Five Eyes, Fangs, Flippers and a Thousand Tales
For ordinary people like you and me, fear, anger and lies are poison – but to the ultra rich and their famous servants, they are the tools and fuels they use to herd us like cattle and take our money
For ordinary people like you and me, fear, anger and lies are poison – but to the ultra rich and their famous servants, they are the tools and fuels they use to herd us like cattle and take all of our money. Their favourite trick of all? Making all of us normal people they are exploiting in common, blame each other for their fear anger and lies, and the consequences of their exploitation.
(Making the rest of us into one gigantic self-kicking ass).
Over the last few months, I have had messages from a few intelligent and principled friends who are much busier than I am (and thus, blameless for not having the time to research and dig, with which I am so generously supplied at present). Each has expressed their skepticism about some of my key observations. The big one? They still just can’t believe the Trump Putin ties and 2016 election interference were all fabrications from the very beginning. The reason they can’t believe it? They can’t believe ALL THE MEDIA WAS LYING TOGETHER – and somehow using the exact same script for their lies.
I get it – it feels like a huge chaotic open semi-random system suddenly displaying statistically impossible order – it does. But that only feels so implausible because the framing is itself so lazy (it never was a truly open system, and what’s left of it has about three or four corporate owners now, so what range and diversity of view there once was, has long since imploded in on itself).
Yes my friends – the major media outlets really were lying (and still are) and they are all working from the same script. I can even take you on a little trip around a whole bunch of things that you already know, to prove that to you. Zero conspiracy theories are involved with this tour – instead we visit things like economics, politics, monopolism and rhetoric, and with them, we can finally pull back the curtain and laugh at the pathetic bastards who have been manipulating and frightening all of us, causing us shared and lasting harm, all to their exclusive benefit.
A bit complex, yes, but I like to think of this one as kind of like learning to fly. You really only need to know a hundred simple things to do it well. But you have to know all hundred, all of the time!
So, sorry if you’re looking for another ranting denunciation to help you shake a fist and feel great – you will be disappointed. What I’m offering is a way to think again and feel real hope. (remember hope?)
First of all – why do I seem to be the right man for this very strange mission?
I don’t write essays because I think I am important, or even because I think I have an unusual combination of memory, curiosity and concerns (though that does seem true). I write because my particular personal defect happens to be illuminating for this heartbreakingly alienated age. I got blinded just right, to see something many find invisible. Essentially, I’m standing up for missing caring.
Like a few dozen other kids in our cult, I was intensely groomed by a psychopath who decided to make himself the headmaster of an experimental school, and also happened to be the immaculate prince of the cult (son of the matriarch). Psychopaths really are complicated, and their charm is not mythical, but rather absolutely key to the enormous damage they do. It gets them deep access, which they then use to cause pain. He charmed me into demanding I be allowed to move out, at age twelve, and within a few months of that incredibly painful break (all contact cut), there was no longer any home for me to go back to – my brother had been moved in with another family, and my dad was somehow not really a dad at all anymore. No escape.
It is a very different feeling when other people burn all of your bridges for you, trust me.
My childhood did not teach me that I had a right to comfort, affection, joy or safety. I learned about care affection and responsibility, by experiencing their absence. For four straight years my life was a combination of constant duty (I was immediately put to work as the unpaid maintenance man for the creaky school mansion – furnace cleaning and oiling, two full-perimeter security patrols per night, and up extra early to water the backyard rink, all winter long) with such a wide variety of different flavours of fear, that I have struggled more than forty years to describe them, and still fail.
Now – as I mentioned previously – I was lucky as heck in a few ways. I had a wonderful letter from an old babysitter a few weeks ago, which confirmed my own memory that I was already an avid reader at age four (just as my brother was four, when I taught him to read, a couple of years later). I have also always got a lot of emotional spiritual and intellectual value from music – even though those years were much too poor and stressed for me to get any access to instruments for practising, and my one attempt at music lessons, with a kind and brilliant jazz bandleader, was quickly smashed by the mad prince, for fear of any positive outside influence diluting my rigorous conditioning.
I also had some really good friends, for whom I am inexpressibly grateful to this day. (And the way we were all frequently manipulated into hyper competition and paranoid conspiring against one another, was one of the greatest of so many cruelties dealt, for how it undermined our best and most reliable source of solace, all those long isolated years).
I have joked that it was one half “Electric Skillet” – the CIA high stress incubator school for training prodigy tacticians, from John Brunner’s still dazzling “Shockwave Rider” – the first true cyberpunk novel – and one half Magister Ludi, Herman Hesse’s most extraordinary feat of imagination – a performance art form which embraces and encompasses all fields and forms of knowledge and artistic skill into one organic and staggeringly aesthetic whole. (Over the years, I have been amazed by how many of the approaches we took and ‘games’ we played, came straight from the freakish prodigies at the RAND corporation – though I don’t mean to imply we were a DARPA project – only that it was a very weird time to be a pawn in someone else’s game).
