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Thread: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

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    United States Avalon Member onawah's Avatar
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    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    Dems Converge Around Dementia-Addled Warmonger Ahead Of Super Tuesday
    by Caitlin Johnstone
    3/3/20
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/03...super-tuesday/

    (Now it's Sanders, Biden and Warren in the Democrat lineup, and the DNC is poised again to attack Sanders. )

    " Back in January, well before the Democratic primary race had taken on its current composition, independent journalist Ruth Ann Oskolkoff reported that a source had heard from high-level Democratic Party insiders that they were planning to install Joe Biden as the party's nominee, and to smear Bernie Sanders as a Russian asset.

    "On January 20, 2020 at 8:20 p.m. PDT I received a communication from a reliable source," Oskolkoff wrote. "This person had interactions earlier that evening with high level party members and associates of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) who said that they have now selected Biden as the Democratic Party nominee, with Warren as the VP. They also said the plan is to smear Bernie as a Russian asset."

    Now, immediately before Super Tuesday, we are seeing establishment candidates Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar drop out of the race, both of whom, along with former candidate Beto O'Rourke, are now suddenly endorsing Biden. Elizabeth Warren, the only top-level candidate besides Sanders who could be labeled vaguely "left" by any stretch of the imagination, has meanwhile outraged progressives by remaining in the race, to the Vermont senator's detriment.

    The day before Super Tuesday also saw The Daily Beast, whose corporate owner IAC has Chelsea Clinton on its board of directors, publishing an article titled "Kremlin Media Still Like Bernie, ’Cause They Love Trump" which aggressively smears Sanders as a tool of the Kremlin.

    Prior to the South Carolina primary, Russian state media were touting Bernie Sanders as the most likely Democratic nominee, and it won’t be surprising if they do the same after Super Tuesday https://t.co/mH98PVmcjr

    — The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) March 2, 2020

    This latter development is becoming a conspicuously common line of attack against Sanders and, while we're on the subject, also tracks with a prediction made by journalist Max Blumenthal back in July of 2017. Blumenthal told Fox's Tucker Carlson that "this Russia hysteria will be re-purposed by the political establishment to attack the left and anyone on the left--a Bernie Sanders-like politician who steps out of line on the issues of permanent war or corporate free trade, things like that--will be painted as Russia puppets. So this is very dangerous, and people who are progressive who are falling into it need to know what the long-term consequences of this cynical narrative are."

    So we're seeing things unfold exactly as some have predicted. We're seeing the clear frontrunner smeared as a tool of Vladimir Putin, accompanied by a deluge of op-eds and think pieces from all the usual warmongering mass media narrative managers calling on so-called "moderates" to rally around the former Vice President on Super Tuesday.

    Sanders has not been pulling in anywhere near the numbers he'd need to pull to prevent a contested convention. This means that even if he gets more votes than any of his primary opponents, party leaders can still overrule those votes and appoint Biden as their nominee to run against Trump. Establishment spinmeisters as well as all Sanders' primary opponents have been working to normalize this ahead of time.

    "Whatever the case for either Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren...neither is going to be the nominee. And...it’s not going to be Mike Bloomberg either. So it’s Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden." Tomorrow, if you live in one of 14 states, you can choose Biden.https://t.co/btuPbGtWxG

    — Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) March 2, 2020

    The only problem? Biden's brain is turning into sauerkraut.

    There are two new clips of video footage making the rounds today, one featuring Biden at a rally telling his supporters that tomorrow is "Super Thursday", and another featuring the former VP saying (and this is a direct quote), "We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women created-- by the-- you know, you know the thing."

    I've written about Biden's recent struggles to form coherent sentences before, and it seems to be getting worse. There's simply no comparing the befuddled, fuzz-brained man we see before us today with the sharp, lucid speaker we were seeing even a few years ago. The man's brain does not work.

    And yeah, it's unpleasant to have to keep pointing this out. I'm not loving it myself. I resent Biden's handlers and the Democratic Party establishment for making it necessary to continually point out an old man's obvious symptoms of cognitive decline. But it does need to be pointed to, and it's creepy and weird that they're continuing to prop up this crumbling husk of a man while pretending that everything's fine.

    Imagine putting all your eggs in the Joe Biden basket. https://t.co/nRPX4gqol5

    — Krystal Ball (@krystalball) March 3, 2020

    Not that Biden would be an acceptable leader of the most powerful government on earth even with a working brain; he's a horrible war hawk with an inexcusable track record of advancing right-wing policies. But even rank-and-file Americans who don't pay attention to that stuff would plainly see a man on the debate stage opposite Trump who shouldn't be permitted near heavy machinery, much less the nuclear codes. And Trump will happily point that out.

    It's been obvious since 2016 that the Dems were going to once again sabotage the only candidate with a chance of beating Trump in favor of a scandalously inappropriate candidate, but wheeling out an actual, literal dementia patient for the role is something not even I would have imagined.

    2020 is weird, folks. And it's going to get a whole lot weirder. Buckle up."
    Each breath a gift...
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  3. Link to Post #102
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    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    DNC Scrambles To Change Debate Threshold After Gabbard Qualifies
    MARCH 4, 2020
    by CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/03...ard-qualifies/



    "On a CNN panel on Monday, host John King spoke with Politico reporter Alex Thompson about the possibility of Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard qualifying on Super Tuesday for the party’s primary debate in Phoenix later this month.

    “I will note this, she’s from Hawaii,” King said of Gabbard. “She’s a congresswoman from Hawaii; American Samoa votes on Super Tuesday. The rules as they now stand, if you get a delegate, you’re back in the debates. As of now. Correct?”

    “Yeah, they haven’t, I mean, that’s been the rule for every single debate,” Thompson replied. “And the DNC has not released their official guidance for the March 15 debate in Phoenix, but it would be very obvious that they are trying to cancel Tulsi, who they’re scared of a third party run, if they then change the rules to prevent her to rejoin the debate stage.”

    And indeed, as the smoke clears from the Super Tuesday frenzy, this is precisely what appears to have transpired.


    Caitlin Johnstone ⏳
    @caitoz
    Watch it til the end.https://twitter.com/i/status/1235013004011458561

    Min Min 🌺🕊 🍬 🐢 🏄‍♀️ 🧘‍♀️ 🏂⛹🏻‍♀️ 🏃‍♀️
    @parisencorecom
    Replying to @XochitlHinojosa
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    “The Gabbard campaign said it was informed that it would net two delegates from the caucuses in American Samoa, which will allocate a total of six pledged delegates,” The Hill reports today. “However, a report from CNN said that the candidate will receive only one delegate from the territory on Tuesday evening.”

    “Tulsi Gabbard may have just qualified for the next Democratic debate thanks to American Samoa,” reads a fresh Business Insider headline. “Under the most recent rules, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii may have qualified for the next televised debate by snagging a delegate in American Samoa’s primary.”

    “If Tulsi Gabbard gets a delegate out of American Samoa, as it appears she has done, she will likely qualify for the next Democratic debate,” tweeted Washington Post‘s Dave Weigel. “We don’t have new debate rules yet, but party has been inviting any candidate who gets a delegate.”

    Rank-and-file supporters of the Hawaii congresswoman enjoyed a brief celebration on social media, before having their hopes dashed minutes later by an announcement from the DNC’s Communications Director Xochitl Hinojosa that “the threshold will go up”.

    “We have two more debates– of course the threshold will go up,” tweeted Hinojosa literally minutes after Gabbard was awarded the delegate. “By the time we have the March debate, almost 2,000 delegates will be allocated. The threshold will reflect where we are in the race, as it always has.”

    “DNC wastes no time in announcing they will rig the next debates to exclude Tulsi,” Journalist Michael Tracey tweeted in response.


    Xochitl Hinojosa

    @XochitlHinojosa
    We have two more debates-- of course the threshold will go up. By the time we have the March debate, almost 2,000 delegates will be allocated. The threshold will reflect where we are in the race, as it always has.

    478
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    This outcome surprised nobody, least of all Gabbard supporters. The blackout on the Tulsi 2020 campaign has reached such extreme heights this year that you now routinely see pundits saying things like there are no more people of color in the race, or that Elizabeth Warren is the only woman remaining in the primary. They’re not just ignoring her, they’re actually erasing her. They’re weaving a whole alternative reality out of narrative in which she is literally, officially, no longer in the race.

    After Gabbard announced her presidential candidacy in January of last year I wrote an article explaining that I was excited about her campaign because she would severely disrupt establishment narratives, and, for the remainder of 2019, that’s exactly what she did. She spoke unauthorized truths about Syria, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, she drew attention to the plight of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden and said she’d drop all charges against both men if elected, she destroyed the hawkish, jingoistic positions of fellow candidates on the debate stage and arguably single-handedly destroyed Kamala Harris’ run.

    The narrative managers had their hands full with her. The Russia smears were relentless, the fact that she met with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was brought up at every possible opportunity in every debate and interview, and she was scoffed at and derided at every turn.

    Now, in 2020, none of that is happening. There’s a near-total media blackout on the Gabbard campaign, such that I now routinely encounter rank-and-file liberals on social media who tell me they honestly had no idea she’s still running. She’s been completely redacted out of the narrative matrix.


    Wajahat Ali

    @WajahatAli
    All candidates of color are out. An openly gay married candidate is out. 2 women left. The rest? 70+ old white men fighting for the future of America in 2020. Because of course.

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    So it’s unsurprising that the DNC felt comfortable striding forward and openly announcing a change in the debate threshold literally the very moment Gabbard crossed it. These people understand narrative control, and they know full well that they have secured enough of it on the Tulsi Problem that they’ll be able to brazenly rig her right off the stage without suffering any meaningful consequences.

    The establishment narrative warfare against Gabbard’s campaign dwarfs anything we’ve seen against Sanders, and the loathing and dismissal they’ve been able to generate have severely hamstrung her run. It turns out that a presidential candidate can get away with talking about economic justice and plutocracy when it comes to domestic policy, and some light dissent on matters of foreign policy will be tolerated, but aggressively attacking the heart of the actual bipartisan foreign policy consensus will get you shut down, smeared and shunned like nothing else. This is partly because US presidents have a lot more authority over foreign affairs than domestic, and it’s also because endless war is the glue which holds the empire together.

    And now they’re working to install a corrupt, right-wing warmongering dementia patient as the party’s nominee. And from the looks of the numbers I’ve seen from Super Tuesday so far, it looks entirely likely that those manipulations will prove successful.

    All this means is that the machine is exposing its mechanics to the view of the mainstream public. Both the Gabbard campaign and the Sanders campaign have been useful primarily in this way; not because the establishment would ever let them actually become president, but because they force the unelected manipulators who really run things in the most powerful government on earth to show the public their box of dirty tricks."
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  5. Link to Post #103
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    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    Stop Calling It A “Stutter” :  Here Are Dozens Of Examples Of Biden’s Dementia Symptoms
    MARCH 5, 2020
    by CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/author/caitlin-johnstone/

    (WAY TOO MANY LINKS and VIDEOS in the article--to EMBED here (I embedded a few gems), but GO TO THE ARTICLE AND WATCH if you could use a good: ( I wonder if Tulsi might be able to run as a third party candidate. Dark Journalist said in one recent program he would be watching for a 3rd party candidate that might actually be able to affect the election. )

    "It’s very bizarre and dissonant how there are currently two separate and non-overlapping lines of criticism going on against the campaign of establishment-anointed Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. There are the perfectly accurate criticisms regarding the right-wing, militaristic policy positions of the politician Joe Biden used to be, and then there are the equally accurate criticisms of Biden’s handlers and Democratic Party leadership for wheeling out the dementia-addled husk of a man he currently is to run for the world’s most powerful elected office.

    These two debates do not interweave, because they are not relevant to one another. It doesn’t matter what political positions a dementia victim once had; what matters is taking care of him and keeping him away from hazards, like sharp objects and nuclear launch codes. It’s impossible to know what actual political convictions still remain held within a mind that can no longer lucidly string thoughts together anyway.

