have had
children serve in the Israeli army. One of them is columnist David
Brooks, who says that he gets gooey-eyed when he visits Israel. He is
one of several Zionists with columns at the Times. Tom Friedman
justified the Iraq War because suicide bombers were going into Tel Aviv pizza parlors.
(Huh?) Yesterday Martin Indyk said on National Public Radio that Jared
Kushner’s strong Jewish background was an asset for his being a Middle
East mediator, a job that Aaron David Miller, who also has a strong
Jewish background, defined as being Israel’s lawyer. Indyk, himself a
mediator, started a pro-Israel thinktank with Haim Saban, an
Israeli-American who was Clinton’s biggest funder and who lately smeared
Keith Ellison at a giant gathering at Brookings, which he also helps fund, as
“clearly an anti-semite” and “anti-Israel;” and Jake Tapper of CNN
moved on to the next question, presumably because smearing a public
official in that manner is not news.
jonrappoport | —In 1947, the president of the United States, Harry Truman, decided:
I’m going to create a snake and call it the CIA. Its watchword will be
secrecy. It will collect secrets of our enemies and hold them secret
and report the secrets to the president, who will decide what to do. Of
course, the snake will remain under the president’s control. Its
entire personality will be based on deception, but it will remain loyal
to the president. No problem. Sure.
Hollander offers vital reminders of the war between two parts of the Executive Branch: the presidency and the CIA.
“Implicit in Pynchon’s fiction is the view that events in recent
American history have led to a virtual constitutional crisis, a
challenge to the supremacy of the presidency by the intelligence
community.”
“In a very short time, two presidents, a Republican and a Democrat, ran
afoul of the CIA. The result amounted to a constitutional crisis, a
change in our actual form of government without benefit of a duly
ratified constitutional amendment. The crisis is reminiscent of that
period in Roman history when the Praetorian Guard could sell the office
of Emperor to the highest bidder and then, after a time, assassinate him
and have a new auction. To this day, the president has never again
challenged the CIA, though the agency has made its share of egregious
errors. With the selection of former CIA director George H.W. Bush, the
presidency and the CIA effectively merged…”
WaPo | The public outcry led the administration to reverse course
and name the CIA director an NSC principal, but the White House’s
inclination was clear. It has little need for intelligence professionals
who, in speaking truth to power, might challenge the so-called “America
First” orthodoxy that sees Russia as an ally and Australia as a
punching bag. That’s why the president’s trusted White House advisers, not career professionals, reportedly have final say over what intelligence reaches his desk.
To
be clear, my decision had nothing to do with politics, and I would have
been proud to again work under a Republican administration open to
intelligence analysis. I served with conviction under President George
W. Bush, some of whose policies I also found troubling, and I took part
in programs that the Obama administration criticized and ended. As
intelligence professionals, we’re taught to tune out politics. The river
separating CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., from Washington might as
well be a political moat. But this administration has flipped that
dynamic on its head: The politicians are the ones tuning out the
intelligence professionals.
The CIA will continue to
serve important functions — including undertaking covert action and
sharing information with close allies and partners around the globe. If
this administration is serious about building trust with the
intelligence community, however, it will require more than rallies at
CIA headquarters or press statements. What intelligence professionals
want most is to know that the fruits of their labor — sometimes at the
risk of life or limb — are accorded due deference in the policymaking
process.
unz | Michael Moore’s flabby mug always looks indecently exposed, like
middle-aged female genitalia. The fat slob could lead the old hags’
march without the pink pussyhat. Just his own visage would suffice. He
is actually similar to George Soros: the same obscene pussyface. For me,
his appearance would doom him: like Oscar Wilde, I believe that ugly
creatures are immoral as well. It’s enough to look at Madeleine
Albright, another pussyface, for a proof. But if you need more, his Stupid White Men
has been the most execrable book produced in the US in this century:
there he claimed that were 9/11 passengers black, the hijack would never
have succeeded. Now the Pussyface bared the hidden plans of Putin and called for enthroninge Clinton because Trump is a Russian spy.
