Matt Taibbi on the State of the Campaigns

Matt Taibbi has eyes and ears that work, unlike the so-called journalists of corporate media organizations. An excerpt:

[T]he campaign is pure chaos, Pompeii after the blast. In the annals of presidential races we haven’t experienced many days like yesterday, July 31, which ended with the futures of all major candidates appearing hopelessly clouded. Forget the national debt; there are now not-improbable scenarios in which the main issues in next year’s debates, which could easily involve both nominees in ankle monitors, are nuclear fallout and alien visitation. Our leaders, who once had the election process reduced to scripts more predictable than Everybody Loves Raymond, now seem to have no clue what will happen beyond the next few minutes.

If not for the fact that the disintegration of American society might be imminent as a result, I’d be laughing harder. It might be funny anyway. Consider: the establishment plan for the Republican Party this cycle was clearly Ron DeSantis, but a New York Times/Siena poll published yesterday shows he’s plunging like a stone, falling to 17%, a.k.a. 37 points behind Donald Trump...

Incumbent Joe Biden not only has the lowest approval rating in history — he “shouldn’t” be this unpopular “but he is,” mused a mortified Washington Post — but as of Monday, when his son’s former partner Devon Archer testified in Congress, he appeared to be careening toward withdrawal due to impairment, scandal, or both. [P]apers like the New York Times and Washington Post . . . are suddenly filled with baleful criticisms of Biden, appearing to notice flaws for the first time. Pamela Paul in the Times compared her dread feelings about a Biden-Trump rematch to Lars Von Trier’s film, Melancholia, whose premise is an inexorable collision of a rogue planet with Earth.

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Beware Wikipedia

Wikipedia as a source of propaganda? Just read the Wikipedia article titled "COVID-19 Lab Leak Theory." From the Wikipedia article, would think that there is no legitimate clashing version of this story.

Glenn Greenwald describes what has happened to Wikipedia in recent years, demonstrating by looking at various Wikipedia pages that demonstrate almost comedic bias. What kind of information is reliable according to Wikipedia? It is weighed heavily in favor of established corporate media sources. See Wikipedia: Reliable Sources. Consider further, this article: "Wikipedia: The Corrupt Encyclopedia: Wikipedia formally censors The Grayzone as regime-change advocates monopolize editing."

Larry Sangar, co-founder of Wikipedia, appeared on System Update to discuss his own concerns.  According to Sangar, during the period of 2006-2012,  Wikipedia became a biased pro-establishment website. He gave examples that he noticed from 2010-2015. Wikipedia became severely biased against Eastern/holoistic medical traditions. He sensed that it "got over the top" around 2013-2018, when  Wikipedia increasingly moved onto the radar of the political establishment. Google began investing many millions of dollars in to Wikipedia.  According to Sanger, "No encyclopedia has ever been as biased as Wikipedia is now."

Sanger mentioned that there are alternative encyclopedias, such as Ballotpedia, which he describes as "fairly neutral" and Conservapedia (on the conservative side).  To read 35 encyclopedias at once, Sanger recommended using encyclosearch.org or encycloreader.org  These sites us open source software, with digitally signed results.  These are two attempts to try to strike a blow against censorship and control. Sanger also mentioned that there will soon be a Wordpress plugin that will allow people to aggregate their own website articles in a mega collection.

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Transgender Activism and the Road not Taken

ELIZA MONDEGREEN argues that we could have avoided most of the pandemonium we are currently witnessing about transgenderism. His article is titled: "Trans Activism and the Road Not Taken: The current conflict over trans rights was entirely avoidable."

Here an excerpt from Mondegreen's article, along with Colin Wright's illustration:

A conversation about reasonable accommodations is a nuanced conversation. Instead, we got a radical trans movement that wants to erase sex in law and society, put men in women's prisons and boys in girls' sports, and run an unregulated medical experiment on gender-nonconforming children. This has given rise to an absurd and dystopian reality where men are granted access to women’s prisons, sports, and other protected spaces, and where gender-nonconforming children have become the target of unregulated medical experiments that involve puberty blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and extreme surgeries.

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Introducing One of the Top Censors at Facebook

Glenn Greenwald: "Meet Aaron Berman: who spent his entire adult life working at the CIA, only to leave to become a top Facebook official responsible for censoring political speech.Among other things, Aaron was the key Facebook official who censored Brazil's debates before its 2022 election."

And speaking of ex-spies now at social media, you'll find CIA, FBI, NSA and DHS ex-employees.  And there is a saying that one you work at the CIA, you never stop working at the CIA, no matter where you end up:

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