    I hate doing this. I hate repeatedly writing about the obvious and undeniable fact that an old man is exhibiting obvious and undeniable symptoms of incipient dementia. It isn’t fun, and it doesn’t feel good. But the alternative is laying down and allowing the Democratic party and its allied media to gaslight people into believing it’s not a thing, as they are doing currently.


    Cody Johnston

    @drmistercody
    At a certain point there needs to be a serious and empathetic conversation about Biden's relatively frequent, confused, irritable inability to complete coherent thoughts. It's not about a stutter. Watching him speak a mere four years ago makes that clear. Hope this happens soon!

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    If you do a live Twitter search for the word “stutter”, you will as of this writing see that word being tweeted multiple times per minute on the social media platform as Democrats scramble to defend Biden from people who are accurately highlighting the indisputable fact that the former vice president is showing signs of cognitive decline. In my interactions with Biden supporters over the last 24 hours I’ve had this irrelevant word suddenly start getting thrown at me, because narrative managers in the mainstream media and the Biden campaign have been aggressively promoting the talking point that Biden’s increasingly frequent neurological misfirings on the campaign trail are actually the result of a longstanding speech impediment.

    This is false. While it is true that Biden has periodically exhibited signs of a stutter, the inability to hold on to his own train of thought, forgetting where he is and who he’s with, grossly incorrect use of language, and inappropriate behavior are not symptoms of a stutter.

    Here is the Mayo Clinic’s list of symptoms for a stutter, also known as a stammer:

    Difficulty starting a word, phrase or sentence
    Prolonging a word or sounds within a word
    Repetition of a sound, syllable or word
    Brief silence for certain syllables or words, or pauses within a word (broken word)
    Addition of extra words such as “um” if difficulty moving to the next word is anticipated
    Excess tension, tightness, or movement of the face or upper body to produce a word
    Anxiety about talking
    Limited ability to effectively communicate
    Here is the Mayo Clinic’s list of dementia symptoms:

    Memory loss, which is usually noticed by a spouse or someone else
    Difficulty communicating or finding words
    Difficulty with visual and spatial abilities, such as getting lost while driving
    Difficulty reasoning or problem-solving
    Difficulty handling complex tasks
    Difficulty with planning and organizing
    Difficulty with coordination and motor functions
    Confusion and disorientation


    Clearly, the symptoms of the speech impediment are very distinct from the symptoms of a degenerative neurological disorder. What follows are dozens of examples suggesting the latter, most of which were compiled by the Twitter user @KoenSwinkels. You may be absolutely certain that Trump will not hesitate to highlight this growing mountain of evidence should Democratic Party leadership successfully install Biden as the nominee; in fact both Trump and his Fox News cheerleaders are doing so already.

    Joe Biden is Jeb Bush plus dementia. Trump will be far less charitable with his symptoms than I am here, and if he’s nominated the president will make certain this story dominates news headlines from the convention until November. Anyone who wants Trump out of office should fiercely oppose Biden’s nomination.

    1. “Make sure you have the record player on at night… make sure the kids hear words.”


    Everyone talked about Biden’s bizarre call for families to make use of an archaic audio technology in response to a debate question about slavery, and some criticized his paternalistic suggestion that black Americans need to be taught how to raise their children correctly, but hardly anyone made a fuss about the fact that his entire answer was also a rambling, incoherent word salad.

    It’s easy to overlook linguistic peculiarities when they’re spoken, so I made a verbatim transcript of Biden’s complete answer, exactly as he spoke it. There are no typos. Read it carefully, resisting the urge to mentally re-word it in order to make it make sense:

    “Well they have to deal with the — Look, there is institutional segregation in this country. And from the time I got involved I started dealing with that. Redlining. Banks. Making sure that we’re in a position where — Look, talk about education. I propose that what we take is those very poor schools, the Title 1 schools, triple the amount of money we spend from 15 to 45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise that equal raise to getting out — the sixty-thousand dollar level.

    “Number two: make sure that we bring into the help the — the student, the, the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home. We need — We have one school psychologist for every fifteen hundred kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are reca — Now, I’m married to a teacher. My deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. We have make sure that every single child does in fact have three, four, and five year-olds go to school — school, not daycare. School. We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t wanna help, they don’t want — they don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television, the — ‘scuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the-the-the-the phone, make sure the kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school, a very poor background, will hear four million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.”

    Compare this muddle-headed mess, and all the following subsequent examples, to the crisp, forceful way Biden used to speak:

    Or even just a few years ago:

    Aisha Sharna
    @SharnaAisha
    Joe Biden explains why Bernie Sanders is the best to beat Trump.

    (Yes, this is Joe 4 years ago.. I know it's strange watching him talk in full sentences.)

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    2. “We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women created by the, go, you know the, you know the thing.”

    3. “Super Thursday”

    4. “I’m a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate. Look me over, if you like what you see help out, if not vote for the other Bi- gimme a look though okay?”

    Shaun King

    @shaunking
    This is so sad.

    Here @JoeBiden says to the crowd in South Carolina that he is "running for the United States Senate" and that if they don't like him they can "vote for the other Biden."

    I honestly wish he would've retired & not subjected himself to the rigors of this campaign.

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    Fact check: Biden has not been a candidate for the United States Senate in a great many years, and is in fact running for the presidency.

    5. “Alright Chuck!”

    Benny

    @bennyjohnson
    BIDEN: “Alright Chuck”
    WALLACE: “It’s Chris but anyway..”
    How many Biden Gaffes have there been this week?
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    Fact check: Chris. Chris Wallace.

    6. “Right here in the state of North South Carolina.”

    Fact check: Not a state.

    7. Randomly biting his wife’s finger.


    Fact check: Don’t do that, Joe.

    8. Worked with Deng Xiaoping, who died 23 years ago, on the Paris Climate Accord during the Obama administration.


    9. “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.”


    10. Whatever the hell this is.


    11. We’ll increase healthcare premiums and make sure care is not quality, only affordable.


    12. “Look, fat, look, here’s the deal.”


    13. “My deceased son was the Attorney General of the United States.”
    https://twitter.com/Becca4Bernie/sta...354354176?s=20

    Beau Biden was only the Attorney General of Delaware.

    14. Being aggressive and inappropriate with Iraq war veterans, wrongly insinuating that his son died in the war.


    US veterans recently confronted Biden over his support for the Iraq invasion, one saying “My friends are dead because of your policies.”

    “So’s my son,” Biden replied. “He was in Iraq, okay? For a year. Not that it matters, right?”

    “I’m not going after your son,” the veteran said.

    “You better not,” Biden replied.

    Biden’s son was in Iraq from 2008 to 2009. He died in 2015, of cancer.

    15. This incoherent word salad.

    29 U.S.C. § 157
    @OrganizingPower
    Anyway, good time to remind everyone that Joe Biden has dementia.

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    Here’s a transcript of an answer Biden gave to a question at a town hall. Read through it, resisting the urge to mentally revise it into something more coherent:

    “And so I was saying that, and what they turned around and said, Joe Biden said, in effect, they said, that Joe Biden said that what he was told, that what, that what the white supremacists argue, that we have no problem, that our, our, our basic English jurisprudential system is not the problem. The problem is those countries like Africa and Asia and those places, they’re the reason why we have all these problems. So they turn it around to make it sound like that, and by the way, the title of the article is, was, is the Washington Post ‘The Deceptively (indecipherable) of Joe Biden Singles, Signals What Is Coming’ and that is that’s a whole bunch of lies. The generic point I’m making here is that, what has happened is that, I know we’re going to get in to, whomever the nominee is of the Democratic Party, is going to have a plethora of lies told about him or her, and misrepresentations and this went on the internet, this edited article, it got retweeted by some press people and then they realized it was edited to make it look like something not… white supremacists, see, Biden’s acknowledging that the problem here is that that all those folks, all those minority folks are the problem. And so, in essence. And so they corrected, they corrected. You’re going to see a lot more of it. You’re going to see a lot more of not only my statements being taken out of context, and lied about, or altered, you’re going to see whomever the Democratic nominee is because that’s how this guy operates. Now. Whether or not I can win?”

    16. “We choose truth over facts.”


    17. “150 million people have been killed since 2007 when Bernie voted to exempt the gun manufacturers from liability.”


    This would be about half the population of the United States. Pretty sure that would’ve made bigger headlines.

    18. Confusing Theresa May with Margaret Thatcher.
    https://twitter.com/DavidWohl/status...78887018684416

    19. Confusing Angela Merkel with Margaret Thatcher.


    20. “You’re a lying dog-faced pony soldier.”


    21. Rambling confused gibberish, including saying Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr were assassinated in the late 70s.


    Both men were assassinated in 1968.

    22. Fix the problem of violence against women by “punching at it and punching at it and punching at it.”


    23. Implementing a childcare tax credit would “put 720 million women back in the workforce.”


    This would be more than double the entire US population.

    24. Thought he was in Vermont when he was in New Hampshire.


    25. Confused New Hampshire and Nevada.

    CaseStudyQB
    @CaseStudyQB
    #Biden mistakes New Hampshire for Nevada

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    26. Said he was vice president during the Parkland shooting.


    Biden left the office of the vice presidency in January 2017. The Parkland shooting was February 2018.

    27. Said 1976 when he meant 2014.


    28. Said he’s looking forward to “appointing the first African American woman to the United States Senate.”

    Andrew Pollack

    @AndrewPollackFL
    Joe Biden is looking forward to ‘appointing’ the first African American woman to the Senate.

    First, since when are senators appointed?

    Second, Carol Braun was the first African American woman senator in 1993.

    Third, Joe Biden’s repeated gaffes make him unfit for the office!

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    Nobody “appoints” senators; they’re elected. The first African American woman in the US Senate took office in 1993.

    29. “Go to Joe 30330 and help me in this fight.”

    Axios

    @axios
    I beg your pardon?

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    Biden apparently received instructions from his team to tell debate viewers to text “Joe” to 30330, but these directions were too complicated for him. He wound up sending viewers to a random empty URL which was subsequently bought up by a Buttigieg supporter.

    30. Made, then dropped, claim that he was arrested in South Africa while trying to visit Nelson Mandela in prison.

    Tom Scocca
    @tomscocca
    Biden's fake Mandela story would have been a week-long news disaster for him back when anyone still had bandwidth and standards https://slate.com/news-and-politics/...ela-story.html


    Biden Camp Backs Away From His Story About Being Arrested Trying to Meet Mandela
    After the debate, the campaign finally admitted he wasn’t arrested.

    slate.com
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    That’s all I’ve got for now. Let me know if I missed any good ones; I’ll probably keep this updated with all the latest neurological misfirings until this discussion goes mainstream like it should already be."
    Last edited by onawah; 5th March 2020 at 22:46.
    Each breath a gift...
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    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    America’s “Two”-Party System Is Like Bill Cosby’s Routine About Beating His Children
    by CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
    MARCH 7, 2020
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/03...-his-children/

    "Today I just want to make the simple observation that America’s two-headed one-party political system is a lot like an old stand-up bit Bill Cosby once did about beating his children.

    The bit I’d like to highlight is from Cosby’s 1983 special “Himself”. Society’s attitude toward physically assaulting children has changed a bit since then, as has society’s attitude toward Bill Cosby, so it rings a fair bit different in modern ears than it did in those of the audience at the time. In fact when you just read a transcript of the routine, it doesn’t look like a comedy bit at all; it just looks like some guy’s description of abusing his children with his wife.

    After painting a scene in which his children bicker and fight in defiance of their mother’s instructions, Cosby said the following:

    “My wife turns around, grabs a yardstick. She holds it like a samurai warrior. She then makes an announcement that the beatings will now begin by saying, ‘I have had enough of this!’ Now these three brain-damaged people have the nerve to look surprised. My wife is… [imitates yardstick being thrown]. Children run everywhere.

    “Now my job is, I am the goalie. The children come at me, I kick ‘em back into play. Now the beatings are over, not because I see my wife, but because I hear all of upstairs going: [Imitates sobbing.]