Years ago he spoke against the Iraq War; now he calls for the nuclear
Armageddon. With such enemies, we should not give up on Trump.
Trump
is down, cry the fans and haters alike. He’s been defeated, broken,
never to rise again. He is a lame duck soon to be impeached. He will
crawl back to his golden lair leaving the White House to his betters, or
even better, he will run to his pal Vlad Putin.
No,
my friends and readers, Trump is fighting, not running, but things take
time. It is not easy to change the paradigm, and the odds were heavily
slanted against Trump from step one. Still, he got this far, and he will
go on. Stubborn guy, and he perseveres. The corrupt judges chain his
hands; the CIA and NSA reveal his moves to the NYT, CNN, NBC; but he stands up, ready to carry the fight to his – and American people’s – enemy, the hydra of so many triple-letter heads.
Now you understand why the pessimistic assessments of our colleagues
Paul Craig Roberts and The Saker are at least premature. In the face of
the ancient regime’s hostility, Trump will need at least six months
merely to settle properly in the White House. Just for comparison: Putin
had spent five years consolidating his power, and another five years
solidifying it, though he had full support of Russian security services
and a most authoritarian constitution written by the Americans for their
stooge Mr Yeltsin.
President
Putin remembers that it takes time. For this reason, he is not unduly
upset by President Trump’s delay with normalising US-Russia relations.
The fake news of Russian disenchantment with Trump are exactly that,
fake news. Russians believe in positive developments for US-Russia
relations, and they do not hold their breath.
But
why I do believe that Trump will win, at the end? The US is not an
island; it is a part of the West, and the West is going through a
paradigm change. Cuntfaces lost, Deplorables won, and not as a fluke.
Remember, Trump was not the first victory; the Brexit preceded him.
Between the Brexit vote and the Trump election, the British government
hesitated and postponed acting upon. The Brits weren’t sure whether that
vote was a sign of change, or a fluke. After Trump’s victory, the Brits
marched on.
thesaker | I just don’t put anything past the evil capabilities of the Donald!
Reading the article I was surprised to find that the Deep State isn’t
what I thought it was – apparently it’s only when the government leaks
information to the media?
That’s funny, because one time on the SF-NYC “Job Creator Red-eye” I
sat next to an Egyptian guy. Of course I was worried, at first, but I
found out it he was a Coptic Christian, so that put me at ease. Who even
knew they had those?!
This Egyptian told me about his country’s Deep State, and it sounded really bad:
He said that they colluded with “some Western countries” – he didn’t
say which and looked kind of uncomfortable as he said it, for some
reason – to stop that great Tahrir Square Revolution which was to
guarantee that Israel would be safe.
“Mr. Gypsy” said that the Egyptian version of the Deep State was that
their military controlled the economy, and that they bribed, imprisoned
and killed people to keep their grip on the economy and control over
foreign policy.
It sounded pretty bad.
I told him I was happy that Washington was supporting Al-Sisi’s
military takeover with billions in aid, and that he didn’t have to thank
me personally for that.
A “military” intertwined with the “economy”…I must admit, it did make me think.
Of Russia! I’m nearly certain that Putin created something similar
over thereafter he banned elections, so why even verify it with some
research?!
But this Egyptian must not have known what he was talking about,
because the New York Times article didn’t say anything about the
economy?
What they said was:
“Mr. Trump, apparently seeking to cut the intelligence community,
State Department, and other agencies out of the policy-making process
almost entirely, may have triggered a conflict whose escalation we are
seeing in the rising number of leaks.”
Officials, deprived of the usual levers for shaping policies that are supposed to be their purview, are left with little other than leaking.”
Trump was clearly trying to cut public officials out of the
democratic process, and they had no choice but to resort to these
“illegal” leaks!
