Roadmap

This particular blog began as a hard rock and metal discussion.  In my opening statement I parodied standard corporate articles of incorporation and their drab invocation of being “organized under this [Corporations] Act for any lawful purpose.”  In like manner, this blog is organized for any lawful speech. Like the dystopian urban wasteland of Blade Runner, this post is going to sprawl out over everything– but you can expect the built-up area to be ground zero for the battle over free speech.  The heavy metal community has traditionally opposed and battled censorship, but the discussion is relevant to anyone who cares about ideas and their free dissemination.

RT

This is already a few months old, but pieces like the one in the youtube video I’m featuring further below– from the “Russian Propaganda” news outlet RT (Russia Today)– are why our government is pushing to limit our access to RT.  Go ahead.  Watch it.  It’s just youtube.  It’s not going to electrocute you; you’re not a hacker with a neural link jacked into a cyberdeck, right?  We may be in the Matrix, but we aren’t running the Neuromancer or Shadowrun simulation yet.  It’s okay.  Go ahead, DO IT.  Everyone’s doing it.  Didn’t you hear there is a global information war going on? Scroll down and click the link.  Push the button!  It’s not going to put you on a government blacklist.

Oh, wait.  STOP!

f1x-2’s cover art for a recent print of Neuromancer published by Aleph (Brazil)

Actually, I can’t promise that last thing: you are probably using Google right now, and Google owns youtube.  I don’t know the extent of Google’s possible collusion with the U.S. government, intelligence community (IC), and/or military in the design of its algorithms to suppress what is allegedly “fake news”– nor do I know what kind of information the ICs are collecting on us with or without Google’s collusion.  I don’t think they are going to start rounding up dissidents yet, but if you don’t hear from me in a while, it may just be that I sometimes take up to six months between blog posts.  What I do know is that neoconservative/neoliberal thinktanks make their own software to sniff out dissenting opinions, and that software is currently in a state of being pathetic:

To be fair, the software is only “pathetic” if you don’t like the idea of the thought police casting an insanely wide net.   Go ahead and look at the bizarrely-named program Hamilton 68— and tell me it doesn’t give you the creeps.  Named after Federalist Paper #68 for either asinine or obfuscatory reasons (see the Hamilton Electors who opposed Trump), it was put together by the “bipartisan” Alliance for Securing Democracy.  Note that “bipartisan,” when translated from the Military-Industrial Guild thieves’ cant, is usually rendered “neocon-neoliberal marriage made in hell,” i.e. pro-war players from both the Red Team and the Blue Team.

Foreign Meddling Case Study:  The German Marshall Fund of the United States

The Alliance for Securing Democracy is a creation of the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF)– which is itself funded by a number of arms dealers, transnational oil corporations, AIPAC affiliates, and other countries (specifically NATO countries).  Go ahead– take a look at the entities that fund it (examples:  Lockheed Martin {arms dealer}, American Israel Education Foundation {AIPAC affiliate}, Chevron {transnational oil corporation}, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Latvia {foreign country}).  So before you indict me for tossing around terms like “neoliberal” and “Jabba the Hutt”, bear in mind that we are talking about a policy group that is not exactly American as apple pie.

Speaking of portly gangsters, the Iraq War “WMD” co-conspirator Kristol is still beating the drum for the Iraq War.  The following tweet is less than a year old:

Uh, Mr. Kristol, 2002 called, they want their propaganda back.

In league with Satan, oops, I mean Billy Kristol (who is on the GMF advisory council), Hamilton 68 targets literally anything that might be deemed remotely critical of regime change and foreign interventionism– as you can see from this analysis by the Ron Paul Institute:

the dashboard more often targets hugely popular independent news sites like Robert Parry’s Consortium News, The Federalist, Breitbart, and WikiLeaks. As The New York Times mentions, “Of 80 news stories promoted last week by those accounts, more than 25 percent ‘had a primary theme of anti-Americanism.'” It is impossible to know what, according to the site’s designers, “anti-Americanism” means, but it no doubt involves articles which are critical of US foreign policy. This means that if a Washington Post or Reuters article, for example,highlights “staggering” Iraqi civilian deaths under US coalition bombings, that article would likely register as “anti-American” by the platform and its creators. By such methods, the Washington Post, Reuters, and numerous independent sites are brought under suspicion alongside RT News and Sputnik. But “anti-American” could also simply mean any article produced by a site that Hamilton 68’s creators don’t like. Again, the data is meaningless.

Indeed, on Thursday both The Intercept and Antiwar.com were top trending sites on the Hamilton’s 68 dashboard. Ironically, The Intercept has take [sic] various editorial positions concerning Russian hacking allegations, and last June published a rather sensational headline, Top-Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days Before 2016 Election, which ended up making only a small splash, but landed NSA leaker Reality Winner in jail.

