Entertain a Clown and You Become Part of the Circus

This article was originally published by Doug “Uncola” Lynn at TheTollOnline.com

If I were the devil, I would desire the most efficient system of governance whereby maximum control could be exerted over the greatest amount of people at any given time. I would identify those who stood in my way and take them down either by force or subversion. There would be no room in my world for individuality, free thought, or vain imaginings of anything, or anyone, more powerful than me. As an orchestrator of chaos, the only unity I could tolerate would be that which served both my means and ends.

Without a doubt, divide and conquer would be my means and one world under me would be my objective.

I would use my power to threaten, coerce, blackmail, and subjugate those under my command; to harness them on the way toward my ultimate goal of total world dominion. The loyal ones would reap rewards of preeminent prestige, privilege, and perverted pleasures. The traitors to my cause would suffer lawsuits, investigations, poverty, public humiliations, torture, or death. Deception would be my modus operandi and confusion would serve me well; as long as I remained ever in the know with billions of eyes continually watching and one eye always on the final destination.

I would stamp out truth and label it by other names. Facts would become fake and vice versa. I would cover the eyes and ears of my minions to shield them from all except my own reality; until their collective voices became one with mine. Comprehensive consensus would appear universal as dissent would be quelled and free speech quashed.  Language would be utilized to affect thought and to establish the ideological premises for whatever conclusions I required.

Soon, words and concepts would come to mean the very opposite of what they once meant.

Thus, diversity would actually mean unity, tolerance would manifest as intolerance, affordable would become expensive, and Departments of War would be transformed into Departments of Defense that would make military strikes labeled as surgical and causing damage that was collateral.

Of course any newly-spawned and continuously altered ideologies would, in turn, be utilized to inaugurate mandated orthodoxies intended to benefit me first and foremost.

Like a snake swallowing itself, I would feed my people and they would feed me. All for one and one for all. From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.

In a realm of electronic lights and sparkling colors, optics would become paramount; smoke and mirrors, imperative. These would be utilized, like holographic clowns, to guide humanity into my funhouse where they would all righteously point their fingers at illusory scapegoats for things they, themselves, have done; or not done. The people would encircle each other in a maze of bubbles and distorted visions, while snarling and cursing one another.

All of the fresh frontiers would be closed and gutted like anchor stores in a death mall.

It would be my way or no way at all.

In the end, however, my people would find my gift shop and beyond that, the circus; where I would stand in the middle of the center ring, laughing, and enjoying the applause.

“Behold what is new and forego the old”, I would say.

“Marvel at my efficiencies of digital algorithms, and data sets, and my avant-garde system of credits under the twin tent-poles of global taxation and sustainable development. See Gaia dance; bow before her now. Isn’t she lovely?  Behold the beauty of the technological transhumanists, and the twirling transgendered, as the aliens from outer space explode from the cannons.”

“Am I man or beast?”, I would tease them with a grin before my boots would stamp upon their faces, forever. For it was written into papyrus, paper, stone, and the stars; though most knew I was never here.

Would the tears in their eyes come from laughing, gratitude, fear, grief, or rage?

It would make no difference to me. That would be their choice.

Considering Faking Your Own Death? Then The Philippines Is The Place For You

The technical term is pseudocide - a fancy word that means, essentially, “faking your own death."

Hundreds of thousands of Americans - some struggling with seemingly insurmountable debt burdens or are being hounded by the IRS after stiffing the tax man - have probably fantasized about faking their own deaths. But few understand just how easy it is to - um - execute such an ambitious, if legally precarious, plan.

That’s where purveyors of so-called “death kits” come in. Few westerners are aware of its existence, but there’s actually a thriving cottage industry based in the Philippines, where investors can purchase all the tools they need to fake their own deaths for the surprisingly low price of about 350 pounds (about $500).

Of course, the scheme has several macabre elements. The process involves buying an unclaimed corpse from one of the many morgues in the Philippines where the bodies of John and Jane Does are stored.

According to the Telegraph, many customers who choose this route are desperate Wall Street bankers seeking to escape debt, and men having affairs who want to leave their families.

The Philippines has long been cited in official statistics as the foreign location with the highest number of American tourist deaths. But many of these fatalities are actually fraudulent, the result of desperate westerners faking their own deaths.

Take Elizabeth Greenwood, who “died” as a tourist in the Philippines in 2013. Multiple spectators witnessed her crash her rental car into another vehicle on a busy road in Manila, and doctors at the local hospital pronounced Greenwood dead on arrival - or so her death certificate would have you believe...

Greenwood, who was inspired to fake her own death by her ballooning student debt, is now working as a journalist in New York City after deciding at the last minute that she didn’t want to go through with the scheme.

She first stumbled upon the idea during lunch with a friend who joked about it after she finished ranting about the colossal size of her student debt. But the joke got her thinking. So she started Googling.

“I began poking around online and discovered that death fraud truly is an industry with a whole host of experts and consultants to help you go through with it, and that there are far more people than you might imagine who had done it themselves, with varying degrees of success,” Greenwood explains.

She eventually stumbled on a Wall Street Journal article from the 1980s that referenced “a southeast Asian country” where morgues pick up the bodies of derelicts and freeze them to help customers commit death fraud for insurance purposes.

Greenwood then discovered two elite private investigators, Steven Rambam and Richard Marquez, who consult for life insurance companies seeking to stamp out death fraud.

“Again and again, they named the Philippines as a hotbed for the kind of theatrical death fraud that involves false corpses,” she adds. “They sniff out life insurance fraud all over the globe - it is attempted everywhere - but they told me some memorable stories about cases they’d worked on in the Philippines, so I wanted to check it out myself."

The cost of death fraud can vary widely. A fake death certificate from the Philippines generally costs anywhere in the region of £100 to £350. Some will pay upwards of £20,000 to hire a professional fixer who will help them scratch their trail as they move forward with a new identity.

During a week-long stay in the Philippines, Greenwood found a pair of locals there who obtained a fake death certificate for her from a mole working inside a government agency. All the witness accounts were fake, and there was never a fatal traffic accident as outlined on the papers.

She never crossed the line and actually filed the documents with the US embassy.

“My death certificate sits encased in a plastic sheath at the bottom of my filing cabinet,” Greenwood states.

The difficulty of feigning one’s death depends on the purpose of the fraud. If one is trying to cash in a life insurance policy, then the fraud will require a body and an accomplice, since, without a body, most insurers will wait seven years before paying out a claim. This is why the cottage industry of fake morgues has sprung up.

Some fraudsters might go to the lengths of staging a funeral for their dummy corpse and filming it to submit to the insurance company, she adds, but in most cases, this is an unnecessary flourish.

If insurance fraud isn’t your ultimate aim, then the process of faking your death will be exponentially easier.

“If you’re not committing life insurance fraud, you needn’t go to all the extra trouble,” Greenwood told the Telegraph. “Staging a more open-ended, elegant escape, like disappearing while on a hike, usually looks more believable to investigators."

While insurance companies typically hire private investigators to sniff out death fraud, few cases are ever prosecuted, particularly if they were committed on foreign soil. Often, the only punishment for death fraudsters is their insurance claim being denied.

Greenwood cites one example of a German woman who faked her death and whose fraud remained undiscovered for two decades.

When German authorities discovered she was alive in 2015, after being presumed dead since 1985, the only penalty she shouldered was the trouble of filling out the paperwork necessary to declare herself still alive.