    “Now here’s the funny part: my wife comes downstairs with the broken stick, throws it on the table, sits down and begins to talk out loud to nobody: ‘Gonna tell me that you’re not going to do something when I tell you to do something. I mean, you move when I say move. Think I carried you in my body for nine months so you can roll your eyes at me? I’ll roll that little head of yours down on the floor. You don’t know who you’re fooling with. I’ll beat you until you can’t grow anymore.’ “

    America’s dad, everyone.“Now my job is, I am the goalie. The children come at me, I kick ‘em back into play.”

    Does this sound familiar?

    Does it sound kind of like the Democratic Party?

    Does it sound like the party which draws in voters who are looking to escape from the abusive, violent, warmongering, climate-killing, oligarch-coddling Republican Party, only to “kick ’em back into play”?

    That’s the Democratic Party’s job. The Democratic Party is the goalie. Whenever the victims of America’s corrupt status quo start looking for an exit from the abuse, the Democratic Party’s job is to block that exit. It blocks that exit by offering up the promise of social justice, economic justice, advocacy for the working class and progressive reform, and then it actively neuters all attempts to make that happen. Attempts such as electing a progressive candidate to lead the party in a direction that actually reflects the will and interests of the people, for example.

    Democrats sometimes accuse me of claiming that both parties are exactly the same, but that’s not true at all. The parties fulfill two very distinct roles in the administration of the beating: one wields the actual yardstick, while the other one acts as the goalie. One openly advances warmongering, ecocidal agendas of the billionaire class, while the other advances all those agendas more slyly while nullifying any attempt by the populace to thwart them.

    They play two different roles in advancing the exact same agenda. Their behaviors are a bit different, but they’re both working to assault children with a yardstick.

    Quote Caitlin Johnstone ⏳
    @caitoz
    America’s Two-Headed One Party System
    "Ralph Nader occasionally shares an anecdote about the time he told his father that what America needs is a good third party.
    'I’ll settle for a second,' his father replied.


    America’s Two-Headed One Party System
    There’s a scene from John Steinbeck’s The Pearl that’s been coming back to me over and over again ever since I started writing about US…

    medium.com
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    Cosby’s routine paints him as an innocent and well-intentioned bystander, but in actuality he’s telling a story about two adults beating up young children. Democratic Party leadership paint themselves as the sensible advocates of the people, but in actuality they’re facilitating an assault on the American people just as much as the Republicans are.

    And now we are seeing Trump held up as the menacing threat who everyone must run away from, and what is the life raft that the Democratic Party leadership is trying to throw them to escape this threat? Joe Biden. An actual, literal dementia patient with an extensive history of advancing the most toxic and violent policies imaginable.

    As the closest thing to a viable left-wing party that exists in the most powerful and influential government on earth, the Democratic Party has more real power than any other political party in existence in terms of the changes it could make to the world if it wanted to. The fact that it plays goalie instead is an inexcusable evil which justifies the total elimination of the entire status quo the entire system is built upon."
    Each breath a gift...
    _____________

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    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    Nine Thoughts On COVID-19 And What’s Coming
    MARCH 17, 2020
    by CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/03...-whats-coming/

    "This gig is kinda weird at the moment. I write about what’s going on in the world for a living, and there’s certainly plenty going on in the world to be written about. But also there’s this acute awareness that anything I write about today is going to look petty and insignificant in the very near future.

    I mean, we’re in the first moments of an unfolding pandemic which, from what I can tell just looking at the numbers, is about to change the world in some pretty significant ways. Governmental faceplant after governmental faceplant after missed opportunity after missed opportunity all around the world appears to have set us on a trajectory toward overburdened healthcare systems, severe economic downturns, and, of course, mass deaths.

    And maybe chaos. And maybe healing. And maybe, when all is said and done, a total restructuring of power and the way we do things.

    Standing on the precipice of that, how the hell am I supposed to write about how Bernie didn’t go hard enough at Biden in the last debate or whatever? So many of the arguments we’ve been placing so much importance on lately could easily look irrelevant in a matter of weeks.

    Anyway, here are nine thoughts on COVID-19 and what’s coming.
    Quote Ryan Heath

    @PoliticoRyan
    My job is literally to monitor and compare global policy responses to coronavirus, and this is categorically untrue.
    Countries that are doing it better include: Sth Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, China (after the first month of lies and obfuscation), Austria and Australia https://twitter.com/brianstelter/sta...59123587846144

    Brian Stelter

    @brianstelter
    "America has had the best response to coronavirus in the world!"

    —@mattgaetz on Fox

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    1 – Everyone in conspiracy circles has strong opinions about what’s going on, so anything I could possibly say about this is going to get a ton of pushback from some faction or another. That’s fine. In my opinion the fears that the ruling class will seize this opportunity to advance preexisting authoritarian agendas are well-founded, and people are right to have suspicions about the official narrative on the origins of the virus, but people who are still saying the whole thing is fake from top to bottom and it’s just another flu/no big deal have been proved wrong by facts in evidence. People should minimize social contact to avoid overburdening healthcare systems and thereby killing people. No matter how certain you are that this is all fake, you’re not certain enough to justify needlessly risking lives.

    2 – Google-owned YouTube has just announced that they’re going to be censoring a lot more videos during the pandemic, citing the need to rely on automated censorship as they scale back workers’ presence at the office. No attempt has been made to explain why YouTube staff can’t just review the material working from home. Definitely worth keeping an eye on; if widespread authoritarian measures are going to be implemented during this time, increasing internet censorship will likely be the first step.

    3 – I think this is going to hit America much harder than other countries, unfortunately. Combine a literal joke of a healthcare system with a president who up until just today has been dismissive of the threat the virus poses, the fact that the majority of Americans can’t afford a $1,000 emergency expense at a time of mounting layoffs while being chronically uninsured or underinsured, an inability to make anything happen without massive corporations voluntarily going against their own profit margins, a culture of rugged individualism with a reflexive distaste for collectivist organization for the good of the whole, and a highly religious population with many preachers telling their underinsured parishioners to demonstrate their faith by gathering at the megachurch and shaking hands with everyone, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

    Please stay as safe as you can.
    Quote Erik Solheim

    @ErikSolheim
    How did China 🇨🇳 beat coronavirus⁉️
    One of China’s creative techniques was the ❝Disinfection Tunnel❞ which was invented & manufactured in days, NOT years.
    Embedded video https://twitter.com/i/status/1239461496587014144

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    4 – Meanwhile China is having success getting the pandemic under control on its end, with its government’s ability to build hospitals and crank out brand new tech solutions with astonishing swiftness, and of course to clamp down on the public’s free movement as soon as it was deemed necessary. Now Beijing is moving into a world leadership position in tackling the pandemic, stepping in to aid nations which can’t get help elsewhere like Italy and Serbia.

    5 – The US became a superpower after being left intact while competing nations were stuck rebuilding themselves from two devastating world wars, allowing it to surge ahead of the competition. China, as we’ve discussed here many times, has been poised to overtake America as the dominant world power, so it’s possible we’ll see China’s relative success and America’s relative failure on this front dance in a way which gives a significant boost in that direction in the same way the US was given a boost by the world wars. It’s very likely China comes out of this notably further along in its agenda to create a multipolar world than before this all began.

    6 – And the US of course realizes this threat, which is why my social media notifications right now are full of propagandized human livestock bleating about China being the Latest Official Bad Guy who I absolutely must believe very bad things about. A dying empire knows it’s going to need to take some drastic, dangerous measures to secure world dominance in the face of a surging contender, and it knows it needs to manufacture consent for those drastic, dangerous measures. Anti-China propaganda has been pouring into mainstream consciousness with more and more aggression lately, first and foremost within right-wing echo chambers but also within mainstream liberal ones – Joe Biden compared the Chinese government to Jack the Ripper just last night.

    The result has been rank-and-file westerners beginning to lose their minds about China, which has looked exactly like a right-wing mirror of the Russia hysteria we watched unfold throughout late 2016 and early 2017. I have been encountering far more hysterical anti-China sentiment online than I was even a week or two ago; a poll published at the beginning of this month reports US anti-China sentiment is at a 20-year high, and I’ll wager if they took it again today it would be significantly worse.

    People are now constantly shrieking about how authoritarian the Chinese government is, which is stupid, because China has always had an authoritarian government. It hasn’t changed; the only thing that’s changed is the narrative management, with glaring adjustments like the mass media reporting on the Hong Kong protests vastly more than the anti-government demonstrations in US empire-aligned nations like France. All this irrelevant emphasis on where the virus originated isn’t there to protect you from the virus, it’s there to make China look bad. China is no more of a threat to you than it was two years ago; the only thing that’s changed is you’re now being hammered with narratives about how threatening it is. Mass media converging upon a single empire-targeted nation is never a good thing.

    7 – It’s interesting how the virus which might knock down the most powerful government in the world behaves so much like that government: dominating world affairs and killing the most vulnerable members of the populations it attacks. Nations which are being smashed with US sanctions have already been watching their frail and elderly die of inadequate medical care and malnutrition, and now with the coronavirus they’re experiencing those same exact effects squared. Which is why places like Iran are being hit so uniquely hard. America is like if COVID-19 was a country.

    8 – Also interesting is watching people react to the way so many of the corporate and government policies which have been causing ordinary human beings to suffer great pains are now simply being canceled all around the world in response to the pandemic. This Slate article documents a number of the changes which have been made just in America, like how for people being thrown in jail for minor offenses, “San Antonio is one of many jurisdictions to announce that, to keep jails from being crowded with sick citizens, they’ll stop doing that. Why were they doing it in the first place?” Or how “Trump has instructed government agencies who administer loans to waive interest accrual for the duration of the crisis. But why on earth is our government charging its own citizens interest anyway?”

    We’re seeing immense burdens lifted from people with an easy “Oh, that’s making the pandemic worse? Okay we’ll stop that then.” And we’re seeing people react with fully justified indignation with, “Well why were you doing that to me in the first place??”

    And the answer is very simple: because until now, your suffering wasn’t exacerbating a virus which does not discriminate on the basis of class. Politicians and billionaires are just as capable of losing their lives and loved ones to this virus as anyone else, as the CEO of Universal Music Group just learned with his COVID-19 hospitalization. Simply not causing needless human suffering wasn’t enough to get them to stop crushing people; it had to actually show up on their doorstep to make a difference.


    9 – I have long thought that it would be awesome if the world could just take a nap for a minute. Capitalism is built around the glorification of busyness. We’re going to find out how many jobs we can do from home, how many jobs are only busywork, how many jobs we can comfortably consolidate or do without completely, and how many jobs are actually harmful. A big chunk of jobs have nothing to do with feeding, housing or caring for us, and everything to do with persuading people that they are deficient in some imaginary way and require this placebo tonic snake-oil to make us better again. Religion is one such job. Advertising, marketing, and most media are others. If we redesign the economy, we could do away with those altogether and have all that creative effort go toward healthy things.

    Primarily though, we all need a big rest from constantly doing such soul-draining things. Having to do this while under the worry that we won’t be able to pay our rent and bills is not ideal, but do as my Mum always says — worry about the things you can change, and for the things you can’t change right now, leave them for the birds. Leave the bills for the birds for now. We will work out something; we always do. But for now, you are safe and you have everything you need. Notice that. Once you’ve established that you’re solid in this moment at least, take this time to really dig as deeply in to relaxation as you can. Watch some stand-up and get yourself laughing, sing to some youtube karaokes, nap often and deeply, take showers and baths, really taste your food and enjoy your breath, yawn and stretch and cuddle and shake it all out. Forget about cleaning out the cupboards or learning that instrument or reading that book or whatever cute thing you decided you really should do now that you have the time — let your animal body lead the way, and give your brain a rest from all the shoulds and shouldn’ts. You’re fine just to do nothing at all. Sink in to that."
    Each breath a gift...
    _____________

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    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    The Official Bad Guy Of The Day: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
    MARCH 18, 2020
    by CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/03...rative-matrix/

    "Missing the cute, innocent days of early 2020 when our biggest concern was just that the continent of Australia would burn to ashes and Trump would start a full-scale war with Iran.

