Category Archives: Media

Elon Musk’s Twitter Is Still US State-Affiliated Media, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on January 7, 2023 | 1 comment

When you get right down to it, Elon Musk is a creature of the government. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

A couple of months into Elon Musk’s control of Twitter, it’s fair to say that from an anti-censorship, pro-transparency perspective there have been a few positive results of the platform coming under new management. The revelations from the Twitter Files about US government involvement in influencing a massive social media company’s policies and actions have been indisputably newsworthy information that’s absolutely in the public interest to have, and some anti-establishment voices have been saying their accounts have been noticeably more visible since the changeover.

It’s also fair to say at this point that Musk has allowed far more negative practices to continue than he has ended. In an excellent new article titled “Under Musk, Twitter Continues to Promote US Propaganda Networks,” Fair.org’s Bryce Greene breaks down the many different ways that Twitter is still manipulating the information its users see in ways that serve the interests of the US government.

Greene contrasts the wildly unbalanced way media coming from empire-targeted governments is suppressed and labeled “state-affiliated media”, while US-aligned accounts which would deserve such a designation are not given it, and are often amplified and aided.

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Repentance, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on January 6, 2023 | Leave a comment

With a few exceptions, the medical profession should be on its knees, begging for forgiveness. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

“You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible.” — Anton Chekhov

The doctors of this country — of all Western Civ, really — owe their citizens an apology and an explanation, and even then, they might not be able to save modern medicine. The doctors have dishonored and disgraced their profession. They promulgated a Covid- 19 vaccination program that is now clearly killing a lot of people early in life and unnaturally. To this day, no established professional group of doctors, or formal association, or major journal, has called for an end to the vaxx program.

The hazard signal has been clear for the better part of a year. The mRNA products made by Pfizer and Moderna did not stop transmission of Covid-19 and were causing widespread harm, especially in the working-age population between 25 and 64 who were forced to take the shots to keep their jobs. For the whole population, all-causes deaths and disabilities were still rising at the end of 2022.

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Obedience Culture, by Eric Peters

Posted on January 6, 2023 | Leave a comment

At best the obedient are boring, at worst they become the tyrants they once obeyed. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

When did Americans become so  . . . obedient? That is easy to answer. It became so when they became so reflexively fearful. Of everything. Of anything.

That happened a little more than 20 years ago.

They were told to freeze in place – some may remember this – and they did. And so it came naturally when they were told to stand six feet apart. They just did it.

They were told to spread their legs. Having done that, putting on a “mask” came naturally enough, when they were told to do that, too.

They were told the “threat” was “elevated.”

The cases! The cases! 

Panic became the new American drug. Obedience, its hangover. The drug was pushed from the top down by the man who was president – just barely – when (supposedly) a handful of disgruntled Saudis flew commercial jets into American landmarks, one of which pancaked straight down into its own footprint after not being struck by a commercial jet. Americans were told by George W. Bush, squinty-eyed and finger pointing, to be very afraid – of everything. Of everyone. That to not be afraid was a kind of affirmation of “evil-doing.”

“You are either with us or with the terrorists,” he said.

“We are all in this together,” Americans said – a generation later, as they terrorized one another.

One doesn’t hear much about “Islamic terrorism” anymore. Probably because the “enemies of freedom,” as Bush styled them, won. Their squinty-eyed leader now comfortably retired to his ranch in Texas where he occupies his latter days painting luridly, disjointedly – in the John Wayne Gacy style.

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Snowden and Controlled Opposition, by Mr. E

Posted on January 5, 2023 | 3 comments

Many people regard Edward Snowden as a hero, and SLL will regard him as such until its proven otherwise. However, the author makes some disturbing points which raise the possibility that he’s not all he’s cracked up to be. From Mr. E at bombthrower.com:

Follow Mr. E on Substack and Twitter!

For nearly ten years, the US government has been legally enabled to disseminate misinformation and propaganda domestically. They’ve been doing it for centuries internationally, and of late this criminal organization has taken a very clear stance that its own population is now its greatest enemy.

Of course, this has been going on illegally for much longer. If we define misinformation as the telling of half-truths or outright lies to the public, then we’ve just accurately characterized what every politician, bureaucrat and military officer who ever appeared in the mass media does.

Shortly after the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act of 1987 were neutralized, a savior appeared. Risking life and limb, a former CIA and NSA technical contractor leaked classified materials giving Americans an updated look at just how pervasive the US surveillance state had gotten. I say ‘updated’ because, to most in the know, it was no surprise at all. It’s been common knowledge since before the days of Echelon that mass domestic electronic spying (“Sigint”) was going on.

Snowden was paraded around the world by mainstream media outlets to tell his story. He set up a Twitter account to continue his revelations and further cultivate his image. Not one, but two films (fiction and non-fiction alike) were produced. He even published a book to explain why he did it. All the while Senators, Congressmen and intelligence officials would call for his head – but for some reason seemed powerless to do anything about this one, lone man. How can that be so? The US government has clearly demonstrated it has no problem murdering American citizens and their children, without due process of law, for far less, wherever they may be.

And therein lay the problem.