Death fraud happens “constantly”, Greenwood said adding that she detected a spike in cases around the financial crisis.

But while faking one’s death on foreign soil is easier than many believe, the reasons people get caught are also simpler than many might assume.

Particularly if an accomplice is battling it out with an insurance company, fraudsters are typically caught when they try to reach out to loved ones or their parents.

As it turns out, even if they’re dead on paper, many people just can’t cut the ties to their old lives.
 

Newsweek: “U.S. Government Planned False Flag Attacks to Start War”

Mainstream Media Admits that False Flags Are Real

Last month, Newsweek ran an article headlined (all caps in original Newsweek title):

U.S. GOVERNMENT PLANNED FALSE FLAG ATTACKS TO START WAR WITH SOVIET UNION, JFK DOCUMENTS SHOW

The article notes:

The U.S. government once wanted to plan false flag attacks with Soviet aircraft to justify war with the USSR or its allies, newly declassified documents surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy show.

 

***

 

False flag attacks are covert operations that make it look like an attack was carried out by another group than the group that actually carried them out.

The mainstream media is finally catching up with what historians have long documented ...

After all, influential royal advisors have been advocating false flag attacks for more than 2,000 years ... and false flag attacks are so common that U.S. officials commonly discuss them.

Indeed, there are now so many admissions by government officials of false flag terror that only the willfully ignorant still doubt the reality of the concept.

The Internecine Deep State Conflict Moves To Stage Two

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

It now seems evident that the Neoliberal Camp of the U.S. Deep State is highly vulnerable on an individual basis.

I tend to notice things like a year-old blog entry suddenly getting thousands of page views. The essay that received a surge of recent interest: Is the Deep State at War--With Itself? (December 13, 2016).

I"m reprinting the essay below for those interested, as nothing has emerged to change the conclusions.

That in itself reveals that the internecine war within America"s Deep State is if anything heating up as those attempting to hang a "Russian collusion" narrative on their Deep State opponents have failed to produce any proof of this collusion despite a year of effort.

Then all of a sudden big political donor Harvey Weinstein gets taken down for behaviors that have been well-known within the circles of power for 20+ years. So what changed? Why did Mr. Weinstein"s protective wall suddenly fail after serving him so effectively for decades?

But Mr. Weinstein was only the first to fall. Now high-profile figures across the mainstream media are toppling like dominoes. Doesn"t it seem a bit peculiar that all these Protected Privileged are suddenly being exposed, disgraced and removed from positions of influence and power?

Maybe it"s just random coincidence, but I doubt it. It has the scent of an intentional covert campaign. It"s well known that the mainstream media and Hollywood has been in bed with the security agencies for decades, and so it seems non-random that suddenly all these big-shots have lost their Protected Privileged Status more or less at once.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but it looks like those who played on the losing side"s team (or cheered from the sidelines) just had their privileges revoked.

Were we to speculate on the meaning of this first-sweep of the media: how about a campaign to strip the failed narrative of its media supporters? Now that everyone sees the lay of the land, the Second Stage will be to collect all the dirty laundry that"s been hidden away out of fear, and then methodically expose, disgrace and remove the next layer of media/entertainment supporters of the failed narrative.

Stage Three will be to collect and release the same sort of evidence against the political class. We can discern evidence for this campaign in the number of candidates who suddenly declare they won"t be running for re-election for personal reasons, or to "move on to other projects," etc.

As this campaign moves up the wealth-power pyramid, we"ll see more big shots resigning or retiring. Those that resist will find all their dirty laundry is suddenly being made public.

Isn"t it interesting that PBS and the rest of the mainstream media went all out to support Hillary Clinton"s recent media campaign to revive the "Russian collusion" narrative via her new book, yet the campaign fell flat with the American public?

This is remarkable: a highly coordinated, massive media campaign failed to re-energize the "Russian collusion" narrative, and may have actually backfired by drawing renewed interest in Russian dealings with the Clinton Foundation during Hillary"s term as Secretary of State.

I hesitate to draw a military analogy, but it certainly feels like a replay of the Battle of Midway, in which an over-confident Japanese Imperial Navy was poised to declare victory until the cream of its fleet, four aircraft carriers, were sunk or disabled in the space of a few moments by U.S. Navy dive bombers.

The grand attack that was supposed to reverse these catastrophic losses--Hillary"s book and accompanying media blitz--fizzled, and that failure clearly eroded the defenses of those who supported this counter-attack by the demoralized but still powerful Neoliberal Camp of the Deep State.

It now seems evident that the Neoliberal Camp of the U.S. Deep State is highly vulnerable on an individual basis: all too many over-confident big-wigs appear to have counted a bit too much on their Protected Privileged Status being permanent.

Collectively, they appear to have forgotten, perhaps as a result of their titanic hubris, that only the paranoid survive.

Various cliques within the 3-Letter Agencies are frantically trying to protect their satraps and benefactors, but the tide has turned and all the threats and pay-offs that defended the Protected Privileged so effectively for decades are no longer working.

Now the Protected Privileged are running scared, as well they should, for the opposing camp within the 3-Letter Agencies has all the dirty laundry it needs to bring down the Neoliberal Camp, one disgraced big-shot at a time.

The way of the Tao is reversal.

Here"s last year"s essay on the Deep State conflict:

Is the Deep State at War--With Itself?

December 14, 2016

 

The recent pronouncement by the C.I.A. that Russian hackers intervened in the U.S. presidential election doesn"t pass the sniff test--on multiple levels. Let"s consider the story on the most basic levels.

 

1. If the report is so "secret," why is it dominating the news flow?

 

2. Why was the "secret report" released now?

 

3. What actual forensic evidence is there of intervention? Were voting machines tampered with? Or is this "secret report" just another dose of fact-free "fake news" like The Washington Post"s list of 200 "Russian propaganda" websites?

 

4. The report claims the entire U.S. intelligence community is in agreement on the "proof of Russian intervention on behalf of Trump" story, but then there"s this:

 

"The C.I.A. presentation to senators about Russia’s intentions fell short of a formal U.S. assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies. A senior U.S. official said there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered."

 

Given that the N.S.A. (National Security Agency) was so secret that its existence was denied for decades, do you really think the NSA is going to go public if it disagrees with the C.I.A.?

 

Given the structure of the Deep State and the intelligence community, "minor disagreements" could well mean complete, total disavowal of the C.I.A."s report.

 

That this is the reality is suggested by the F.B.I."s denunciation of the report"s evidence-free, sweeping conclusion: FBI Disputes CIA"s "Fuzzy And Ambiguous" Claims That Russia Sought To Influence Presidential Election

 

5. The supposed interventions clearly fall under the purview of the NSA. So why is the C.I.A. going public in what is clearly a politicized report intended to influence the public via massive, sustained coverage in the mainstream media?

 

6. Notice the double standard: so when the U.S. attempts to influence public opinion in other nations, it"s OK, but when other nations pursue the same goal, it"s not OK?

 

7. What are we to make of the sustained campaign to elevate "Russian hackers and propaganda" from signal noise to the deciding factor in the U.S. election?

 

8. Russian hacking and attempts to influence American public opinion are not new. The intelligence agencies tasked with protecting American cyberspace have long identified state-sponsored hacking from Russia and China as major threats. So why, all of a sudden, are we being told the Russians successfully influenced a U.S. election?

 

What changed? What new capabilities did they develop?

 

9. And most importantly, what evidence is there that Russian efforts affected the election? Were digital fingerprints found on voting machine records? Were payments to American media employees uncovered?