I mean, I’m pretty sure you don’t get elected to be a CIA spy or NSA
agent, but somebody up top is and…well, I don’t know if they did the
leaks…and I don’t know if the leaks are really true or not…but I’m
telling you – we have to get Donald out NOW!
Anything that’s bad for Trump must be good. It’s really that simple, so case closed.
“We’re in a world now where the president is playing to the edge of his powers, and I think there are real concerns about the constitutional implications of some of the actions he’s taken,” said somebody who must be totally objective and perfect because why else would the New York Times choose them?
If there’s one thing Obama never, ever, ever did it was to expand his
executive authority in ways unbeseeming to the presidential authority.
If Obama had done that, I would have been in the streets, you can
bet! Trust me: I have my anti-Trump “pussy hat” in my closet and ready
for the next protest!
globalresearch |Weather warfare technology was the teeth “sustainable
development” Agenda 2030 had been waiting for (and surely why developing
nations had valiantly attempted to include an International Tribunal of
Climate Justice). Immediately after the two conferences, the Dutch
Defence Joint Meteorological Group (JMG) took the lead “in providing
weather forecasts for every exercise or deployment of [NATO’s] Very High
Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF).” [20] And if you think the VJTF is
only “forecasting” weather …
To be fair, some academics do ponder the naked emperor. How exactly
is CO2 to be removed from the atmosphere “using an infrastructure we
don’t have and with technology that won’t work on the scale we need, and
finally to store it in places we can’t find” [21]? Others recognize that the carbon solution is a ploy for raking in disaster capitalist cash:
$90 trillion in energy infrastructure investments, $1 trillion green
bond market, multi-trillion dollar carbon trading market, $391 billion
climate finance industry. [22] The UN Green Climate Fund alone will clear
$100 billion per year, purportedly to support concrete carbons
mitigation in developing countries. Should we take bets on if the money
will ever make it to the developing countries after being filtered
through multilateral and private banks like World Bank and Deutsche
Bank? After all, the naked emperor is not known for keeping his
promises.
Traditional bureaucratic foundations like Ford,
Rockefeller and Carnegie were said to be giving way to
“philanthrocapitalism,” a muscular new approach to charity in which the
presumed entrepreneurial skills of billionaires would be applied to the
world’s most pressing challenges … [23]
Too late, the public is awakening to the dismal fact that its
institutions, agencies, universities, laboratories, and courts obey the
very powers that have milked public assets dry. Worker and food safety,
gone. Bill of Rights, gone. Environmental protections, gone. Soon, the
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Transatlantic Trade and Investment
Partnership (TTIP) or facsimiles thereof will lock in corporate
feudalism under an oligarchic world rule. Billionaire members of the
Good Club [24] are establishing “brain institutes” to support the Brain
Initiative and its neuroscientists in service to a Transhumanist future.
[25]
“Science is broken”
For two decades, independent scientists and the science-minded have
been attempting to sound the alarm regarding what is going on in our
skies and in low-earth orbit while university labs and
burgeoning university scientists buckle to military grants dedicated to
weaponizing everything under the Sun, if not the Sun itself. Rutgers
University climatologist Alan Robock relates how CIA-funded consultants
contacted him to ask two questions: If we control someone else’s climate, would they know about it? and Would climate experts be able to determine if another nation was attempting to control the climate?
