Tag Archives: internet

The Internet Is Next, by Good Citizen

Posted on March 24, 2022 | Leave a comment

Totalitarianism requires total control of information, which puts the internet in the totalitarians’ cross hairs. From Good Citizen at thegoodcitizen.substack.com:

The war on truth in the race toward tyranny across the west.

The famous phrase about truth as the first casualty of war is everywhere these days if only because the people recognize the truth is often nowhere.

There are variations of this saying, and this one on populism is appropriate given the past decade of rising animosity to elites and global management.

Truth is not the first casualty of war alone: it is the first casualty of populism.
— Theodore Dalrymple

You’ve heard the term “if it’s free you are the product”? Well, that’s always been a quaint yet silly advertising slogan for our collective malaise with our digital world. The implication being if it’s free, you will be paying for it in may other ways that you cannot see. A more appropriate and honest slogan would be: “You are and always have been the target.” Your body, your mind, your mental state, your political beliefs, your private and public habits, your DNA (the past two years) and now your bank accounts and ideological and philanthropic associations are being targeted by western governments for lists, censorship, seizure and freezing out from participation in society unless you submit and obey, forever.

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Governments, History, Media, Politics, Propaganda, Tyranny

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The Overlapping Infrastructure of Urban Surveillance, and How to Fix It , by Matthew Guariglia

Posted on June 26, 2021 | Leave a comment

Would you like to know who’s monitoring you, and how they’re doing it? From Matthew Guariglia at activistpost.com:

Between the increasing capabilities of local and state police, the creep of federal law enforcement into domestic policing, the use of aerial surveillance such as spy planes and drones, and mounting cooperation between private technology companies and the government, it can be hard to understand and visualize what all this overlapping surveillance can mean for your daily life. We often think of these problems as siloed issues. Local police deploy automated license plate readers or acoustic gunshot detection. Federal authorities monitor you when you travel internationally.

But if you could take a cross-section of the average city block, you would see the ways that the built environment of surveillance—its physical presence in, over, and under our cities—makes this an entwined problem that must be combated through entwined solutions.

Thus, we decided to create a graphic to show how—from overhead to underground—these technologies and legal authorities overlap, how they disproportionately impact the lives of marginalized communities, and the tools we have at our disposal to halt or mitigate their harms.

A cityscape showing 13 types of common surveillance

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Media, Politics, Privacy, Surveillance, Technology, Tyranny

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Peak Internet — The Censorship Bubble Is About to Burst, by Joseph Mercola

Posted on June 7, 2020 | Leave a comment

Trying to censor the internet is like trying to stop a flood with a teaspoon. From Joseph Mercola at lewrockwell.com:

Over the past year, I’ve written extensively about the initially creeping — and then sweeping — censorship occurring online. Initially, the censorship vortex was on vaccines. Social media platforms and Google all started suppressing and then outright banning content raising questions about vaccine safety.

I warned everyone that this would eventually spread to other topics that might threaten a corporate bottom line. The only surprise was how quickly that happened. Within months, Google started shadow banning and hiding holistic health sites, including this one, in its search results.

In August 2019, I made the decision to leave Facebook due to its clear censoring of valid and truthful information. One year from the time social media platforms began censoring vaccine information, they all started banning views on COVID-19 treatments that differ from that of the World Health Organization.

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The Controlled Demolition of Western Civilization, by Claudio Grass

Posted on June 7, 2020 | Leave a comment

The end game for the string-pullers who have been directing the coronavirus response and now the riots is small ruling class and a large subjugated class. Almost all those either observing the coronavirus “rules” or rioting are viewed as useful idiots and will end up in the subjugated class. From Claudio Grass at claudiograss.ch:

Please forgive me that I don’t talk about the flue called “Corona”. I truly believe it is a deception and will be remembered as the attempt to destroy the private economy as well as the capitalistic system. What we are witnessing during this “corona-crisis” is simply unprecedented. It is nothing short of a blatant attempt to destroy the private sector, the capitalist system and the financial sovereignty of every citizen. The state denies the right of every individual to work, to put food on the table, to provide for their families and to take personal responsibility for their own choices. On a societal level, is nothing less than the transformation into a technocratic, big data “new normal” that already exists in China and this Orwellian nightmare is already our new and sad reality.

Ron Paul wrote the following the other day: “Governments have no right or authority to tell us what business or other activity is “essential”. Only in totalitarian states does the government claim this authority. We should encourage all those who are standing up peacefully and demanding an accounting from their elected leaders. They should not be able to get away with this.”