 

Shouldn"t statements purported to be "fact" or the "truth" be substantiated beyond "trust us, an agency with a long history of failed intelligence, misinformation and illegal over-reach"?

 

10. Doesn"t it raise alarms that such a momentous accusation is totally devoid of evidence? If you"re going public with the conclusion, you have to go public with at least some of the evidence.

 

Here"s the media blitz and some skeptical response:

 

CIA: Russia intervened to help Trump win

Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House

Former UK Ambassador Blasts "CIA"s Blatant Lies", Shows "A Little Simple Logic Destroys Their Claims"

Longtime readers know I have proposed a major divide in the Deep State--the elements of the federal government which don"t change regardless of who is in elected office. This includes the intelligence community, the Pentagon, the diplomatic and trade infrastructure, Research and Revelopment, and America"s own organs of media "framing" and "placement."

Is the Deep State Fracturing into Disunity? (March 14, 2014)

More recently, I wondered if the more progressive elements of the Deep State recognized the dangers to U.S. security posed by the neocons and their candidate, Hillary Clinton, and had decided to undermine her candidacy:

Could the Deep State Be Sabotaging Hillary? (August 8, 2016)

In other words, it"s not the Russians who sabotaged Hillary--it"s America"s own Deep State that undermined her coronation. It wasn"t a matter of personalities; it was much more profound than that. It was about the risks posed by the neocon strategies and policies, and just as importantly, the politicization of the intelligence network.

And this is precisely what we discern in the C.I.A."s unprecedented and quite frankly, absurd "secret report:" a blatantly politicized "report" that is not supported by any evidence, nor is it supported by the other 16 intelligence agencies. (Silence doesn"t mean approval in this sphere.)

We can now discern the warring camps of the Deep State more clearly. On the one side is the C.I.A., the mainstream media, and the civilians who have feasted on wealth and power from their participation in the neocon"s Global Project.

On the other side is the Defense Department"s own intelligence agencies (D.I.A. et al.), the N.S.A., the F.B.I. and at least a few well-placed civilians who recognize the neocon agenda as a clear and present danger to the security of the nation.

From this perspective, the C.I.A."s rash, evidence-free "report" is a rear-guard political action against the winning faction of the Deep State. The Deep State elements that profited from the neocon agenda were confident that Hillary"s victory would guarantee another eight years of globalist intervention. Her loss means they are now on the defensive, and like a cornered, enraged beast, they are lashing out with whatever they have in hand.

This goes a long way in explaining the C.I.A"s release of a painfully threadbare and politicized "report."

*  *  *

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The US Aristocracy"s Smear-Russia Campaign: Big Brother At Work

Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Billionaires, both liberal and conservative ones, own, and their corporations advertise in and their ‘charities’ donate to, America’s mainstream (and also many ‘alternative news’) media.

They do this not so as to profit directly from the national ‘news’media (a money-losing business, in itself), but so as to control the ’news’ that the voting public (right and left) are exposed to and thus will accept as being “mainstream” and will reject all else as being “fringe” or even ‘fake news’, even if what’s actually fake is, in fact, the billionaires" own mainstream ’news’, such as their ’news"media had most famously ‘reported’ about ’Saddam’s WMD’ (but the’news’media never changed after that scandal — even after having pumped uncritically that blatant lie to the public). 

Have America’s numerous foreign coups and outright military invasions (including Iraq 2003) been the result of fake-news that was published by the mainstream ’news"media, or only by some of the ‘alternative news’ sites that mirror what the mainstream ones have been ‘reporting’ (passing along the Government’s lies just like the mainstream ones do)? Obviously, the catastrophic fake news — the fake news that ‘justified’ America’s invading and destroying Iraq, Libya, and many other countries — was all published in the mainstream ’news’media. That’s where to go for the really dangerous lies: it’s the mainstream ’news’media. If those media, and their Government (whose lies they stenographically report to the public) will now censor the Internet, such as is increasingly happening not only in the US but in its allies including the European Union, then the only ‘information’ that the public will have access to, at all, will be the billionaires’ lies. Have we already almost reached 1984, finally, in 2017?

Two typical examples of this coordinated mass-deception-operation happened to be showing at the top of the magazine-pile at an office recently and struck my attention there, because of the ordinariness of the propaganda that was being pumped.

One of them was the cover of TIME magazine, dated “July 24, 2017” and with the cover headlined “RED HANDED: The Russia Scandal Hits Home”, overprinting onto the face of Donald Trump Jr., as their menacing-looking cover-image. That cover-story, as published inside, was titled “How Donald Trump Jr."s Emails Have Cranked Up the Heat on His Family”, and it used such phrases as “potentially treasonous” and “Russia is the one country that could physically destroy America” (as if it weren’t also the case that US is the one country that could physically destroy Russia, and very much the case also that possession of the weaponry isn’t any indication of being evil, such as this particular propagandist was implicitly assuming). Hillary Clinton’s V.P. running-mate was reported to be “saying that these fresh revelations move the Russia investigation into the realms of "perjury, false statements and even, potentially, treason."” 

These mere speculations, with slimy inferences of evil, with no real facts that back them up, were the front-cover ‘news’, in TIME. The facts were thin, but the speculations were thick, and the only thing really clear from it was that almost all of America’s billionaires and centi-millionaires want Trump ousted, and want Vice President Mike Pence to become America’s President as soon as possible — before Trump’s term is up. Democratic ones certainly do, and many of the Republican ones apparently do as well. Perhaps Trump isn’t hostile enough toward Russia to suit their fancy. At least Pence would be predictable — predictably horrible, in precisely the way that the controllers of the ‘news’media overwhelmingly desire.

The other example was the cover of The New Republic magazine, dated “December 2017” and it simply headlined in its center, “HOW TO ATTACK A DEMOCRACY”, and the opening page of the article inside was bannered “WEAKEN FROM WITHIN” and below that in the printed edition (the December physical issue of the magazine) was:

“Russian manipulation of American social media in the 2016 presidential election took the United States by surprise. But Moscow has been honing an information-age art of war — through fake news, disinformation, leaks, and trolling — for more than a decade. How can these societies protect themselves?”

The online version of that article (which was dated 2 November 2017) opened almost the same: “Moscow has been honing an information age art of war — through fake news, disinformation, leaks, and trolling — for more than a decade. How can free societies protect themselves?”

The unspoken assumption in this article is that the US CIA hasn’t been doing the same thing — and doing it even worse than the old (and thankfully expired) KGB ever did. (And the CIA, even after the end of communism as its supposed enemy until 1991, still does far worse to other countries than Russia’s FSB does or ever did.)

Underlying both the TIME article and the TNR article are unstated speculations about the American situation, which are based upon thin facts such as that "at least $100,000 in ads purchased through 470 phony Facebook pages and accounts” were "using Facebook to incite anti-black hatred and anti-Muslim prejudice and fear while provoking extremism”, and that supposedly somehow (they never say how) such puny expenses threw the multi-billion-dollar 2017 US Presidential election to Trump. How is a case such as that, to be viewed by an intelligent reader as constituting anything but propaganda for the weapons-making firms such as Lockheed Martin, who benefit from such international anti-Russia hate-spewing to NATO countries, which are those firms’ major markets (other than Saudi Arabia, and the other fundamentalist-Sunni kingdoms that together constitute the Gulf Cooperation Council or “GCC” nations, which hate Shiite Iran as much as the US regime hates Russia)?