The CIA—not exactly known for being forthcoming—has funded multiple
grants targeting weather domination (including HAARP via minions like
Raytheon), including two February 2015 National Academy of Sciences
reports: “Climate Intervention: Carbon Dioxide Removal and Reliable
Sequestration” (154 pages) and “Climate Intervention: Reflecting
Sunlight to Cool Earth” (234 pages). [26]
The peer review system has been co-opted, favoring
some theories and scientists and banishing others to the outer darkness
of non-publication and stonewalled careers. Nobel Laureate biologist
Sydney Brenner:
I think peer review is hindering science. In fact, I
think it has become a completely corrupt system. It’s corrupt in many
ways, in that scientists and academics have handed over to the editors
of these journals the ability to make judgment on science and
scientists. There are universities in America, and I’ve heard from many
committees, that won’t consider people’s publications in low impact
factor journals … it puts the judgment in the hands of people who really
have no reason to exercise judgment at all. And that’s all been done in
the aid of commerce, because they are now giant organizations making
money out of it. [27]
“Powerful orthodoxy against a marginalized heterodoxy” is how Charles
Eisenstein describes the opposition to cutting-edge Electric Universe
scientists:
If you have faith in the soundness of our scientific
institutions, you will assume that the dissidents are marginalized for
very good reason: their work is substandard. If you believe that the
peer review process is fair and open, then the dearth of peer-reviewed
citations for [Electric Universe] research is a damning indictment of
their theory. And if you believe that the corpus of mainstream physics
is fundamentally correct, and that science is progressing closer and
closer to truth, you will be highly skeptical of any major departure
from standard theories … Can we trust scientific consensus? Can we trust
the integrity of our scientific institutions? Perhaps not. Over the
last few years, a growing chorus of insider critics have been exposing
serious flaws in the ways that scientific research is funded and
published, leading some to go so far as to say, ‘Science is broken.’
[28]
Between 1973 and 2013, the decision-making as to which scientific
papers merited publication and which didn’t was controlled by six major
publishers (ACS; Reed Elsevier; Sage; Taylor & Francis; Springer;
and Wiley-Blackwell), all in the back pocket of Big Pharma and the
medical industry:
’As long as publishing in high impact factor journals is a
requirement for researchers to obtain positions, research funding, and
recognition from peers, the major commercial publishers will maintain
their hold on the academic publishing system,’ added [Professor Vincent
Lariviere, lead author of the study from the University of Montreal’s
School of Library and Information Science]. [29]
Then there’s the danger quotient far beyond loss of career for
scientists working on classified projects. In the early days of the
“Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) now culminating in the
Space Fence, two dozen scientists and experts working for Marconi and
Plessey Defence Systems either disappeared or died under “mysterious
circumstances.” Most were microbiologists.
theatlantic | China’s rapid rise up the ranks of AI research has people taking notice. In October, the Obama White House released a “strategic plan”
for AI research, which noted that the U.S. no longer leads the world in
journal articles on “deep learning,” a particularly hot subset of AI
research right now. The country that had overtaken the U.S.? China, of
course.
It’s not just academic research. Chinese tech
companies are betting on AI, too. Baidu (a Chinese search-engine company
often likened to Google), Didi (often likened to Uber), and Tencent
(maker of the mega-popular messaging app WeChat) have all set up their
own AI research labs. With millions of customers, these companies have
access to the huge amount of data that training AI to detect patterns
requires.
Like the Microsofts and Googles of the world, Chinese
tech companies see enormous potential in AI. It could undergird a whole
set of transformative technologies in the coming decades, from facial
recognition to autonomous cars.“I have a hard time thinking of an
industry we cannot transform with AI,” says Andrew Ng, chief scientist
at Baidu. Ng previously cofounded Coursera and Google Brain, the
company’s deep learning project. Now he directs Baidu’s AI research out
of Sunnyvale, California, right in Silicon Valley.
newatlas | The looming specter of eugenics hovers
over a great deal of transhumanist thought. In the first half of the
20th century the term became disturbingly, but not unreasonably,
associated with Nazi Germany. Sterilizing or euthanizing those who
displayed characteristics that were deemed to be imperfect was
ultimately outlawed as a form of genocide. But as the genome revolution
struck later in the century a resurgence in the philosophical ideals of
eugenics began to arise.
Transhumanist thought often
parallels the ideals of eugenics, although most self-identifying
transhumanists separate themselves from that stigmatized field,
preferring terms like reprogenetics and germinal choice. The difference
between the negative outcomes of eugenics and the more positive,
transhumanist notion of reprogenetics seems to be one of consent. In a
21st century world of selective genetic modification, all is good as
long as all parents equally have the choice to genetically modify their
child, and are not forced by governments who are trying to forcefully
manage the genetic pool.
