PP NewsBrief: 2021-02-02

We need to begin to reclaim control over the institutions which have such oversized roles in our lives. As you read this people work tirelessly to see to it that you are dumb and docile. Let's stop them.

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If America Dissolves

"This essay is an introduction to the topic of Mass Propaganda and, perhaps more importantly, to a brief series of articles detailing how the US has been for more than 100 years the most propagandised and brainwashed nation in the world. The history of this has been buried for generations, but the facts are indisputable. One of the most important elements in this tale, as we shall see, is the employment of propaganda in American war marketing.

To paraphrase Michael Lewis, “One of the qualities that distinguishes Americans from other people is their naive conviction that every foreigner wishes to be one of them, but even the most zealous Japanese patriot has no illusions that other peoples want to be Japanese”. The Americans not only believe everybody secretly wants to be like them, they believe no nation can succeed or even progress without being like them and adopting the entire American value system. It isn’t possible. There are no alternatives to the American way and, if there were alternatives, God would be displeased with them.

The elites in the US government and corporatocracy invented, and for 200 years promulgated, the concept of “manifest destiny”, a theological proposition that “merged religious delusion with boundless hypocrisy and racism” into a popular theory that God was entrusting Americans to rule the world. Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that what promised no end of grief was Americans’ arrogant conviction that “Providence has summoned America to tutor all of humankind on its pilgrimage to perfection”. (1) These ideas of American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny rest on a cornerstone of a pervasive political culture infused with the religious concept of a kind of covenant with God. “The packaging of wars of aggression, genocide and imperialism in the tattered camouflage of liberty with a Divinely-directed spin are old propaganda tricks which have been used to delude the US masses throughout the history of the country to the present moment.” (2) To this day, most Americans fervently believe all of their nation’s unjustified and criminal wars were conducted to “make the world safe for democracy”.

American politicians and their allies in the military, in Hollywood, in publishing, in business and banking, deliberately created and then exploited the nationalistic loyalty of a gullible and uninformed public to shape perceptions and values on a massive scale. Americans have been programmed with religion-based politics for generations, being taught to see the world as black and white, good and bad, to believe that only American virtues and values were good for mankind and would always triumph. Their fabricated historical myths taught them that they, their leaders, and their nation were moral, righteous and upright, selfless benefactors to the world, battling evil wherever it was found. Everything was distorted, based not only on misinformation but on outright deceit. America’s image of itself, and its image of the world’s nations and peoples, were tragically and shallowly twisted to create the narrative of American moral superiority.

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And herein lies part of the tragedy of America, and the reason the country will eventually have to implode: the enormous disconnect between the propagandised ideology of the people and the brutal reality of the thin layer of elites that run their government and military, their corporations, banks and mass media. There is no other nation whose population has such a large gap between myth and reality, between what the people believe their government has done and what it has actually done. When the people one day put the pieces together, the US will have another revolution; I don’t believe anything can prevent it. It was not for nothing that George Bush Sr. said, “If the people knew what we were doing, they would hang us in the streets”. Perhaps one day soon, they will."

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Hijacking the Clown Car

"America, in many ways, has become a clown country.

We lack borders, societal cohesion, shared values, trust in one another, a common culture, and a clear direction for our future.

One could argue that we are more of an economic zone than a nation-state. Multinational corporations park their assets here, and those assets are managed by the ruling class oligarchs to the benefit of the corporate plutocracy and the detriment of the common man. That’s why Walmart can move into your town, sell products at a loss to bankrupt the small businesses, and then jack its prices back up after it successfully kills off the competition.

There’s no system of checks and balances for this pernicious behavior. It’s the “free market” at work, we’re told. If you don’t like it, you can just bootstrap your own multibillion-dollar retail giant.

Politicians are on the other side of the ruling class coin. They are pimped out by their friends in big business in exchange for campaign donation kickbacks, and they pull out all the stops to ensure their pimps get paid. Wall Street, which publicly trades behemoths like Walmart, is the biggest, baddest pimp on the block. Along with securities, Wall Street has been buying and selling our politicians for decades, and everybody knows it. The only time the peasant class—you and I—have a say in any of this, is when the politicians and the plutocrats nearly crash the world economy, and we’re forced to say “yes” to a massive taxpayer-funded bailout to keep their scheme afloat.

The people who are supposed to represent honest, hard working Americans long ago dropped the façade that they are even trying to make our lives better. They represent special interests while they attempt to keep us, the cattle, busy so they can rob us of our milk. It’s been working like a charm.