Also among the underlying and unstated speculations in the background here is the older mass-media allegation about Russia’s allegedly having spied and swayed the US election by ‘hacking’ it, which is likewise being pumped by Democrats and other opponents of Mr. Trump, alleging that ‘Russia hacked the election’.

And, so, for an example of the flimsiness of those allegations, one of the two main ‘authorities’ who are the source of that, the Bush and Obama Administration’s James Clapper, was headlined at Politico on 7 July 2017, "Clapper: No evidence others besides Russia hacked US election”. Mr. Clapper happens to be a military-industrial-complex revolving-door ‘intelligence’ ‘professional’ whom, on 10 February 2011, even Politico was reporting to be “backing away from comments he made Thursday calling Egypt"s branch of the Muslim Brotherhood movement "largely secular’,” and who had also covered-up George W. Bush’s lies about ‘WMD in Iraq’ so as to protect the liars. On 29 October 2003, the New York Times stenographically passed along his deception about the non-existent WMD by headlining, "WEAPONS SEARCH; Iraqis Removed Arms Material, US Aide Says” and reported, "The official, James R. Clapper Jr., a retired lieutenant general, said satellite imagery showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria, just before the American invasion in March, led him to believe that illicit weapons material "unquestionably" had been moved out of Iraq.” No evidence ever existed that Saddam Hussein still had any WMD after the U.N. monitors (UNSCOM) destroyed the last of them in 1998; but Clapper ‘unquestionably’ ‘knew’ to the contrary — though no evidence was ever made available to the contrary of UNSCOM’s reports, and lots of evidence existed that Bush simply lied about the entire matter.

 

The other main source for the allegation that ‘Russia hacked the election’ is the Obama Administration’s John Brennan, whom Glenn Greenwald exposed as a fraud back on 7 January 2013, headlining “John Brennan"s extremism and dishonesty rewarded with CIA Director nomination”. 

Both of the official ‘experts’ who are promoting the Russiagate charges, are longtime, and repeatedly, exposed liars - but that’s the best they can do, always assuming that the public don’t know that these people are propagandists for the military-industrial complex, not real ‘public servants’ at all.

This isn’t to say that Trump isn’t also a liar — just that the ‘news’ in America is full of conflicting lies — and that they constantly are coming from the fake ‘news’media that are the mainstream ones who are now trying to censor out, and ultimately to obliterate, the few small news-operations (some of which, unlike any of the mainstream ones, actually are good, and authentic journalistic operations, no mere PR hackery) that are constantly exposing the fraudulence of the mainstream ones, which want to impose their dictatorship — the mainstream lies — even more rigorously than they already do. After all, the mainstream Western media still haven’t yet reported US President Obama’s bloody racist-fascist coup that in February 2014 replaced the democratically elected President of Ukraine (and his supporters in the legislature) by a racist-fascist or ideologically nazi regime that’s rabidly hostile toward its neighboring nation of Russia. Even now — nearly four years after the event. It’s already solidly documented history, but the mainstream US-and-allied press still hasn’t reported it.

The fake-news masters are certainly the mainstream ‘news’media themselves - and they, and the billionaires and centi-millionaires who own and control them, are the real megaphones by which the US dictatorship constantly fools the American people (and the publics in its allied nations), to keep in line, for the aristocracy.

Blowback: CNN Pushes Plan To "Ban The Term "Fake News""

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via InfoWars.com,

CNN is now pushing an effort to “ban the term fake news” after the slogan became synonymous with CNN itself thanks to President Donald Trump.

In a CNN opinion piece written by Hossein Derakhshan and Claire Wardle, who are affiliated with the globalist Council of Europe, the authors argue that the term “fake news” has “become meaningless” and lost its power because politicians (primarily Donald Trump) have hijacked it as a way to “undermine” the media establishment.

The authors decry the fact that many people now believe the mainstream media peddles “fabricated stories” and that information monopolies are being challenged by the ability for “anyone in the world” to have a platform.

Remember when the mainstream media & the Hillary campaign invented the term "fake news" in an effort to discredit alternative & right of center media outlets?

Yeah, that went well. pic.twitter.com/HJPpIQEr4j

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) November 27, 2017

Complaining that “less powerful agents can harm large institutions or established individuals,” Derakhshan and Wardle warn that trust in institutions is declining and that only through intervention at the level of “public education” (ie indoctrination) can this be reversed.

Of course, the real reason media elites want to clamp down on the term “fake news” is because its original intention, to smear and discredit opponents of Hillary Clinton, right of center media outlets, and people who distrust the mainstream media, has completely backfired.

This was illustrated yet again by Donald Trump’s tweet earlier today when he suggested that a “fake news trophy” should be awarded to the network that has been responsible for the most inaccurate reporting.

We should have a contest as to which of the Networks, plus CNN and not including Fox, is the most dishonest, corrupt and/or distorted in its political coverage of your favorite President (me). They are all bad. Winner to receive the FAKE NEWS TROPHY!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2017

“Fake news” was one of many excuses trotted out after November last year to push the narrative that President Trump’s election was somehow illegitimate.

In reality, a major Stanford University study found that “even the most widely circulated fake news stories were seen by only a small fraction of Americans,” and that the most widely believed fake news stories were those that benefited Hillary Clinton.

Fake news had virtually no impact on the election, but the establishment media weaponized the term as part of an agenda to silence and censor voices of dissent, including media platforms, that had opposed Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

In addition, mainstream media news coverage in the weeks leading up to the election was 91% negative towards Trump, according to a study by the Media Research Center.

The Podesta emails also revealed how mainstream journalists were completely in bed with the Clinton campaign and even ran stories by them before publication.

The “fake news” narrative has completely backfired on the political establishment and the media because it has acted as a boomerang, showing the mainstream media to be the most consistently dishonest entity of all.

Is it any wonder therefore that the political class is now so keen to retire the term altogether?

Bush-Era Intel Chief Blasts Trump: "If This Is What We Are, Then I"ve Wasted 40 Years"

President Donald Trump stirred up yet another twitter shitstorm over the weekend when he once again slammed his favorite fake news network – CNN – for using its international arm, CNN International, to spread fake news across the world.

At the same time, the president praised Fox News, claiming his favorite news network is “much more important” in the US.

The exasperation this tweet provoked cannot be understated, as liberals and anti-Trump conservatives joined forces to blast the president for his blatant disregard for the first amendment (to be fair, Trump said nothing about shuttering CNN or revoking its license to operate). But one voice that cut through the noise was that of Michael Hayden, a former general who ran the NSA and then the CIA under President George W Bush and has directed national intelligence agencies under the previous three presidents, as the Hill pointed out.

Hayden blasted Trump for his “outrageous assault” on the first amendment, saying “if this is who we are or who we are becoming, I have wasted 40 years of my life."

 

If this is who we are or who we are becoming, I have wasted 40 years of my life. Until now it was not possible for me to conceive of an American President capable of such an outrageous assault on truth, a free press or the first amendment.

— Gen Michael Hayden (@GenMhayden) November 26, 2017

 

Of course, the hypocrisy embedded in Hayden’s rebuttal is nothing short of galling: He served in the Bush administration and was complicit in deceiving the American people to justify invading Iraq, a decision that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and down chaos in a region that persists to this day.

 

.@FoxNews is MUCH more important in the United States than CNN, but outside of the U.S., CNN International is still a major source of (Fake) news, and they represent our Nation to the WORLD very poorly. The outside world does not see the truth from them!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 25, 2017

 

Of course, the criticism didn’t stop Trump from bashing CNN again this morning.

