https://consortiumnews.com/2018/06/27/did-sen-warner-and-comey-collude-on-russia-gate
Seeking Truth in a World of Propaganda. Links do not necessarily indicate agreement with stories or perspectives.
“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.” - Plato
Monday, July 2, 2018
Tuesday, June 26, 2018
Monday, June 25, 2018
Activism Without Inner Work Is Impotent
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Image via Toshimasa Ishibashi
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Image via Toshimasa Ishibashi
Have you ever known someone who’s intensely interested in helping people, but is so neurotic and unskillful that they mostly just make things worse?
“Stop!” you’ll find yourself wanting to yell at such people. “Stop helping! Go help yourself!”
That’s how I see most political activism today. So many well-intentioned people who want to help, and are so crazed by mass media psyops and cultural mind viruses that their energy seemingly goes everywhere but where it needs to. I’d like to say a bit about that here, if you’ll indulge me.
Revolution Is An Inside Job #revolution #awakening #evolution https://t.co/qKmulNQ2th
— @caitoz
It’s really weird how many people in the political circles I move in are still running pretty much the exact same programs they were running in 2016. There are still former Berners acting like Hillary Clinton is the single greatest threat to America despite her being more or less irrelevant in 2018. There are still leftists and anarchists acting as though small neo-Nazi groups present a greater existential threat than the mainstream neoliberal neoconservative Orwellian power establishment. There are still liberals running the same “OMG TRUMP NAZI LITERALLY HITLER WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE” script despite overwhelming evidence showing that the most evil things this administration has done are all extensions of Bush and Obama administration policies. There are still anti-interventionist Trump voters doing everything they can to compartmentalize away from the undeniable fact that this president is continuing and expanding the interventionist policies of his predecessors.
Even if you had a crystal clear understanding of what was happening in US politics in 2016, continuing to perceive through the lens of that same understanding today is blindness. And the more the world continues to change (and change it always will), the more blind you will be if you continue to apply your 2016 worldview to it.
Unless you’ve got a very clear sense for what’s true and what matters and when you’re being manipulated, your conceptual framework for understanding the world is almost a matter of luck of the draw. You were born into a particular family with a particular worldview, you have a set of life experiences which shapes your ideology, and that ideology forms a perceptual filter through which you consume information. That filter dictates what your media consumption habits will look like, what you’ll take in as true, what you’ll reject as false, and what you’ll overlook or omit. You might get very lucky and coincidentally stumble into a worldview which happens to accurately reflect what’s going on in the actual world, but before long that world will change, and your habitual relationship with information will necessarily lead you and reality along diverging paths.
It Is Your Human Duty To Stand Unapologetically In Your Own Authority #propaganda #MSM https://t.co/q6QBBhWWdF
— @caitoz
The only variable in this process, as near as I can tell, is consciousness. Individuals who have done a lot of work bringing consciousness to their mental habits and inner workings are not randomly floating about at the whims of chance in a tornado of information, but are grounded in a clear sense of which way is up. This doesn’t mean that everyone who has done a lot of inner work will necessarily share the same ideology (I often feel like I have more in common with someone on the other end of the political spectrum who has engaged extensively in self-discovery than I have with a fellow socialist who has not). What it does mean is that they have a much better chance of correctly figuring out when they are being told the truth, when they are being manipulated, and whether something is ultimately good or detrimental for the path they’d like to see society walk along. In a culture that is saturated with media propaganda, this is an indispensable asset for understanding the world.
People often ask me where my perspective comes from. What media outlets do I use? What books have I read? Who do I look to to get my finger on the pulse of the world? I usually just list off a few alternative publications I honestly don’t use all that much and a few journalists I mainly enjoy because they sometimes say cool things on Twitter, but I only do this because I don’t expect my real answer would be particularly interesting to the people asking the question.