Some of the more valid concerns about
the dawning transhumanist future are the socioeconomic repercussions of
such a speedy technological evolution. As the chasm between rich and
poor grows in our current culture, one can't help but be concerned that
future advancements could become disproportionately limited to those
with the financial resources to afford them. If life extension
technologies start to become feasible, and they are only available to
the billionaire class, then we enter a scenario where the rich get
richer and live longer, while the poor get poorer and die sooner.
Without exceptionally strong
political reform maintaining democratic access to human enhancement
technologies, it's easy to foresee the rise of a disturbing genetic
class divide. As environmentalist and activist Bill McKibben writes:
"If we can't afford the fifty cents a person it would take to buy bed
nets to protect most of Africa from malaria, it is unlikely we will
extend to anyone but the top tax bracket these latest forms of genetic
technology."
Humans must become cyborgs and develop a direct
high-bandwidth connection with machines or risk irrelevance and
obsolescence, says Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
Musk’s latest cheery thoughts were imparted at the World Government Summit in the UAE. “Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence,” Musk said, according to CNBC.
The main thrust of Musk’s argument seems to hinge on the limited
bandwidth and processing power of a single human being. Computers can
ingest, transfer, and process gigabytes of data per second, every
second, forever. Meatbags, however, are severely limited by an
input/output rate—talking, typing, listening—that’s best measured in
bits per second. Thus, avoid replacement by robot or artificial intelligence, we need to become machines.
By way of example, Musk spoke about self-driving cars, which will very soon start displacing jobs—lots
and lots of jobs. “The most near term impact from a technology
standpoint is autonomous cars … There are many people whose jobs are to
drive. In fact I think it might be the single largest employer of people
… We need to figure out new roles for what do those people do, but it
will be very disruptive and very quick.” Autonomous vehicles are perhaps the most visible prominence when
it comes to recent developments in AI, but rest assured (or not) that we
aren’t even close to AI’s capability ceiling. Current deployments of AI
are quite limited in that they can only perform one or two tasks
adequately—drive a car, lift a piece of steel, flip a burger—but AI
research is slowly bubbling towards artificial general intelligence
(AGI), which can ostensibly perform every task that a human is capable
of.
Once that happens, it’s fairly safe to assume that AGI will
continue to improve until, in the words of Elon Musk, it is “smarter
than the smartest human on earth.”
As for how humans might achieve silicon symbiosis, the jury’s still out. Musk, according to CNBC, proposed a brain-attached high-bandwidth computer link, perhaps via neural lace.
Low-speed and low-resolution EEG-based brain-computer interfaces
already exist, of course, but I doubt that’s what Musk has in mind. In
all likelihood, we will need to massively improve our understanding of
the human brain before any such interface can be created.
Musk has been one of the individuals at the forefront of warning
about the threats of artificial intelligence (AI) for a very long time,
but it appears the thrust of his most recent comments center around
concerns that a rapid increase in technology applied to the economy will
result in a massive wave of job losses. This seems plausible to me, and
I’ve called attention to it in the past. For example, in the 2015
post, Chinese Company Moves to Replace 90% of its Workforce with Robots,
theantimedia | Will artificial intelligence get more aggressive and selfish the more intelligent it becomes? A new report
out of Google’s DeepMind AI division suggests this is possible based on
the outcome of millions of video game sessions it monitored. The
results of the two games indicate that as artificial intelligence
becomes more complex, it is more likely to take extreme measures to
ensure victory, including sabotage and greed.
The first game, Gathering, is a simple one that involves
gathering digital fruit. Two DeepMind AI agents were pitted against each
other after being trained in the ways of deep reinforcement learning. After 40 million turns,
the researchers began to notice something curious. Everything was ok as
long as there were enough apples, but when scarcity set in, the agents
used their laser beams to knock each other out and seize all the apples.