 

We should have a contest as to which of the Networks, plus CNN and not including Fox, is the most dishonest, corrupt and/or distorted in its political coverage of your favorite President (me). They are all bad. Winner to receive the FAKE NEWS TROPHY!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2017

 

He also criticized MSNBC’s Morning Joe, a perennial target of the president"s ire (remember the infamous Mika Brzezinski facelift tweet?).

 

The good news is that their ratings are terrible, nobody cares! https://t.co/I7h4Ryin3h

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2017

 

Of course, Trump also took time out from his holiday vacation to blast the Democrats and their single-minded focus on the Russia collusion narrative, which elicited this entertaining response from former US Attorney Preet Bharara.

 

Marcia, Marcia, Marcia! The President of the United States is Jan Brady. https://t.co/1WkL7FJvv0

— Preet Bharara (@PreetBharara) November 26, 2017

 

"Not Our Fault" - ECB Says "Fake Data" Is To Blame For The Coming "Manias And Panics"

In the days ahead of China"s Communist Party Congress last month, which culminated with the crowning of Xi Jinping as the modern equivalent of a quasi-emperor, China’s securities watchdog made it clear to local companies that bad news would not be tolerated, and "advised" loss-making companies to avoid publishing quarterly results as authorities were desperate to maintain stock-market stability. As a result, as we reported at the time, at least 17 Shenzhen-listed companies announced delays to their earnings reports from Oct. 20 to Oct. 24, up from three during the same period last year.

Moral of the story: if you are about to report bad news, especially news which can destabilize the stock market, it is "prudent" to delay...  or simply not report at all, or alternatively just make it up. And since we are talking about China, whose government has itself admitted it has repeatedly fabricated both trade and GDP data in the past, fabricating data has become a way of life.

There is just one problem: as ECB board member Benoit Coeure explained yesterday, “fake data” is as much of a threat to economic and financial stability as “fake news” is to politics.  Speaking in Paris, the central banker said there "was a growing prevalence of poor quality data which risks fuelling economic manias and panics."

It was unclear if by poor quality, and/or "fake" data, the ECB was merely referencing any data that suggested the "recovery" was off track - in the same way that any news that criticizes the US and global political establishment has become synonymous with "Russian propaganda", and "fake news" - or if the ECB was genuinely worried about fabricated data, of the type that has made a mockery of China"s GDP which has printed between 6.5% and 7.5% for the past 3 years with such determination, the number has become a joke (as Michael Pettis warned last week).

Quoted by Reuters, Coeure said that since skewed public perceptions can even alter the course of monetary policy, the ECB is increasingly relying on large scale analysis of news to gauge whether its message is correctly received.

But that carries what he described as a “monkey in the mirror” risk - a reference to a behavioral experiment in which it is unclear whether an animal recognizes itself in the mirror or thinks it is a different animal.

"Just as there are concerns about ‘fake news’ dominating social media, there is a risk of ‘fake’, or at least poor quality, statistics driving out better quality ones in public discourse,” Coeure said adding ominously that “actions by economic agents could become less anchored to actual activity and more prone to manias and panics, with obvious implications for economic and financial stability.”

Reading between the lines, Coeure is clearly preparing to blame "fake economic data" when the ECB next disappoints markets, and bond yields - propped up by the ECB"s CSPP program - finally crash.

In other words, the next crash will be blamed not on central banks blowing the biggest bubble in history but... drumroll... "fake data"!

Of course, the crash when it comes, will hardly be a surprise: recovering from the biggest recession in decades, the ECB has relied on a plethora of unconventional and still not fully understood tools to kick start growth, boost employment and raise inflation. Much of it has been based on a signalling and propaganda, including the constant refrain that things are getting much better.

Well, if they are so much better, why not stop QE and hike rates?

As Reuters adds, central banks also talk more since they rely on tools poorly understood by the public, so they also increasingly employ sophisticated computer technology to study whether their message reaches the right destination. But such feedback could also be misleading.

But the scariest thing is what he said next:

“We may one day be tempted to draft our monetary policy statements and speeches in the light of how they will be comprehended and interpreted by artificial intelligence algorithms,” Coeure said, adding that the consequences of such a mechanism has yet to be understood.

In other words, with human traders swept away from the market, in the ongoing passive revolution which has increasingly left algos and robots to make most capital allocation decisions. central banks are admitting that soon their statements will be written if not in binary code, then certainly designed to fool as many algos as possible into BTFD, since unfortunately the "keep the markets propped up" mandate has emerged over the past decade as the only one central banks truly care about. In light of this admission, the only "fake news" to be concerned about, is that created by central banks including "there is a global, coordinated recovery." Well, yes, when you inject a record $2+ trillion annualized in liquidity in 2017 and when you monetize a third of global GDP since the Global Financial Crisis, you better have at least a short-term recovery to show for it...

The Real Winner In America"s Russia Crisis Is China

Authored by Leon Hadar via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The continuing American obsession with Russia plays directly into Beijing"s hands and makes it less likely that Washington will develop an effective strategy to deal with China...

When thinking about male-pattern baldness, what comes immediately to mind? Genetics? Thanks for this, grandad.

But then I conducted my own scientific research and discovered the following: I started losing hair at the temples or the crown of the head when Vladimir Putin first held the position of president from 2000 to 2008, and my hairline receded big time after the Russian leader took office again in 2008.

Coincidence? Or is it possible that the balding Putin, resenting the hairy Dmitry Medvedev, not to mention those American presidents with their incredible full heads of hair, decided to do something about that? Isn’t that what you would expect from the Kremlin’s notorious alpha male, who was probably envious of my Fabio-like flawless hair in the late 1990s?

So did my hair loss have anything to do with the RT programs I started watching in the beginning of the new century? Or with the news reports on pravda.ru I was devouring daily? Or perhaps my bald spot was expanding as a result of paying more attention to the sexy Russian ads on Facebook? Or should I blame those Russian trolls on the social media who wanted to become my virtual friends and were posting videos of cats playing the piano on YouTube?

Well, after an extensive research of the topic, I am now more inclined to blame my late grandpa, not Putin, for my receding hairline.

But then surely we can still all agree that the Kremlin has been responsible for much the problems plaguing the world today, like the rising protectionist tide and the emergence of right-wing nationalist political parties in Europe. And of course, Putin was behind the election of President Donald Trump and the Brexit vote.

In fact, according to a study issued last week, one of the many research projects conducted these days about alleged Russian intervention in the electoral process of this or other country, more than 150,000 Russian-language Twitter accounts posted tens of thousands of messages in English urging Britain to leave the European Union in the days leading to last year’s referendum on the issue.

Similarly, the Spanish media have been accusing Russia of playing a major role in the Catalan independence crisis by employing its state-controlled media outlets, like RT and Sputnik, and its legions of trolls on Facebook and Twitter, as part of a strategy to encourage Catalan separatism. Much like the case of Brexit, Russia has been accused of trying to weaken the EU and NATO and devastate the West.

Many of these “the Russians did it” accounts assume that supporters of Brexit in England’s East and West Midlands and the pro-Trump voters in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania, as well the backers of independence in Catalonia, were driven to the polls by a sophisticated propaganda campaign directed from Moscow, which is believed to have coordinated with candidate Trump and his aides.

