Second Thought

i've watched several 'second thought' videos so far. every one of them has been excellent just like this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhBkeAo2Hlg

"Conspiracy Theories"

the brilliance of richard dolan is once again on display here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx3V92ou0lk&list=UUnaIeNm-jSa1l8yHrn7PlQg&index=9

Caitlin Johnstone

caitlin johnstone has a blog/website devoted to educating the public regarding the ubiquity of propaganda and misinformation that comes from mainstream corporate media in the 'west' in support of a u.s. centralized empire intent on world domination. based in australia, she began the blog about 6 years ago. i just learned about her writing recently, in spite of my great interest in alternative news and opinion sites which caustically critique our dystopian world from a rational and well informed 'leftist' viewpoint. of course this might be due to the internet having been rigged to favor establishment friendly websites whenever one does a google search, as she herself has pointed out.

her writing is excellent. she pulls no punches and clearly knows of what she writes. it also so happens that her views are very very similar to mine, as readers of this blog would know if there were any. i've copied and pasted a few paragraphs selected from her writings below, along with a link to one of her posts in which she briefly tells her readers about herself and her purpose.

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'Freedom and democracy only exist within the western empire to the extent that it keeps up appearances. Because the trouble with democracy, it turns out, is that human minds are very hackable, as long as you’ve got the resources. Wealthy and powerful people do have the resources, which means that it’s very possible for wealthy and powerful people to manipulate the masses into voting in a way that consistently benefits the wealthy and powerful. This is why billionaires and narrative control consistently go hand-in-hand.

This dynamic has allowed for western power structures to operate in a way that western democracy was explicitly designed to prevent: for the benefit of the powerful instead of for the benefit of the voting populace. So now we’ve got people in so-called liberal democracies voting to maintain governments which advance wars which don’t benefit them, to advance intrusive surveillance and police state policies which oppress them, to advance austerity policies which harm them, to advance labor policies which exploit them, and to maintain ecocidal environmental policies which threaten the very survival of our species. All because the wealthy and powerful are able to use their wealth and power to manipulate the way people think and vote.'
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'My goal here in this little slot of digital real estate is to do every little thing I can to help save the world. Humanity appears to be hurtling toward extinction by way of climate destruction or nuclear annihilation, both of which are movements held in place by a transnational alliance of plutocrats and secretive government agencies. This unelected power establishment (which is sometimes referred to as the deep state, a term I now avoid since Republican partisans have distorted its meaning) seems to be motivated not by any ideology, nor by any loyalty to any particular nation or government, but by sheer hunger for limitless power. I place emphasis on the United States, because that’s where the largest amount of power appears to be centralized.

In a system where money both (A) translates directly to political power and (B) comes most abundantly to whoever is sufficiently cold and unfeeling to do whatever it takes in order to become immensely wealthy, we naturally find ourselves in a world ruled by sociopaths. These plutocratic rulers use their political influence to amass more power/money for themselves and create a system that is more and more favorable to the immensely wealthy, and they buy up media outlets to manufacture public support for that system. This ongoing propaganda campaign is what I see as the key weakness in the armor of their machine, and it’s the point I spend my energy attacking here.

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Understand this key point and you’ll understand why plutocrat-controlled media outlets are constantly smearing Julian Assange, why they never fail to fall in line to support a US-led military agenda, why they pay massive amounts of attention to some political candidates while completely ignoring others, and why they put so much energy into keeping everyone arguing over the details of how the status quo should be maintained instead of debating whether it should exist at all. The unelected power establishment uses its control over politics and media to determine what the public believes about what’s going on in their world in order to keep them from rebelling against a status quo which does not serve them; without the ability to effectively propagandize the masses in this way, they cannot rule. I therefore concentrate most of my energy here in attacking that propaganda machine and weakening the unearned trust that the public has placed in the mass media.'

https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/who-i-am-where-i-stand-and-what-im-trying-to-do-here-4a113e783578

Honest Government Ads

'surprisingly honest and informative' 'government ads' from the 'australian' government!

