Human Targets,
Caitlin Johnstone got banned from Twitter this week, for saying mean things about nice (disabled by brain cancer) Senator McCain spending his life killing innocent people. This was one little bridge too far, but "thought leaders" unleashed Twitter "followers" on Caitlin, and she was banned for the ensuing "public outcry". Caitlin, unlike most of us, had some Twitter vigilantes, herself, who asserted that this was ordinary, protected, political speech. She was "reinstated", but then "suspended" for 12 hours.
Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. The only cracks in plutocratic narrative control have come in the form of alternative media outlets and social media, the access to which is unfortunately guarded by plutocrats with well-documented ties to secretive and unaccountable government agencies. The plutocratic alliance has successfully funneled online audiences into platforms that can be easily regulated, and now they are censoring those platforms. An ungoverned media landscape would cripple the consent-manufacturing propaganda machine of the ruling oligarchs, making us impossible to manipulate and control. This would give us our only real shot at ending the wars that the John McCains of the world have devoted their lives to facilitating, our only shot at creating true and authentic democracy, and our only shot at turning the world around from the omnicidal, ecocidal trajectory that these sociopathic oligarchs have us on.
The Judge in the Manafort case has already been threatened. How comfortable do you think these jurors ar feeling? It's a very weak "Russian rigging" case.
In a motion filed in federal court on Thursday, CNN and several other media outlets requested that the court release the names and home addresses of all jurors in the Paul Manafort fraud case. Jurors haven not yet rendered a verdict on any of the 18 charges against Manafort, who briefly served as President Donald Trump’s campaign manager in 2016.There is some carnival cryer in his cultural makeup as well, and he is not above peddling some survivalist/prepper snake oil
That said, we share certain important similarities. Neither of us is part of the official narrative that is endlessly being hammered home by US mass media with increasingly poor results. Thinking Americans are just not gullible enough any more. Jones has exploited this gullibility shortfall in the general public for all it’s worth by going after every conspiracy theory out there, while I am just like you—gullible. Sure, a few Arab tourists armed with box cutters destroyed three steel skyscrapers by flying two aluminum planes into them.
Do your own math, but that’s just 2/3 of a plane per skyscraper—ought to be enough, right? Jet fuel, which burns at 800° to 1500°F, melted steel columns. (Steel melts at 2750°F.) Two aluminum cans packed with kerosene, meat and luggage destroyed three steel structures. I find this explanation perfectly satisfactory; do you? If you need to know more, it’s easy to find out, but don’t wait on me because, being so gullible, I am perfectly satisfied.
Spurious claims of “hate speech” and “inciting violence” aside, what happened is that an order to shut down Jones was issued from Washington, DC. In response an impressively large group of transnational internet companies saluted and marched off to carry out the order, thereby making it perfectly obvious who they work for. And that is likely to become a big problem for them.
The World Socialist Web Site reported last year that changes to Google’s algorithms had seriously negatively impacted left-wing socialist and anti-war websites. An analysis by WSWS found that 13 such websites had seen their traffic plunge by a whopping 55 percent in the six months since Google had changed its algorithms. WSWS itself experienced a 74 percent drop in traffic between April and July last year. The changes also affected sites like Alternet, which saw its traffic plunge by 71 percent between April and September, Democracy Now (50 percent drop) and Truth-out.org (49 percent drop).
Similarly, Police the Police (a page dedicated to exposing US police brutality) and the Free Thought Project (which focuses on government transparency) also saw their Facebook page traffic tank in 2018 after Facebook made changes to its newsfeed and search algorithms in an effort to combat “fake news”. PTP traffic dropped from between 12-15 million people per week to about 4 million — and the website had to fire its writing staff as a result. “The left is cheering this on, when historically the left is usually the side cheering for free speech,” PTP founder Jason Bassler told Mic.
Amidst all of the celebration over the banning of Jones, some on the left cautioned that in fact, the left may indeed be the “real target” in all of this — and that those celebrating while people like Jones are banned are in fact being “conditioned” into accepting further censorship down the road.
