Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a plaintiff in the case of Murthy v Missouri (pending before the U.S. Supreme Court), a man who was censored by a highly coordinated group of organizations financed and instigated by the U.S. Government, notices a purported news organization applauding censorship (of X, run by Elon Musk):
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 . . . ]
Gloria Mark is a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine. She has documented an overall shrinking of the attention span of Americans. This is not a good thing for various reasons, including switching costs. Here is an excerpt from her interview by Kim Mills:
Mills: . . . How much have our attention spans shrunk?An article by Jac Mullen of The Nation indicates that this is hurting students:
Mark: So we started measuring this back in 2004, and at the time the measures that we used were stopwatches because that was the most precise thing we had at the time. We would shadow people with stopwatches for every single activity they did. We would record the start time and the stop time. So you're on a screen where you're working in a Word doc, as soon as you get to that screen, we clicked start time, soon as they turned away and checked email, we clicked stop time for the Word document, start time for the email. But fortunately, sophisticated computer logging methods were developed, and so of course we switched to those. So back in 2004, we found the average attention span on any screen to be two and a half minutes on average. Throughout the years it became shorter. So around 2012 we found it to be 75 seconds.
This is with logging techniques. This is an average. And then in the last five, six years, we found it to average about 47 seconds, and others have replicated this result within a few seconds. So it seems to be quite robust. Now, another way to think about this result is the median. The median means the midpoint of observations. The median is 40 seconds. And what this means is that half of all the measurements that we found were 40 seconds or less of people's attention spans. Now obviously because we're talking about averages and medians, sometimes people do spend longer, but quite a good bit of the time, their attention spans are much shorter and with an average coming to 47 seconds.
Mills: So why is this a problem? Since it seems to be happening almost universally at this point, is this just the new normal?
Mark: It seems to be the new normal because we seem to have reached a steady state over the last five or six years where these are the measures that we're seeing. Is this a good thing? I would argue it's not a good thing for the following reasons. First of all, we find in our research a correlation between frequency of attention switching and stress. So the faster the attention switching occurs, stress is measured by people wearing heart rate monitors. We show that stress goes up. We know from decades of research in the laboratory that when people multitask, they experience stress, blood pressure rises. There's a physiological marker in the body that indicates people are stressed. And in our studies, we've also simply asked people with well valid instruments to report their stress, their perceived stress, and it's reported to be higher the faster that we measure attention shifting.
So all of these measures seem to be consistent. I'll also measure that when people shift their attention so fast, and this is multitasking, when you keep switching your attention among different activities, people make more errors. And that's been shown in studies in the real world with physicians, nurses, pilots. We also know that performance slows. Why? Because there's something called a switch cost. So every time you switch your attention, you have to reorient to that new activity, that new thing you're paying attention to, and it takes a little bit of time.
By many measures, our powers of attention appear to be rapidly deteriorating. The average attention span of the individual has seemingly contracted almost 70 percent in the last 20 years, for instance, and our collective attention span is reported to be shrinking as well. Overwhelmingly, people report that their capacity for sustained focus is declining, along with their ability to engage in deep thought. There is growing evidence that many of the methods devised to continually reengage an already depleted attention, or to seize a developing capacity for focus, pose special dangers to children: A recent spate of publications, for instance, highlight evidence linking“chronic sensory overstimulation (i.e., excessive screen time)” during brain development to cognitive impairment and substantially increased risks of early-onset dementia in adulthood.
According to Cal Newport, in his 2021 book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. What we need is less of the above and more "deep work":
Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate. Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity. We now know from decades of research in both psychology and neuroscience that the state of mental strain that accompanies deep work is also necessary to improve your abilities. . . Indeed, if you study the lives of other influential figures from both distant and recent history, you’ll find that a commitment to deep work is a common theme. . . .
A 2012 McKinsey study found that the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication and Internet searching, with close to 30 percent of a worker’s time dedicated to reading and answering e-mail alone.
This state of fragmented attention cannot accommodate deep work, which requires long periods of uninterrupted thinking. At the same time, however, modern knowledge workers are not loafing. In fact, they report that they are as busy as ever. What explains the discrepancy? A lot can be explained by another type of effort, which provides a counterpart to the idea of deep work:
Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
In an age of network tools, in other words, knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative— constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction. Larger efforts that would be well served by deep thinking, such as forming a new business strategy or writing an important grant application, get fragmented into distracted dashes that produce muted quality.