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NFL’s Vaccine Elephant Stomps the Field, by James Grundvig

Posted on January 5, 2023 | Leave a comment

Everybody knows what happened and everybody knows why you’re not supposed to say what happened: the odds are very high that Damar Hamlin’s collapse was caused by the vaccine. From James Grundvig at americanmediaperiscope.com:

[Click link to original article for video]

When the ambulance rolled onto the field on Monday Night Football to attend to Buffalo Bill’s 24-year-old defender, Damar Hamlin, it became clear what happened to him. Clear, except to those mingling in the incestuous sheets with Big Pharma. That short list includes Big Tech, Big Media, Big Government, Big Sports, and their sponsors.

They couldn’t let the truth or even a discussion about the truth emerge in the public domain that the COVID-19 bioweapon, mislabeled a vaccine, destroyed the young life of one of the NFL’s rising young stars. So unable to sweep the “postponed” game under the rug, a parade of medical doctors hit YouTube—where real science and debate are banned—and other social media outlets to tell the world that an event, which never had happened in the league’s 100-year history, took place on the big stage of a nationally televised game.

The doctors’ banal and inaccurate observations about the football injury on a routine play with limited contact at half speed ran counter to what NFL announcers Troy Aikman, Kurt Warner, and Booger McFarland—all league players—said in a stone-cold sober manner: “I have never seen this happen on a football field before.”

They actually implied that they had never seen a cardiac arrest in a young fit athlete at any level of football. Pee Wee. High school. College. And the pros. Unprecedented is the understatement of the year.

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Capsule Summaries of all Twitter Files Threads to Date, With Links and a Glossary, by Matt Taibbi

Posted on January 5, 2023 | Leave a comment

Here’s a handy reference for the Twitter files, especially for those of us who find it tedious making our way through Twitter threads. From Matt Taibbi at taibbi.substack.com:

It’s January 4th, 2023, which means Twitter Files stories have been coming out for over a month. Because these are weedsy tales, and may be hard to follow if you haven’t from the beginning, I’ve written up capsule summaries of each of the threads by all of the Twitter Files reporters, and added links to the threads and accounts of each. At the end, in response to some readers (especially foreign ones) who’ve found some of the alphabet-soup government agency names confusing, I’ve included a brief glossary of terms to help as well.

In order, the Twitter Files threads:

  1. Twitter Files Part 1: December 2, 2022, by @mtaibbi

    TWITTER AND THE HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY

    Recounting the internal drama at Twitter surrounding the decision to block access to a New York Post exposé on Hunter Biden in October, 2020.

    Key revelations: Twitter blocked the story on the basis of its “hacked materials” policy, but executives internally knew the decision was problematic. “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?” is how comms official Brandon Borrman put it. Also: when a Twitter contractor polls members of Congress about the decision, they hear Democratic members want more moderation, not less, and “the First Amendment isn’t absolute.”

    1a. Twitter Files Supplemental, December 6, 2022, by @mtaibbi

    THE “EXITING” OF TWITTER DEPUTY GENERAL COUNSEL JIM BAKER

    A second round of Twitter Files releases was delayed, as new addition Bari Weiss discovers former FBI General Counsel and Twitter Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker was reviewing the first batches of Twitter Files documents, whose delivery to reporters had slowed.

  2. Twitter Files Part 2, by @BariWeiss, December 8, 2022

    TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS

    Bari Weiss gives a long-awaited answer to the question, “Was Twitter shadow-banning people?” It did, only the company calls it “visibility filtering.” Twitter also had a separate, higher council called SIP-PES that decided cases for high-visibility, controversial accounts.

    Key revelations: Twitter had a huge toolbox for controlling the visibility of any user, including a “Search Blacklist” (for Dan Bongino), a “Trends Blacklist” for Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and a “Do Not Amplify” setting for conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Weiss quotes a Twitter employee: “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool.” With help from @abigailshrier, @shellenbergermd, @nelliebowles, and @isaacgrafstein.

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California Bill To Punish Doctors For ‘False’ Covid-19 Information Goes Into Effect, by Tyler Durden

Posted on January 4, 2023 | Leave a comment

California is out front on medical totalitarianism. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

A bill which allows the state of California to punish doctors over ‘false information about Covid-19 vaccinations and treatments’ went into effect on January 1st.

Under the new law (AB 2098) which took effect Jan.1, the state’s Medical Board would categorize dispensing information – such as the effectiveness of Ivermectin, or the Covid-19 vaccine’s rapidly waning efficacy, as unprofessional conduct.

The law was challenged in court by two California doctors, who said that it would restrict their free speech in violation of the first amendment, and that it was “vague” under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.

However on December 28th, Biden Nominee Judge Fred Slaughter refused to halt the law, ruling that the law trumps free speech claims, and that it falls “within the longstanding tradition of regulations on the practice of medical treatments.”

Another lawsuit, brought by Physicians for Informed Consent, was filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of California in early December. The plaintiffs, physician LeTrinh Hoang and Children’s Health Defense, are being represented by Rick Jaffe, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Mary Holland, and argues that the state of California has weaponized the vague phrase “misinformation,” and thereby has illegally targeted physicians who disagree with the government’s public stance on Covid-19.