    ~

    Everyone’s been primed by years of popular post-apocalyptic movies/shows, as well as a growing sense of dread and a general intuition that something’s gotta give soon. Please stay calm and let your better nature win out, humans. We can use this opportunity to transcend ourselves.

    ~

    The political/media class is largely responsible for its own inability to get the public to take this pandemic seriously. You can’t constantly lie to people about important issues their entire lives and then expect them to suddenly trust you.

    ~

    The primary reason people are so vulnerable to propaganda is that hardly anyone clearly sees just how much human consciousness is dominated by mental narrative. There’s a night and day difference between reality and the stories minds tell about reality. Manipulators exploit this.

    Most people assume that the mental stories in their heads are an accurate reflection of what’s happening outside their skull, and it just isn’t. Manipulators know they can just feed people stories, narratives, about what’s happening and they’ll accept those narratives as reality.

    Manipulators know they can trade a bunch of convincing words in exchange for all sorts of real valuables: sex, deals, loyalty, votes, political power. Humanity’s deluded relationship with narrative means you can get real, concrete treasures in exchange for pure illusion.

    Most of the things which consume your attention are pure narrative constructs: religion, philosophy, culture, politics, the economy, even what you take to be your very self. But few ever take the time to sift these narratives apart from reality, so we’re hackable by manipulators.

    The difference between what’s happening and what the babbling mind says is happening could not possibly be more different. Until our species evolves a new relationship with mental narrative which allows a real relationship with the real world, we’ll keep moving toward extinction.

    ~

    Obvious cognitive decline is a stutter.

    Massive exit poll discrepancies are normal.

    An ex-president installing his right-hand man as his successor is democracy.

    Facts are Kremlin talking points.

    Journalism is a crime.

    War is peace.

    Freedom is slavery.

    Ignorance is strength.

    ~

    Oh, you have another Official Bad Guy of the Day, America? It’s the Chinese government today, is it? We’re meant to hate China? Very cool.

    So have you you stopped circling the globe with military bases and mass murdering human beings all over the world, America?

    No?

    Then stop asking me to care about China.

    ~

    Pandemic priorities:

    Priority #1 – Make sure everyone is aware that this virus indisputably originated in China. China, China, China. Call it the China virus or the Wuhan virus so everyone knows. China is very, very bad and we must say so over and over and over again.

    Priority #2 – Deal with virus if we have time.

    ~

    I’ve been saying the US is more evil and violent than China for years, and the shrill, hysterical responses I’ve been receiving when I say this over the last few days have been exponentially more intense than they’ve ever been at any other time. China hasn’t gotten any worse during that time, the propaganda has.

    All this shrieking about the virus originating in China does nothing to help address the actual virus, and it isn’t meant to: it’s meant to manufacture consent for future unrelated, pre-planned escalations against America’s chief geopolitical rival. People are being trained to support those escalations.

    ~

    Someone who bought the propaganda about Russia is dumb, like a guy with his head up his ass. Someone who rejected the propaganda on Russia but bought into it on China is even dumber, like a guy who pulled his head out of his ass, lubed up his scalp, and willfully re-inserted it.

    ~

    Conservatives: We hate gays!

    Fox News: Muslims Execute Gays

    Conservatives: We love gays and hate Muslims!

    Fox News: China Imprisons Muslims

    Conservatives: We love Muslims and hate China!

    ~

    Officials know they’ve got a few months where there won’t be any public backlash in the form of demonstrations and protests due to coronavirus fears, and it’s a safe bet that they’ll take that fact into account when planning decisions in the near future. Assange’s extradition hearing resumes in May and the DNC convention is in July, just for example.

    ~

    It’s so dumb having to constantly argue against the latest herd of propagandized human livestock saying I must believe bad things about the Latest Official Bad Guy. It’s Saddam! It’s Gaddafi! It’s Kim! It’s Putin! It’s the Ayatollah! It’s Assad! It’s Maduro! It’s Xi! They always think they’re so original, too. It’s ****ing tedious.

    ~

    China has not changed. What’s changed is that the USA’s leading rival is poised to surpass a dying empire, which will need to take some drastic actions in order to prevent this. Consent for these actions must first be manufactured. Hence the sudden spike in narrative management.

    China has always had an authoritarian government. If you find yourself thinking negatively about the Chinese government more than you did a year or two ago, it’s not because China changed during that time, it’s because you’ve been sucked in by an escalating propaganda campaign.

    ~

    China’s getting its COVID problem under control and helping other nations while American preachers are telling their underinsured parishioners to come to the megachurch and shake hands with everyone. This virus could change the world a lot more than we think.

    It’s the perfect storm for ending the hegemony of the US, a nation with a broken healthcare system, dependent on private corporations to make anything happen, full of individualists who reject any collectivist impulse and fundamentalists who think science is a liberal hoax.

    ~

    If COVID-19 were a nation, that nation would enact domestic policies which kill the most vulnerable members of its population. Then it would spread this to the rest of the world by inflicting endless war and sanctions on other countries, killing the most vulnerable people there.

    ~

    Starvation sanctions do the same thing the coronavirus does: kill the most vulnerable members of the population. A population with both experiences these effects squared. The Trump administration owns every single one of the COVID-19 deaths in Iran.

    ~

    It shouldn’t take a new virus pandemic to make people start thinking about whether it’s wise to have a political system that is dominated by very old leaders who won’t be around to suffer the future consequences of their actions.

    ~

    The American people don’t deserve what’s coming. Their government is criminal, but they aren’t. I’m in Australia and I’ve shed more tears for what’s about to hit the US than here, because they really have nothing in place to insulate themselves from this.

    ~

    Stop legitimizing the use of the word “corruption” in news reports of Saudi Arabia’s mass arrests; it’s a meaningless term in a nation whose government just openly owns all the treasure and resources. The Saudi government arresting people for “corruption” would be like water arresting fish for getting wet.

    ~

    Every Trump Supporter I’ve Ever Argued With: Trump is ending the wars and draining the swamp!

    Me: No he’s doing the exact opposite, as shown in this mountain of facts here.

    Every Trump Supporter I’ve Ever Argued With: Yeah well you can’t expect Trump to just suddenly end wars and drain the swamp, you naive idiot.

    ~

    It’s amazing how far you can get in life without having any idea what you’re doing, just by feigning confidence and speaking in an assertive tone of voice. You can become President of the United States. You can get through almost a full term before people really start noticing.

    ~

    Trump being **** doesn’t magically make Biden not ****. Biden being **** doesn’t magically make Trump not ****.

    There. That’s the winning answer to 90 percent of the arguments I’m going to get into from now until November.

    ~

    Biden: I have decided that I will implement progressive policies I opposed up until five minutes ago.

    Biden: *tells a mountain of demonstrable lies in one debate*

    Biden: You can trust me that I will implement those policies.

    ~

    Democrats: Trump is an unprecedented threat to our democracy because he’s a vulgar racist jingoistic authoritarian reactionary wingnut with dementia who lies constantly.

    Those same Democrats: Here vote for this vulgar racist jingoistic authoritarian reactionary wingnut with dementia who lies constantly.

    ~

    The Democratic primary is clearly being tampered with in myriad ways and on multiple levels, both overtly and covertly. The general election will not be. Because the dominant power structures know they’ll get exactly what they want with either Biden or Trump.

    ~

    When I was five, I had a friend who would “be the judge” to whatever game we were playing and whenever I started to win, she would judge that I was actually not winning. I stopped playing with her.

    Progressives are correct that the Dems will never stop ****ing them over if they keep unconditionally supporting that party. But what many of them fail to take into account is that the Dems will also keep ****ing them over if they don’t support the party. Because they’re fine with losing.

    Progressives assume that they have negotiating power because they assume, wrongly, that the Democratic Party exists to win elections. It doesn’t. The Democratic Party exists, first and foremost, to sabotage the left.

    A Democratic Party leader retains their status and donors regardless of who wins an election. But if the left ever succeeded in taking over the party and implementing anti-oligarchic policies, that would end. Given this, who do you think party leaders perceive as the real threat?

    Staying with the Dems is a losing strategy, but so is removing your votes with the hopes of influencing them. This is because the answer has never been in electoral politics, one way or the other. It’s an illusory construct built to distract from reality.

    ~

    If you object to people calling Chelsea Manning by her preferred pronouns more than you object to the things that have been done to her, you have wasted all of your time on this planet.

    ~

    If we lived in a truly healthy, sane world, and then it suddenly began acting like the normal status quo of this current world, our collective shock and horror would dwarf the reaction we’re having to the COVID-19 pandemic. Because we’ve normalized so many vastly worse horrors.

    ~

    America shouldn’t be in the Middle East at all, much less Iraq, and the US government is solely responsible for every American soldier who dies there.

    ~

    Some days I just can’t write. I have plenty to say, I know all the things I want to write about, I’ve done all the research and prepared all my links, but I just can’t get the words flowing. It’s what I imagine erectile dysfunction feels like.

    ~

    Doubt anyone remembers this but there was once a time when people expressing socialist or antiwar views were referred to as “pinkos” and “moonbats” instead of “Kremlin agents” and “Russian bots”.

    ~

    Truth is Russian in an empire of lies.

    ~

    Whenever there’s an economic downturn I always get my hopes up that maybe this is the one where people go “Hey wait a minute, this whole ‘economy’ thing is made up! We can just make up something different instead!”

    ~

    I am optimistic that we’ll be okay because I know that humanity has untapped potential in areas within ourselves that we’ve barely even begun discussing, much less researching. The manipulators only understand thoughts and language, and there’s so much more to us than that.

    We have the potential to break our conditioning patterns, which is huge because our conditioning patterns are what brought us to this point. Every species eventually hits a point where it either evolves or dies, and I already see signs of mass scale unpatterning. We can make it.

    Long-established patterns are now being disrupted on a mass scale, creating lots of space to form new ones. Where there used to be a solid brick wall, there are now many gaps with plenty of space to shine light through. Make sure you take advantage of this, clear-eyed rebels."
    Each breath a gift...
    _____________

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    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    Quote Posted by onawah (here)
    Nine Thoughts On COVID-19 And What’s Coming
    MARCH 17, 2020
    by CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/03...-whats-coming/

    People are now constantly shrieking about how authoritarian the Chinese government is, which is stupid, because China has always had an authoritarian government. It hasn’t changed; the only thing that’s changed is the narrative management, with glaring adjustments like the mass media reporting on the Hong Kong protests vastly more than the anti-government demonstrations in US empire-aligned nations like France. All this irrelevant emphasis on where the virus originated isn’t there to protect you from the virus, it’s there to make China look bad. China is no more of a threat to you than it was two years ago; the only thing that’s changed is you’re now being hammered with narratives about how threatening it is. Mass media converging upon a single empire-targeted nation is never a good thing.
    Many true observations by Caitlin Johnstone about the increased hatred against China in the USA . However looking from Europe I also see the aversion of that communist regime exists because it is put in the same category as the US Democratic Liberals and used in that ideological interior US fight.
    But I do not agree with the above argument that nothing has changed in China and "constantly shrieking about how authoritarian the Chinese government is stupid". A hell of a lot has changed in China and with name the new AI monitoring of citizens and the mandatory vaccinations since last year. As an individual citizen I look how horrendous this roll-out is and realize that this is the test ground for what is in store for all of us. Shame on Facebook and Google CEO Eric Smith for their business in China. Is Johnstone also ideologically motivated for not reporting on those changes in China ?
    Last edited by Philippe; 21st March 2020 at 04:03.

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    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words


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    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    We Should All Be Seriously Re-Prioritizing Our Lives And Our Thinking Right Now
    MARCH 21, 2020
    by CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/03...ing-right-now/

    "Imagine if you looked out your window tomorrow morning and saw a mushroom cloud growing on the horizon.

    What do you imagine your first thoughts would be?

    Do you imagine you’d think to yourself, “Man I wish I’d spent more time arguing with Tulsi Gabbard supporters on the internet”? Or “I wish I’d devoted more of my mental energy to what a dickhead Dale from accounting is”? Or “Maybe I can call my sister and get in one last passive-aggressive jab at her for thinking she’s better than me all these years”?

