Friday, March 9, 2018

The Skripal Mystery - Supposition Masquerading as Fact

ORIGINAL LINK
Just how far political and journalistic standards have slipped in Britain could be seen again this week with the reaction to the Salisbury spy poisoning story.

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German Startup Finds Ideal Way to Help Old People Not to Feel Lonely

ORIGINAL LINK
The innovative project was founded by Katharina Mayer, a young German entrepreneur in her 20s who cares for elderly people and wants to improve the quality of their lives.

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Tuesday, March 6, 2018

How The US Establishment Lies Through Its Teeth, For War Against Russia

ORIGINAL LINK

Authored by Eric Zuesse via TheDuran.com,

The same people, Republicans and Democrats, who lied through their teeth for an invasion of Iraq in 2003, are doing it again for an invasion of Russia, sometime soon, so as to ‘defend’ ‘democracy’.

The US has by now swallowed up virtually all lands surrounding Russia, at least in Europe, the latest being Ukraine, and is placing its missiles now on and near Russia’s borders, which is to Russians like would be to Americans if Russia had swallowed up Canada and were placing its missiles there.

But the lying holier-than-thou US Establishment accuses Russia of being ‘aggressive’ when Russia holds war-games on and near its borders in order to prepare for a US-NATO invasion, which actually looks increasingly likely to them every day — and not because of ‘Russian propaganda’, but because of the US Government’s actions.

Hillary Clinton clearly hated Russians and wanted to start a war against Russia by establishing a no-fly zone in Russia’s ally Syria (which Russia defends while the US invades and occupies Syria) so as to shoot down Russia’s planes there, and then, when Russia shoots down US planes in retaliation, America would have its pretext for invading Russia itself ‘so as to defend democracy against Russian aggression’ — but instead, Donald Trump became elected, and he has now turned out to be almost as much of a neoconservative as she was. This displays how extreme the grip is that the neocons, the Establishment and its many minions who dominate both of the two Parties and the press, now have.

An example of the Establishment’s holier-than-thou lies, is an article that appeared on February 22nd at the magazine, The National Interest, whose article-title is itself a marvelous deception, “Averting the US-Russia Warpath” (while the subliminal message there is: reasons why we’ll probably have to invade Russia), and whose authors are three ‘defense’ hawks, including James Northey Miller, of Harvard.

He had been an Under Secretary of Defense during the Administration of the merely moderately neoconservative President Barack Obama — the President who in 2014 grabbed Ukraine, and who used Al Qaeda in Syria to lead ’the rebels’ there in order to try to grab Syria. (Ukraine had been friendly toward Russia and is now rabid against Russia; and Syria was and is allied with Russia; so, both of these two lands were American grabs, and the neocon Trump continues both.)

Anyone who trusts the US Government to represent in international affairs the interests of America’s public, instead of the interests of America’s billionaires, has been deceived by the Establishment’s (the billionaires’ and their agents’) virtually all-pervasive propaganda in America, and therefore needs a lot of re-learning about US history before understanding anything about US foreign policies.

There is very good and sound reason why around the world the United States is considered, by far, to be “the biggest threat to peace” — because it is. (The Peter Kuznick book and Oliver Stone documentary Untold History of the United States, are the best cleaner-away of ‘historical’ lies about US history from 1912 to 2012 that I know of — and the seeing or reading of that, will expose to anyone the mockery of historical truth which is represented in articles such as “Averting the US-Russia Warpath.”)

This ordinary, and profoundly deceptive, article starts:

FOR NEARLY twenty years following the end of the Cold War, military confrontation between the United States and the Russian Federation seemed implausible. Even during periods of tension, as during the Kosovo crisis in the late 1990s, few believed that disagreement between Washington and Moscow could lead to a serious crisis, no less war.

Before the first decade of the new century had passed, however, Russian officials were accusing the United States of working to isolate Russia. Such apprehensions have mounted steadily in Russia in the years since. At the same time, Russian behavior, including interventions in Ukraine and Syria, military posturing and harassment in Europe, and interference in Western elections, has led many in the United States to conclude that, while a US-Russian conflict is by no means inevitable, the risk of such a confrontation is growing.

The “Russian officials were accusing the United States,” while there was supposedly actual “Russian behavior, including interventions in Ukraine and Syria, military posturing and harassment in Europe, and interference in Western elections,” which pretexts the Establishment is now debating with itself whether that will be sufficient to ‘justify’ an American and NATO invasion, as response.

This holier-than-thou and upside-down presumption, of Russian-government guilt and American-government innocence, is reeking throughout that pompous article; but what’s even worse is that the reality is exactly the opposite of the story-line that’s portrayed in it.