To make matters worse for depth, there’s increasing evidence that this shift toward the shallow is not a choice that can be easily reversed. Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work.
Mike Benz often speaks of "the Blob." To what is he referring? I created the following transcript Dr. Drew's interview of Mike Benz:
"The Blob" is actually a term from President Obama's Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, who was opining on the difficulty within the White House of getting things done because they seem to be up against an impenetrable force, an a amorphous alien monster that was more powerful than even even the Obama White House. And so he sort of coined this phrase, out of exasperation, in a certain sense, but it's been adopted in Washington. It refers to the foreign policy establishment and I'll sketch out what that is, and it's not just the foreign policy establishment within the government. It is the external stakeholders in the corporate and financial worlds who are the donor draftor class off of the government activity.
So I'll sketch that out a little bit here. The foreign policy establishment is the side of our government that faces outward rather than inward to manage the American empire, rather than the American homeland. We have government agencies that manage the American homeland, like Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Labor. They all face inward. They don't do international business, so to speak with, you know, Ukraine or Moldova, or Sub Saharan Africa.
We have three sides of our government--three departments or constellations of entities that face outward and those are the Pentagon, the State Department and our intelligence services, such as the CIA. Now, together, they basically form this defense diplomacy intelligence apparatus. And because they face outward and their mandate is to protect and maximize US national interests on the world stage, they have a license to do dirty tricks that domestic facing institutions are not empowered to do. So for example, they can wiretap foreign citizens. They don't need to get a warrant for it. They can bribe foreign media institutions to promote or kill stories. They can set up their own media vehicles to be able to swing hearts and minds so that another country's own parliament votes for or against a different bill there in order to get the people of a foreign country to support a US military base in the region, or a UN Security Council vote in a region. And they're they're deployed with this dirty tricks power, which involves a license to lie.
So for example, the Central Intelligence Agency under National Security Council 10-2 back in the 1940s, was given basically a license to do all sorts of criminal or illegal illegal activity as long as they maintain plausible deniability, meaning as long as the US government could plausibly deny that the Central Intelligence Agency or that the US government was behind it, they could engage in criminal activity. Now, that was all set up the foreign policy establishment, the blob, who again on the inside is State Department, Pentagon and, and CIA--we'll just say for shorthand--for the intelligence community. The social contract when that was set up in 1947 1948, was that it was for managing the American empire for the benefit of the citizens of the homeland. And it would have these dirty tricks powers. It would be able to spy. It would be able to lie. It would be able to rig elections, be able to rig media, because at the end of the day, the citizens here would benefit from it, but it would never be turned on our own citizens. That's what our constitution is for. And, and all the other you know, protections that go into being a US citizen.
That's the inside of the blob. The outside of it is the corporate and financial stakeholder class. These are the corporations and the banks, and the financial investors who are the sort of donor draftor class off of the activities of the government. When I refer to drafting you can think of it like a bike race. The strategy in a bike race is not to be out in front where the full blast of the wind is hitting you. The most efficient strategy in a bike race is to be second in line, to draft off of the person who goes first, so that they cut the wind for you so you save all your energy and are able to just overtake them on the last lap, so to speak.
So US multinational corporations, since the age of globalization, have relied on the blob, have relied on the State Department, the Pentagon to the CIA, in order to protect and secure foreign markets for their products, to protect and secure cheap manufacturing in those regions. To protect and secure against issues around tariffs or taxes or labor or regulations. And it's the job of the State Department to go in and pressure that foreign country's government. It is the job of our Central Intelligence Agency to go in and rig those elections or to go in and set up a constellation of surround-sound NGO media in order to get that country's population to support that initiative. And it's the job of the Pentagon to do both the sort of dangling threat of military intervention in the name of democracy or the civil affairs of hearts-and-minds works around psychological warfare in order to make that that happened.
Now, that is not that redounds to the benefit of US multinational corporations who operate in that region. So famous example: in the oil and gas space, for example, is Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, these companies, most of their most of their profits come from all the different shale or hydrocarbon reserves around the whole rest of the world. Other countries don't want to voluntarily just give up their oil or give up their gas or give up these these loose business partnerships where they get mostly railed in negotiations there. The government has to cut the wind for Chevron and for ExxonMobil, the government has to go in and basically coerce these foreign governments or or offer carrots and sticks. And so so those companies draft off of the activities of the blob. Now because they are also major financial donors to the political class, they are essentially donors into the decision making within the government, while their own corporate and financial interests draft off the activities of the government who does that work?
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:
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.