    Now, this pandemic is of course not the same as a nuclear holocaust. It will not kill all of us, or even most of us. But it does appear likely that, for better or for worse, it’s going to change the world in some pretty significant ways.

    Which means that we are taking a giant leap into the unknown, which can feel like a kind of death. And, since we are all taking that leap together, it can feel like a we’re all about to die.

    When you’re standing on the brink of a history-shaping global paradigm shift, if you’re really consciously experiencing the reality of your situation instead of dissociating and compartmentalizing away from it, you will necessarily have to re-evaluate your priorities. Your priorities in life. Your priorities in thinking about your world. What really matters when you’re about to take the plunge into the Big Unknown.
    Quote Eric Topol

    @EricTopol
    The daily update from @jburnmurdoch @FT for #COVID19 deaths and cases (log scales)
    US Deaths keeps looking worse, steeper, more marked divergence from South Korea
    US Case curve now worst of all, altho more difficult to interpret w/ testing only ramping up now (2 months too late)

    View image on TwitterView image on Twitter

    682
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    Quote Louis Allday
    @Louis_Allday
    The contradiction between knowing that extreme measures are obviously needed in order to contain the virus but doing so means giving awful states like the US & UK sweeping powers that they will definitely misuse & likely make permanent is extremely hard to reconcile and process.

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    Quote Caitlin Johnstone ⏳
    @caitoz
    Humanity’s Salvation Will Necessarily Look Like A Leap Into The Unknown

    "What this means is that if there is to be any deviation from our species’ self-destructive trajectory, the cause of that deviation will come completely out of left field."https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/humanitys-salvation-will-necessarily-look-like-a-leap-into-the-unknown-b5d71489ec61 …


    Humanity’s Salvation Will Necessarily Look Like A Leap Into The Unknown
    If humanity is to turn away from its murderous, omnicidal, ecocidal, oppressive and exploitative trajectory, it will necessarily involve a…

    medium.com
    Humanity’s Salvation Will Necessarily Look Like A Leap Into The Unknown
    If humanity is to turn away from its murderous, omnicidal, ecocidal, oppressive and exploitative trajectory, it will necessarily involve a…

    medium.com
    189
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    If we are bravely confronting the reality that we may emerge on the other side of this thing to a world that is in some ways unrecognizable to us, some things we previously didn’t pay as much attention to will become more important to us, and other things will become less important.

    Our personal relationships will become more precious to us. My elderly parents are isolating now so I’m video-chatting with them every day, and I spent some time yesterday overwhelmed with grief when I realized I won’t get to hug them for months, at best. This is happening all around the world right now, with all of us.

    For those of us who are political, it will also change our areas of emphasis. As near as I can tell the four most crucial and attention-worthy things in the world right now are (A) the virus itself, (B) the certainty that powerful people will try to use the virus to advance longstanding authoritarian agendas which they have no intention of reversing, (C) the acceleration toward cold war escalations between the US and China, and (D) the possibility of an opportunity to create something good for all of us coming out of all the increasing amount of shifts and changes we are experiencing. And not necessarily in that order.

    It will also de-emphasise a lot of things we’d previously been placing immense importance on. The US presidential race is the first thing that comes to mind. It consumed so much of our attention over the past year, but now it’s a fairly safe bet that this virus and its consequences are going to affect our lives and the world far, far more than they would be affected if the White House changed hands or stayed under the current administration. Doesn’t mean this doesn’t matter at all, just that it’s less significant now.

    There are many other areas people have been placing emphasis on that they will necessarily de-emphasise when they get real with themselves about what’s going on which will vary from person to person. Maybe you see the things we should prioritise differently than I do. Maybe you see the things we should de-emphasise differently as well. It doesn’t really matter; all that matters is that we be very courageously honest with ourselves and the reality of our situation, and that we rearrange our priorities in a way that we feel best reflects this.

    That’s all I’ve got to say about this for now. Let’s keep watching the shifting tides together.
    Each breath a gift...
    _____________

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    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    Hollywood Celebrities Are Psyops Wrapped In Human Skin






    CNN recently trotted out Hollywood actor Sean Penn to give the nation expert advice on how to deal with a novel virus pandemic.

    Did they do this because we live in a meaningless, godless universe where madness reigns and everything is chaos? Close, but no. They wanted Penn to explain to the public that it would be wonderful if the US military were deployed inside US borders to deal with the pandemic, because the US military is the greatest humanitarian force on planet Earth.

    “There is no greater humanitarian force on the planet than the United States military,” Penn said. “The logistical skills, commitment to service, their care for the people. It’s really time to give the military the full breadth command and control of this operation. I wouldn’t blink, I would have put command and control in their hands a month ago, certainly today.”
    "There is no greater humanitarian force on the planet than the United States military… it's really time to give the military the full breadth and control of this operation."
    – Actor and activist Sean Penn on battling coronavirus#CNNTownHallhttps://t.co/tVVAtXQVh5 pic.twitter.com/hnAfQq5UmK
    — Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) March 20, 2020
    The US military is in fact one of the least humanitarian forces on this planet, second only to malaria-laden mosquitos (and even that’s debatable). No other force is circling the globe murdering people in countless undeclared military entanglements and bullying the world into complying with the interests of a nationless alliance of plutocrats and opaque government agencies at the expense of ordinary humans everywhere. They are the exact opposite of a humanitarian force on this planet.

    Medical staff are a force for humanitarianism on this planet right now. Grocery store clerks are a force for humanitarianism on this planet. The US military are the armed thugs of a metastatic globe-sprawling empire run by sociopaths.

    Don’t say “Thank you for your service” to veterans whose only contribution to humanity has been helping to murder people for imperialist fossil fuel control agendas and Raytheon profit margins. Say “Thank you for your service” to your local cashier. To do the former is to participate in a cruel collective propaganda operation which only encourages more young people to hurl their bodies into the gears of the US war machine in search of the respect and honor you’re displaying, while to do the latter is to thank someone for actually providing a crucial service to human beings.

    The malfunction in Penn’s mind is the result of many malignant factors, but among them is the fact that people who rise to fame and fortune naturally experience a gravitational pull toward elitist echo chambers which cultivate narratives that favor the status quo which gave rise to their fame and fortune. You have a hard time hanging out with normal people because most of them don’t treat you normally anymore, so you find yourself spending time with other rich and famous people, and with people who have a vested interest in the rich and famous.

    This dynamic naturally fosters an environment where celebrities are eager to believe positive stories about the system which favors them, and where narrative managers are eager to circulate those stories among influential voices. This is why, with very few exceptions, the closest you’ll ever get to seeing a Hollywood celebrity express an anti-establishment opinion is one of them saying “**** Trump” at the Tony Awards. It’s also why every few weeks you’ll see some celebrity tweet something disgusting and then go into a meltdown when thousands of ordinary people react with revulsion; they don’t have ordinary people in their lives giving them feedback on what’s normal anymore, all they have is the elitist echo chamber.

    This echo chamber is what led a group of self-quarantining celebrities to believe it would be an awesome idea to share a video compilation where they all badly sing lines from John Lennon’s “Imagine” from inside their mansions with a world full of people who’ve been laid off from their jobs and are terrified for their futures. The figuratively and literally tone-deaf video was universally panned and people have been mocking it on social media ever since its release, which probably would have come as a surprise to the celebrities themselves since nothing in their insulated day-to-day lives would have told them they could all be collectively rejected with such disgust.

    The celebrity “Imagine” project was spearheaded by Israeli actress Gal Gadot, who as an IDF veteran would not have required any Hollywood echo chambering to have undergone deep psychological programming in favor of the empire. Gadot, who famously came under fire for publicly cheerleading the 2014 Gaza massacre, first shared the video on Instagram with the caption “We are in this together, we will get through it together. Let’s imagine together. Sing with us.”

    Memesters have of course been having fun with this.

    Then you’ve got celebrities like Rob Reiner, who just tweeted “No more ****ing around. We’re standing on a precipice. Time to consider a Federal lockdown.”

    Reiner is one of the more ham-fisted of the right-wing Democrats who we first saw promoting Russia hysteria, then working against the Sanders campaign, and are now promoting drastic totalitarian measures from their high-profile platforms. If you still hadn’t seen these people for what they are yet, you should definitely be seeing them now.

    It is an absolute guarantee that powerful people will use this pandemic to advance authoritarian measures which they have no intention of rolling back once the pandemic is over. They are working to do this currently. This is not a possibility, this is an absolute certainty.
    No more ****ing around. We’re standing on a precipice. Time to consider a Federal lockdown.
    — Rob Reiner (@robreiner) March 21, 2020
    While it does appear necessary to collectively use self-quarantining and social distancing to avoid crashing our healthcare systems and needlessly killing millions of people, we need to make sure we slam on the brakes long before we yield any more ground to the authoritarians than they’ve already shored up over the years. And we need to loudly shout down any celebrities who try to tell us otherwise.

    Hollywood is a giant propaganda mill which when it isn’t cranking out movies which are literally funded and controlled by the US war machine is putting on spectacular ninety-minute “The imperialist world order is perfectly sane and capitalism is totally working” infomercial presentations. It is an arm of cultural control which is unrivaled by anything else in this world, so of course it has powerful forces at work within it ensuring status quo loyalism.

    Whoever controls the narrative controls the world, and Hollywood celebrities are psyops wrapped in human skin. May our collective disgust with them continue to grow.
    ____________________________________


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    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    “The Coming War On China”  –  Watch John Pilger’s Powerfully Relevant Documentary
    by CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
    MARCH 23, 2020
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/03...t-documentary/



    "“The aim of this film is to break a silence: the United States and China may well be on the road to war, and nuclear war is no longer unthinkable,” Pilger says in his 2016 documentary The Coming War on China, which you can watch free on Youtube here or on Vimeo here.

    “In a few years China has become the world’s second-biggest economic power,” Pilger’s introduction continues. “The United States is the world’s biggest military power, with bases and missiles and ships covering every continent and every ocean. China is a threat to this dominance, says Washington. But who is the threat? This film is about shifting power, and great danger.”

    As we’ve been discussing for years now, the relentless quest of the US-centralized empire-like power alliance for total world domination has put it on a collision course with the surging economic powerhouse of China which refuses to be absorbed into the imperial blob. The empire’s continued existence depends upon its ability to undermine China before it grows too powerful or the empire grows too weak to stop its ascent, at which point global hegemony becomes impossible and we are living in a truly multipolar world.

    China has therefore always been the final boss fight in the global campaign of violence and domination by what Pilger calls the “empire which never speaks its name”. And the ramping up of anti-China narrative management by the US government indicates that we are being psychologically primed to accept this world-threatening confrontation, just as Pilger warned in 2016.

    “The danger of confrontation grows by the day,” Pilger says.

    The powerful film breaks down the way the USA has been encircling China with a “noose” of military bases since the Korean War, which all have massive amounts of military firepower, including nuclear firepower, pointed right at China’s cities. Pilger shows the psychopathic toll this has inflicted upon the people who live in the areas where the US war machine has set up shop in the Pacific, including an especially enraging segment on the use of Bikini Atoll natives as human guinea pigs to test the effects of nuclear radiation on people. Also deeply disturbing is the revelation of just how close the US came to launching nuclear warheads at China due to a miscommunication during the Cuban missile crisis.

    The film describes China’s recent history and explains its climb in economic power which led us to this point, and the USA’s generations-long history of provocation and hostility toward its government. It also addresses the silly projection so many westerners harbor that if the US wasn’t bullying and slaughtering the world into compliance, China would take over doing the same.
    Quote The Daily Beast

    @thedailybeast
    The White House is launching a communications plan across multiple federal agencies that focuses on accusing Beijing of orchestrating a “cover-up” & creating a global pandemic, according to two US officials & a government cable obtained by The Daily Beast https://trib.al/kRQSbeL


    White House Pushes U.S. Officials to Criticize China For Coronavirus ‘Cover-Up’
    A State Department cable obtained by The Daily Beast says the U.S. and the American people are the “greatest humanitarians the world has ever known.”

    thedailybeast.com
    5,269
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    Back in 2016 it was harder for people to see this escalation on the horizon, but now in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic we’re hearing a frantic, disproportionate amount of anti-China sentiment from the Trump administration and its supporters, in the same way we heard Russia hysteria amplified over the last three years by Trump’s enemies. Trump was politically pressured to dangerously escalate cold war tensions with Russia, and he’s now being politically incentivized to pass the blame for his administration’s spectacular failures in addressing this pandemic on to the Chinese government in a way which manufactures support for escalations on that front as well. Two different narratives, same agenda.