In all honesty, I actually get my ideas about what’s going on in the world by meandering around between conversations with my husband, conversations and debates I get into with people on social media, random articles and video clips that readers draw my attention to, bits of information I happen to stumble across, and all the while checking in with my guts about the whole mess as I go along. It’s an ongoing and ever-changing process of taking in useful information and discarding unhelpful or harmful information, and it’s guided primarily by the intuition and insight I’ve cultivated through many years of dedicated inner work.
I’ve got a picture of a guy meditating as the feature image for this article (credit to Toshimasa Ishibashi) because that image is a commonly recognized symbol of the pursuit of inner work, but that isn’t to suggest that meditation is the only form that that work can take, or even that it’s necessary. Any method which brings consciousness to one’s inner processes and mental habits is beneficial, including self-inquiry, mindfulness practices, yoga, energy work, and psychotherapy. If you remember that the goal is to no longer be at the whim of preconditioned mental habits in perceiving the world, it’s easy to figure out what practices are useful toward that end by how acutely aware they make you of how little conscious control you have over your own inner processes. Anyone who’s ever tried to still their mind in sitting meditation for the first time knows what I’m talking about.
How Humanity Could Become Impossible To Propagandize #propaganda #media #enlightenment https://t.co/EnT778tsk5
— @caitoz
This matters politically because activism without inner work is impotent. If you’re beholden to the whims of your unexamined mental habits, any political activism you engage in will be determined by the groupthink of the people you’re surrounded by (who are generally equally unconscious) and leaders who may or may not be guided by truth and compassion.
The difference between the activism of someone who has done a lot of inner work and someone who hasn’t is the difference between a highly trained sniper and someone randomly firing shots in the dark. If you don’t have a finely tuned inner truth compass you won’t know where to push, where to pull, when to stop pulling and start pushing and vice versa, or where pushing or pulling would be a waste of energy. You won’t have a clear sense of what’s a worthy goal or what’s just a politically convenient agenda for someone in power. You won’t be able to see the gaps between the bars in the cage and know when and how to make a break for it.
No matter how well-intentioned you are, your good intentions are useless in this fight unless they are guided by cultivated wisdom. Plenty of well-intentioned people have thrown all their activism and energy into feeding into America’s pernicious two-party system, into fanning the flames of Russia hysteria, into cheering for western interventionism in Syria or Iran.
No matter how intelligent you are, your intelligence is useless in this fight unless it’s guided by cultivated wisdom. Plenty of highly intelligent people have poured all their cleverness into justifying neoconservative agendas, into staging coups to install brutal dictators, into creating engines of genocide.
The only thing that will enable you to use your gifts for the benefit of mankind is the guidance of clear inner wisdom, and the only way to obtain that is by buckling down, going against the grain of your unconscious habitual conditioning, and getting to work. The most compassionate thing you can do for the world is to clear your perceptual lenses of falsehood and delusion so that you can make yourself useful to it.
____________________________
Internet censorship is getting pretty bad, so best way to keep seeing the stuff I publish is to get on the mailing list for my website, so you’ll get an email notification for everything I publish. My articles and podcasts are entirely reader and listener-funded, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, or buying my book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.
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Sunday, June 24, 2018
Thursday, June 21, 2018
For The Deep State, Smearing Julian Assange Is As Good As Killing Him
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Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Steemit.com,
As I write this, demonstrations around the world are taking place in protest of WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange's arbitrary detention and silencing by the US-centralized power establishment that has been actively pursuing his destruction for over a decade. The demonstrations will be well-attended, but not a fraction as well-attended as they should be. They will receive international attention, but not a fraction as much attention as they should.
This is because the manipulators and smear merchants who have made their careers paving the way for oligarchic agendas have been successful in killing off sympathy for the plight of Assange. As we discussed yesterday, sympathy is key for getting narratives to take hold in public consciousness. This is why western corporate media will circulate pictures of dead children all day long when it's in the interests of advancing longstanding imperialist agendas, but never when those children were killed by western weapons. If you can tug at someone's heart strings while telling them a story, the story you tell them will slide right in with minimal scrutiny. And it works the other way, too: if you can prevent someone's heart strings from being plucked while hearing about a legitimately heartbreaking story, you can prevent that story from taking hold.