Eleni sends this review by Yanis Varoufakis, of "Crashed", a book explaining (just in time!) the financial crash of 2008, what caused it, and how the causes have been amplified, leading to our current arrangement. An excerpt from this review seems pretty good.
Legendary intelligence analyst, Ray McGovern, discusses how former Director of CIA Brennan got his clearance jerked and may soon face criminal charges.
What needs to be borne in mind in all this is, as former FBI Director James Comey himself has admitted: “I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president.” Comey, Brennan, and co-conspirators, who decided—in that “environment”—to play fast and loose with the Constitution and the law, were supremely confident they would not only keep their jobs, but also receive plaudits, not indictments.
Unless one understands and remembers this, it is understandably difficult to believe that the very top U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials did what documentary evidence has now demonstrated they did.
We have used CREDO wireless since it was Working Assets for our land line in 1992, but today they sent me a petition to sign to make sure Alex Jones got banned from all electronic media in an organized fashion.
Do y'all have suggestions for a network for us and our flip phones? We're up next, you know?
Similarly, Police the Police (a page dedicated to exposing US police brutality) and the Free Thought Project (which focuses on government transparency) also saw their Facebook page traffic tank in 2018 after Facebook made changes to its newsfeed and search algorithms in an effort to combat “fake news”. PTP traffic dropped from between 12-15 million people per week to about 4 million — and the website had to fire its writing staff as a result. “The left is cheering this on, when historically the left is usually the side cheering for free speech,” PTP founder Jason Bassler told Mic.
Amidst all of the celebration over the banning of Jones, some on the left cautioned that in fact, the left may indeed be the “real target” in all of this — and that those celebrating while people like Jones are banned are in fact being “conditioned” into accepting further censorship down the road.
https://www.rt.com/news/436058-censorship-left-right-facebook-google/
This puts every nation that can't print a global reserve currency at an extreme disadvantage. While the U.S. can conjure "money" out of thin air and trade it for goods, other nations must cough up resources and goods in exchange for the "money," and borrow it at hefty rates of interest if they want to use the global "money" for development or investment.
Charles Hugh Smith on how we have ALL been reduced to dependence on predatory global financial capitalism. (YIKES!)
Nowadays, trade and "prosperity" are dependent on currencies that are created out of thin air via borrowing or printing. The problem with gold, in the view of predatory globalization, is that it can't be printed or conjured out of thin air. That won't do, because predatory globalization's primary export is newly printed currencies: dollars, euros, yen and yuan.This puts every nation that can't print a global reserve currency at an extreme disadvantage. While the U.S. can conjure "money" out of thin air and trade it for goods, other nations must cough up resources and goods in exchange for the "money," and borrow it at hefty rates of interest if they want to use the global "money" for development or investment.
That leaves them highly vulnerable to foreign exchange fluctuations which can raise the cost of their interest due in dollars, etc. to punishing heights while devaluing whatever they built with the dollars, etc. they borrowed.
This is how "free" trade works in predatory globalization: The only thing that's free is the cost of issuing trillions in global reserve currency. Everything else will cost you dearly.
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogaug18/predatory-globalization8-18.html
This is how "free" trade works in predatory globalization: The only thing that's free is the cost of issuing trillions in global reserve currency. Everything else will cost you dearly.
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogaug18/predatory-globalization8-18.html
Eleni sends this review by Yanis Varoufakis, of "Crashed", a book explaining (just in time!) the financial crash of 2008, what caused it, and how the causes have been amplified, leading to our current arrangement. An excerpt from this review seems pretty good.
Back in 1967, John Kenneth Galbraith described how capitalism had shifted from a market society to a hierarchical system owned by a cartel of corporations: the Technostructure, as he called it.[6] Run by a global elite that usurped markets, fixed prices and controlled demand, the Technostructure replaced the New Deal’s full employment objective with that of GDP growth. Though Tooze does not mention Galbraith, he implores us to grasp how Galbraith’s Technostructure extended, post-Bretton Woods, its realm magnificently by adding the black magic of financialisation to its structure (through, for example, turning car companies like General Motors into large speculative financial corporations, that also made some cars!), magnifying by a dizzying factor its power and, ultimately, replacing the aim of GDP growth with that of ‘financial resilience’: enduring paper asset inflation for the few and permanent austerity for the many.