    “The new president, Donald Trump, has a problem with China,” Pilger says at the end of the documentary. “The urgent question now is will Trump continue with the provocations revealed in this film and take us all to the edge of war?”

    The answer to that question appears to be coalescing. It’s a good time for us all to watch this film."
    Each breath a gift...
    _____________

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    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    Quarantine Meditations: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
    MARCH 24, 2020
    by CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/03...rative-matrix/

    "The world is messed up because powerful people think in terms of narrative control, and ordinary people don’t. Change that and you change the world.

    Hot tip: Dump all stocks and invest in becoming the kind of decent human being who people will want to help in chaotic times.

    Let’s go humans! The sooner we can put aside our differences all around the world and unite to beat this virus the sooner we can get back to exploiting each other over an imaginary monetary system and murdering each other with bombs!

    FYI if your government is pushing the suspension of civil liberties before coming up with a healthcare plan or providing you with financial security in an unprecedented economic crisis, then their desire to suspend civil liberties has nothing to do with fighting the pandemic.

    Protecting the citizenry in situations like this is the thing governments are supposed to be for. It’s the single most compelling argument for their existence, by a very wide margin. Any government which doesn’t take good care of its people right now does not deserve to exist.
    If this virus hasn’t yet caused you to seriously re-evaluate your priorities in life, it should. For better or worse we appear to be standing on the brink of some very significant worldwide paradigm shifts. Where you choose to put your mental energy right now should reflect this

    Powerful people will work to advance authoritarian agendas which they have no intention of reversing during this pandemic. They are working on it right now. This is not a possibility, this is a certainty.

    I love that so many people are pleading with the Trump administration to end Iran sanctions during the pandemic because it’s killing civilians, but it won’t work. They know it’s killing civilians, and they know it will kill a lot more. That has always been the objective. Pompeo has openly admitted that Iran is being sanctioned no so that its government will change its behavior, but so that the Iranian people will get so desperate from all the suffering and devastation that they rise up and overthrow their government.

    Sanctions are the only form of warfare where it is considered legal and acceptable to deliberately target a civilian population with deadly force. That’s what they’ve been doing this whole time. It’s what they want. The pandemic only helps them.

    Every single Iranian who is dying because of these sanctions is on Trump. The MAGA narrative that he’s better on war than Obama has been thoroughly invalidated by every metric.

    Humanity is uniting against this common crisis. We’re uniting in our desire to beat this virus and protect our more vulnerable populations, and in a shared awareness that this thing could technically kill any of us. If ever there was a catalyst for a shift in consciousness, this is it.

    We appear to be watching a confluence of factors on a trajectory to push the world toward vast changes which may leave it unrecognizable in some ways within a matter of months. Maybe we don’t need to pour as much mental energy as we used to into sectarian infighting and petty social media spats.

    Nothing’s the same and it never will be again. **** seizing the means of production. Seize this moment. Take back everything they took from us and refuse to give it back.

    Also seize the means of production because you can and why not.

    Every time there’s a major mainstream narrative shift half my mentions are people going “Caitlin I’m so disappointed in you for saying something I disagree with. Normally I agree with you but now here you are not agreeing with me, like you’re an independent person or something.”

    Imagine being such a bleating, brainwashed NPC cuck that you believe China is your enemy.

    The nation that is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and engaging in countless undeclared military operations around the world is the belligerent rogue nation. Everyone else is, at worst, acting in self-defense in response to this belligerence.

    Governments using force to dominate the planet put every human being on a trajectory toward extinction via nuclear armageddon, and should be vehemently opposed. One government is the worst offender in this area, by a very, very, very wide margin. And it ain’t China.

    Every few weeks, depending on who the empire is targeting at a given moment, I swing from arguing with liberals about a nation liberals hate to arguing with conservatives about a nation conservatives hate, or vice versa. And they always think they’re different from the others.

    “Caitlin I normally agree with you, but I don’t know what’s gotten into you supporting Evil Nation X like this!” they say, firmly believing that they’re doing something original and unique.

    “This Official Bad Guy is different from all the others, Caitlin!” they say. “This one’s real!” It’s like listening to a serial loser-dater explain that her new boyfriend with the neck tattoo is actually a really great guy.

    I oppose warmongering against Venezuela and China and they say it’s because I love communism.

    I oppose warmongering against Iran and they say it’s because I love theocracy.

    I oppose warmongering against Russia and Syria and they say it’s because I love autocracy.

    Maybe I just oppose warmongering.

    Rank-and-file Dems unwittingly consented to cold war escalations against Russia out of concern for election interference. Rank-and-file Republicans are now doing the same with China out of concern for a virus outbreak. But both escalations were pre-planned by government agencies.

    The only reason people don’t worry about cold war escalations against China and Russia like they do about hot wars with non-nuclear powers is because we got lucky in the last cold war. But that’s all it was: sheer, dumb luck. No one was ever in control during that time. Not once.

    Nobody likes to think about the fact that we came within a hair’s breadth of total annihilation on multiple occasions during the last cold war due to communication breakdowns and tech malfunctions. That can easily happen again, but without getting lucky. People have a tendency to believe they succeeded because they were in control and lost because they lost control, but nobody was ever in control. We survived by sheer, dumb luck.

    With hot wars they take a few lives here, a few lives there. With cold war it’s an all-or-nothing dice roll that nothing goes wrong; no tech glitches, no miscommunications, even when things get very tense. And you roll those dice every single day. And with every escalation you add more dice.

    All arguments the US government makes against any “regime” it dislikes are completely invalidated by its alliance with Saudi Arabia alone, to say nothing of all the other tyrannical governments it’s allied with.

    If you find yourself thinking more thoughts about China’s authoritarian government than about the abusive authoritarian governments of US allies like Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, Egypt, the Philippines etc, it’s because you’ve been propagandized to align you with US interests.

    Establishment narrative managers aim their publications not at their followers but at other establishment narrative managers, seeking their approval. Alternative media should always do the opposite and address the people; too many also engage in upward-looking approval-seeking.

    Everything’s been in a steadily accelerating pattern of unpatterning for a good while now, since well before the virus. There are people who think they’ll be able to shore up control through this thing, but you have no control in a tornado. Nature, which includes homo sapiens, wins out."
    Each breath a gift...
    _____________

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    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    Pay People A Living Wage To Stay Home
    MARCH 25, 2020
    by CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/03...-to-stay-home/

    "Headline says it all, really. I’m not claiming to have all the answers, but this is one option we should all be talking about a lot in my opinion.

    This whole debate about either (A) returning to normal and killing millions of people or (B) consenting to draconian authoritarian measures which may never be fully rolled back once the pandemic is over is a false dichotomy, since our governments have the option of simply giving everyone a paid holiday.

    At a time of far less material abundance, governments all around the world managed to fund two years-long planetwide wars which killed tens of millions of human beings. When they say it’s impossible to pay people a living wage to stay home, they are lying. Instead of the citizenry funnelling their money toward the war machine, money can be funnelled away from the war machine and toward the citizenry for a few months.

    Money is a made-up concept the rules of which are constantly bent for the benefit of plutocrats, imperialists and war profiteers. Bend it for the benefit of ordinary people instead. To the extent that we still want to pretend money is an actual thing with hard and fast rules, we can redistribute it away from the very wealthy and away from the obscene and unnecessary war machine.



    Governments are supposed to take care of their citizenry in situations like this. That is the primary argument for their continued existence. A government which cannot take good care of its citizenry at a time like this does not deserve to exist. If we’re going to consent to the existence of governments, at bare minimum we should be able to expect them to protect our quality of life as much as possible without consenting to full-blown authoritarianism.

    Suspend as many bills for citizens as possible for a few months, and create millions of government jobs with the job description reading something like “Employee will stay inside place of residence during employment, with the following exceptions X, Y and Z.” Just like any other job one’s employment is not mandatory, but you’ve got to do what your job description says or you don’t get paid. Rather than consent to smartphone surveillance or carrying a monitor, compliance can simply be monitored by police; being found out risking infection after signing up for the job means you’ve violated the conditions of employment and lose a certain amount of pay. Not a fine, but docked pay from your employer.

    Keep critical infrastructure jobs like hospital staff, farm staff, grocery store staff etc open during this time, and pay those employees extra, maybe their normal wage plus the living wage going to everyone else. Also add more jobs producing PPE and medical equipment and building houses. Anyone who wants to work at these jobs is free to do so, anyone who wants a free paid vacation is free to do so. No crushing authoritarianism, the important stuff stays operational, people catch up on their reading lists, and grandma gets to live.

    Quote Existential Comics
    @existentialcoms
    I know this is going to come as an absolute shock to the ruling class but rich people might have to lose some money during this particular moment in history.

    4,281
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    This would be a good opportunity to redistribute wealth to create a more equitable world than the one where a plutocratic class can just buy up entire governments and media organizations, and to expose just how much abundance has been cut off from ordinary people while they scrape and slave to make ends meet. It would also be an opportunity for the working poor to get a paid vacation in places like America where such things often don’t otherwise happen.

    Everyone needs a break anyway. The world is getting crazier and crazier and many people would benefit from a good long breather to get their psychological legs underneath them. We all need a nap.

    This is totally doable, but instead we’re hearing groups like the Republican Party saying it would be better for a few million older Americans to die than for the economy to take a hit by people not showing up for work. Instead of playing the beggar and trying to negotiate a compromise with that insane position (“Maybe we can at least find a way for fewer people to die?”), citizens can demand an actual non-psychopathic solution to our dilemma that actually makes sense.

    I don’t know everything and there are no perfect solutions to the mess that we have found ourselves in, but to me this looks like the best one that’s out there right now. My main goal is to start a conversation, so please contribute any extra ideas you can think of and if you don’t like what I’m suggesting please share what solution you would like to see. Let’s get our hive mind chewing on this.

    _________________________________

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics onTwitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my books Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge."
    Each breath a gift...
    _____________

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    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    All The Craziest Things About America Are Being Highlighted By This Virus
    by CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
    MARCH 27, 2020
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/03...by-this-virus/
    Copied and pasted here: https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1346425
    Each breath a gift...
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    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    The US Is Using Germ Warfare On Sanctioned Nations





    “As billions hunker down to halt the spread of the virus, President Donald Trump has only ramped up sanctions and other pressure against frequent targets such as Iran and Venezuela,” reads a new article by AFP.

    “Iranians say humanitarian imports have effectively been blocked as few foreign banks are willing to deal with Iran due to US sanctions, leading to shortages of vital supplies such as masks,” AFP adds. “Ali Vaez, an Iran expert at the International Crisis Group, which studies peaceful solutions to global problems, said the Trump administration likely believes that any aid would only throw a lifeline to a regime it sees on the brink of falling.”

    “It’s almost like a bad joke. What’s worse than a pandemic appearing in a country where there is no government? That is really the last thing that you want,” the Quincy Institute’s Max Abrahms told AFP. “We need to rethink our understanding of US national security. It seems particularly absurd for the United States to invest so heavily in remaking foreign countries at a time when our own nurses in New York City are literally wearing trash bags.”
    Me: "We need to rethink our understanding of US national security. It seems particularly absurd for the United States to invest so heavily in remaking foreign countries at a time when our own nurses in New York City are literally wearing trash bags." https://t.co/fOtxsMuY9M
    — Max Abrahms (@MaxAbrahms) March 27, 2020
    Indeed, in some very important ways the US government has clearly seen the coronavirus outbreak not as a dangerous humanitarian crisis, but as a strategic advantage to be weaponized against governments which refuse to bow to its empire-building agendas.

