Someone Please Explain These Developments on FISA and the Non-Stop Funding of Wars

Matt Taibbi is flummoxed. So am I. Any curious person would be. Matt tries to explain what happened in he recent article: "A Saturday Massacre in CongressOn a Saturday to mark and remember, congress funds two wars and hands the intelligence agencies sweeping new surveillance power, getting nothing in return."

Please. Someone tell me who is moving the levers of power in DC and how?  Matt Taibbi offers this:

Mike Johnson is now Winston Churchill. All he had to do was give the NSA unlimited spying power, overrule constituents about funding two wars, and support allowing government to block a platform used by 60 million Americans.

In return he got: nothing. No immigration reform, no articulation of benchmarks or a plan for success in Ukraine, no accounting for past spending, no insistence on warrants to spy on Americans, no concession that FISA can only be reauthorized by Congress, no claw-back of a major new “Everybody is a Spy” surveillance ask. Johnson traded his starting lineup for the proverbial bag of balls.

History will look back at a moment below from April 12th, just before the House passed FISA, and wonder about a last comment from Johnson. The Speaker talks about being originally horrified by the “terrible abuses, hundreds of thousands of abuses” of FISA by the FBI.

But “then when I became Speaker, I went to the [secure briefing room] and got a confidential briefing” from intelligence officials, and heard “sort of the other perspective on that.” It “gave him a different perspective.”

Regarding FISA, Reason explains what was at stake in an article titled "Revised Section 702 Surveillance Authority Poses More Danger Than EverNew language could make almost anybody with access to a WiFi router help the government snoop."
If this became law, millions of American small business owners would have a legal obligation to hand over data that runs through their equipment," caution former Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R–Va.) and former Sen. Mark Udall (D–Colo.), both now with the Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability. "And when they're done with doing their part in mass surveillance, these small businesses would then be placed under a gag order to hide their activities from their customers."

It seems like Glenn Greenwald is thinking more bad things are happening than he is willing to articulate at this time. Consider this part of Glenn's monologue: [More . . . ]

Continue ReadingSomeone Please Explain These Developments on FISA and the Non-Stop Funding of Wars

The Anxiety-Complacency Connection

Fear is a market. To instill fear in people also has advantages. Not only in terms of drug use. Anxiety-driven people are easier to rule.

-Gerd Gogerenzer, Director Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Educational Research (Torsten Engelbrecht, Virus Mania, 2021)

I've been struggling to understand why it is that "The Blob" (or, as Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi have termed it, the "censorship-industrial complex") tolerates and even seems to embrace so many flavors of woke dogma. Many of these woke position are outright oxymorons. Here are a few examples:

Men = Woman

Carefully- gathered statistics (e.g., regarding police/race) are racist. And see here for many statistics that are inconvenient to the "abolish the police" insanity.

The Rule of Law is unfair, even racist/colonial/white supremacist etc.

Enlightenment Principles, including free speech, have become barriers to progress. See here for my articles on free speech.

Intelligence Tests (modern versions, which are highly predictive, as much as any other aspect of psychology, as well as very carefully designed to be race-neutral) are "racist."

Allowing high schoolers to take advanced math courses is racist. To preserve "equity" we must not allow such classes in high school.

I have written about all of these pronouncements at DI. I have also written repeatedly about immense pressures to conform to particular unwarranted, nonsensical and incurious narratives (see more than 250 of my articles that I have tagged as "narratives in media"), especially by corporate media outlets (which I am increasingly thinking of as government propaganda (often CIA) outlets--See Dick Russel's "Belly of the Beast" two-part article here and here. It is guaranteed to ruin your week--it can be painful when scales fall from your eyes).

My understanding from the sordid marriage between multinational corporations, U.S. foreign policy, government censorship and CIA dirty tricks is those with great economic and political power want more and more. They are never satisfied. But why allow woke ideology or even push it on us?  What does that have to do with money or power? For that, consider the quote at the beginning of this article. When those around us utter palpable bullshit, it makes us anxious, even when we know that it is bullshit (see here). It makes us stay indoors. It causes us to avoid going to school board meetings. It keeps us from speaking up at the workplace or even at family dinners. We know woke ideology makes no sense, but most of us are willing to do a LOT of work to keep others from disliking us, even if they are saying things that we know, for sure, make no sense. Even if we know that they are saying and believing these things due to a vast censorship effort funded and operated by our own government. Even if we are certain that the corporate media consensus is a false consensus enabled by a highly sophisticated government apparatus.

Hearing nonsensical things being uttered around us by family, friends and co-workers who rely on corporate media makes us anxious. In the long run, this anxiety makes us more obedient.

This leaves us with two paths in life.

#1: Run out to get yet another COVID booster, then go home to watch Disney and eat ice cream;

#2: Keep speaking up. When you hear nonsense, call it nonsense. You might be worried that if you say what you believe out loud, people will yell at you and call you names. That will, indeed, happen. But remember, for every ignorant loud mouth in the room, you have become a hero to 9 anxious and silent people who are sitting on their hands. Your job is to inspire those people to be heroes next time.

Continue ReadingThe Anxiety-Complacency Connection

Mike Benz: Censorship Versus Propaganda

Thanks to some heroic people like Mike Benz, many of us have seen the scales falling from our eyes regarding the insidiousness and the perniciousness of the censorship-industrial complex. And it's largely funded by you, the taxpayer.  Over the past couple of years, I've seen the scales falling from the eyes of Dr. Drew in a very public way.

In this video, Mike Benz discussed the dangers of censorship and propaganda in the digital age, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. He argues that censorship is a more insidious threat than propaganda because it can silence counter-narratives and undermine public faith in institutions. He noted that while propaganda can still provide a 'fighting chance' against it, censorship can completely silence opposing viewpoints. I created a transcript of the above discussion:

I see censorship as being the flip side of propaganda. Propaganda is the knob upturning of the volume of a government message. Censorship is the knob down turning of any of any counter messaging. And until the social media censorship expanded-AI toolkit was really unveiled, starting after the 2016 election here in the US, there really was no ability to do censorship at mass scale in a peer-to-peer way.

You had famous examples of of censorship in the 20th century where, you know, JFK basically gave command orders to the mainstream media not to not to report certain things about the Cuban missile crisis when it looked like we were on the verge of world war three in 1961. But they couldn't reach into the dinner table conversations of 300 million Americans and just turn down their volume if they start talking about a key phrase like lab leaked. And, you know, so in this case, I do see the censorship weapon as being actually a lot worse than just propaganda, because propaganda still allows people to have a fighting chance against it, they simply don't believe it or the institutions lose so much credibility that when they see a propaganda poster, they roll their eyes and say, well, that means nothing to me and it means nothing to my friends or my clergy.

So the the issue here is the exactly what you identified around fear is was part of the censorship scheme. You see the way they censored COVID And when I say they, I mean these pentagon and CIA and State Department cutouts like Graphika, like the Atlantic Council, like the Stanford Internet Observatory, like the University of Washington, all staffed by former CIA or former DoD or former state folks. They, basically censored anything that might "undermine public faith and support or the severity of the virus and the government's response to it."

So for example, you know, the Department of Homeland Security's Cyber Security Division, which was their censorship, division, but they simply said any Mis- dis- or mal-information about COVID is a cyber attack because it's speech online that attacks a critical government response. This is why the cybersecurity task force was censoring COVID speech on Twitter. And they, for example, put out a video and in the heat of COVID, in 2021, where they instructed young children to report their own family members for for disinformation--if their family members simply cited CDC data, that compared the death rate of COVID to the death rate of the flu, they gave an example of someone tweeting "COVID is no more fatal than the flu" and they go through an instruction manual basically for a young child to report her own uncle for posting that. Not because it's wrong, because he cited CDC data, but because it would undermine the fear response.

Continue ReadingMike Benz: Censorship Versus Propaganda

Pathologist Ryan Cole Discusses his Concerns about the mRNA vax with Brett Weinstein

For those who fell for the false consensus and were tricked by public health and government officials into taking the COVID vac, here at least a dozen big things to worry about. Take your pick: cancer, blood clots (including enormous elastic clots reported by funeral homes), myocarditis. There something for everyone here, especially with the recent report on the cancer risks of pseudouridine (see end of this article).

Ryan Cole is an experienced pathologist who was severely abused by the medical establishment for daring the question the narrative (that story is that last 10% of this video). You can find this video on Rumble.com at Darkhorse podcast hosted by Brett Weinstein.

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Recent article on the cancer dangers of pseudouridine: 

Continue ReadingPathologist Ryan Cole Discusses his Concerns about the mRNA vax with Brett Weinstein

The Damage Done by Democrat Elites to Fly-Over States and Cities

Chris Hedges:

I rage against this demonization of the working class because it’s a very dangerous cop-out. The Democrats had this term to essentially enact the kind of New Deal reforms that might’ve been able to save what’s left of our very anemic democracy. And they didn’t. And why didn’t they? Because figures like Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer would not have political power but for their corporate backers. I mean, nobody wants Biden. Nobody wanted Biden in the primaries. It took the Democratic establishment to force everyone else out. The guy’s not even sentient. But they don’t want to lose their positions of privilege and power, and they’re really willing to take the country down because if they pushed for these kinds of reforms, then Goldman Sachs and Raytheon - and let’s not forget the Israeli lobby - wouldn’t fund them. They are creatures of this system, so that’s the problem. They will blame people who don’t rush out and vote for them. The liberal East Coast establishment, the college educated, the quote-unquote “knowledge industry,” they have no contact with these people at all. And that isn’t to excuse some of their opinions. . .

Reagan started it, but Clinton was the Democratic impetus for this, where they talked in that “I feel your pain” language of liberalism but thrust a knife in the back of the working class. So are there irredeemable racists and bigots? Of course there are. But to write off the entire working class like that and essentially blame them for their own, I think, very legitimate rage has been a way for the Democratic Party and the liberal establishment to wash their hands of culpability.

. . . They packed the equipment up and shipped it to Monterey, Mexico. And the plants, they’re just empty lots now, but they’re massive and they’re surrounded by cyclone fencing, weed-choked lots, a kind of painful reminder of the jobs they used to have. What happens in Anderson? Well, it’s completely predictable: opioid crisis, diseases of despair, massive numbers of suicides, and so on.

You can find the full interview of Chris Hedge's (by Matt Taibbi) at Racket News.

Continue ReadingThe Damage Done by Democrat Elites to Fly-Over States and Cities