Kill all sympathy for a dissident journalist and you kill all belief in his side of the story.
And Assange's side of the story is indeed devastating to the preferred narrative of the US-centralized empire. A journalist (yes, journalist, per definition) who publishes 100 percent authentic documents exposing the inner mechanics of power structures all over the world, who was forced to seek political asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in order to avoid extradition by the same government which brutalized Chelsea Manning, is on its face a highly sympathetic story. And it does tremendous damage to the narrative that America and its close network of allies are freedom-loving democracies whose systems of government are nothing like those naughty, oppressive regimes they seek to topple.
So they smear him. As often as possible, using whatever they can, they smear his reputation. Because if they can kill all sympathy for him and his outlet, it's as good for their agendas as actually killing him.
The smears work because the social engineers know how to manipulate people. In America, for example, people are herded into two isolated ideological holding pens and encouraged to identify as much as possible with whichever pen they're in so that narratives can be slipped into their consciousness in a smooth, streamlined way. Are you in the 'R' pen and upset about the hand you've been dealt? You should blame the 'D' pen, and those foreigners who are of no strategic consequence to your rulers. Are you in the 'D' pen and upset about the hand you've been dealt? You should blame the 'R' pen, and those Russians whose downfall would advance the longstanding geopolitical agendas of your rulers.
In the same way, those in the 'R' pen were fed narratives against Julian Assange in 2010 which they lapped up because believing them was easier than believing that the pen they're so tightly identified with had enabled the evils revealed in WikiLeaks releases about US war crimes. And in exactly the same way, those in the 'D' pen were fed narratives against Julian Assange in 2016 which they lapped up because believing them was easier than believing that the pen they're so tightly identified with is pervasively corrupt.
By enforcing a strong sense of identification with a particular ideological tribe, they ensure that the psychological discomfort known as cognitive dissonance will arise from any revelation which can be spun as detrimental to that tribe. They then create a narrative which alleviates that discomfort, and that narrative always damages the reputation of the enemies of the power establishment. It's a snake oil cure for an ailment that they deliberately caused.
Nobody actually thinks that Julian Assange is a Russian agent, or a rapist, or a "hostile non-state intelligence service", or any of the other absurd smears I've seen circulating about him throughout all political sectors of the US-centralized empire. Those are not ideas that anyone has taken on board because they sincerely believe there's enough evidence for them to outweigh the undeniable fact that many extremely powerful and influential people stand to benefit from tarnishing his reputation on false pretenses. At best, they're just fairy tales people tell themselves because they're easier than believing that their favorite country/political party persecutes journalists for telling the truth and is as corrupt and evil as the various WikiLeaks publications of their communications would indicate. At worst, it's a fairy tale they are deliberately seeding into public consciousness so that people will believe lies instead of truth.
People find all sorts of ways to wiggle their way around the cognitive dissonance that unedited, authentic documents can create in them when it challenges their deeply treasured identity structures. People who present themselves as anti-establishment progressives often say things like "Well, you can be critical of Assange and still support WikiLeaks for providing a valuable service." And sure, that may be technically true, but it's never actually true for the people who say it: look at their writings and social media posts and you won't see them aggressively defending WikiLeaks, you'll only see them smearing Assange as often as they can get away with. They're just trying to retain their anti-establishment cred (another treasured identity structure) while promulgating smear campaigns which advance the agendas of the CIA and the State Department. They pay lip service to the image they're trying to convey, but their actions tell you where they really stand.