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The Baleful Cargo of Woke Diversity Worship, by Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on January 4, 2023 | Leave a comment

The diversity that’s not tolerated is diversity of thought. From Victor Davis Hanson at amgreatness.com:

Just as uniformity can result in both stability and stagnation, so too can diversity sometimes ensure either dynamism or bedlam.

What do all our notable fabricators—George Santos, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama—have in common?

Well, quite like the Ward ChurchilIs or Rachel Dolezals of the world, one way or another, they lied about their identities. Or they sought fraudulent ways of suggesting their ancestries were marginalized. Or they had claims on being victims on the theory their constructed personas brought career advantages.

George Santos claimed, apparently in search of a victimized status, that he was an “American Jew” and a “Latino Jew,” and a descendent of Holocaust survivors.

Joe Biden lied that he went to “shul” as well as that he grew up in a veritable Puerto Rican household and just happened to attend a black college as well as being an honorary Greek.

Elizabeth Warren ended up a laughingstock for claiming her high cheekbones were proof of her Native-American ancestry—a lie she rode all the way to being the “first” Native-American professor on the Harvard Law school faculty.

Somehow the half-white, prep-schooled Barry Soetoro, who had taken his Indonesian stepfather’s last name, rebooted in the university back to Barack Obama. The latter oddly did not catch his literary agent “misidentifying” him in a book promo as being born in Africa. And only as president, did we learn his “autobiographical” memoir was mostly a concoction.

This fixation with constructing identities is one of the great pathologies of our woke era.

When we obsess in neo-Confederate style on race, ethnicity, or religion as the defining element of who we are, and we do this to leverage political advantage, then we set off a chain-reaction of Yugoslavian- or Lebanese-style tribalism. Like nuclear proliferation, once one group goes tribal, then all others will strain to find their own deterrent tribal identity.

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Twitter Files: Why Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In, by Matt Taibbi

Posted on January 4, 2023 | Leave a comment

The latest Twitter files release, from Matt Taibbi at taibb.substack.com:

Once Twitter began rolling over for Congress in 2017, the ending was inevitable: formal surrender to the intelligence community on content moderation.

Virginia Senator Mark Warner led the campaign to break Twitter’s will

From the Twitter Files, a story about media, that also sketches the origins of Twitter’s surrender to the intelligence community:

:

Twitter avatar for @mtaibbi

Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi
1.THREAD: The Twitter Files How Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In
8:27 PM ∙ Jan 3, 2023

4,318Retweets

Twitter through the end of August, 2017 was on nobody’s radar as a key actor in the Trump-Russia “foreign influence” scandal.

By the second week in October — six weeks later — the company was being raked over the coals in the press as “one of Russia’s most potent weapons in its efforts to promote Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton,” with Clinton herself adding:

It’s time for Twitter to stop dragging its heels and live up to the fact that its platform is being used as a tool for cyber-warfare.

What happened in those six weeks? Answering that question is a key to understanding the content moderation phenomenon. In this period, crucial in the company’s history, a pattern was established. Threats from Congress came first, then a rush of bad headlines (inspired by leaks from congressional committees), and finally a series of moderation demands coming from the outside. Once the company acceded, the cycle repeated.

The documents lay out the scheme. You can see how the Russian cyber-threat was essentially conjured into being, with political and media pressure serving as the engine inflating something Twitter believed was negligible and uncoordinated to massive dimensions.

“KEEP PRODUCING MATERIAL”

The timeline started when a fellow tech titan, Facebook, decided in late August 2017 to suspend 300 accounts with “suspected Russian origin.” The move appeared to irritate some Twitter insiders, as Facebook not only shared data with Twitter, but with the Senate Intelligence Committee, where ranking Democrat and Virginia Senator Mark Warner was on an all-out hunt for Russian meddlers.

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Questions and Answers, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on January 2, 2023 | Leave a comment

Perhaps at least a few of the plethora of questions that swirl around our corrupt government and its many minions will find answers. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

“Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” — Richard Feynman

The exhausting toils of the holidays are behind us; the mischief that could be done by the lame ducks in Congress has been done ($1.7 trillion Omnibus Spending Bill); and the time has come for the citizens of this land to get some answers about the escalating trips laid on them by their own government. The House of Representatives is in new hands. You’ll know in pretty short order whether they are capable, trustworthy hands, or just a blur of fast fingers running another three-card-monte table.

The most pressing questions abide around justice, and the gavel of the Judiciary Committee passes from the barely-alive Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) to the very animated Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). He needs to ask FBI Director Chris Wray how it came to be that the Bureau sat in possession of the Hunter Biden laptop during the impeachment of January 2020 and did not offer up to the defense the exculpatory evidence it abundantly contained in the way of business deal memos between the Biden family and officials in several foreign lands, Ukraine in particular. After all, the impeachment hinged on a telephone inquiry Mr. Trump made about just those matters. Was there a good reason for that phone call, or not? Obviously, there was, and Mr. Wray’s conduct looks like obstruction of justice in the highest degree.

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