    Weaponizing a virus is the thing that biological warfare is. The US government might not have deliberately released the virus (also not a settled question), but they are using the virus as a weapon aimed at toppling vulnerable targeted governments.
    The use of biological warfare, or germ warfare, is prohibited by international law, though in typical fashion the US is skirting the parameters of those laws in this case by weaponizing a virus that was already spreading. Which is not to say that the US is above deliberately infecting a population using biological weaponry as well; they used them extensively during the Korean War.

    Thousands of Iranians have already died of this virus due to the difficulties US sanctions create in obtaining medicine, equipment and resources, and it’s possible that orders of magnitude more dead may follow. This is not accidental, this is deliberate. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has gone on record to say that the objective is to make Iranian civilians so miserable and desperate that they overthrow their own government, and it is clear that this virus is being employed toward this purpose.

    This same imperial war machine is actively attempting to inflict this same fate upon Venezuela, where tens of thousands have already died of malnutrition and inability to access medicine because of the Trump administration’s brutal economic warfare. The DC-based International Monetary Fund has denied Venezuela a loan it says it needs to fight the pandemic citing dispute over the legitimacy of the Maduro government, a dispute the US itself created out of thin air and narrative spin. On top of all this the Trump administration is now offering a $15 million bribe to anyone who will help them arrest Maduro on ridiculous drug trafficking and terrorism charges.

    Who would benefit from a disease-ravaged nation not having a government? Certainly not the Venezuelan people.
    Assange denied bail in UK amid pandemichttps://t.co/IrmmzU8IFU
    — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) March 25, 2020
    We’re seeing the same germ warfare inflicted upon targeted individuals as well as governments, with Julian Assange denied bail as the virus spreads through UK prison systems despite doctors’ warnings of his vulnerability to death from an infection due to chronic lung disease.

    We may be absolutely certain that at least a few people in at least a few government agencies have voiced the observation that Covid-19 may finally solve their Assange problem once and for all. And of course those observations would be a perfectly accurate appraisal of the situation. Psychopathic, but accurate.

    For all the outraged shrieking the US government does about disobedient nations like Syria allegedly using chemical weapons, it has certainly shown no hesitation in employing biological warfare today. Those dead Iranians are just as dead as the Syrian civilians who according to the US government’s plot hole-riddled claims were killed by chemical weapons dropped by the Assad government, and they are dying on a much larger scale. They are dying of a virus that is being used as a weapon to topple a government which dared to disobey the dictates of Washington and its covert controllers, which means they are dying of germ warfare.

    Everything the US empire accuses unabsorbed governments of doing, the US empire does worse. That’s the true meaning of American exceptionalism.
    _______________________________


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    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    US Escalates Warmongering Against Venezuela Because Of… Drug Trafficking?
    APRIL 2, 2020
    by CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/04...g-trafficking/



    "The Trump administration is sending Navy ships to patrol Venezuela, the latest escalation against the government targeted by an aggressive hybrid US regime change intervention.All of this, of course, is bull****. The US government does not care about “the Venezuelan people” (a term only ever invoked to advance pro-regime change narratives); if they did they wouldn’t be murdering them by the tens of thousands using starvation sanctions and targeting them with backdoor biowarfare by cutting off their ability to protect themselves from a deadly pandemic.

    The US government is also not interested in “drug traffickers”. As journalist Ben Norton notes, “Even the US government’s own data admit the vast, vast, vast majority of drugs (mostly cocaine) coming from Latin America come from Colombia — a right-wing US colony.”

    “70% of the coca (used to create cocaine) grown in the whole world came from Colombia in 2017 according to the UN,” Norton adds. “Right-wing US colony Colombia is the CIA’s favorite drug dealer, used to fund death squads and Contra terrorist wars to overthrow leftist governments.”

    As Venezuela Analysis rightly points out, in 2009 George W Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to then-president of Colombia Álvaro Uribe Vélez, who was previously listed by US intelligence as one of Colombia’s leading narco-traffickers.

    So no, the US government does not care about drug trafficking, and it does not care about the Venezuelan people. What the US government cares about is securing control over the largest proven oil reserve on planet Earth, which is located beneath Venezuelan soil.

    “President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that Navy ships are being moved toward Venezuela as his administration beefs up counter-narcotics operations in the Caribbean following a U.S. drug indictment against Nicolás Maduro,” AP reports in an article packed with pro-US disinformation.

    “As governments and nations focus on the coronavirus there is a growing threat that cartels, criminals, terrorists and other malign actors will try to exploit the situation for their own gain,” said Trump. “We must not let that happen.”

    “The Venezuelan people continue to suffer tremendously due to Maduro and his criminal control over the country, and drug traffickers are seizing on this lawlessness,” added Defense Secretary Mark Esper.

    Quote venezuelanalysis.com
    @venanalysis

    AP Sources: US to deploy anti-drug ships near Venezuela
    MIAMI (AP) — The Trump administration will soon announce that the U.S. is moving naval ships toward Venezuela as it enhances counter-narcotic operations in the Caribbean following a U.S. drug...
    apnews.com
    230
    4:11 PM - Apr 1, 2020
    All of this, of course, is bull****. The US government does not care about “the Venezuelan people” (a term only ever invoked to advance pro-regime change narratives); if they did they wouldn’t be murdering them by the tens of thousands using starvation sanctions and targeting them with backdoor biowarfare by cutting off their ability to protect themselves from a deadly pandemic.

    The US government is also not interested in “drug traffickers”. As journalist Ben Norton notes, “Even the US government’s own data admit the vast, vast, vast majority of drugs (mostly cocaine) coming from Latin America come from Colombia — a right-wing US colony.”

    “70% of the coca (used to create cocaine) grown in the whole world came from Colombia in 2017 according to the UN,” Norton adds. “Right-wing US colony Colombia is the CIA’s favorite drug dealer, used to fund death squads and Contra terrorist wars to overthrow leftist governments.”

    As Venezuela Analysis rightly points out, in 2009 George W Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to then-president of Colombia Álvaro Uribe Vélez, who was previously listed by US intelligence as one of Colombia’s leading narco-traffickers.

    So no, the US government does not care about drug trafficking, and it does not care about the Venezuelan people. What the US government cares about is securing control over the largest proven oil reserve on planet Earth, which is located beneath Venezuelan soil.
    Quote Caitlin Johnstone ⏳
    @caitoz
    "Yeah we're super interested in getting rid of Maduro because his country's got so much... uhhh... drug trafficking."

    View image on Twitter
    487
    6:08 PM - Apr 1, 2020
    Twitter Ads info and privacy
    255 people are talking about this
    It’s so precious how the US empire pretends that its transparent resource control agendas are about protecting human interests. It reminds me of the excuses the guys make when they get busted on To Catch A Predator: “No, Chris Hansen, honest! I just drove 300 miles because I wanted to give the 13 year-old girl a talking to about the dangers of flirting with strangers online.” No you didn’t America, you drove 300 miles because you wanted to steal that little girl’s oil reserves you pervert.

    The Trump administration has already admitted that its sole interest is in toppling the Venezuelan government with its ridiculous offer https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52111805
    ... to cease murdering civilians via economic warfare if Maduro leaves office; adding a bunch of unrelated gibberish about narco-trafficking on top of this does nothing to obfuscate this. Warships have been sent to Venezuela because the Trump administration is waging a deadly war upon Venezuelans and that’s what you do during a war. These continued escalations are directed at nothing other than shoring up more power and control for the globe-spanning US-centralized empire, which works tirelessly to dominate the world by dominating its resources.

    I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t remember voting for a paradigm where powerful governments pour the lion’s share of riches into sabotaging, toppling and destroying nations which don’t bow before their demands. This dynamic exists without the consent of ordinary human beings, and it brings nothing but harm to ordinary human beings. It harms human beings abroad with overt and covert applications of deadly force, and it harms human beings at home by robbing them of riches and resources for agendas which benefit them in no way, shape or form.
    Quote Ken Klippenstein

    @kenklippenstein
    In 2017 the military identified a novel influenza disease as "the most likely and significant threat" which it anticipated would lead to a shortage of ventilators, face masks and hospital beds, per Pentagon document leaked to me.

    They knew.https://www.thenation.com/article/po...tage-pandemic/

    View image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on Twitter
    All these Venezuela shenanigans are occurring as revelations emerge that the Pentagon had predicted the exact sort of disruptions a deadly coronavirus pandemic would cause way back in 2017. The Nation‘s Ken Klippenstein shows that the Department of Defense had warned that unless changes were made an outbreak of a novel virus would see a shortage of “ventilators, devices, personal protective equipment such as face masks and gloves”, which “will have a significant impact on the availability of the global workforce.”

    Hey America? If your Department of “Defense” is not being used to defend the American citizenry from the deadly threats it perceives, but is being used to patrol the shores of an oil-rich nation that has nothing to do with you, then maybe that department needs a new name. And maybe you need a new kind of government. Just a thought."
    Last edited by onawah; 2nd April 2020 at 05:11.
    Each breath a gift...
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    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    Prepare To Have Your Worldview Obliterated
    APRIL 7, 2020
    by CAITLIN JOHNSTONE

    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/04...#comment-31261


    "The first draft of the civil rights-eroding USA PATRIOT Act was magically introduced one week after the 9/11 attacks. Legislators later admitted that they hadn’t even had time to read through the hundreds of pages of the history-shaping bill before passing it the next month, yet somehow its authors were able to gather all the necessary information and write the whole entire thing in a week.

    This was because most of the work had already been done. CNET reported the following back in 2008:

    “Months before the Oklahoma City bombing took place, [then-Senator Joe] Biden introduced another bill called the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995. It previewed the 2001 Patriot Act by allowing secret evidence to be used in prosecutions, expanding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and wiretap laws, creating a new federal crime of ‘terrorism’ that could be invoked based on political beliefs, permitting the U.S. military to be used in civilian law enforcement, and allowing permanent detention of non-U.S. citizens without judicial review. The Center for National Security Studies said the bill would erode ‘constitutional and statutory due process protections’ and would ‘authorize the Justice Department to pick and choose crimes to investigate and prosecute based on political beliefs and associations.’

    Biden’s bill was never put to a vote, but after 9/11 then-Attorney General John Ashcroft reportedly credited his bill with the foundations of the USA PATRIOT Act.

    “Civil libertarians were opposed to it,” Biden said in 2002 of his bill. “Right after 1994, and you can ask the attorney general this, because I got a call when he introduced the Patriot Act. He said, ‘Joe, I’m introducing the act basically as you wrote it in 1994.'”

    I point this out because it is now more important than ever to be aware that power structures (and their goons like Biden) can and will seize on opportunities to roll out pre-existing authoritarian agendas. We know it happened after 9/11, and we may be absolutely certain that it is happening now.

    Quote Good thread compiling the many, many authoritarian measures which governments around the world have implemented and are preparing to implement to deal with the virus. https://twitter.com/consent_factory/...71734063226881 https://t.co/cZ3KnMzdPp
    — Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) April 1, 2020

    Commentator and satirist CJ Hopkins has a long, long, long, long ongoing thread https://twitter.com/consent_factory/...71734063226881
    ...on Twitter right now compiling dozens and dozens of creepy Orwellian steps that have been taken by governments around the world and by Silicon Valley tech giants in response to the virus over the last three weeks. I emphasize how long the thread is because if you think you’ve finished scrolling through it you probably haven’t; make sure you keep clicking “more replies” until you get to the current entries.

    I strongly encourage everyone to scroll through the thread when you get a chance to get a sense of the scale and scope of the drastic measures that are being implemented around the world, and maybe bookmark it and keep checking back now and then for updates. The entire thread is comprised of mainstream media articles with excerpts; some entries are more jarring than others, but taken as a whole it becomes clear that we’re looking at a whole lot of power being handed over to the kinds of institutions which historically don’t do good things when given a lot more power.

    And these are just the steps we know about.