This is what it is all about. Full control of the ones living off taxes over the ones who have to pay them. Maybe you remember my latest article in the previous edition of this magazine when I summarized the definition of capitalism from a Marxist perspective: “the workers spend what they earn and the capitalists earn what they spend”. This is how the original Marxist thinkers defined capitalism. You might have understood that in their eyes the individual is the worker and when everything is under government control, the politicians and bureaucrats become the real capitalist. It is important to understand that the term “capitalism” has been purposefully misdefined and hijacked from the beginning by Marxist thinkers. Six weeks ago, this was just a theory, but now it already turned into reality. The corona scare shows just how fearful certain cultures and civilizations have become.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Civil Liberties, Crime, Government, Insurrection, Privacy

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How’s That Alternative Reality Working Out For You? by Robert Gore

Posted on December 6, 2019 | 47 comments

Two plus two equals four. Epstein didn’t kill himself.

At the end of 1984, Slavery is Freedom, two plus two equals five, and Winston Smith loves Big Brother. The Party has destroyed Smith’s mind, he embraces whatever narratives it promulgates. The fictive Party has solved the conundrum that bedevils any individual or organization seeking to exercise power: coercion can exact physical compliance and the desired verbalizations, but how do you compel the subjugated to think and believe as you want them to think and believe?

Our Party, the confederation of powerful people who promulgate the narratives that always point the same direction—more government and power for the powerful, less freedom for the subjugated—has yet to reach the mind control of Orwell’s Party, but not for want of desire or effort. We know the Party’s narratives: globalism, climate change, surveillance, incarceration, political correctness, open borders, free migration, fiat debt, central economic planning, socialized education and medical care, and wars on terrorism, drugs, poverty, any regime that refuses to toe the Party line, hydrocarbons, private firearms, individual rights, privacy, precious metals and cash, and socialized education and medical care. We know the Party’s institutions: governments, central banks and their central banks, intelligence agencies, military forces, police, permanent bureaucracies, multinational corporations, multilateral economic, political, and financial institutions, foundations, universities, nonprofits, and NGOs. We know the Party’s overlapping mouthpieces: the mainstream media, think tanks, government and intelligence agency propaganda organs, crony executives and their companies, Hollywood, and academia. And we know the figureheads who stock governments and their allied institutions, and the Party puppeteers who pull their strings.

The Perfect Gift

Amazon Paperback Link

Kindle Ebook link

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Crime, Cronyism, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, History, Imperialism, Insurrection, Intelligence, Law, Media, Morality, Philosophy, Politics, Privacy, Science, Society, Surveillance, Taxes, Technology, Trade, War

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China: The Perfect High-Tech Totalitarian State, by Judith Bergman

Posted on June 20, 2019 | Leave a comment

You can be sure all sorts of US politicians and bureaucrats are going to school on the Chinese. From Judith Bergman at gatestoneinstitute.org:

  • In China, censorship, now largely automated, has reached “unprecedented levels of accuracy, aided by machine learning and voice and image recognition.” — Cate Cadell, Reuters, May 26, 2019.
  • As in other Communist regimes, such as that of the former Soviet Union, the Communist ideology does not tolerate any competing narratives. “Religion is a source of authority, and an object of fidelity, that is greater than the state… This characteristic of religion has always been anathema to history’s totalitarian despots…” — Thomas F. Farr, President of the Religious Freedom Institute, in testimony before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, November 28, 2018.
  • In 2018, China had an estimated 200 million surveillance cameras, with plans for 626 million surveillance cameras by 2020. China’s aim is apparently an “Integrated Joint Operations Platform” which will integrate and coordinate data from surveillance cameras with facial recognition technology, citizen ID card numbers, biometric data, license plate numbers and information about vehicle ownership, health, family planning, banking, and legal records, “unusual activity”, and any other relevant data that can be gathered about citizens, such as religious practice, travels abroad, and so on, according to reports of local officials and police.
  • At the moment, China is in the process of fulfilling what Stalin, Hitler and Mao could only dream about: The flawless totalitarian state, powered by digital technology, where the individual has nowhere to flee from the all-seeing eye of the Communist state.

The 30th anniversary on June 4 of the Chinese regime’s 1989 massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square served to highlight the extreme censorship in China under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and President Xi Jinping.

The Tiananmen anniversary is referred to euphemistically in mainland China, as ‘the June Fourth Incident’. The regime there evidently fears that any talk, let alone public commemoration, of that historical event will stir up anti-regime unrest, which could endanger the Chinese Communist Party’s absolute power.

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Goodbye to the Internet: Interference by Governments Is Already Here, by Philip Giraldi

Posted on March 22, 2019 | 1 comment

It’s only a matter of time before governments fully tame and domesticate the internet. From Philip Giraldi at strategic-culture.org:

There is a saying attributed to the French banker Nathan Rothschild that “Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes its laws.” Conservative opinion in the United States has long suspected that Rothschild was right and there have been frequent calls to audit the Federal Reserve Bank based on the presumption that it has not always acted in support of the actual interests of the American people. That such an assessment is almost certainly correct might be presumed based on the 2008 economic crash in which the government bailed out the banks, which had through their malfeasance caused the disaster, and left individual Americans who had lost everything to face the consequences.

