No, I'm not going to let the Democrats forget what they did and said regarding the COVID vaccines that they eventually foisted upon us. In case you are thinking that I'm a conservative or a republican, not true. I haven't voted republican for decades. I am now completely politically homeless. I've seen 100 times more BS than I need to see to be convinced that both of our two major political parties (and their allied media) are corrupt to the core.
Consider the haunting opening lines to the 2010 BBC documentary, "The Power of Nightmares":
In the past, politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this. But their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered to their people. Those dreams failed. And today, people have lost faith in ideologies. Increasingly, politicians are seen simply as managers of public life. But now, they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us from nightmares. They say that they will rescue us from dreadful dangers that we cannot see and do not understand.
Ten years ago, I found this intense documentary online. Over the years, the links to the documentary keep breaking and I have fixed them at least twice. You can now view the entire work here. Also here is the full script.
What would motivate a phalanx of high-paid government-financed experts to protect us from a never ending procession of alleged nightmares? How about job security. More specifically, now that Middle East terrorism is no longer looming as a threat to Americans, how about drumming up the new threat of misinformation/malinformation/dysinformation? How about funding huge bureaucracies of highly paid experts to protect us from each other? Notice that they have now turn our suspicions and paranoia toward each other, a disgraceful tactic in a country founded on the principle that we the citizens are in charge and it is our duty as self-rulers to interact and negotiate with each other to find solutions to complex problems. To feed their coffers, they have found a gift that keeps on giving, the concept of "misinformation," ignoring that this concept is comically vague, in other words, perfectly suited for instigating Americans to form circular firing squads.
See the latest example, “They're searching for fears to tap into," article at Public by an excellent journalist, Lee Fang. Here is an excerpt:
Smith: So when you're talking about this mission creep, do you think that this is just an example of the government just trying to grab power increasingly or do they seem to have some sort of position that they're creeping towards intentionally, if that makes sense, like some sort of policy or what?
Fang: Bureaucracies tend to be self-perpetuating. We see this in a number of areas. The military is certainly an example of this. It's difficult to wind down major military programs to cancel or roll back major military conflicts. Even with wars ending and conflicts ending and winding down in Iraq and Afghanistan, oversized military budgets seem to only grow and grow. There's no peace dividend when these conflicts end. And the same is the case with the Department of Homeland Security. This agency has grown and grown.
And even as the threat of Islamic terrorism from Al-Qaeda or ISIS has radically waned in recent years, has gone down, this agency needs to justify its existence. So it's searching for new threats, searching for new fears to tap into, and coming up with new justifications for this enlarged bureaucracy and variety of government contractors. It's shifting from protecting against overseas terror threats to focusing on social media censorship. And that seems like a radical progression, but it helps justify the duration and expansion of these agencies.
From Matt Taibbi's latest article, "Why Julian Assange Must Be Freed."
[S]ecrets do not belong to governments. That information belongs to us. Governments rule by our consent. If they want to keep secrets, they must have our permission to do so. And they never have the right to keep crimes secret.
I’m an American. Many of you are from the U.K. In our countries, we’re building skyscrapers and huge new complexes to store our secrets, because we don’t have room to keep them all as is!
Why do we have so many secrets? Julian Assange told us why. From an essay he wrote:
'Authoritarian regimes give rise to forces which oppose them by pushing against the individual and collective will to freedom, truth and self realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce resistance. Hence these plans are concealed by successful authoritarian powers.'
When governments become authoritarian, they inspire resistance. Techniques must then be developed to repel that resistance. Those techniques must then be concealed.
In short: the worse a country is, the more secrets it has. We have a lot of secrets now.
Julian Assange became famous as we were creating a vast new government-within-a-government, a system of secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, mass surveillance, and drone assassination. Many of these things we know about only because of Wikileaks. Ostensibly, all this secrecy was needed to fight foreign terrorism.
The brutal irony now is the architects of that system no longer feel the need to hide their dirty tactics. My government, openly, wants to put this man in jail for 175 years, mostly for violations of the Espionage Act. These include crimes like “conspiracy to receive national defense information,” or “obtaining national defense information.”
What is “national defense information?” The answer is what makes this law so dangerous. It’s whatever they say it is. It’s any information they don’t want to get out. It doesn’t even have to be classified. What is conspiracy to obtain such information? We have a word for that. It’s called journalism.
My government wants to put Julian Assange in jail for 175 years for practicing journalism. The government of this country, the U.K., is going to allow it to happen.
If they did this to Andrei Sakharov, or Nelson Mandela, every human rights organization in the world would be denouncing this as an intolerable outrage. Every NGO would be lining up to lend support. Every journalist would be penning editorials demanding his release.
But because our own governments are doing it, we get silence.
If you’re okay with this happening to one Julian Assange, you’d better be okay with it happening to many others. That’s why this moment is so important. If Assange is successfully extradited and convicted, it will take about ten minutes for it to happen again. From there this will become a common occurrence. There will be no demonstrations in parks, no more news stories. This will become a normal part of our lives.
Don’t let that happen.
Free Julian Assange.
For those of you who think that the Washington Post is a credible news source, please notice that today's WP article on the destruction of the Nord Stream Pipeline, purportedly by Ukrainians, fails to mention: A) shortly before its destruction, Joe Biden promised that he would make sure that the pipeline was no longer operational B) Much decorated investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published a detailed account that the United States destroyed the pipeline and C) Immediately after the destruction of the pipeline, Victoria Nuland, working for the U.S. Secretary of State celebrated celebrated that the Nord Stream pipeline "is now a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea."
At Public, Michael Shellenberger writes:
The people who say they are fighting disinformation appear to be transparent and trustworthy. Groups like Stanford Internet Observatory and the Atlantic Council put photos, bios, and contact information for their staff and board members on their websites. They record videos that explain their work. And they regularly write for mainstream media publications.
But of the 50 top ”anti-disinformation” governmental and nongovernmental groups in the world, which Matt Taibbi’s investigative team at Racket identified, only one has agreed to answer our questions, and only 10 even bothered responding to our repeated requests for an interview.
It’s reasonable to wonder if this low response rate has something to do with the fact that I have repeatedly called for all of them to be defunded and dismantled because they are violating a fundamental human right.
But the key “disinfo” censorship groups are not giving substantive interviews to other independent journalists. Indeed, over the last several weeks, they have increasingly gone quiet....
Two weeks ago, BBC heavily promoted the launch of its own “anti-disinfo” program called “Verify,” but has refused to answer questions about it or make its 27-year-old host, whose role is apparently to fact-check all of the news, available for an interview.
And now, the lead censorship organization, Stanford Internet Observatory, is refusing to respect a House Judiciary Committee subpoena for records in the form of “tickets” from the Jira project management software system...
Why? What are Stanford Internet Observatory, Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab, BBC, and other pro-censorship organizations hiding?
Stanford Internet Observatory says it was simply “flagging” disfavored views to Twitter and Facebook, not demanding that they be censored, and not acting on behalf of the government.
But the de facto leader of the SIO, and the rest of the Censorship Industrial Complex, Renee DiResta, openly boasted that the Virality Project existed to act as a proxy for the U.S. government’s Department of Homeland Security in demanding censorship by social media platforms of true vaccine side effect information.