The aggression, they determined, was the result of higher levels of complexity in the AI agents themselves. When they tested the game
on less intelligent AI agents, they found that the laser beams were
left unused and equal amounts of apples were gathered. The simpler AIs
seemed to naturally gravitate toward peaceful coexistence.
Researchers believe the more advanced AI agents learn from their
environment and figure out how to use available resources to manipulate
their situation — and they do it aggressively if they need to.
“This model … shows that some aspects of human-like behaviour emerge as a product of the environment and learning,” a DeepMind team member, Joel Z Leibo, told Wired.
“It holds great promise in new disease therapies but immeasurable
peril due to its capacity to make germline genetic modifications, which
would be passed on to all future generations, not to mention planned
extinctions through gene-drive technology which is already past ‘proof
of concept,'” said the co-author of “Pandemonium’s Engine.”
WND reported in November
on plans by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,
dubbed DARPA, to develop a cleanup crew for engineered genes deemed
harmful to the eco-system.
The initiative is called “Safe Genes” – a program designed to
counteract gene-drive systems currently being developed to override the
standard rules of gene inheritance and natural selection. The danger,
scientists recognize, is that without a backup plan, a gene drive
released into nature could spread or change in unexpected ways with
potentially disastrous effects.
Kevin Esvelt, head of the Sculpting Evolution lab at MIT Media Lab,
which is applying for Safe Genes funding in collaboration with eight
other research groups, predicts that eventually an accident will allow a
drive with potential to spread globally to escape laboratory controls.
“It’s not going to be bioterror,” he told Scientific American, “it’s going to be ‘bioerror.'” Fist tap Big Don.
fredoneverything |The desire to shock of the eternally pubescent. Smirk, smirk, look at me, smirk, smirk.
We saw Ashley Judd, apparently an actress, addressing the “Women’s March.”
“I am
not as nasty as racism, fraud, conflict of interest, homophobia, sexual
assault, transphobia, white supremacy, misogyny, ignorance, white
privilege. I’m not as nasty as using little girls like Pokemon before
their bodies have even developed. I am not as nasty as your own daughter
being your favorite sex symbol, like your wet dreams infused with your
own genes.”
The astonishing thing is not that some foul-mouthed twit came up with
such cloacal gush, but that the “Women’s March” sponsored her, did not
eject or even censure her.
Can you imagine any of Trump’s
middle-American supporters accusing Obama of lusting for incest with his
daughters? The two camps are different peoples. Half of the country
seems culturally dominated from the ghetto. The other half embodies
standards of behavior that have usually been thought congruent with
civil society. While Trump himself is crass, making menstrual jibes on
the air at Megyn Kelly for example, his supporters are not.
Any number of arguments can be adduced against Trump but so much of
the outpouring of hostility, even from the intelligent, lacks thought.
Thisaphobe, thataphobe, Nazi, misogynist. Putin’s Bitch.
Most seem not
to know what the words mean, or care.
Wild thought: We may be seeing Darwinian regression. The intellectual
nanoparticles waving placards, the sobbing talking headesses may
represent the return of the procaryote IQ. They give us a living
paleontological record of what life looked like before it evolved. Think
“Cambrian Implosion.” I imagine Rachel Maddow with twelve body segments
and compound eyes.
Different peoples. I would like to
see a comparative poll: How many women who voted for Trump would allow
themselves to be associated with Ms. Judd’s remarks? None, I suspect. How
many women voting for Trump would parade around in “pussy hats”? How
many fathers voting for Trump would allow their daughters, have raised
their daughters, to behave as the “Women’s Marchers”? Their children to
copy Black Lives Matter?
Different civilizations. Virtually no overlap.
The media are decidedly of the
Clinton America. In Washington at least some journalists donned pussy
hats and jointed the demonstrators. Trashy behavior has seeped into many
in the professional classes. Trump recently sued a journalist and the London Daily Mail
for describing Melania as “a high-end escort”–i.e., a take-out call
girl, a prostitute. Can you imagine a conservative paper–say, the Washington Times, The American Conservative, National Review–describing Michelle Obama as a whore? Or Trump’s fans wearing scrotal hats?