The actual reality is: Ever since 24 February 1990, the US and its NATO allies have been pursuing secretly a continuation of the Cold War after the termination in 1991 of the Soviet Union, and of its communism, and of its counter-NATO military alliance, the Warsaw Pact; and the US plan has been to swallow up, first the former Warsaw Pact nations, and then the former nations (such as Ukraine itself) that were inside the Soviet Union itself, and then, any other foreign allies that Russia might still have (such as Syria); and, then, finally, to invade and conquer Russia itself.

And, instead of helping those countries, the US Government has been destroying them.

Neoconservative, holier-than-thou, lying is so widespread in America’s ‘news’media, there’s practically nothing else than such deceptions about Russia, that’s “Fit to Print” (or broadcast) in today’s United States, and this is true in the media of both Parties, not merely the Republican media, or the Democratic media. This neoconservative consensus — the bipartisan ceaseless warmongering — is driven by the military-industrial complex (MIC) profiteers, whose companies’ main market is the American and allied governments (so that in order to increase their sales, more and costlier weapons must be purchased by those governments).

It’s the MIC-sick current style of capitalism: capitalism that’s of, by, and for, the billionaires: a fascism that’s merely called ‘democracy’. (By contrast, one area of commerce that Russia refused to privatize was its weapons-manufacturers — there aren’t any stockholders who pay politicians to increase the ‘defense’ budget: instead, the Government itself is in control over that.)

America’s billionaires, and their many agents, are giving hypocrisy a bad name.



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Sunday, March 4, 2018

When people argue FOR YouTube’s right to discriminate, as “it is a Private Company”... I can’t help but think of a certain Baker who refused to bake a certain wedding cake and the ensuing firestorm and outrage that followed.

ORIGINAL LINK


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Social Media Censorship Is Vastly More Dangerous Than The Censored Material

ORIGINAL LINK
US oligarchs: Russia hacked our election.
Public: Uh oh! What should we do about it?
US oligarchs: Greatly inflate the military budget, sanction US rivals, and censor dissenting opinions.
Public: Umm… aren’t those things you’ve always wanted to do anyway?
US oligarchs: Hush.

I know objecting to internet censorship makes me a right-wing Nazi-kissing literal Hitler in the eyes of many in this bizarre funhouse mirror world of online political discourse, but I insist that censorship by powerful corporations is one of the greatest obstacles we face in our fight to survive and thrive as a species in a world that is increasingly imperiled and dominated.

It has become painfully obvious that political solutions to the problems we face are locked shut to us. Democracy does not exist in America in any meaningful way, and those of us who live outside of America are all subject to the whims of the power establishment which has loosely centralized itself there. Here in Australia we have paper ballots, exit polls and ranked-choice voting, which is a wet dream for many American election reform advocates, but it’s completely meaningless for us in a lot of ways because we’re functionally a US military/intelligence asset. All matters of interest to the US-centralized power establishment are completely uninfluenced by Australian voters; we only get to pretend to be a real country insofar as that doesn’t interfere with the interests of the empire.

I love my birth country Australia but as a state it doesn't exist. Here is why it had its prime-minister denounce me, moved to cancel my passport, secretly passed data on me to US intelligence and has never made representations on my behalf. It is owned by US+UK corporations.

 — @JulianAssange

Before WWII Australia was dominated by the UK--of which it was a colony. After the war it subordinated itself U.S. hegemony. A brief attempt at an independent Australian foreign policy in 1975 resulted in a US+UK backed constitutional coup: https://t.co/I6bxou4VeO.

 — @JulianAssange

The idea that we can vote our problems away is only useful insofar as it gets the populace trying the doors and learning for themselves that those doors are locked. The rigged US Democratic primary was a perfect example of that; if millions of people hadn’t tried to elect an unauthorized candidate, they never would have discovered that the machine was manipulating the field in a plethora of different ways to prevent them from accomplishing their goal. But beyond that the door of actual political democracy is bolted shut.

This is not yet the case with democratized information sharing. The operational word being yet.

I highlighted this way back in May when I wrote an article titled “How To Fight The Establishment Propaganda Machine And Win”, which was promoted by Julian Assange and received a fair bit of attention. I’d noticed what a crucial role the mass media plays in manipulating the way ordinary people think and vote, and how the oligarchs would be unable to rule if public trust in their propaganda machine was shattered, so I pointed out the fact that our species has a radically unprecedented ability to share ideas and information and described some ways we can use that new ability to disrupt the machine.

But the machine had noticed this hole in its armor as well, and planned accordingly. Since I published that article the democratization of information has been greatly hindered by censorship from powerful Silicon Valley plutocrats, with Google algorithm changes slashing the viewership of leftist and anti-establishment websites like CounterPunch, World Socialist Website, Alternet and WikiLeaks, while Facebook and Twitter along with Google’s YouTube grow increasingly brazen with the kinds of political speech they are willing to silence. Facebook has caused a drastic drop in the visibility of unauthorized articles, and I myself have been temporarily suspended for political speech by both Facebook and Twitter.

Just the other day I was supposed to have a live streamed interview on Youtube with progressive commentator Jamarl Thomas, but minutes prior he had his live streaming privileges revoked for reporting on a standard mainstream story about Russiagate. Thomas is someone I’d consider a relatively mellow voice on the progressive circuit, providing thoughtful commentary on the political landscape without extending nearly as far into the realm of conspiracy theory as many of us do, and they censored him of all people, for a story about something that happened on freaking MSNBC. He talks about his experience here in the first part of our conversation.

Hours after Medium announced it had suspended the accounts of right-wing pundits Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec and Laura Loomer, Mother Jones Senior Reporter Shane Bauer was on Twitter tagging Medium and telling them that they needed to censor antiwar leftists like myself as well for expressing skepticism of the establishment Syria narrative. The empire and its loyalists will never be content with merely silencing right-wing voices, which is why when Infowars starts receiving strikesfrom Youtube for merely expressing skepticism, we should all get worried.

I don’t care for Infowars. I think the way echo chamber cultists try to paint it as a white supremacist Nazi outlet is cartoonishly ridiculous, but it isn’t a good source of information and Alex Jones’ analyses of what’s going on in the world rarely seem to consist of much more than him making whatever noises sound most soothing to conservatives who are fed up with the status quo. But the things that he says are infinitely less dangerous than powerful media corporations censoring controversial political speech.

And when I say censorship, I mean censorship. America has a corporatist system of government, with no meaningful separation between government power and corporate power, so corporate media isgovernment media, and corporate censorship is government censorship. When you’ve got Senate Judiciary Committee meetings featuring plutocrat-sponsored Senators meeting with plutocrat-owned social media officials talking about how to use internet censorship to “prevent the fomenting of discord” in America, you’ve got government censorship.

Oh, you didn’t hear about that last one? Yeah, it’s a thing. A few months ago the Senate Judiciary Committee spoke with top legal and security officials for Facebook, Twitter and Google in a very disturbing way about the need to silence dissenting voices. Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii demanded that the companies adopt a “mission statement” declaring their commitment “to prevent the fomenting of discord.” Former FBI agent and deep state lackey Clint Watts kicked it up even further, saying, “Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words. America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.”

This happened on the Senate floor, right out in the open.

The media manipulators know all about manufacturing the consent of the governed. They know you can’t just say “Hey we want to invade Iraq to destabilize the region and flood the area with terrorists so we can justify troop presence throughout the Middle East, thwart the agendas of Russia and former Soviet allies, and ensure the institution of the petrodollar in key OPEC nations,” so they say “Everyone! Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and he’s trying to do another 9/11!”

In the same way, they can’t say that anyone who questions establishment narratives needs to be censored, but they can come up with reasons to censor soft targets with little mainstream support who the dominant American culture enjoys making fun of. People like Alex Jones. Once they’ve got the public trusting Big Brother to protect them from the Alex Joneses, Mike Cernoviches and RTs of the world using every excuse from “harassment” to “fake news” to “Russian propaganda”, they’ll secure more and more public consent to silence anyone who makes things difficult for the mass media machine.

Don’t like it? Go to Gab, where you can talk about it as much as you like to eleven people with cartoon frog user pics.

Mother Jones' @shane_bauer has deleted his tweet calling for the corporate censorship of the antiwar left without apology or retraction, so for posterity here is documentation that empire loyalists will never be content with merely silencing right-wingers.

 — @caitoz

No political speech should be censored. The new media is a tool that we need to use to dialogue with one another and share information, and if these vast social media corporations obstruct political speech that is not explicitly violent or pornographic they are disrupting humanity’s attempts to communicate with itself. This is far, far more dangerous than anything Alex Jones has ever said, because it removes the only obstacle standing in the way of the omnicidal, ecocidal plutocracy which is threatening our very existence with the looming probability of extinction via nuclear holocaust or climate chaos. Individuals with access to unauthorized ideas and information are that obstacle, and the plutocrats are neutering us with censorship.

Refuse to consent to this. They wouldn’t be working so hard with the Russian propaganda/fake news narrative and the “Nazis are taking over America” narrative to manufacture that consent if they didn’t need it. Leave all nonviolent political speech alone and let us sort it out, Big Brother. Ordinary people are far more sane and intelligent than you are.

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YouTube TYRANTS now attacking your ability to think, speak or question the state… are we living under Communist China? – NaturalNews.com

YouTube TYRANTS now attacking your ability to think, speak or question the state… are we living under Communist China? – NaturalNews.com:



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