'These videos are brilliant at pointing out how governments just work for their own interests and self-preservation, and not the interests of the people or planet.
The fact that they also accurately describe what's going on in the UK (and I'm sure many other countries) shows that the people who run things are a global problem.' -youtube comment from 'rick parkin'

this youtube channel (thejuicemedia) reminds me of the old daily show with jon stewart. one knows one's living in a dystopian society when satirists who point out establishment 'shitfuckery' are a much more honest news source than big corporate media outlets which are of course part of the 'shitfuckery' establishment, and whose primary job is to defend it with propaganda and deceit.

i think these videos are awesome. link below is to one. check it out and let me know what u think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvFy2TuPDaw

Happy B-Day George Carlin!

george carlin was born 85 years ago may 12. he died almost 14 years ago, but left behind a great body of work.

every great act deserves a good opener. FAMILY GUY is a great opener. if u love FG and george, we have a little something in common. this little scene is pretty representative of FG's crude, lewd, and rude double entendre humor. i think it's art at it's finest. if it doesn't bust your gut, u have a strong gut, or maybe a weak sense of humor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VErb9_vCRJ8

this is probably my favorite carlin bit, in which he takes down dogmatic religion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r-e2NDSTuE

george lived quite a full and fascinating life. here he talks about it at length:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm4YnDl5hOk

Atrocity Propaganda

recently a progressive friend of mine cited as fact a claim she'd heard or read somewhere that the russian military had bombed 300 hospitals in ukraine during it's recent invasion of that nation. i don't believe this, just as i doubt just about everything that comes from corporate american media that purports to be 'news'.

i've just discovered a new term which relates to this sort of claim: 'atrocity propaganda'. it's an old trick which has probably been used for centuries if not millennia to drum up support for wars against supposedly evil enemies of all sorts. as it happens, i know of a very good example of it to cite that's extremely well documented, relatively recent, and that was directed mainly at the american public to incite war fever against iraq for the first invasion there by usa forces in 1991.

this involved a 10 million dollar p.r. campaign and the daughter of the kuwaiti ambassador to the usa who was also a member of the royal family. she presented herself as a regular citizen who as a volunteer hospital worker claimed to have witnessed iraqi soldiers stealing incubators from the hospital and pitilessly leaving the babies taken from them to die on the cold floor. she gave this testimony to some sort of congressional panel tearfully and earnestly and it was all just a well rehearsed big lie which got sopped up not only by the establishment media and the american public, but by other supposedly more discerning and trustworthy groups like amnesty international. it wasn't until a couple of years later, after this propaganda bs had served it's purpose in galvanizing public support for an invasion that the truth came out.

u can read about it in the short article linked below or watch an award winning canadian documentary titled To Sell A War which is about the same event also linked below. the bottom line being imo that u may have a lot to learn about the pervasiveness of deceitful propaganda that's regularly sold to the public on a whole host of things including international relations which consistently demonize one side or the other. imo, there's been such a thing going on to demonize russia quite endlessly for the past decade, quite similar to other campaigns which demonize other supposedly evil regimes like those of cuba, venezuela, iran, syria, and so on.

https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Nayirah_al-%E1%B9%A2aba%E1%B8%A5

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hExlqV-fsP8

The Grayzone

i think it's a pretty good rule of thumb to assume that the u.s. government and most american media including some supposedly independent and objective sources can't be trusted, or even worse, can be trusted to be deceitful and on the wrong side of most conflicts / issues. for many years i've placed much more trust on alternative media which are openly critical of the american government and mainstream media, including russia today, a platform financed by the russian government which employed several american journalists and social critics who have been effectively banned from appearing on american media outlets because of their refusal to toe the establishment line. russia today has itself now been deplatformed by tptb that control internet access, like google, owner of youtube, so that there are fewer and more difficult to find sources of radical disagreement to what might be termed 'consensus media (sur)reality' to be found.

one that remains is the grayzone. as far as i know, it depends on no governmental or corporate funding. regarding the current ukrainian russian war, it takes a far different stance as to which side is more to blame, more reprehensible, than can be found in the near unanimous decree from other american media that this is 'putin's war', or 'russia's war' and that it's the russian side that is totally evil, while ukrainians are the heroic resistant victims. if u wish, check this alternative view out, which paints almost the opposite picture:

https://thegrayzone.com/2022/04/17/traitor-zelensky-assassination-kidnapping-arrest-political-opposition/