There is a brattyness in the apparent
belief of the Clinton Americans that they are entitled to the electoral
result of their choice. When they don’t get it,they act like spoiled
two-year-olds. Poor widdle fings! It is embarrassing. If Hillary had
won, would disappointed Trumpists be squalling and posing in genital
headgear or looting and burning? Whatever the merits of the politics of either side, the two have little in common culturally.
According to the laws of physics and the principles of nature, nothing disappears into thin air, so it must be around here somewhere. It
was too big and loud to fall between the couch cushions or hide in the
closet, so someone must have stolen it. Someone must have found a way to
silence it. I know there were a lot of people who wished it would
evaporate into the ether or slowly fizzle out, but I’m sure it can’t be all gone.
What happened to Black Lives Matter?
Barely a year ago, #BlackLivesMatter was on the tip of almost every
tongue in the country. It caused such a commotion that America had no
choice but to take notice. Whether they supported it or hated it,
everyone had an opinion of it. It led the evening news. It popped up in
every social media feed.
They argued about it on SportsCenter. Have you seen it lately? I know it hasn’t gone anywhere.
Don’t reduce its existence to a simple hashtag, because it was more than that. It was a living, breathing thing. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I saw it at football games kneeling during the national anthem. I saw it change the entire municipal structure
of the city of Ferguson, Mo. I watched it strut onstage at halftime of
the Super Bowl. It strong-armed police departments into buying body
cameras. It showed up at presidential debates and awards shows. It fueled conversations in every corner of the country about how America treated black bodies.
But
lately, my friends don’t talk about it as much. Is it dead? Is it
asleep? Have we lost interest? Why is it so quiet? Where did it go?
theduran | Russian pranksters called US Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) posing as Ukraine's Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman. The conversation which transpired between them is both hilarious and telling.
While seeking reassurances from the US in the wake of Moscow’s most
recent “invasions” across the globe and impudent “hacking” of
presidential elections in a fictitious country, the two tricksters
pretending to be Ukraine’s Prime Minister revealed just how clueless
Congresswoman Waters really is about the world she lives in.
To refresh your memory, this is the same Congresswoman who told us
last week that Donald Trump should be impeached because he wants to be
friends with Russia, and that Putin is invading Korea. Clearly, that was
a clue that something was not right in the head of Rep. Waters.
What the phone conversation with the fake PM of Ukraine revelaed,
however, is that she is much more airheaded and gullible than anyone had
previously thought.
BostonGlobe | President Donald Trump mounted a vigorous defense of his presidency
Thursday, pushing back against media reports that his campaign advisers
had inappropriate contact with Russian officials and vowing to crack
down on the leaking of classified information.
Nearly a month into
his presidency, Trump said in a free-wheeling White House news
conference that his new administration had made ‘‘significant progress’’
and took credit for an optimistic business climate and a soaring stock
market.
The president denounced media reports of a chaotic start to his
administration marked by a contentious executive order — now tied up in a
legal fight — to place a ban on travelers from seven predominantly
Muslim nations.
‘‘This administration is running like a fine-tuned
machine,’’ Trump declared. He said he would announce a ‘‘new and very
comprehensive order to protect our people.’’
Rejuvenation Pills
-
No one likes getting old. Everyone would like to be immorbid. Let's be
careful here. Immortal doesnt include youth or return to youth. Immorbid
means you s...
Death of the Author — at the Hands of Cthulhu
-
In 1967, French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes wrote of
“The Death of the Author,” arguing that the meaning of a text is divorced
from au...
9/29 again
-
"On this sacred day of Michaelmas, former President Donald Trump invoked
the heavenly power of St. Michael the Archangel, sharing a powerful prayer
for pro...
Return of the Magi
-
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...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
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 ...
