A Tale of Two Informational Ecosystems

For years it has been increasingly difficult for me to have a give-and-take conversation with a Democrat. I've voted almost entirely with the Democrats all my life, and I remain committed to what were, more or less, the Democratic values that were known and accepted by the far majority of Democrats 10 to 15 years ago: anti-war, anti-censorship, don't judge people by irrelevant characteristics like the way they look, deference to the family re how to raise children, etc.

Now it is almost impossible to talk. My guiding assumption is that almost all people think and act rationally based upon what they know and believe. We live in two primary informational ecosystems, however, and the one embraced by most self-proclaimed modern day Democrats has ever-fewer connection points with those who are not in that tribe. It is for that reason that I have, indeed, been posting X links to my FB page, to the the dismay of what turns out to be a smallish group of very loud people who respond almost entirely with ad hominem attacks. I also receive many private messages thanking me for sharing these posts, many of these also adding that they can't "like" or res-hare my links because of social and economic repercussions. Such a sad state of affairs.  BTW, Elon Musk has encouraged the sharing of X posts to those who are still trapped in the Matrix:

I try to explain what I'm doing on FB and why, but it's difficult to see much progress. In this way, the resistance to free speech and fear of wide-open discussion seems so much like a religion! Here's one of my recent FB posts:

If you eat shitty food, your body will suffer. If you ingest shitty information, you will act "rationally" on the basis of that bad information. If you are extremely smart, you will think and act extremely well on behalf of that shitty information. There are thousands of Iago-equivalents on on the federal payroll. Their job is to insidiously gain control of your brain so that (in the case of modern-day Democrats) you'll become pro-censorship, pro-war and and a big believer in race-essentialism (among many other things). In short, you'll become the opposite of what you were 10 years ago, you won't know why you did the 180 and you won't even be concerned that you have betrayed many of your deepest convictions.

Before you weigh in on any issue of national importance, the first question you need to ask yourself is whether your world view has been hijacked by US censorship and propaganda. The "misinformation" and "malinformation" system is extremely sophisticated, developed over the decades by deep state experts. Based on recent disclosures, legacy media have been significantly funded by USAID and other federal sources for many years, going back to Project Mockingbird and beyond. Whether you are "smart" has nothing to do with it. Your only hope is to read widely and read news sources that conflict with each other so you can weigh the evidence for yourself. This will take too much work for many people. They will get fatigued and stick with U.S. approved "news" sources and they are the most over-confident people here on FB.

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About the Need for Peace on Earth, including Ukraine and Russia.

From Grok:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky provided an official update in early February 2025, stating that 45,100 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed since Russia’s full-scale invasion began on February 24, 2022.

The number of dead Ukrainians is now comparable to the number of Americans killed in Vietnam, in a country of about 40 million people (many of them children and elderly). An entire generation of Ukrainian men has already been decimated.

Meanwhile, many of the people I know on the Left look at me with glazed over eyes when I talk about the need for PEACE. They no longer appreciate the need for peace. They used to understand this before the Democratic party inverted its positions on many important values (including censorship). Nor do they want to hear anything about the history of the corrupt involvement of the U.S. in Ukraine since at least 2014. They used to understand that our north star should be peace.

Trump's bold move today, including his tough talk with President Zelenskyy (see video below), will make no sense to many Democrats, but I don't blame many of them. They have been subjected to systematic censorship for years, much of it from the legacy media that they over-trust and much of it financed by the U.S. government (here are hundreds of examples). Neocons have infested our government for years--most recently Biden's cabinet (e.g. Victoria Nuland and Anthony Blinken, architects of the Iraq war).

I hope that someday soon Democrats can once again figure out that murder, mayhem and destruction of cities on a mass scale is actually a bad thing and that such carnage should be avoided at all costs. We are not playing the game of Risk. We are talking about real human lives.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1895535520836681851

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CIA, USAID and Media Manipulation

60 Minutes Interview with John Stockwell. Who is John Stockwell? (this is from Grok):

John R. Stockwell (born 1937) is a former CIA officer who became a critic of United States government policies after serving in the agency for 13 years. He managed American involvement in the Angolan Civil War as Chief of the Angola Task Force during the CIA's 1975 covert operations. Born in Angleton, Texas, Stockwell spent part of his childhood in the Belgian Congo due to his father's engineering work. After studying at the University of Texas and serving in the U.S. Marine Corps, he joined the CIA in 1964. His career included roles in three major conflicts: the Congo Crisis, the Vietnam War, and the Angolan War of Independence.