If America is a clown country, the ruling class on Wall Street, along with their ruling class friends in Washington, are driving the clown car.

Enter Reddit."

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The Senate Is Playing A Dangerous Game With The 14th Amendment

"After a vote suggesting that about half of the Senate has constitutional or prudential concerns over the trial of former President Trump, members are discussing censure as an alternative. I previously supported a censure resolution, but this is censure with a twist. Senator Tim Kaine would add yet another controversy to an array of constitutional issues by electorally barring Trump under the 14th Amendment. With the snap impeachment and a retroactive Senate trial, the country needs another constitutional controversy like Wall Street needs another Reddit stock tip.

Censure is not mentioned in the Constitution because it is a resolution with the view of Congress. Such a statement could allow for bipartisan condemnation. It is also now seen as a type of shadow impeachment. A Senate trial could work to the advantage of Trump if it ends in acquittal. For the first time ever, the House used a snap impeachment and sent the Senate no record to support its article. As before, the Senate can refuse to call witnesses and vote on the record or lack thereof, meaning a brief trial and about half of the Senate rejecting the case. It has led some members back to censure as the effective substitute for conviction."

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The Sad Death of “Roadside America”

"Roadside America was an indoor miniature village and railway covering 8,000 square feet (740 m2), created by Laurence Gieringer in 1935. It was first displayed to the public in the home of Mr Laurence Gieringer in Hamburg, Pennsylvania. Word got out about the exciting miniature village after a story was published in the local newspapers, and due to its popularity, Mr. Gieringer moved the display to a recently closed local amusement park called Carsonia Park, where more people could come to see his spectacular miniature village. The display stayed there for a very short time, from 1938 to about 1940 when Mr. Geringer purchased land at the current site of Roadside America to build a larger display in order to accommodate the growing interest. In 1953 [1] the exhibit reopened at the current location, a former dance hall in Shartlesville, Pennsylvania, Exit 23 on Interstate 78, approximately 20 miles west of the Lehigh Valley."

How much was spent creating, protecting, and maintaining BLM murals? Yet this piece of true art, showcasing years of dedication and hard work, is auctioned off piecemeal.

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Humans First: A Manifesto for the Age of Robotics

"In 2018, the hashtag #ThankGodIGraduatedAlready began trending on China’s Weibo social media platform.  The tag reflected concerns among Chinese students that schools had begun to install the ‘Class Care System’, developed by the Chinese technology company Hanwang.  Cameras monitor pupils’ facial expressions with deep learning algorithms identifying each student, and then classifying their behaviour into various categories – “focused”, “listening”, “writing”, “answering questions”, “distracted”, or “sleeping”. Even in a country where mass surveillance is common, students reacted with outrage.

There are many technological, legal, and ethical barriers to overcome before machine learning can be widely deployed in such ways but China, in its push to overtake the US as world’s leader in artificial intelligence (AI), is racing ahead to introduce such technology before addressing these concerns. And China is not the only culprit.

Frank Pasquale’s book ‘The New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI’ investigates the rapidly advancing use of AI and intelligent machines in an era of automation, and uses a wide range of examples – among which the ‘Class Care System’ is far from the most sinister – to highlight the threats that the rush to robotics poses for human societies.  In a world dominated by corporations and governments with a disposition for centralising control, the adoption of AI is being driven by the dictates of neoliberal capitalism, with the twin aims of increasing profit for the private sector and cutting costs in the public sector.

Pasquale’s book vividly demonstrates how the use of immature technology and crude algorithms for these purposes is shattering privacy rights, undermining workplace protections, ignoring diversity, and reinforcing discrimination, power imbalances, and wealth differences."

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When Pathology Becomes the Norm. The Ruling Elites

"We as homo sapiens still have not learned to coexist with each other. This is no accident. By and large, our ruling elites do not consider themselves created the same and equal with the rest of us. This gives them the right to control, manipulate, and sacrifice us, while enriching themselves at our expense. It is not a problem for them, because– in their opinion – we are different, they are superior to us, we are slaves, and our lives don’t matter, aside from whatever material benefit we may bring to our masters.