People who disrupt dominant narratives will always be attacked and vilified, because those narratives often form the building blocks of people's identity structures, their egos. An ego is just a collection of believed "I" stories; they typically include believed ideas about really basic things like "I am this body," but they also include a bunch of other "I" stories like "I am a Democrat" or "I am a patriotic American" as well. Attacking dominant narratives on a large scale will cause intense cognitive dissonance in everyone who has a lot of identity wrapped up in the power structure which is weakened by that attack, to such an extent that it can feel as though you yourself are being personally attacked. The way Democrats have talked about Assange since 2016 you get the distinct impression they feel like he may as well have walked up and stabbed them.
As this webcomic from The Oatmeal brilliantly explains, the brain is hardwired to protect strongly valued belief systems in the same way it's hardwired to make sure the body protects itself from a physical attack. This serves a useful function in that it gives us a cognitive strategy for making sense of the world that isn't blown to pieces every time you encounter a new idea, but it can also be malformed in a way which does not accurately represent reality. When that happens, it really is worthwhile to tough it out through the brain's distress signals of cognitive dissonance and consciously restructure your sense-making apparatus in a way that accommodates a more accurate perspective.
This is the invitation whenever you're looking at a WikiLeaks drop which challenges your existing worldview. It's just raw information sitting there, and you can choose to believe a story which allows you to comfortably dismiss it, or you can stick it out through the psychological discomfort and allow it to restructure your worldview. You have defense mechanisms in place to prevent random bits of information from tearing apart your sense-making apparatus that haven't been properly audited for reliability, but a publishing outlet with a 100 percent perfect record for releasing authentic documents is as reliable a source of information as you will ever find.
If your goal is psychological comfort, you have plenty of good reasons to loathe Julian Assange and spend all day helping plutocrats and secretive government agencies damage his reputation so that nobody will ever pay attention to him or his publications. If your goal is the truth, however, it is to your benefit to ignore the smears, to accept the reality of how and why Assange is being targeted, and to allow the truths that have been revealed by WikiLeaks publications to reshape your understanding of how the world works.
* * *
Internet censorship is getting pretty bad, so best way to keep seeing the stuff I publish is to get on the mailing list for my website, so you’ll get an email notification for everything I publish. My articles and podcasts are entirely reader and listener-funded, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, or buying my book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.
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Wednesday, June 20, 2018
"Delete Your Account" Warns Virtual Reality Founding Father
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Virtual Reality pioneer Jaron Lanier with a prototype VR kit in 1990. Photograph: Rex Features
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In a new explosive interview, Silicon Valley tech pioneer and creator of the virtual reality 'avatar' Jaron Lanier tells people to delete your social media accounts due to the strong correlation between persistent social media usage and a dramatic societal rise in depression, anger, and anxiety that he says is the result of internet-induced modified forms of behavior.
The warning comes in the wake of his new book which details how the creators of social media and the early engineers behind the internet "foolishly laid the foundations for global monopolies."
Virtual Reality pioneer Jaron Lanier with a prototype VR kit in 1990. Photograph: Rex Features
Jaron Lanier is best known as a founding father of the field of virtual reality and throughout his polymath career has written extensively on human-computer interaction, including most recently in his book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.
Lanier explained in a recent UK Channel 4 interview:
When you watch the television the television isn't watching you. When you see the billboard the billboard isn't seeing you... When you use these new designs — social media, search, YouTube — when you see these things, you're being observed constantly and algorithms are taking that information and changing what you see next.
This Silicon Valley 'computer philosopher' says you need to delete your social media.
— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) June 18, 2018
Jaron Lanier argues we are hooked through a scheme of rewards and punishments - making us 'cranky' and 'jittery' and modifying our behaviour. pic.twitter.com/tuR3cXQSSD
According to Lanier's bio, he coined the term 'Virtual Reality' (VR) and in the early 1980s founded VPL Research, the first company to sell VR products. In the late 1980s he led the team that developed the first implementations of multi-person virtual worlds using head mounted displays, as well as the first "avatars," and developed the first widely used software platform architecture for immersive virtual reality applications.