Stockwell resigned from the CIA in 1976, citing concerns over the agency's methods and the impact of its operations in Third World countries. He wrote "In Search of Enemies," detailing his experiences and criticisms of CIA activities, which became a bestseller. His other notable works include "The Praetorian Guard" (1991) and "Red Sunset" (1982). He has also been a frequent public speaker on issues related to CIA operations.

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The U.S. Role on Producing Heroin in Afghanistan

Why was USAID funding the production of heroin in Afghanistan?

John Kiriakou, who exposed the CIA and went to prison for it: "I went to Afghanistan to do a study on on the heroin Poppy crop. And I'll tell you, nobody liked it. Afghanistan used to be a net food exporter, and as soon as the US takes over, they're producing 93% of the world's heroin. That's right. I'd like to know how the fuck that happened. I get to Bagram Air Base and I said, I'm gonna need a helicopter to Lashkar. We get down there, and it's a god-awful place, but man, I'm telling you, as far as your eye can see, all there is, is Poppy. So I make an appointment to go to this DEA secret site, and they were like, you're in over your head. "There are very powerful forces that want that Poppy to be cultivated." And I said, "Why? It's 93% of the world's heroin." And they said, "Because almost all of that heroin goes to Iran and to Russia, and we want them to be addicted to heroin. It weakens their societies." I'm writing all this up. And [John] Kerry's like, "We're not we're not publishing that." And I was like, ah, they got to him too."

Mike Benz offers the details and they include connections with USAID:

And more details from Benz, including connections to the innocent-sounding "US Institute for Peace:

"And why is USAID’s network partner, the US Institute of Peace, lobbying the Taliban to keep 95% of the world’s heroin supply flowing while taking $56 million from US taxpayers each year?"

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Why Neocon Foreign Policy Fails Over and Over

This goes for the Neocons who taok over Republic foreign policy and also those how commandeered the cabinets of Democrats such as Obama and Biden. Mike Dimino, a former CIA analyst and a fellow at Defense Priorities. He has been involved in Mideast policy, particularly under the Trump administration, where he has served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East. He hammers it here:

We could talk about sort of the military analysis all day, and I think it's really important to do that. But the bigger point here has to be, you know, we have now seen 20 years worth of evidence in Iraq, in Syria, in Libya, and Afghanistan that we cannot force liberal democracy at the end of a gun. Okay? Iran is a nation of 90 million people. Enough of the people in that country have to overcome what many sociologists and political scientists have called the collective action problem, right? The cost benefit analysis of organic political change, that calculation has to get to a point where change can happen. And that's how it has to work if it's going to last and if it's going to be meaningful. This idea that the United States should be using its military to go around the world and depose every single tin pot dictator that we find and bog ourselves down there to the tune of trillions of dollars to 1000s of American lives with no real goal or or purpose, where we are squandering our national resources in our bandwidth that need to be directed on far more pressing issues is just not really in America's interest. And that's, again, the biggest point that I would make here, is that, you know, this idea that you can, you know, send a couple of, you know, American stealth bombers, you know, over the border and kill all the ayatollahs and some kind of cinematic cutscene. And then, you know, some young woman stands up in a pantsuit and goes, you know, I'm ready to be the president of Iran now. I mean, life is not a Marvel movie and life is not, it's not Harry Potter. So as somebody that has spent a lot of time in the region and has worked on these issues as an intelligence officer, I could just tell you the idea that something like that is possible, I think, is what is in the heads of a lot of people like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, and even a lot of the, you know, the Persian diaspora elsewhere, that is very against the regime. Again, I'm against the regime too, but it just doesn't work that way, where there's going to be some sort of perfect cutscene ending, and there's going to be, you know, overnight, some kind of new regime in Iran, we have learned that the world just doesn't work that way.

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