Indeed, according to a report on the Russian electoral interference, released by America’s intelligence agencies on January 6, the coordinated activities of RT and the online-media properties and social-media accounts that make up “Russia’s state-run propaganda machine” have been utilized by Moscow to “undermine the U.S.-led liberal democratic order.”

Yep. Forget about the impact the German chancellor Angela Merkel’s immigration policy had on the British public, or the impact of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s bashing of the “deplorables,” or the rise of secessionist movements in Catalonia—not to mention the deep structural economic and political changes sweeping the West in response to the effects of unrestrained globalization and mass migration, and the backlash against the political and business elites. It’s the Russians, stupid!

We are supposed to buy into the notion that white blue-collar workers in deindustrializing areas of the Rust Belts of the United States and the UK spent the last days of the 2016 Brexit campaign and the American presidential race getting their news from RT and Sputnik while exchanging tweets with Russia-friendly trolls. We are supposed to believe that they just couldn’t get enough of those ads on Facebook, which induced them to switch their support from Hillary to Trump.

If Russian propaganda is to be blamed for Trump’s electoral victory, we might as well take seriously serial killer Ted Bundy’s explanation for raping and murdering women in the 1970s. Pornography drove his behavior, he insisted during an interview a day before his execution. Penthouse made him commit all those horrific crimes!

But contrary to communication scholar Marshall McLuhan’s quip, the medium is not the message or the massage. The same news story or political or commercial advertising would have different effects on different audiences of perhaps have no effect at all.

You probably won’t be able to convince an Eskimo to spend his or her vacation in Antarctica or to sell sand to Bedouins in the Arabian Peninsula. Nor would a billionaire financing an expansive campaign in support of polygamy have a major impact on the views of the large majority of Americans.

This explains why the extensive Soviet propaganda machine had almost no effect on American public opinion during the Cold War, and why it was mocked by those who were exposed to it.

That RT, which, according to a 2015 survey of the top ninety-four cable channels in America by Nielsen, a research firm, captured at one point just 0.04 percent of American viewers, suggests that today’s Russian global-propaganda apparatus, isn’t much more effective. It certainly has not had much impact when it comes to reaching British voters in the country’s rural areas who spend more time drinking in pubs than watching RT.

America’s spooks, who asserted in their much-cited report that RT videos get one million views a day on YouTube, didn’t bother to add that much of what it posts there consists of footage of natural disasters or dancing dogs.

But then how do you explain that the loser in the 2016 presidential race and her allies spent about $1.4 billion on their campaign, including on ads, compared to the roughly $1 billion spent by the winner’s campaign? How do you explain that some of the best media strategists on the planets were working on Clinton’s campaign?

If you watched the recent grilling of the heads of the social-media companies on Capitol Hill, then you might conclude that what turned the election outcome in Trump’s direction was a decision by “the Russians” to spend $100,000 on Facebook ads and the “Russian trolls” who posted disinformation or fake news online.

Recall that Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook was until recently considered by Democratic lawmakers to be a cross between Henry Ford and Albert Einstein, while liberal pundits celebrated Facebook as a leading force promoting democracy and freedom worldwide, not to mention its role in helping Barack Obama win two presidential elections.

But now that they conclude that Zuckerberg supposedly provided a platform to the disinformation campaign of the notorious Putin and his evil partner, Trump, Facebook is “too big” and it and the rest of the social media need to be regulated.

But as Democratic campaign consultant, Mark Penn, explained in the Wall Street Journal, there is no evidence that the Facebook ads and fake news had any effect on the election outcome.

“Even a full $100,000 of Russian ads would have erased just 0.025 percent of Hillary financial advantage in the campaign,” wrote Penn, who calculated that only half of the “Russian” ads went to swing states. In the last week of the campaign alone, Clinton’s Super PAC dumped $6 million on ads into Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

If the Russians were indeed engaged in a propaganda campaign, it proved overall to be very inept and amateurish. Certainly there are no signs that RT has captured larger American television audiences than other foreign-media outlets, like the moribund Al Jazeera America, or similar operations launched by China and other foreign governments.

But don’t tell that to the Washington elites who, through media reports and a government investigation, have continued trying to convince themselves and the rest of us that Russia, in collusion with Trump campaign officials, was responsible for Clinton’s election loss.

Their efforts have gained steam thanks in part to the way that Trump and his close aides conducted their campaign. Boasting that they would not rely on the assistance of so-called Washington insiders and disregarding standard operating procedures, like the need to properly vet political advisors with or without ties to foreign governments and businesses, they made it easier for their adversaries to depict telephone conservations and brief conversations with Russian diplomats and businessmen as “collusion.”

It’s important to point out the obvious: the United States and Russia are not at war and the Americans maintain extensive diplomatic and economic ties with the Russians, much like they do with the Chinese communists or the Saudi theocrats. That China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Israel and other friends and frenemies spend a lot of money recruiting political allies in Washington or expanding their business operations in the United States shouldn’t come as a big surprise to anyone. It would also explain why any big time lobbyist and political operator maintains some sort of ties to these countries.

The current demonization of Russia as a global threat to American interests and values, and of President Putin as the world’s leading arch-villain, can be explained as an extension of the Cold War, of auto-piloting a foreign-policy paradigm that Republicans and Democrats feel comfortable with. But that is intellectually dishonest, considering American partnerships with mass-murderers like Stalin and Mao, and runs contrary to U.S. interests.

First, the preoccupation with the alleged Russian threat makes it impossible to cooperate with Moscow in dealing with common interests in the Middle East and elsewhere, which was President Trump’s goal in reaching out to Moscow, hoping to work out a deal to end the civil war in Syria and reduce the costs of American intervention in the Middle East.

Moreover, the long-term challenge to U.S. global military and economic power is China, and not that second-rate power, Russia.

The continuing American obsession with Russia, like the never-ending military interventions in the Middle East, plays directly into Chinese hands and makes it less likely that Washington would be able to develop an effective strategy to deal with China, including through ad-hoc cooperation with Moscow.

Instead, keeping the Russia collusion story would only encourage China and Russia to further collaborate over and target U.S. interests. And unlike my receding hairline, that isn’t a funny joke.

Are Journalists An Enemy Of The American People?

As usual, it depends who you ask...

You will find more statistics at Statista

Statista"s Niall McCarthy notes that according to the Cato 2017 Free Speech and Tolerance Survey, 63 percent of Republicans agree with President Trump that journalists today "are an enemy of the American people".

During his presidency, Trump has taken to Twitter to call the national media "fake news" and in mid-February, he tweeted "The FAKE NEWS media is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people. SICK!"

Generally, 35 percent of Americans agree with Trump"s view while nearly two-thirds disagree.

Unsurprisingly, the share of Democrats considering the media an enemy of the people is very low at just 11 percent.

Among Independents, it rises to 38 percent.

Will "RussiaGate" Result In Social Media Regulation?

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Oriental Review,

Whether preplanned or inadvertent, one of the most likely and far-reaching consequences of the fake news RussiaGate scandal is that Facebook and other social media giants might soon come under strict regulation by the state.

The artificially contrived and “deep state”-driven RussiaGate scandal has been inflated to epic proportions and has already resulted in the unexpected suicide of the US’ soft power, but this never-ending conspiracy theory is now poised to affect the rest of the world in a completely different way due to the likely “regulation” that Washington might soon impose on social media giants like Facebook. “Traditional” media has long been clamoring for the American government to do something about the astronomical rise of social media, which has poached millions upon millions of people away from newspapers and TV stations and redirected them to their smartphones instead. From the perspective of social media and many of its users, however, these people weren’t “poached”, but liberated from their prior status as a captive audience to conventional influence techniques and allowed to roam freely in cyberspace as they searched for alternative non-mainstream interpretations of current and past events.