https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2018/08/13/crashed-long-version-of-my-observer-review-of-adam-toozes-new-book-on-the-crash-of-2008/
https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2018/08/13/crashed-long-version-of-my-observer-review-of-adam-toozes-new-book-on-the-crash-of-2008/
The days of the $US as global-reserve-currency-and-cudgel appear to me to be very limited. The dollar is still used to beat up the countries without global reserve currencies, who have to borrow and sell in dollars, but they will not want another round of the same treatment after this one. I propose that they will borrow in not-dollars. I noticed something funny Friday afternoon on the gold market graph, a very steady rise in the dollar price of gold in the last 150 minutes of trading, going into Friday close (green). This kind of linear graph cannot be created by ordinary multibillion dollar participants. this is Masters of the Universe handiwork. Just as the current round of gold bashing, dropping it about $125 in 6 weeks, began with 3 days of immediate drop at New York open, which short sellers piled onto, I suspect that this is a signal that the US and China have reached some agreement, and there will be a gradual increase in the price of gold. Am I reading too much into these tea leaves? The decrease in Dollar Index mentioned in this article all happened Friday afternoon.
Russia offers China 2.5 million acres to grow soybeans, so as to not have to buy them from trade-warring American multinational corporations. BING!
Eleni sends this fun story, which makes perfect sense, if it can be done.
Greece and Turkey are the overlap of what was the Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Empire. There is not a whit of difference in the populations of these countries, both diverse, yet similar. What if Greece and Turkey join in common cause with each other? (Gosh, armies and navies, too!)
Amid the havoc and the despair in Greece’s wildfires, a joke comes from Turkey. In all seriousness. Chief aide of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a notorious provocateur, opened his mouth and started telling fairy tales right from the darkest corridor of the Anatolian bazaar.
From snoozing story teller to hypnotized audience, so to say.
“The West is terrified of a specter that countries seceded from Ottoman Empire might join Turkey again,” aid Yigit Bulut said in an interview with a Turkish television channel on July 28th.
Amid the havoc and the despair in Greece’s wildfires, a joke comes from Turkey. In all seriousness. Chief aide of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a notorious provocateur, opened his mouth and started telling fairy tales right from the darkest corridor of the Anatolian bazaar.
From snoozing story teller to hypnotized audience, so to say.
“The West is terrified of a specter that countries seceded from Ottoman Empire might join Turkey again,” aid Yigit Bulut said in an interview with a Turkish television channel on July 28th.
Legendary intelligence analyst, Ray McGovern, discusses how former Director of CIA Brennan got his clearance jerked and may soon face criminal charges.
After eight years of enjoying President Barack Obama’s solid support and defense to do pretty much anything he chose—including hacking into the computers of the Senate Intelligence Committee—Brennan now lacks what, here in Washington, we refer to as a “Rabbi” with strong incentive to advance and protect you. He expected Hillary Clinton to play that role (were it ever to be needed), and that seemed to be solidly in the cards. But, oops, she lost.What needs to be borne in mind in all this is, as former FBI Director James Comey himself has admitted: “I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president.” Comey, Brennan, and co-conspirators, who decided—in that “environment”—to play fast and loose with the Constitution and the law, were supremely confident they would not only keep their jobs, but also receive plaudits, not indictments.
Unless one understands and remembers this, it is understandably difficult to believe that the very top U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials did what documentary evidence has now demonstrated they did.
Senator Rand Paul proposes that Julian Assange be granted immunity for testimony before Congress. Boy, does this idea make sense!
“I think that he should be given immunity from prosecution in exchange for coming to the United States and testifying,” Senator Paul told the Gateway Pundit. “I think he’s been someone who has released a lot of information, and you can debate whether or not any of that has caused harm, but I think really he has information that is probably pertinent to the hacking of the Democratic emails that would be nice to hear.”
The 6 pounds of bacteria inside you are also "you". Beginning to understand your microbiota.
(It is a bit cumbersome getting through the definitions and introductions, but it looks like more articles will follow this overview.)
Full of It
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