    To what extent are these drastic, intrusive, authoritarian measures justified? The answer, in my estimation, isn’t clear yet. There are too many unknowns about the virus, too many unknowns about the responses to it, and too many unknowns about exactly what is going on behind the veil of secrecy in opaque government agencies around the world. There’s an argument expert epidemiologists are making that there’s no time to get perfectly certain of these things before dealing with a pandemic, that speed is of the essence and hesitating due to fear of maybe getting something wrong can cost millions of lives. https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/1238504143104421888 Maybe that’s true; I’m not an epidemiologist and I do not know.

    What I do know is that enormous changes are happening, and that powerful people are definitely conspiring to advance their own interests as this unfolds. There are many theories about who specifically is conspiring with whom and the specific manner in which they are doing so, and they’re being dismissed by establishment loyalists as “conspiracy theories” as though that in and of itself constitutes some sort of argument. That conspiracies are happening is actually just a fact that is obvious to any adult with a mature understanding of the world, and it can be useful to come up with theories about how that might be occurring; calling theories about conspiracies the thing that they are in a disparaging tone does not actually invalidate them.

    There are a ton of theories about what’s going on behind the scenes with this pandemic and the policies that are being put in place to respond to it. Some are smart and relatively well-founded, some are stupid and rooted in generalized paranoia or partisan idiocy, many contradict each other, and many could potentially fit together in some way. I personally haven’t seen enough evidence for any one theory to throw my weight behind it, but I am watching carefully, and I am glad that the hive mind is chewing on this riddle.

    One thing I will put my weight behind right now is the prediction that those of us who are dedicated to truth are going to have to drastically revise our worldviews in the coming months. There are such large-scale shifts happening in such an unclear information environment that the only thing we should expect is the unexpected; this virus is shaking things up (and being used to shake things up) in ways we don’t really understand yet, and even before the virus the world’s dominant power structures were acting very weird. This means our ideas about what’s going on in the world will likely have to undergo some revising in the relatively near future; the bigger the revelations, the more revision will be necessary.

    Right now that’s the primary piece of advice I have to offer: stay skeptical, stay intellectually honest, and keep your perspectives malleable. If we are more interested in the truth than we are in being proven right or in feeling smug, then we are likely on a collision course with future revelations that will change our ideas about how the world is functioning in some pretty significant ways. If this doesn’t sound possible to you, it’s only because you currently lack the humility, intellectual honesty and cognitive flexibility to understand that you may not be seeing the full picture yet.

    Things are shifting; all we can do is keep our minds agile enough to shift with them. Prepare to have your worldview obliterated."
    Each breath a gift...
    _____________

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    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    Ellen DeGeneres is hydraulic fracking with a face
    Caitlin Johnson
    4/21/20
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/04...g-with-a-face/


    "Ellen DeGeneres is hydraulic fracking with a face.
    She's like if Walmart union busting was a person.
    She's like if Amazon and Disney had a baby
    and raised it on a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier
    on a steady diet of digital surveillance and NAFTA desolation.

    Most people have birds behind their eyes.
    Some have owls, some have flamingos,
    some have crows,
    I have lorikeets.
    But most have birds.
    Not Ellen DeGeneres, though.
    Behind Ellen's eyes, there are fentanyl patches
    and eviction notices.
    I swear to you I saw them once
    during a particularly labored monologue
    when she clearly didn't want to be there
    and had probably thrown a plate of cheese fries
    at the makeup lady minutes before.

    Did you know Ellen stopped dancing during her shows?
    She says she never liked it.
    I believe her.
    The whole universe believes her.
    Ellen DeGeneres is the opposite of dancing.
    Ellen DeGeneres is the Australian coal lobby.

    Ellen only enjoys dancing
    when she dances with George W Bush,
    which she does constantly
    for all eternity
    in the center of every tear
    that falls from the eyes
    of Gaia.

    There is a sacred, primordial spark within all of us.
    It rejoices.
    It delights.
    It dances.
    It is the exact opposite of Ellen DeGeneres.
    May the whole world be the opposite of Ellen DeGeneres.
    May the whole world dance.
    May the whole world delight.
    May the whole world de-Ellen,
    and may Portia do the same
    (come on girl you know you gotta get outta there).

    Amen."
    Each breath a gift...
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    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    We could nickname her Ellen Degenerate or Ellen Disingenuous. Such a tool!
    Each breath a gift...
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    Default Re: The thread of Caitlin Johnstone's words

    Five Things That Are Revealed By Democrats’ Rehabilitation Of Bush
    by CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
    MAY 4, 2020
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/05...ation-of-bush/


    "George W Bush is in the news again today, and once again it’s not for the only legitimate reason that he should ever be in the news, namely a war crimes tribunal. No, it’s because his voice was used in a cutesy feel-good video about unity during the Covid-19 pandemic.

    “Let us remember how small our differences are in the face of this shared threat,” Bush is heard saying. “We are not partisan combatants. We are human beings, equally vulnerable and equally wonderful in the sight of God.”

    And, needless to say, Democrats are all over social media orgasming in their pants about it.

    “This video made me ugly cry,” tweeted actress-turned-McResistance pundit Alyssa Milano.

    “A REAL president,” tweeted the other Alyssa Milano, Debra Messing.

    “In a million years I never thought I’d be crying watching this, thinking how much better we’d all feel if Bush were president today,” tweeted former Democratic congresswoman Katie Hill to thunderous online applause.

    The Intercept‘s Mehdi Hasan spent all day on Twitter defending his position that Dubya is superior to Trump, at one point even arguing “You can be a sane warmonger. You can be a warmonger but be an ok human being to your friends and family. You can be a warmonger and be able to handle a domestic public health crisis.”

    In a million years I never thought I’d be crying watching this, thinking how much better we’d all feel if Bush were president today. Wtf. https://t.co/SSR3ieZEFP

    — Katie Hill (@KatieHill4CA) May 2, 2020

    For years rank-and-file Democrats have been giving the true Butcher of Baghdad a majority approval rating, running with the common narrative that while Bush perhaps made some “mistakes”, Trump is spectacularly worse. Here are five things that are highlighted by that common perspective:

    1. It shows how little Democrats care about the lives of human beings overseas.
    By the end of his first term Bush had launched two full-scale ground invasions, murdered a million Iraqis, destabilized an entire region in a way that would shortly give rise to ISIS, and ushered in a whole new level of unprecedented US military expansionism and imperialism. Trump has done none of these things. He has inflicted many evils upon our world and, like Obama, has continued and expanded the warmongering of his predecessors. But he has done nothing that rises to the level of depravity of Bush’s wars.

    The fact that Democrats see Trump’s evils as not only equal to but far in excess of Bush’s reveals as plain as day that, for all their supposed bleeding heart liberal sensibilities, they simply do not place much value on the lives of foreigners. Sure they might enjoy a little masturbatory melodrama over kids in cages when it shows up on their doorstep, but kids getting ripped to shreds by cluster bombs and being born severely disabled from depleted uranium munitions simply does not register for them, because they don’t have to look at it.

    They do not care. Rude tweets and racism are worse than institutionalized mass murder for them, because they have to look at one but not the other.

    2. It shows that Trump-era Democrats are Bush-era Republicans.
    The problem is that Bush and Cheney’s operatives, speechwriters, policy advisers, propagandistas and top aides are the close friends and colleagues of media liberals and DC Democrats and their beloved pundits, so they have to whitewash Bush’s evil to justify themselves: https://t.co/Z1C3CB7JQn

    — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 3, 2020

    “Dems have no choice but to rehabilitate George Bush because their core narrative is the US was a fundamentally good and decent land before Trump vandalized it,” journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted in response to Democrats’ fawning over Bush, adding, “How do you join with Bill Kristol, Nicole Wallace, Rick Wilson, David Frum and the CIA without whitewashing Bush’s crimes?”

    Indeed, Bush-era neocons have been able to fully ingratiate themselves to and integrate themselves with Democrats in the age of Trump by posing as moral opposition longing for a more civilized time when presidents would politely butcher humans by the hundreds of thousands without using offensive language like “**** hole”. A gentlemanly time for gentlemanly presidents to unfold gentlemanly Orwellian surveillance measures all around the world without posting rude tweets about celebrities they don’t like.

    Trump-era Democrats are Bush-era Republicans. That’s how far to the authoritarian right the party has moved in the last few years on important matters like foreign policy. You can see this by the shrieking, hysterical response they had to Tulsi Gabbard calling for what more or less amounted to a simple reversion back to pre-9/11 US foreign policy. It has been necessary for Democrats to gaslight themselves into this position because for three presidential campaigns in a row–Obama 2012, Clinton 2016, and now Biden 2020–they’ve had to find ways of convincing themselves that a politician who has facilitated Bush’s foreign policy agendas would make a good commander-in-chief.

    3. It shows how the amnesia-inducing effects of the mass media news churn make it difficult to retain perspective.
    The News Churn Memory Hole: How The MSM Lies Even When Telling The Truth

    "It’s not enough to simply expose the truth. You must also fully, repeatedly and consistently expose the ones who are telling lies."https://t.co/OSW6eFQVAn

    — Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) December 18, 2019

    Mass media propagandists are able to distort perception even while telling the truth using the news churn memory hole. Even when forced to report on uncomfortable truths like not finding any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or the fact that the occupation of Afghanistan has been justified by an entire generation of lies, the memory of that reporting can be made to fade into the background by frantically reporting on what’s happening right now without referring back to the previous revelations.

    Russiagate alone did so much to distort people’s perceptions in mainstream liberal circles. Having the baseless narrative breathlessly promoted year after year after year that the Kremlin had literally seized control of the highest levels of the US government left rank-and-file Democrats who subscribed to it without any sense of scale or proportion, because they were constantly being told that the Most Important Thing Ever was about to happen. How can you hold perspective on a million dead Iraqis when you’re being told day after day, year after year in myriad ways that Russian Hitler was controlling your country but Super Mueller is going to swoop in to the rescue any minute now? It would be very difficult.

    4. It shows the glaring difference between fact and narrative.
    Most of the mass media reporting on Trump has been factual, it’s just had a ton of narrative spin attached to the facts. It is a fact that Trump frequently says and does dumb, obnoxious and horrible things. It is a fact that many racists think he’s the cat’s pajamas. It is a fact that there was an impeachment and a collusion investigation. But the narrative overlay that has been heaped upon those facts while they’re being reported–the urgency, the alarmism, the hyperbole–leaves viewers with the distinct impression that this US president is awful in a way that is unique and historically unprecedented, and he simply isn’t.

    Trump is not worse than Bush, the mass media just yell about him a lot more. If the narratives matched the facts, mass media consumers would be aware that nothing Trump has done is as evil as Bush’s invasion of Iraq alone. In reality Trump didn’t wind up being another Hitler, he wound up being another Obama (not a compliment). And if the narrative spin matched the factual reality, people would understand that.

    liberals have the baffling ability to simultaneously believe both that George W. Bush was a good president whom they love and miss dearly AND that Ralph Nader is a piece of **** who's going to burn in hell for supposedly getting George W. Bush elected

    — i bless the rains down in castamere (@Chinchillazllla) May 3, 2020

    5. It shows that this simply is not working.
    Imagine you’re out in the woods with a friend you trust in the dark. You know there’s a horrible monster out there stalking you, and suddenly you hear it in the distance coming crashing towards you. It has picked up your scent and it will be upon you in moments.

    You turn to run, but your friend grabs you and won’t let you move. He falls to the ground grabbing your legs screaming “No! No! We must stay here! We mustn’t move an inch!”

    Who do you need to fight first? The monster? Or your “friend”?

    That’s why I focus so much of my criticism on the Democratic Party instead of the Republicans. Ultimately they’re the party which could actually allow for positive changes to be made to the world, but instead they keep moving further and further into the warmongering totalitarianism they once purported to despise in George W Bush.

    Relying on either head of the two-headed one-party system to make meaningful changes simply is not working, and will not ever work. No institution that would so warmly rehabilitate and welcome a bloodthirsty monster like Bush is going to help humanity one iota. In fact, its sole purpose is to do the exact opposite."
    Each breath a gift...
    _____________

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