As he defiantly asserts on his personal website, Lanier himself has "no social media accounts at all and all purported ones are fake."
He's elsewhere said that most internet and social media pioneers in Silicon Valley "have regrets right now" after perfecting what is essentially mass human behavioral engineering and that that internet addiction is not only ruining people's lives but the political process as well.
This is what I could call almost a stealthy addiction. It's a statistical addiction.
What it says is we will get the broad population to use the services a lot, we'll get them hooked through a scheme of rewards and punishment, and the rewards are when you're retweeted and the punishment is when you're treated badly by others online, and then within that we'll very gradually start to leverage that, to change them.
It's this very kind of stealthy manipulation of the population. -Jaron Lanier to Channel 4
Lanier described this process of manipulation more in-depth in his book, where he puts it like this: “The algorithm is trying to capture the perfect parameters for manipulating a brain, while the brain, in order to seek out deeper meaning, is changing in response to the algorithm’s experiments…Because the stimuli from the algorithm doesn’t mean anything, because they genuinely are random, the brain isn’t responding to anything real, but to a fiction. That process – of becoming hooked on an elusive mirage – is addiction.”
There is a great deal of wisdom here. Depression is clearly up in many countries as part of the internet age, and while correlation isn't causation, it seems clear part of it is causation. The internet promised greater connectedness but in many key ways it produced the opposite: https://t.co/hJDD1fcxN3
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 18, 2018
Of the nature of this addiction he described further to Channel 4:
So it's not as dramatic as a heroin addict or a gambling addict, but it is the same principle.
...It's made people jittery and cranky, it's made teens especially depressed, which can be quite severe.
The scariest example is a correlation between rises in teen suicide and the rise in use of social media.
Concerning practical advice especially to young people who've grown up within a digital and device driven world:
If you're a young person and you've only lived with social media, your first duty is to yourself. You have to know yourself.
You should experience travel, you should experience challenge to yourself... you can't know yourself without perspective,so at least give it six months without social media.
And among the more worrisome results of this process for society as a whole?
Though as Lanier explains in his book the internet was not established with built-in monetized functions, the potential of the architecture to be used wrongly for "global monopolies" whether political or economic has proven explosive: “Everyone knew these functions … would be needed. We figured it would be wiser to let entrepreneurs fill in the blanks than to leave that task to government … We foolishly laid the foundations for global monopolies.”
View the full interview below:
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Jaron Lanier's Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now according to his book:
1) You are losing your free will.
2) Quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times.
3) Social media is making you an asshole.
4) Social media is underming truth.
5) Social media is making what you say meaningless.
6) Social media is destroying your capacity for empathy.
7) Social media is making you unhappy.
8) Social media doesn't want you to have economic dignity.
9) Social media is making politics impossible.
10) Social media hates your soul.
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Tuesday, June 19, 2018
Thursday, June 14, 2018
Government Nutrition Policy: A Big, Fat Failure
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Authored by Jose Nino via The Mises Institute,
In her book The Big Fat Surprise, Nina Teicholz controversially contends that United States nutritional guidelines have largely contributed to rising levels of heart disease and obesity in the American populace.
Since the American Heart Association (AHA) linked the consumption of saturated fat with heart disease in 1961,government bureaucrats and policymakers have embarked on a low-fat crusade.
Despite this zealous campaigning in favor of low-fat dieting, obesity is rising at alarming rates and heart disease remains one of the leading causes of mortality in the United States.
Teicholz's text is very relevant these days now that the Trump administration announced its continuation of Obama-era nutritional policy.
These new policies consist of mandatory calorie labeling on restaurant menus and new “Nutrition Facts” on foods products.
While this article won’t spend much time addressing the scientific merits of the low-fat diet’s impact on health, one crucial question remains: Why does the United States government insist on getting involved in dietary affairs?