It might be clearer if I say that parts of my childhood sound familiar to people who were raised in strict Catholic boarding schools, parts to those raised within Scientology, and parts of it resonate only with people who were raised in the Hitler youth (damn I miss Fred). There just aren’t so many normal easy analogies to reach for. Hard bad painful scary.
I did learn to work very very hard indeed, without anyone tasking me, directing, supervising or rewarding my activity. So much so, in fact, that I am still the only one who can properly task myself to this day, and I still work way harder on such (objectively arbitrary) projects, than I’d ever let any boss force me to. (To be clear, I work way too hard for bosses also – but only because I decide to!) ;o)
Of course, when I am not working on a project, I do not feel I have any right to exist – so there’s that.
Like many cult survivors, I learned to watch other people very carefully. The commune was full of therapeutic ideas (some sound, and some way beyond whacko) which gave me one rich conceptual overlay, but I was such a spy fiction junkie (LeCarre appealed instantly in that context, as you can imagine) that even as a child I more often thought of my burgeoning ‘cold reading’ skills, as mastering key aspects of tradecraft.
Am I hard on the boomers? Yes I am, but I do this as a specific corrective to their still epic denial of responsibility.
I remain bound to this duty, because that myth of peace and love and no costs borne by others was never clearly rebuked and understood, so the crucial societal lessons about compassion were never learned – which means we are still making victims with our willful petulant blindness to this day.
As I have mentioned before, as soon as I escaped the cult, my apartment almost instantly became a drop-in centre for club-kid runaways from all over town, and I was horrified to discover that the abuse my friends and I had suffered was not confined to our cult, as I thought, but that versions of it could be found in many other communities also – traditional and modern. The key factor was not about the code being followed, or excuses being employed – Catholics could go wrong just as easily as Hippies – the key factor was always about responsibility.
More specifically (and this is a crucial distinction, for a man who still believes in revolutionary change) the idea of rebellion which became not just popular but culturally dominant, during the reign of the boomers (and remains with us today, as a toxic hangover) was a pose of childish abandonment of responsibility, rather than a mature demand for both more autonomy AND more responsibility (the only combination that actually DOES LASTING POSITIVE WORK IN THE WORLD).
It is now out of fashion (not by accident) but the strongest modern revolutionary demand is usually – get the state the heck out of our way, get key resources back into the commons, and then let us do the work to solve this problem ourselves! This gathered-will-over-capital approach is the only way we can ever be sure the solutions implemented, will reflect our enduring and shared humane priorities, instead of meeting the needs of big business and social worker bureaucracies, and only incidentally addressing the problem itself – the way most of our established programs (consistently fail to) work, despite their consumption of significant public resources and many well intentioned participants.
Sorry – I know that all might seem very personal and digressive. But you have to understand why I see the particular things that I do, in such high contrast! Every time we shrug and say it is someone else’s job to think about how to fix something that we know is wrong – especially a huge and urgent ongoing moral problem which is creating badly damaged victims constantly – we are insisting that the government spend a big pile of money in our name, so that we can look away from the bad thing again and go back to our usual blind petty narcissism. We don’t want morality, what we want is an indulgence, a shiny certified ticket that says morality isn’t our problem anymore. Gave at the office.
An indulgence and a prescription for anti-depressants, or a bottle, or an ounce of legal weed. (And still we do not ever even allow ourselves to ask the question – if there might possibly be some connection between acting like childish psychotics, and feeling unsatisfied with life as adults).
Responsibility is different. Different from how we think and how we act. So different that it might even make our badly degraded modern model of Democracy finally work for real (and OMG would having our voices count and feeling the tiller in our hands, ever be way more fun than this BS, right?)
There is an almost total difference between being good people, and being THE good people.
You can even see it in the words, that distinction isn’t just attitude, it actually contains the capacity for violence. Sub-humanity for the other – perhaps our most ancient evil temptation.
The old left of decades ago used to understand this fairy well (though never perfectly), and there were tons of modest kind and open people on the left in the old days. But speaking as a guy who experienced our society full-force for the very first time as a mixed up teenage cult escapee, I have to say, I encountered just as many important kindnesses and lessons from people on the right, and felt no fewer slights from those who placed themselves firmly on the left. Morality isn’t code, it’s action.
I soon learned to look for the kindness itself, and try my best to ignore the faction flag altogether. I also looked for those who were open to real discussion (which is always fun, no matter the factions involved). If you start from stuff that you both find important (and yes folks, there is always something shared, no matter how convinced you are that faction divides everything), and you are both well intentioned, you can always get into the more controversial matter productively – each enriching the other’s view, because you have a store of humour and respect to share, the whole way through.