The rise of social media coincided with that of Russia’s publicly funded RT and Sputnik media outlets, whose reporting and analyses soon went viral all over the internet because they satisfied the crucial information desire that so many people were craving for years. Their explosive popularity led to them gaining a sizeable following among Western audiences, who voluntarily shared their content online and contributed to what Facebook describes as “organic growth”, or the natural trending of non-advertised posts. While posing a challenge to Establishment narratives all across the world, neither RT nor Sputnik were seriously viewed as  “threat” by the US and its allies because they had yet to be blamed for affecting any real-life change outside of the internet “matrix” of clicks, likes, and shares.

That all changed during the 2016 US election, however, since the Mainstream Media’s monopoly on information was wielded in such a blatantly and obviously biased nature against Trump that countless Americans began countenancing what would have previously been unthinkable to many of them just a year prior, and that’s trawling foreign-based media outlets in order to get a more accurate sense of the truth that their own country’s media barons were suppressing. This certainly says a lot about the deep distrust that was already prevalent among many Americans towards their own government, but it hit its climax the more that the Mainstream Media began concocting openly fraudulent “news” stories about Trump in a bid to derail his candidacy, with this effort becoming unquestionably clear when compared with the flowery coverage given to anything that Clinton said or did. As is now known, Americans rebelled against the Establishment by voting Trump into office, and the “deep state” was left scratching its head about how this could happen.

The author explained the domestic dynamics at play in his November 2016 article right after the election titled “Dear Foreign Friends, Here’s Why Trump Won (From A Clevelander)”, but the general idea is that the Democrats’ weaponization of identity politics miserably backfired as Americans sought out a radical solution to bring balance to their “deep state”-destabilized country. Nevertheless, the Establishment couldn’t bring itself to recognize the obvious, take the loss, and move on to fight another battle later on, hence why they decided to continue pressing the cringe-inducingly ridiculous narrative that “Russian trolls” somehow swayed the election due to their social media activity, and hinting that there might even be a whiff of outright collusion between Presidents Trump and Putin in organizing this movie-like conspiracy.

This narrative is convenient for many geopolitical reasons that are outside the scope of this analysis, but the domestic benefit that was expected to be derived from this storyline is that “traditional” media and the Establishment finally had the pretext that they were looking for to “regulate” social media. Bringing Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and others into compliance with already existing American laws about revealing the source of election-related advertisements is one thing, but pressing these platforms to restrict the activity of Russian publicly financed media outlets like RT and Sputnik, as well as speculatively “shadow banning” some of their staff and supporters, is a bridge too far into dystopia, as is doing so on the US governments’ double-standard FARA witch hunt which alleges that the two are “foreign agents”. As a result, it appears as though the “good ‘ole days” of “freewheeling” across Facebook and sharing whatever content one finds enjoyable is soon coming to an end as Washington begins to “regulate” social media on the basis of “safeguarding democracy”.

Of course, the real reason is that some vested power interests also have a stake in supporting their decades-long allies in the “traditional” media against their new social media rivals, to say nothing of the self-evident imperative in suppressing non-mainstream news and analyses through the US’ War on Russian Media. The forthcoming “regulation” might even go further than what’s presently being observed, as there’s a chance that Washington could seek to label social media platform like Facebook as being “media companies” in their own right, which would then instantly force them to comply with the existing legislation that their “traditional” media counterparts have had to contend with for years. In a sense, this would “level the playing field” between “traditional” and social media, but it could also destroy the very essence of social media itself. Not only that, but if the US comes to consider Facebook and Google as “monopolies”, then they could be broken up and “regulated” even further.

What’s terribly ironic about all of this is that the US government’s international stance has always been in favor of “internet freedoms”, routinely attacking Russia, China, and Iran for implementing national security-based legislation aimed at thwarting the risk that Color Revolutions and Hybrid Wars could dangerously recruit across social media, but now all of a sudden “the land of the free” is doing the same thing as the countries that it regularly smears as “dictatorships”, though without any convincing reason and depending solely on a trumped-up fake news conspiracy theory. As is typical, the ruling Establishment and their “deep state” supporters condescendingly believe that their true intentions are invisible to the naked eye because of their presumption that the populace is stupid and politically unaware, though the very fact that their “perfect candidate” was defeated by a “dark horse” like Trump totally disproves this notion.

The reality is that most Americans, and the rest of the world at large, see the US government’s “regulation” of social media for what it actually is, and that’s a dictatorial power grab which crushes any remaining doubt that “the land of the free” is anything but, and that the “freedom of speech” is only allowed if one is either supporting the Establishment or behaving as its “controlled opposition”. The number one thing that “American Democracy” can’t accept is the free flow of information and interpretations that challenge the prevailing state-supported narrative, which in and of itself negates the very basis of what the world always thought that “American Democracy” was supposed to be about, and this powerful revelation proves that the US government’s accusations that its geopolitical rivals are “authoritarian” was never anything more than a psychological projection of its own self.

This and That Vol 3 – Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire

This and That Vol 3 – Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire

By

Cognitive Dissonance

 

 

Lots of original work available exclusively on my Patreon blog. For as little as $3 a month you can support my creative work and access all content. Please consider doing so at https://www.patreon.com/CognitiveDissonance

 

There are a couple of phrases I often use to neatly describe the personal and social dysfunction exploding into view these days. On the personal side, my “We are only as sick as our deepest darkest secrets” perfectly illustrates how personally damaging those things are that we hide from everyone, especially ourselves.

Since a society is composed of, and accurately reflects, its individual citizens, it stands to reason this dysfunction would reverberate throughout society even if it manifested differently on an individual basis. It is entirely possible, and in fact a regular occurrence, for hundreds of millions of people to share a ‘secret’ by simply not talking about the root issues of our social dysfunction.

We as a society will nearly always talk over, under and around the core issues that are slowly grinding away at our sanity. Therefore “What is not discussed is far more important that what is”.  A perfect example of this is the recent silliness of mass righteous indignation about kneeling or not during an act of coerced/conditioned symbolism (the ‘national anthem’) when so many far more important things are ignored like monsters hidden under the bed.

What is often lost by those on the sidelines, either participating in the drama or confused why there is so much ado about nothing, is that the drama IS necessary both for the participants and the viewers. It does not matter which side of the divide we lay on, only that we are engaged in not talking about the things we do not wish to talk about.

To many people my statements above will ring as nonsensical, even ridiculous, because in their view we talk incessantly about everything. The internet sees to that, which is abuzz with endless conversations and dialogue. In my opinion this is a false view and a misunderstanding of what is actually occurring. And it is a perfect example of how the illusion is often just as effective as the real thing, and sometimes more so.

Political correctness, also known as officially promoted self censorship, doesn’t just apply to political speech. We all moderate what we say (and think) in ways large and small depending upon a million variables too numerous to list here.

While we would like to believe society at large determines what speech is acceptable and what speech is not, in practice a few key meme makers leverage their influence via the mainstream media megaphone to set the water mark the public is then coerced into following.

You do not need to control the herd, just a few of the lead cattle. Even then ‘control’ is too strong a word, for nudge would be more in line with how directional bias is achieved by those who wish to command. This is done in part by subtly limiting subjects to be discussed, often but not exclusively via political correctness, but then encouraging everyone to engage in vigorous debate within these narrow confines.