From Scientific Findings to Official Food Policy
When nutritionist Ancel Keyes popularized the “diet-heart hypothesis” in the 1950s, governments around the world initiated the first steps in crafting low-fat nutritional guidelines. The watershed moment came in 1961 when the American Heart Association became the first influential and national organization to officiallyrecommend that the public cut back on its consumption of saturated fat in order to prevent cardiovascular disease. Moving forward, bureaucracies like the United Stated Department of Agriculture (USDA) have acted as reliable vehicles for the promotion of low-fat guidelines.
The Bureaucratization of Food Policy: A Rent-Seeker’s Delight
With the on-going presence of government agencies like the FDA and USDA regulating the food industry, the temptation for major food companies to gravitate toward politics to solve its problems remains strong.
American food policy has not only created barriers to entry in certain sectors of the food economy and harmedconsumer welfare, but it has also incentivized entrenched business interests to capture regulatory agencies and push for policies that advance their ends.
This dynamic creates a scenario of institutional inertia. First, scientists publish findings supporting the entrenched interest group’s (Big Sugar in this case) agenda. Then, the government rewards producers who comply by granting them sweetheart subsidies and the government’s seal of approval.
Due to the public’s rational ignorance and the organizational advantages that lobbies like Big Sugar enjoy, this type of nutritional policy continues in effect without much organized resistance.
Public Choice theory in its rawest form.
Moreover, since the US became increasingly involved in diet policy in 1961, obesity rates in American men and women have increased substantially. This doesn’t prove a causal relationship, of course, but it does suggest that the government’s involvement has done nothing to keep obesity rates down.
Source: National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases
The Government Still Doesn’t Listen
The Trump administration’s continuation of low-fat dietary policy is no surprise due to the aforementioned institutional inertia. The program features policies encouraging the reduction of salt intake and new government mandates requiring restaurants to implement calorie labeling.
Despite what many experts say, the science on low-fat dieting and salt intake is far from settled. Contrarian analysis from researchers like Nina Teicholz and James DiNicolantonio argue that low-fat and low-salt consumption may actually have detrimental effects on health.
In the same vein, nutritional labeling does very little to change people’s food choice behavior.
According to Julie Downs, the lead author of a 2016 American Journal of Public Health study, putting “calorie labels on menus really has little or no effect on people’s ordering behaviors at all.” Mandatory calorie labeling represents another regulatory cost that will ultimately be passed on to restaurants and consumers. More established food chains will welcome these measures with open arms, but their smaller rivals will greatly lament them.
Free Markets are the Solution
Even if scientific research demonstrates that current government dietary standards have deleterious health effects, the government should stay away from dietary affairs.
Critics will argue that the government must play a proactive role in policing food choices and keeping the public healthy because the private sector is simply incapable of doing so.
But this contention is laden with government conceit.
A cottage industry of dietary alternatives like the Atkins Diet, The South Beach Diet , Paleo Diet, and the Keto Diet has emerged in the past decade to address supposed failures in conventional nutritional strategies.
We can debate which of these diet strategies are likely to produce more healthy people, but given the federal government’s record on this matter, it’s hard to argue that the status quo offers better options.
Source: National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases
Incentives matter in these cases. When the government is no longer dictating food policy, civic organizations and business ventures will fill in this nutritional vacuum to provide consumers with the necessary information and resources to make informed choices on nutritional matters.
Crowding out these initiatives through the government’s typical route of subsidizing vested food interests, promoting questionable studies, and erecting massive barriers to entry for potential competitors, hurts society at large.
Donald Trump came to Washington, DC, with the goal of draining the swamp and scrapping many Obama-era policies. However, Trump’s decision to continue Obama’s nutrition policies is a disappointment to say the least.
Trump can still make things right by re-examining these guidelines and bringing in dissenting points of views into these discussions.
At the end of the day, the healthiest nutritional policy the United States can pursue is one of government restraint.
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Jose Nino is a Venezuelan-American political activist based in Fort Collins, Colorado.
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