Such superiority complex, especially when combined with psychopathy, is a manifestation of psychological pathology. Accordingly, we live in a “pathocracy” that was described nearly half a century ago by the Polish psychiatrist Andrzej Łobaczewski as “a system of government…wherein a small pathological minority takes control over a society…”[1]

Our history of wars, with tens of millions of victims in the two world wars only in the last century, confirms this. However, as Steve Taylor writes in Psychology Today, “The problem is not that all people are inherently brutal and cruel, but rather that a small number – those with personality disorders – are brutal and cruel, intensely self-centered, and lacking in empathy. And this small minority has frequently held power and managed to influence the majority to commit atrocities on their behalf.”[2]

This is usually done by impressing the same psychopathic worldview upon US as well. In order not to see other human beings as our brothers and sisters, we are taught to fear them, blame for our troubles and grievances, and be proud of our own superiority. This belief that we are DIFFERENT and EXCEPTIONAL, endowed with the rights of a victim, and with absolute truth on our side only, feeds our sense of primacy and allows us to ignore all violations of their rights, including to life. This is how we all become hostage to the psychopathology, greed, and fighting of the elites for power.

Humanity has always had rulers throughout the entire history of our civilization. There were always those who owned nearly everything and could control multitudes of human lives. Our social contract always relied on their power and edicts. On the other hand, the elite’s social duties, depending on the degree of fairness of a particular system, always included certain responsibility for us, their subjects.

The ruling elites, one way or another, needed the support of their population to carry out their functions. So their goals always included the creation of a certain consensus, frequently by means of fear and violence, around the rightness of their actions. But inevitably, the further the results of their actions diverged from the true interests and realities of people’s lives, the harder it was to maintain the semblance of such accord. This would strain the relationship between the powers and the people to the point of riots and rebellion.

Excesses and abuses by the ruling elites and the flooding rivers of people’s suffering led to several countries, such as Russia and China, conducting revolutionary experiments in violent regime change during the last century. Under the slogans of equality and brotherhood, they gave birth to new social forms rooted in the same old principle of hierarchy and control. Except now they relied on the coercion and exploitation of the many by the privileged party few. The elites and the slogans changed, but the people remained separated from the truth and manipulated just the same.

The relationship that developed between the rulers and the people in the USSR is not alien to the XXI century either. Soviet elites concluded rather quickly that they didn’t need the people as coparticipants in historic decision-making. At best, they needed only producers and performers, but continuing to believe mindlessly in choosing their own leaders and their destiny.

In the U.S., in its turn, sophisticated methods of public opinion control were described almost a century ago by Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays (1891–1995). In his understanding, people must be kept in subordinate submission by distracting our attention with desires and sexual lusts. While the fueling of consumer greed allows for public opinion to be maintained within the confines of manufactured “consent” on key social and political issues. As for the public policy itself, it is dictated in the U.S. through the “Overton window”[3] exclusively by the elites (the “invisible government,” in the words of Bernays’ book, Propaganda[4]).

These “invisible” elites are producing ever more colorful characters and intricate narratives, taking us further and further away from the truth and the possibility of changing anything. Yet such is the lot of the people from the rulers’ point of view – to live by the habits, desires, and myths assimilated while we are being programmed by the social and mass media."

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You Can't Hurt Hedge Funds By Acting Exactly Like Them

"There is no doubt that all of the regular people out there who bought up shares of GameStop and AMC were motivated largely by a desire to give a middle finger to whatever they perceived ​“Wall Street” to be. The stocks themselves were selected because various hedge funds made large short bets against them, which pumped up their prices and ultimately cost those hedge funds money. As the price of GameStop skyrocketed, social media abounded with stories of people who had suffered horribly from the fallout of the last recession, and were now taking their miraculous profits as a sort of balancing of the cosmic scales. A popular narrative has taken hold that these swarms of vindictive retail investors represent some sort of threat to the Wall Street establishment, a bold and unpredictable grassroots force to be feared.

That, I’m sad to say, is not true. Much of the impulse to portray all this manic investing as some kind of force for public good comes from a misunderstanding of how Wall Street really works. Yes, it is true that people successfully pushed up GameStop’s stock price by more than 1500%, costing one hedge fund, Melvin Capital, more than half of its wealth — a temporary decline in assets of more than $4 billion. It is true that this same crowd of people can go on repeating this feat for stock after stock, making concerted attacks on short sellers. And it is true that none of this will prevent the hedge fund industry from making money in the long run, or change anything about the system that makes people despise hedge funds in the first place.