Yes, there are people who will draw outside the lines and talk about anything and everything, particularly on the Internet. But for the brainwashed masses, meaning those who wish to remain safely within their mainstream cognitive comfort zone, these people are easily marginalized and dismissed as kooks, misfits, conspiracy theorists, mentally unstable and mad-as-a-hatter fruitcakes.

Never underestimate the lengths to which people (that’s you and me folks) will go to believe what they want to believe. Therefore all that needs to be done is to convince people they want to believe what they are told to believe. The glowing idiot box in the corner (and increasing in our back pocket) is the perfect vehicle for that task.

 

              

 

Color me surprised, shocked even, that at the last minute the ‘government’ has withheld full and final disclosure of the last remaining documents related to the John F. Kennedy assassination, ostensibly because they needed more time to examine about 200 for possible (further) redaction.

I don’t even know where to begin here other than to confess to my cynical sarcasm. I do not believe a single word uttered by any ‘intelligence’ agency or those who carry their water. From their perspective it is their job, their honor bound duty, to lie about everything and anything in order to protect and promote their power and control. It’s all about furthering American hegemony at all cost, including abusing any and all remaining rights not previously stripped from average Jane and Joe.

Earlier in life I learned that once you begin to lie, even if you never lie again, additional lies must be created and promoted in order to support or supplant old lies. It’s a vicious circle that feeds upon itself and serves no purpose other than to maintain and support the status quo…especially our personal status quo.

We lie to gain some type of advantage, even if the benefit is merely to maintain our own inner lies and denial. The same applies to nations, particularly when that nation maintains its dominant position via bullying, manipulation, falsehoods and various other belligerent behaviors including outright war.

Ultimately the most egregious lies, thus the most carefully crafted and concealed subterfuge, is reserved for the thoroughly domesticated and conditioned native population.

“We the People” have benefited greatly from American hegemony in ways not readily apparent to those completely immersed within the grand illusion of American exceptionalism. Obviously it is to our general and personal benefit for the lies to continue so that the status quo remains in place. The ultimate lie is that present day conditions can, and will, remain in place indefinitely.

They cannot, they will not, they have not. The financial, social and cultural rumblings currently echoing within the hollowed out shell of America are the precursor crumbling to the ongoing (slow motion) collapse. The lies promoted by the powers that be are intended to gain advantage over you and me, along with any one or thing still willing and able to lend the US money, power, prestige, faith and belief.

The looting will continue until the middle class has been stripped of all remaining wealth.

So why would they continue to lie about the JFK assassination? Because we want the lies to continue. It’s that simple. Daddy, tell me another lie so I can believe it’s the truth.

If you were told the truth, whatever that truth may be, exactly what would you do about it? Not think, not bitch and complain, but actually do? For example, if you were informed that elements inside and/or outside the government conspired to kill the President of the United States, then they, along with agencies of the government, acted in concert for decades up to present day to cover up this fact, what would you do?

The answer is mostly likely little to nothing. But that is not the point.

The secret sauce to keeping America limping along and the looting on track is your faith and belief things are not as bad as your average 3^rd world banana republic. Undeniable evidence things might actually be equal to, or worse than, a Central American banana republic would propel a tidal wave of fear and disillusionment among the general public, quickly followed by a loss of faith and belief in our leadership and ourselves.

Deep down inside in places we dare not look, we know this to be the truth. We also know without a shred of doubt that not only are we sleeping with the enemy, but we are entirely dependent upon the sociopaths and their skewed and rigged socioeconomic system to maintain our own (declining) lifestyle. And that lifestyle depends upon our continuing faith and belief in both the sociopaths and the system.

We ARE the system. We support the system. Without our faith and belief the system rapidly collapses. This is called a positive feedback loop in that the faith and belief system is self reinforcing to the greatest extent possible. But nothing lasts forever, in this case simply because more and more parasites are sucking the lifeblood from the nation.

We know this. It’s obvious. But we are desperate to believe it’s fixable (with little to no ‘cost’ to us) when it is not. To admit to ourselves this inconvertible truth means we must confront the fact the end is near. And quite frankly, we’ve grown accustomed to having our cake and eating it too. Or at least to the prevailing illusion this is the case.

And so we lie to ourselves and expect, even demand, our leaders continue to lie to us even as we claim we wish to know the truth.

There is no doubt that, with regard to most ‘truths’, we really do want to know the truth. For example we want to be told when a government official has embezzled money, misallocated funds or lied to benefit others, for these truths do not threaten our fundamental belief in democracy and the rule of law.

But to discover, or be told without a doubt the government was involved in what essentially would have been a coup of the Presidential office of the United States which was, and continues to be, covered up to this day would rock people’s faith and belief in the foundation of so-called democracy. 

If this were to occur, we might actually have to start asking serious questions about other ‘events’ in the recent past. Worse, we would then begin to feel obligated to do something about it. At the very least it would threaten our own relatively comfortable status quo.

Can’t have that, now can we? If nothing else we demand (the illusion of) law and order from our keepers in exchange for remaining mostly quiet and compliant.

The durability and believability of a lie is in direct proportion to the number of people who benefit from the lie or who would be hurt if the lie were exposed and acknowledged. For many, the primary disadvantage, at least initially, is simply the assault upon our ego that we swallowed such a big lie for so long.

The bigger the lie, the easier it is to keep it going once swallowed whole by the public. Our subservient devotion to a higher authority and its paternal hierarchy helps to initially cement the lie in place, then to keep questions at bay while the cement cures and hardens.

Even those who remain skeptical or refuse to believe the lie are diminished and isolated by the tyranny of the majority opinion who (desperately) wishes to believe the authority, particularly when doubt is present. Of course, doubt is always present because only the authority can proclaim something as true or false.

See how that works?

At best the most recent JFK disclosures are part and parcel of an ongoing, and ever evolving, psychological operation directed at the American people. How do you control a large group of people that far outnumber those who wish to control the group? Divide and conquer is the age old method used consistently and successfully to distract, divert and divide the restless herd.

We ain’t seen nuttin’ yet! Stay tuned for more of the same technique applied with increasing force and less subtly.

 

 

I would be remiss if I didn’t at least mention that all of the above is not exclusively an American problem. While lying and denial are decidedly human traits, “We the People” seem to take it to extremes in our mindless pursuit of conspicuous consumption.

And what is the number one American export? That would be the American culture of mindless consumption and overall excess. More is always better, even when it isn’t.

This uniquely American export is an absolute requirement if the practice of non sustainable excessive consumption is to be maintained to the bitter end. When running a Ponzi, new marks must constantly be found and exploited if the status quo is to be maintained for those who ultimately benefit from the Ponzi, usually the founders and/or those at the top of the food chain.

This is a disease, a mind virus, an aliment of the spirit that will ultimately kill many of its hosts if only from an early death caused by disease and decay due to the excessive consumption. The obesity epidemic spreading throughout the western world is a perfect example. Everyone is looking for a single source, such as overeating, for what is causing the problem when it is the cumulative effects of a dysfunctional way of life that is destroying us individually and collectively from within.

If we do not recognize, acknowledge and then own our personal participation in this dance of self destructive insanity, nothing will change. How can we possibly expect others to change if we are not willing to do so ourselves? It all begins within.

 

10/29/2017

Cognitive Dissonance