Thursday’s (9/28) list of Top Trending Domains advanced by what Hamilton 68 identifies as Russian backed social media accounts [sic]. Antiwar News and The Intercept were trending.

Antiwar.com was founded as far back as 1995 for the purpose of opposing American militarism and interventionism. It was one of the early and consistent few news and activist sites which opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Starting in 2011 it came under FBI investigation after what the FBI admitted was a “mistake”. The site’s founders, who were also personally under FBI monitoring for their “anti-war views”, estimate that they had lost at least $75,000 per year after donors pulled their support while citing fears that the FBI might monitor them too.

Source: Ron Paul Institute For Peace and Prosperity

Like a bungload of probe droids ripped in the general direction of every planet potentially harboring a rebel base, Hamilton 68’s wide-net approach doesn’t mean it isn’t good at alerting its Imperial masters to possible rebel scum.

The Last Jedi comes out in America on December 15, by the way– just thought I would save you the time of looking that up.  That means it’s almost Holiday season, but it is too early to get sweaty palms over Christmas shopping and whether Disney’s annual reliably-good installment in the franchise is going to pass muster.  Let’s stay focused.

You are a unique human being.  A valuable node of information.  An interesting person– but not a “person of interest.”  So I urge you to live a little, and take a chance watching an alternative news source that, by the way, is completely legal–

WikiLeaks Is Legal to Read

–Just like reading WikiLeaks is legal, by the way– notwithstanding what Chris Cuomo of CNN tried to trick you into believing.  And we are not talking about something that is “legal” in a highly (no pun intended) conditional way, like how “you can smoke weed in California, but a Fed agent might still bust you” kind of way.  Rather, it’s LEGAL in an unconditional way.  Once a document is in the public domain, claims to legal privilege and confidentiality evaporate (DISCLAIMER:  kids, if you want to play it safe, you might want to resist the temptation to reproduce droves of such documents yourself.  Also– steal less music).  WikiLeaks publishes leaked documents (that’s risky, obviously), putting them in the public domain– once it’s out there, it’s fair game for anyone to read.  Of course, in S. 1761 Congress may make its opinion on WikiLeaks “official”:

Status of that bill here.  One perspective is here.

Again, WikiLeaks documents are no more illegal to read than a newspaper left on the counter in a greasy diner.  In fact, the legality is even more concrete in the case of WikiLeaks.  In the case of the newspaper, someone could theoretically walk out of the bathroom and claim you converted his property or committed a theft– and as we all know, even being wrongly accused of a crime can generate a resultant legal status.  But regardless of your opinion on leakers and publishers like Julian Assange, reading WikiLeaks is not illegal.  Here anyway.  The law may be different in Myanmar for all I know; I’m talking about AMERICA here.  The First Amendment in this country is not dead yet.

BANA

So without further ado, I urge you to watch this short clip from RT about Bana Alabed.  It’s fun:

For more about RT’s Redacted Tonight, see here.

As the great rogue journalist Caitlin Johnstone puts it, in her usual honest, concise, and passionate way:

Bana Alabed is undeniably a deceitful war psy-op which has been advanced by the highest levels of the mainstream media. There is a mountain of irrefutable evidence for this fact, including hard proof that CNN knowingly staged a fake, scripted interview with a little girl who can’t speak English for the purpose of selling an anti-Assad, pro-interventionist narrative against Syria to the American people. They presented that fake interview to their audience as real, and CNN’s Alisyn Camerota necessarily had the other half of the script they used.

(Above quote from “Oh You’ve Got To Be Fucking Kidding Me” by Caitlin Johnstone)

The Bana Alabed psy-op is an example of the “Save the Children” Fallacy.

The above text is excerpted from a University of Texas El Paso course taught by Owen Williamson.

Exploiting children to tug at your heart strings is patronizing, isn’t it?  That’s why anyone who wants an alternative to insulting propaganda should be thankful for the freedom of the press.  Sure, your government and MSM are going to get mad when those alternative outlets don’t support their narrative, and the current craze is to discredit those alternative sources by labeling them “Russian Propaganda.”  That’s another logical/rhetorical foul, by the way– it’s called Poisoning the Well.

Some RT content is going to be pro- Russian Federation.  That doesn’t discredit everything RT says.  Likewise, the fact that CNN is pro-Wall Street, pro-MIC, pro-IC, and pro-Washington Establishment does not mean that CNN is incapable of reporting a true story about wildfires in California.

Next, a look at the kind of culture created by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos.