You Gotta have a Boogyman

Joseph Goebbels, head of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Jules Streicher, founder and publisher of Der Stürmer newspaper, and some propaganda.

A very good friend, DD, turned me onto Slate's amazing article, How Hitler Conquered Germany, a cautionary tale in terms of how people can be manipulated through the artful use of propaganda.

Propaganda was the operational method of the Third Reich, the idea that projected the ideology. Hitler’s chief architect, Albert Speer, told the Nuremberg Tribunal “that what distinguished the Third Reich from all previous dictatorships was its use of all the means of communication to sustain itself and to deprive its objects of the power of independent thought.”5 Hitler was a magician of illusion. The cultural historian Piers Brendon has described propaganda as the “gospel” of Nazism and notes that Goebbels “liked to say that Jesus Christ has been a master of propaganda and that the propagandist must be the man with the greatest knowledge of souls.”

The other part of this twisted philosophy is the fact one must have a boogeyman in order to solidify the notion of us against them, something akin to the US using Russia as the boogeyman in order to continue funding the MIC, aka the Military Industrial Complex, while bankrupting the country.

The essence of the Nazi propaganda method was repetition. Goebbels argued that the skill of British propagandists during the Great War resided in the fact that they used just a few powerful slogans and kept repeating them.13 Historian Baruch Gitlis has argued that: “Wherever the German turned, he met his most ‘dangerous enemy,’ the Jew,”14 and that “while he walked in the street he encountered posters and slogans against the Jews at every square, on every wall and billboard. Even graffiti greeted the German at the entrance to his dwelling: ‘Wake up Germany, Judah must rot!’”

Goebbels channeled Bernays without question. Propaganda, written in 1928, was the blueprint Goebbels needed to enable Hitler to conquer Europe.

Edward Bernays the "godfather" of Goebbels

The Dataset

BRT has talked about propaganda on numerous occasions as it's fascinating & disquieting to see how this technique can be used to manipulate the public in ways that truly boggle the mind. When propaganda is combined with digital, fascination turns to dread because of what's happening in America in the year of our lord 2017.

What we fear is a future in which potent personal data is combined with increasingly sophisticated technology to produce and deliver unaccountable personalized media and messages at a national scale. Combined with data-driven emerging media technologies, it is clear that the use of behavioral data to nudge voters with propaganda-as-a-service is set to explode. Imagine being able to synthesize a politician saying anything you type and then upload the highly realistic video to Facebook with a fake CNN chyron banner. Expect the early versions of these tools available before 2020.

At the core of this is data privacy, or as they more meaningfully describe it in Europe, data protection. Unfortunately, the United States is headed in a dangerous direction on this issue. President Trump’s FCC and the Republican party radically deregulated our ISP’s ability to sell data monetization on paying customer data. Anticipate this administration further eroding privacy protections, as it confuses the public interest for the interests of business, despite being the only issue that about 95% of voters agree on, across every partisan and demographic segment according to HuffPo/YouGov. We propose three ideas to address these issues, which are crucial to preserving American democracy.

Cambridge Analytica, 1901 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Suite 902, Washington, DC, 20006

What's interesting about all of this is the fact CA is totally up front as to what services they are selling to us rubes. 

Edward Bernays, the godfather of propaganda, would be proud.

War is peace ...

In Russia, state television varies little, aesthetically and narratively, from channel to channel.Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker; Source photographs from Getty

Propaganda comes in all forms whether it be whisperings by Iago to Othello or musings from Edward Bernays in his seminal 1928 masterpiece Propaganda. entities one and all designed to persuade its target audience to believe.

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. ”

When reading Bernays, one sees how propaganda, in the guise of Russian TV "news", conceals the truth about Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by using a perverse kind of reality distortion field combining War is Peace with Us Against Them mantras to encourage patriotism to the state without evaluating if said news is truthful or not.

Meanwhile, pedestrian traffic around the square flowed smoothly and speedily. People went in and out of the Metro and a three-story H&M store. They did not stop and stare at the mute scenes of arrest. They did not seem to notice, and the not-noticing did not appear effortful. It seemed, rather, that the Muscovites going about their business and the young women being arrested inhabited different realities. The protesters lived in a world where Russia was waging a brutal, inexplicable war in Ukraine, where it was bombing residential neighborhoods in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. The rest of the people in the square lived in a world where this war did not exist.

Gudkov summed up the world view shaped by Russian television: “Russia is a victim, as it has been ever since the Second World War. The West aims to establish world domination. Its ultimate goal is to humiliate Russia and take possession of its natural resources. Russia is forced to defend itself.” Days before the full-scale invasion began, the Levada Center asked Russians who they thought was responsible for the mounting tensions in Ukraine. Three per cent blamed Russia, fourteen per cent blamed Ukraine, and sixty per cent blamed the United States.

War is peace ...

Most of Russia’s propaganda language is plainly Orwellian. After a few days, newscasts were consistently referring to the war as an “operation to restore peace.” On Tuesday night, when the TV Rain Web site was blocked, the channel was broadcasting a story about how the government, working through ad agencies, was offering to pay bloggers and TikTokers to post talking points about the war. “All posts should be accompanied by #LetsGoPeace and #DontAbandonOurOwn,” the offer began. Among the talking points: “We are calling for peace, and it’s unfortunate that these are the means we must use to achieve it.”

The 1st

Trial of Socrates

Amendment 1

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The most important Amendment there is, is now under threat, thanks to Obama signing H.R 5181 aka The "Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act"

To whit: 

Long before the "fake news" meme became a daily topic of extensive conversation on such discredited mainstream portals as CNN and WaPo, H.R. 5181 would task the Secretary of State with coordinating the Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence, and the Broadcasting Board of Governors to “establish a Center for Information Analysis and Response,” which will pinpoint sources of disinformation, analyze data, and — in true dystopic manner — ‘develop and disseminate’ “fact-based narratives” to counter effrontery propaganda.

In short, long before "fake news" became a major media topic, the US government was already planning its legally-backed crackdown on anything it would eventually label "fake news."

Fast forward to December 8, when the "Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act" passed in the Senate, quietly inserted inside the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) Conference Report.

And now, following Friday's Obama signing of the NDAA on Friday evening, the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act is now law.

Why the 1st is so important as seen thru the lens of history. 

Socrates

Socrates was killed in 399 BC for “failing to acknowledge the gods that the [government] acknowledges”.

Using the Printing Press

Before the invention of the movable type printing press by Gutenberg, the church controlled the production of books.

Gutenberg’s invention allowed cheap production of books. This challenged the monopoly on books by the church, and thus allowed different viewpoints to be heard.

For example, when Martin Luther posted his “95 Theses” on a church door in Germany criticizing the corrupt Catholic practice of selling “indulgences” – paying the church in return for a reduction of your time in purgatory – the printing press spread his writings throughout all of Germany in 2 weeks, and throughout “all of Christendom” within a month.   This launched the Protestant Reformation, and challenged the power of the Catholic church.

So Pope Alexander VI issued an edict against unlicensed printing in  1501.

And in 1535, Francis I of France prohibited – under penalty of death – the printing of any books.

Read the rest of the Washington's Blog blurb. Chilling says it all.

Mintrue looms.

1984 Big Brother is watching you

The only constant in life is change - Heraclitus

2Step/R. Moran

Since the beginning of time, man’s reality distortion field rules as our tiny take on existence
is but a dust mote in god’s eye, something readily understood by Heraclitus, in 500 BC, stating 
The only constant in life is change. 

Heraclitus

Ignore this at your peril.

Here are the essential characteristics that define the success or failure of every endeavor.

500BC: The Art of War

The Art of War - Sun Tzu

Competency and situational awareness determine the success of any given initiative.

• “All warfare is based on deception.”
• “It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on.”
• “He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.”
• “If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle”
• “We are not fit to lead an army on the march unless we are familiar with the face of the country—its mountains and forests, its pitfalls and precipices, its marshes and swamps.”

Selling the Big Lie, aka Propaganda, drives advertising, politics and war.

The "art" of persuasion

 

1928, Edwin Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, writes Propaganda

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.

1933, Joseph Goebbels, channeling Bernays, creates the gospel of Nazism

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.”

“National Socialism is a religion.

 All we lack is a religious genius capable of uprooting outmodedreligious practices and putting new ones in their place. We lack traditions and ritual. One day soon National Socialism will be the religion

Subjectivity rules based on the fact every person views reality in her own way.

The Rashomon effect: Tajōmaru the bandit and the wife of a samurai,
two characters who offer different perspectives of events in the film Rashomon

The word assume kills clear thinking as it remains forever the ass of you and me.

“Question everything.” - Einstein

Inventing ways to “explain” the unknowable never ceases to amaze.

Politics and the English Language - Orwell

Governments lie. - I. F. Stone

Misery loves company.

It’s all about the money.

News as entertainment medium

Tech never sleeps.

Fake Nooze

BRT has channeled Network and George Orwell ad nauseam as both sources spoke truth to power in ways not even contemplated in today's frenzy over fake news and the mainline press who portend to "know" the truth based on unsubstantiated and anonymous "sources" who tell us rubes where fake news comes from and how to "combat" it when one faces it.

On Wednesday, U.S. congressional negotiators approved $160 million to combat what they deem foreign propaganda and the alleged Russian campaign to spread “fake news.” The measure is part of the National Defense Authorization Act and gives the State Department the power to identify “propaganda” and counter it.

This bipartisan stampede into an Orwellian future for the American people and the world’s population follows a shoddily sourced Washington Post article that relied on a new anonymous group (propornot) that identified some 200 Internet sites, including some of the most prominent American independent sources of news, as part of a Russian propaganda network.

Typical of this new McCarthyism, the report lacked evidence that any such network actually exists but instead targeted cases where American journalists expressed skepticism about claims from Western officialdom.

Consortiumnews.com was included on the list apparently because we have critically analyzed some of the claims and allegations regarding the crises in Syria and Ukraine, rather than simply accept the dominant Western “group thinks.”

Also on the “black list” were such quality journalism sites as Counterpunch, Truth-out, Truthdig, Naked Capitalism and ZeroHedge along with many political sites ranging across the ideological spectrum.

Yours truly checked out propornot and Robert Perry is right, no verification regarding the sites purported to be purveyors of fake news is given other then copious bloviation, which means slander becomes a viable response to environments as questionable as this.

Reality TV ...

Reality TV, as every intelligent person knows, is NOT REALITY. a notion shared by the Pentagon when it blew a cool $500 million for fake reality Al Qaeda videos in order to track the people who watched them.

The Pentagon gave a controversial UK PR firm over half a billion dollars to run a top secret propaganda program in Iraq, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal.

Bell Pottinger’s output included short TV segments made in the style of Arabic news networks and fake insurgent videos which could be used to track the people who watched them, according to a former employee.

The agency’s staff worked alongside high-ranking U.S. military officers in their Baghdad Camp Victory headquarters as the insurgency raged outside.

It gets better

The firm’s output was signed off by former General David Petraeus – then commander of the coalition forces in Iraq - and on occasion by the White House, he said.

Now, lets think about this. An illegal war, based on non-existent WMDs, sold to us rubes by various parties that we all know about, right?, combined with this reality tv fubar totally makes sense, right? 

Reminds me of the election from hell where propaganda rules while, as a good friend of mine said, "You're polishing a turd, Son, You're polishing a turd.  " In this case, two.

"And so it goes." - Kurt Vonnegut

PR

Century of the Self, a ground breaking British Documentary, is a very long video of which seeing just short snippets of same, tells volumes about how PR, aka Propaganda, when skillfully applied, generates public consent in all things related to war, commerce and politics using sophisticated techniques espoused by men such as Gustave Le Bon, Sigmund Freud and Edward Bernnays, among significant others.

Propaganda - Edward Bernays

CHAPTER I
ORGANIZING CHAOS 

      THE conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. 

      We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. 

      Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet. 

      They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons—a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million—who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world. 

Sounds familiar doesn't it as we see the continual push for never ending war beginning with  Making the world "Safe for Democracy", the slogan Bernays created for Woodrow Wilson when he declared war with Germany on April 2, 1917.

Gustave Le Bon

Sigmund Freud

Edward Bernays

Factoid: Bernays was Freud's Nephew

Click Rule From the Shadows to get more info on this most fascinating of subjects.

Boiling Frogs

Sweet Benjamin's, the most popular bill in the US save for the dollar, may be going away if government, the banks and CC companies have their way, something along the lines of boiling frogs regarding our privacy if we passively let this happen as it has in parts of Europe and in India. 

Suppose you want to boil a frog. How do you do it? You could place the frog into a pot of hot water, but as soon as it feels the heat, it will jump out. So, what can you do? Put a pot of cool water on the stove and then add the frog. Not sensing danger the frog will stay. Next, turn the burner on low to slowly heat the water. As the water warms, the frog relaxes. The warmth feels good. As the water gets hotter it acts like a steam bath draining away energy and deepening the frog's relaxation. The frog becomes sleepy and has less and less energy while the water is getting hotter and hotter. By the time the frog realizes its danger, the water is beginning to boil, and it is too late to take action. There is neither time nor energy left to do anything. The frog perishes in the boiling water. 

This frog parable is but a myth but it still applies to the dangers of the possible elimination of cash, the last bastion of anonymity us poor rubes have in the 24/7 surveillance world of 2017. To whit.

An operation that began as a seemingly obscure academic discussion three years ago is now becoming a full-blown propaganda campaign by some of the most powerful institutions in the industrialized world. This is what rightly should be termed the War on Cash. Like the War on Terror, the War on Cancer or the War on Drugs, its true agenda is sinister and opaque. If we are foolish enough to swallow the propaganda for complete elimination of cash in favor of pure digital bank money, we can pretty much kiss our remaining autonomy and privacy goodbye. George Orwell’s 1984 will be here on steroids.

Let me be clear. Here we discuss not various block-chain digital technologies, so-called crypto-currencies. We are not addressing private payment systems such as China’s WeChat. Nor do we discuss e-banking or use of bank credit cards such as Visa or Master Card or others. These are of an entirely different quality from the goal of the ongoing sinister war on cash. They are all private services not state.

What we are discussing is a plot, and it is a plot, by leading central banks, select governments, the International Monetary Fund in collusion with major international banks to force citizens—in other words, us!—to give up holding cash or using it to pay for purchases. Instead we would be forced to use digital bank credits. The difference, subtle though it may at first seem, is huge. As in India following the mad Modi US-inspired war on cash late in 2016, citizens would forever lose their personal freedom to decide how to pay or their privacy in terms of money. If I want to buy a car and pay cash to avoid bank interest charges, I cannot. My bank will limit the amount of digital money I can withdraw on any given day. If I want to stay in a nice hotel to celebrate a special day and pay cash for reasons of privacy, not possible. But this is just the surface.

Disquieting is it not? Think about it, I know I have.

Newspeak 2018

Going beyond the mangled syntax of our beloved POTUS is the administration's push to censor, eliminate and codify words along the lines of Newspeak, the official language of 1984.

"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten." (1.5.23, Syme 1984) 

34 year later ...

Consider us officially in an Orwellian world, though we only half realize it. While we were barely looking, significant parts of an American language long familiar to us quite literally, and in a remarkably coherent way, went down the equivalent of George Orwell’s infamous Memory Hole.

Since then, the language of an America that the president and his associates reject has been under constant attack. Some of those acts of aggression were to be expected, given the campaign promises that preceded his election. Take climate change, which Donald Trump called a “Chinese hoax” long before he filled his administration with rabid climate deniers. The Department of Agriculture was typical. Its new officials excised the very word “climate change” from their website, substituting “weather extremes,” and changed the phrase “reduce greenhouse gases” to the palpably deceptive “increase nutrient use energy.” Across the board, in fact, .gov websites replaced “climate change” with vague words like “resilience” and “sustainability.”

It might be worth reflecting on the words of Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister for Hitler’s Nazi Party. He had a clear-eyed vision of the importance of disguising the ultimate goal of his particular campaign against democracy and truth. “The secret of propaganda,” he said, is to “permeate the person it aims to grasp without his even noticing that he is being permeated.”

Consider this a word of warning to the wise. Perhaps instead of hurling insults at President Trump’s incompetence and the seeming disarray of his presidency, it might be worth taking a step back and asking ourselves whether there is indeed a larger goal in mind: Namely, a slow, patient, incremental dismantling of democracy, beginning with its most precious words.

To realise English Socialism (Ingsoc) in Oceania, the Party created the controlled language of Newspeak to ensure universal orthodoxy of ideology and politics among the populace.

Seen below is a partial list of Newspeak works. 

• artsem – artificial insemination
• bb – Big Brother
• bellyfeel – a blind, enthusiastic acceptance of an idea
• blackwhite – to believe that black is white, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary
• crimestop – to rid oneself of unwanted thoughts, i.e., thoughts that interfere with the ideology of the Party. This way, a person avoids committing thoughtcrime
• crimethink – Thoughtcrime, thoughts that are unorthodox or outside the official government platform (or the crime of thinking such thoughts)
• dayorder – Order of the day
• doubleplusgood -Replaces excellent, best and benevolent
• doubleplusungood - Replaces terrible and worst

Addendum: The Trump administration is planning to instate a rule that will bar recipients of federal family planning funding from educating women about abortion options, making referrals to doctors that provide abortions, or providing abortion care. Conservatives have cheered the move as a way for the federal government to partially “defund” Planned Parenthood without requiring an act of Congress.