Be that as it may, if there were a modern version of the Rothschild comment it might go something like this: “Give me control of the internet and no one will ever more know what is true.” The internet, which was originally conceived of as a platform for the free interchange of information and opinions, is instead inexorably becoming a managed medium that is increasingly controlled by corporate and government interests. Those interests are in no way answerable to the vast majority of the consumers who actually use the sites in a reasonable and non-threatening fashion to communicate and share different points of view.

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Censorship vs. Suppression, by Eric Peters

Posted on January 3, 2019 | Leave a comment

Whether you categorize speech suppression by ostensibly private entities as censorship or not, it’s clear that between government and the private entities that control the internet, the ability to speak out is being steadily constricted. From Eric Peters at theburningplatform.com:

Libertarians – me included – have wrestled long and hard with this one: Is it censorship when private entities do it?

No – not in a legal sense. Because these private entities do not have the power to forbid publication, per se.

But they do have the power to suppress (and even to punish) publication when the entities at issue effectively control the means of publication – and so it amounts to the same thing as censorship.

It may even be worse, since one can always get around governmentcensorship (see, for example, the underground Samizdat press in Tsarist Russia or, later, the anti-communist press in East Germany and Poland).

But how does one “get around” private control of the all-encompassing Internet and related “social media platforms”?

There is no alternative Internet – nor is one (given present technology/infrastructure) even conceivable, regardless of one’s financial ability.

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Incoherent Thoughts from the Yankee Capital: Papua New Guinea Looks Better and Better II, by Fred Reed

Posted on December 25, 2018 | Leave a comment

A favorite Fred Reed theme: the disconnect between those who rule us, and us. From Reed at theburningplatform.com:

Having just returned from two weeks in the curious environs of Washington, DC, I offer a few observations on the national lunacy deposit:

The de-Christianization of the country, or at least this part of it,  is almost complete. I can think of hearing the word “Christmas” only twice in two weeks of trough-inciting retail advertising.

Culture shock: We stayed with friends who for various reasons, such as being in the business, always had a television on. At home in Mexico we got rid of the lobotomy box some fifteen years ago, seeing little advantage  in paying seventy dollars a month for 250 channels, none worth watching, adorned with twenty minutes an hour of stupid commercials. Coming back to this was like jumping into raw sewage. Perhaps the worst of it was the contempt for the public manifested in running the same ad twice in one commercial break, and in the loving close-ups of pizzas with dripping cheese. Buy, buy, buy.

An astonishing proportion of the hucksterism was for medicines. I assume all Americans are inured to such predatory swill (if swill can be predatory) but after a year off, it is awful:

“Ask your doctor about Caligulon. Clinical trials show that it will make you perfect in every way. Your eyeballs may explode, Peritonitis and asphyxiation sometimes occur. If you suffer heavy nasal bleeding stop taking Caligulon and consult your doctor. Gangrene of the genitals may occur….”

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Posted in Crime, Culture, Government, Media, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Society

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Behind the North Korean Curtain, Part I

Posted on November 22, 2018 | Leave a comment

North Korea is far different from the way it is usually portrayed, according to a seasoned international traveler who has spent a fair amount of time there. From Joel Bowman at internationalman.com:

Joel Bowman talks to Kolja Spöri

Joel Bowman: Good day, Kolja. Thanks very much for taking the time to speak with International Man today. Where in the world do we find you right now?

Kolja Spöri: Merhaba, Joel! I am just in Istanbul at the airport, in transit to Munich, coming from Baghdad.

JB: Having literally written the book “I’ve Been Everywhere” (in German: Ich war überall), you certainly fit the bill as a true International Man. I imagine our conversation could go in many directions today, but I wanted to start with a particular trip you embarked on earlier this year that must have been quite eye-opening, even by your own standards.

When most people think of taking a vacation, they might imagine heading down to Florida, or the Bahamas, or maybe nipping over to Hawaii. You decided, instead, to opt for the decidedly cooler climes of Pyongyang, capital of North Korea. What inspired you to set off on an adventure to one of the so-called “Axis of Evil” countries?

KS: There’s actually warm weather and good surfing in North Korea in the summer! But yes, I have been a world traveler for a long time, both privately and on business trips. My goal became to visit every country in the world. It was just a natural thing that I would also visit North Korea on the way. North Korea is a good example where I learned that our Western view on the world does not always hold true, or at least the narratives that we are spoon fed from our Western media and our Western education system.

Fifteen years ago, I was in South Korea visiting the demilitarized zone in Panmunjom, from the south. And at that time, already 15 years ago, I had a feeling that something was wrong about the way I was taught to look at things. Now that I’ve seen the border from the other side, from the north, I have a much clearer picture of where I was wrong, and where maybe many of us are wrong in the West.

I want to make clear that I don’t defend the North Korean system. After all, I am an Austrian School Libertarian. But I use the small case study of North Korea to build a strong case against our Western regime.

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