There are thousands of hedge funds, collectively managing more than $3 trillion. Guess what? They can read Reddit too. If it becomes clear that this phenomenon of regular people pumping up random stocks is here to stay, tons of hedge funds and other institutional investors — the very Wall Street establishment that people imagine they are fighting against — will pile into whichever side of the trade will make them money. They will ride that populist, fuck-the-system sentiment all the way to the bank. Indeed, though Melvin Capital may have been hurt by the GameStop stunt, there is no question that tons of other professional investors are profiting from it. Hedge funds are many bad things, but they are not stupid about how to get rich.

The collection of money management firms that make up the investor class are just a huge pool of water that will flow to wherever their money will be maximized. They don’t give a damn if a stock is going up because of fundamental value, or inside trading, or a viral Reddit thread. There are thousands of professional hedge fund employees, along with a wide array of supercomputers and algorithms developed by generations of mathematicians, that do nothing all day except sit around and see where to move their money on a second-by-second basis. For every individual hedge fund that Reddit investors are able to hurt, a hundred more will be on the other side to suck up the profits that their counterpart is losing. In aggregate, everything will continue as always. Trying to strike a blow against ​“Wall Street” by investing in certain stocks is like trying to destroy a forest by chopping down one tree. That tree will turn to dirt and make all the other trees even healthier. You need a better plan."

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5G Wireless Technology Is the “Stupidest Idea in the History of the World”

"It’s clear that we are not being protected, and politicians are simply abiding to the the will of their masters, the big corporations, who in turn act as slaves to their ‘financial overlords,’ the big banks. We continue to see products and services being approved and implemented without ever going through any safety testing. This is a big problem, and one of the main reasons why we could be seeing a drastic rise in multiple diseases and ailments, especially when it comes to neuropsychiatric disorders.  A study titled “Microwave frequency electromagnetic fields (EMFs) produce widespread neuropsychiatric effects including depression” published in the Journal of Chemical Neuroanatomy outlines this quite clearly, and it’s only one of thousands of peer-reviewed studies raising multiple concerns in regards to this type of technology.

Is there really any concern for the well being of humanity within these institutions? If not, why do we continue to support them? Is it because we’re under the illusion that there is actual concern? And why do we continue to take power away from ourselves by electing corrupt politicians?"

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The Corona Crisis. Is There Light at the End of the Tunnel?

"What matters most at this point in time is not the peddled stories of Covid-19’s life-threatening proliferation but rather the enormous effect of those stories in the lives of people whose fear has already evolved into paranoia. This whole situation has likewise led them in a unilateral direction without considering in-depth transcripts of research studies produced on the other side of the fence.

The same people have developed the tendency to ignore the fact that the researchers involved in these studies are competent and distinguished scientists whose expertise is recognized in prestigious academic institutions and professional organizations.

It doesn’t matter anymore how comprehensive and evidence-sustained these studies are. Nobody wants to listen because of the simple reason that people have already been caught in a loop of lies and fear and there is no way out. Well, it is not that there really is no way out; there is, but they are just incorrigibly blinded to the core that such blindness has drawn them away from the way out.

To be more accurate,  it could actually be more of an issue of deafness rather than blindness because nobody wants to listen to how they could find the way out. That is the common aftermath of getting brainwashed–all the windows of possibilities are shut off and any attempt to show them the way to unlock such windows is already an exercise in futility.

People have been agonizing in the face of massive economic disempowerment, disenfranchisement and devastation. But no one, except a few, has the will, courage and initiative to stand up and confront the diabolical powers behind this tragic state of affairs. What rules the situation is nothing but paralysis as no one has the guts to break away from the profound deception that what has befallen the globe is an incontrovertible pandemic. No one is able to break away from the widespread lies that have engulfed humanity."

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YouTube deletes videos of doctors testifying in Senate Homeland Committee as “coronavirus misinformation”

"Google and other big tech platforms consider any coronavirus information not backed by the UN, WHO, and local public health bodies, such as the US CDC and FDA, as false information.

“YouTube doesn’t allow content that spreads medical misinformation that contradicts local health authorities’ or the World Health Organization’s (WHO) medical information about COVID-19,” a statement on Google’s website says.

In a January 26 letter sent to YouTube content creators, the platform’s CEO, Susan Wojcicki, said, since February 2020, the platform had removed more than half a million videos for violating the COVID-19 rules.

“It’s a priority to continue to update our approach to responsibility so people find high-quality information when they come to our platform,” Wojcicki wrote in the letter. “We’re always working to strike the right balance between openness and responsibility as we meet the guidelines set by governments around the world.”"