In essence the ... New Trump Administration Rule Will Force Doctors to Stop Saying “Abortion”?

Any questions about this version of the Memory Hole circa 2018?

Rinse & Repeat

When yours truly sees this pix, it reminds me of what is happening in America where illiteracy, stupidity and propaganda rule while the country continues to slide toward an abyss of our own making. 

We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities. 

There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book. 

Combine this with the incredible incompetency and deceitfulness of Hillary's interview with the FBI where any intelligent person with an ability to read anything of consequence, can see why this nation is so screwed in more ways then this writer can count.

According to the FBI’s notes, between March 25 and March 31 of 2015, someone mistakenly deleted Clinton’s archived mailbox from her server and exported files. The name of the person who deleted the emails was redacted.

“In a follow-up FBI interview on May 3, 2016, ------ Indicated he believed he had an 'oh s--t' moment and sometime between March 25-31, 2015 deleted the Clinton archive mailbox from PRN server and used BleachBit to delete the exported .PST files he had created on the server system containing Clinton’s emails,” the report stated.

BleachBit is a software designed to prevent the recovery of deleted files. 

Investigators also found that the State Department issued a guidance to employees not to use their personal emails for work during Clinton’s tenure. Clinton stated she did not recall this specific notice.

She also said she received no direction from State on preserving her records when she left the department in early 2013 — but claimed she could not recall every briefing she received at that time because of a concussion she suffered in late 2012.

Rinse & Repeat, Rinse & Repeat: Let's not talk about the number of unsecured devices she had (13?), that cannot be found or that she could not remember being trained by the State Department on handling or retaining classified information.

It gets better. 

GONE, GIRL

Hillary Clinton’s Team Lost a Laptop Full of Her Emails in the Actual Mail

A laptop filled with Hillary Clinton’s emails is missing, the FBI just revealed. It makes the stink around Hillary’s private account even worse.

Rinse & Repeat, Rinse & Repeat or maybe it's true, it's turtles all the way on down, right?

Better yet, Keystone Cops antics apply in this never ending saga of gross incompetence and inept lying to the nth degree in mishandling sensitive and corrupt content to the nth degree.

K. Cops to the rescue.:)

The Definition of 'Bourse'

DEFINITION of 'Bourse'
A market organized for the purpose of buying and selling securities, commodities, options and other investments. A bourse is more commonly known as a stock exchange. The word "bourse" is based on the house, belonging to Van der Burse, where merchants would gather and trade with one another.

INVESTOPEDIA EXPLAINS 'Bourse'
Historically, those interested in exchanging commodities and other investments met in common areas to discuss transactions. Over time, traders became more organized and the exchange process more codified, resulting in the development of exchanges such as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Today the word "bourse" is more commonly associated with the Paris stock exchange, the Paris Bourse or Euronext Paris.

This is where it gets interesting regarding Iran, nukes and continued hegemony of the dollar.

A little detail, nobody talks about, and maybe most pundits – even honest ones – are not aware of. In 2007 Iran was about to launch the Iranian Oil Bourse (IOB) – an international hydrocarbon exchange, akin to a stock exchange, where all countries, hydrocarbon producers or not, could trade this (still) chief energy source in euros, as an alternative to the US dollar.

This, of course would have meant the demise of dollar hegemony – the liberation of the world from the dollar stranglehold. This was inadmissible for Washington. It would have meant the end of the dollar as the world’s chief reserve currency, and giving up the instrument of coercing the world into accepting Washington’s dictate, the tool that serves to dish out sanctions left and right – no way!

Hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of hydrocarbons are traded on a daily basis; huge amounts of dollars that find no justification in the US economy, but – they allow the FED to print money at will – and every new dollar is a dollar of international debt, filling the reserve coffers of nations around the world, thereby also gradually devaluing the US currency, but barely affecting the US economy.

As long as petrol and gas are traded in dollars – a ‘negotiated’ imposition on Saudi Arabia by Father Bush, friend of the House of Saud, in the early 70s under the Carter Administration, in return for military protection – and as long as the world needs hydrocarbons to fuel its industries, so long the world will need dollars, insane amounts of dollars. The so-called Quantitative Easing (QE) allowed the US to print hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars to finance wars and conflicts around the globe, and to fund the relentless Zionist-Anglo-Saxon lie and propaganda machine. No problem. It’s just debt. Debt – paradoxically carried by the very countries that the empire eventually fights and lies to; countries which hold dollars in their reserves.

Interesting don't you think, especially in light of the fact Iraq and Libya wanted to do the same thing prior to the US getting involved in the destruction of both nations.

Past as Prelude

As my loyal readers know, Network is one of the all time favorites of yours truly, a film worthy, IMHO, of belonging in the same league as Strangelove, Godfather I and Citizen Kane as great cinema forcing one to think differently about reality after seeing the work in question. Well, it seems Chayefsky wanted to have an ending even more prescient then the one in the film as his take on the news was prescient to a fault.

Chayefsky - "We are shooting for a third act in which the NETWORK becomes so powerful it is an international power of itself and even declares war on some country."

For Chayefsky it wasn't just about the TV network; he was obsessed with the idea of a multination corporation buying all of America's networks, making them the propaganda arms of these independent powers. This sort of corporate dystopia is very familiar to modern scifi and cyberpunk readers, but was less common in the 70s - especially on the scale that Chayefsky was making Network. While the final film is not exactly science fiction, Chayefsky was heading in that direction, including sketching out his vision of what calamties might befall America in the second half of the 70s:

• racial hysteria + jingoism
• police violence in the ghettos + barrios
• a consolidation of a United Front joining together all sections of the 
• revolutionary, radical + democratic movements
• the sheer numbers of the prisoner class and their terms of existence make them a mighty reservoir of revolutionary substructures and infrastructures

Of course like all the best futurists Chayefsky was simply using the past as a guide; you can see the outlines of William Randolph Hearst's yellow journalism, which pushed America into war with Spain, in Chayefsky's original ending concept. He just took that idea - a media entity so powerful it can cause war - and extrapolated one step further - a media entity so powerful it can go to war.

When you think about it, 6 mega corporations run news in this country with the obstensive purpose to sell ads. The best way to do it is be sensationalist, sleazy, patriotic and fear mongering, characteristics The Donald leveraged to the max when beginning his successful run to get the GOP nomination. Also consider the fact the big 6 are connected directly or indirectly with the Military/Industrial/Congressional Complex, the money and power engine that keeps on giving thus helping the big 6 in transforming news into NOOZE, the "reality" show that misinforms 24/7 to keep us rubes quiet and in the dark along the lines of They Live sans the B&W sunglasses.

This infographic created by Jason at Frugal Dad shows that almost all media comes 
from the same six sources.

That's consolidated from 50 companies back in 1983.

NOTE: This infographic is from last year and is missing some key transactions. GE does not own NBC (or Comcast or any media) anymore. So that 6th company is now Comcast. And Time Warner doesn't own AOL, so Huffington Post isn't affiliated with them.

But the fact that a few companies own everything demonstrates "the illusion of choice," Frugal Dad says. While some big sites, like Digg and Reddit aren't owned by any of the corporations, Time Warner owns news sites read by millions of Americans every year.

Commander-in-chief ...

 As the President’s behavior grew increasingly erratic, General Mark Milley told his staff, “I will fight from the inside.”Photo illustration by Klawe Rzeczy; Source photographs from Getty; National Archives / Newsmakers

As George Orwell so famously said, It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda tours.

Sounds like 45, you know, the self proclaimed genius who knew everything, the one who talked tough about war with blithe confidence as he never fought in one, let alone serve in any way, shape or fashion.

But the gulf between Trump and the generals was not really about money or practicalities, just as their endless policy battles were not only about clashing views on whether to withdraw from Afghanistan or how to combat the nuclear threat posed by North Korea and Iran. The divide was also a matter of values, of how they viewed the United States itself. That was never clearer than when Trump told his new chief of staff, John Kelly—like Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general—about his vision for Independence Day. “Look, I don’t want any wounded guys in the parade,” Trump said. “This doesn’t look good for me.” He explained with distaste that at the Bastille Day parade there had been several formations of injured veterans, including wheelchair-bound soldiers who had lost limbs in battle.

Kelly could not believe what he was hearing. “Those are the heroes,” he told Trump. “In our society, there’s only one group of people who are more heroic than they are—and they are buried over in Arlington.” Kelly did not mention that his own son Robert, a lieutenant killed in action in Afghanistan, was among the dead interred there.

“I don’t want them,” Trump repeated. “It doesn’t look good for me.”

President Bone Spurs