Again – I do my best to look for the practical through-line, like a technician, rather than get myself all overexcited in screaming debates about the emotional entertainment sports team side of it. Because while all those sports fans are having a great time screaming at the TV (and each other) a whole bunch of kids out there are still being ignored (I can actually feel it).
Buckminster Fuller suggested something very similar (in a far smarter way, of course). He felt sure that design solutions were the most reliable and positive way to achieve sustainable plenty for the inhabitants of “Spaceship Earth” rather than our rituals of politics, which are inevitably distorted and corrupted not only by OBNOXICO (his beautiful term for obnoxious mass consumerism life-cheapening industry) but also uncountable kinds of irrational tribal emotionalism, mostly bad.
Funny thing though – tribalism is not only powerful and very ancient, as a property of humans in groups (kind of the property that makes humans groups) it is also the basic underlying structure of the greatest game on earth – planetary control – famously described long ago as “The Great Game”.
Rudyard Kipling’s still vital novel “Kim” presents us with a child, torn between two masters, both of whom recognize his cleverness and spirit. One of them offers him service in the Great Game itself as a spy for the British Empire, the other offers no less than the path to enlightenment!
Reading this work as a kid, I suddenly realized that the demented hyper paranoid cold war spy antics I read so much about (and still do, sadly) were not a brand new product of gee-whiz American innovation (as so many things get falsely branded), but rather just the latest version of “The Great Game” which has been played for many centuries. Especially weird? It still has the same players.
The British, who used to run the world (govern global trade, finance and resource allocation) before the US took over that job (after the second world war bankrupted the old Empire for good) actually developed the modern structure of life over a period of centuries, as they pioneered and refined tools as widespread as scaled industry, ironwork and steam power, modern insurance and statistical analysis, and then combined these hard and soft powers with the extraordinary advances being made by newborn corporations, which were then pioneering the modern art of country-stealing.
I know it sounds ridiculous if I put it that simply, but the British East India Company really was the first model of a modern international corporation which does massive damage to people in one place (in that case India) for the benefit of investors far away, (England) and yet somehow doesn’t ever seem to be accountable (certainly not morally) anywhere on earth. Sound familiar?
These corporations were crazy gamblers (protection from risk incentivizes that, naturally), and many times they pushed their luck recklessly, and then begged the government to help them secure the return of so much invested English capital. This old trick is of course completely unknown to us moderns – no way would oil companies invoke armies to subvert and or destroy entire countries (let alone relentlessly, for an entire century now).
The English were geniuses at exploitation, because with a highly literate classics educated elite, they were especially good at studying the tales and myths of other cultures, and then twisting and corrupting those key identity stories, to most efficiently subjugate the target population. If you can make them believe their own ideas of honour require their obedience to you, you got ’em (cheap).
Their favourite management trick was to promote a minority group into administrative power. This meant that the qualified administrators would always be reliant on the colonial power, to protect them from the anger of the unfairly excluded majority. The more privilege they could offer their favoured group, and the more jealous the majority could be made, the more solid a hold the distant parliament had on the territory. ‘The thing kicks itself for you, just by how it’s put together.’
Of course, the ever more privileged and isolated urban administrative elite in the west, who are now being constantly encouraged to fear the angry working class as a horde of unwashed barbarians, and even regard farmers as right wing fanatics (instead of the most practical and important people in the entire freakin’ world) all of whom should now be suppressed by state surveillance and use of chilling force, is in no way similar to this ‘split them then milk them’ colonialist game. That would be a paranoid figment of your imagination, nothing more. Light another one!
There is a lot less diversity of media than there was a few decades ago, and the older you are, the more you recognize how much democracy has been lost in the process. People in big cities can still overlook it sometimes, because they have been more isolated from the change than most, but many medium size towns that used to support three local papers and two evening news channels now find themselves with none of either.
Part of this is about monopolist corporate consolidation which started decades ago (Clinton years), with a whole series of mergers which should never have been allowed. Of course it has all got much worse since (you should be reading Matt Stoller, he writes about nothing but corporate monopolies, and his insights are superb, weighty and extremely clue-full! See link below)
But the other part of that, the thing that made the smaller players such easy prey for the deep pocket corporations to buy them up, is the way advertising revenue has been stolen by the web, which can target advertisements with a level of precision that marketers absolutely love.
This again is a whole huge topic unto itself – the part that you have to understand for today is that the rise of the internet has seen an all-media news-industry-wide revenue implosion. (Local Newspapers, Radio, then Television, in that approximate order of evaporation). The latest casualty? Legendary Downbeat Magazine has been folded into Gentleman’s Quarterly (somebody play taps, but soulful).
The fact that the Washington Post loses tens of millions a year (and thus, must please Bezos mightily as a train set, for him to keep funding it, at such a staggering loss), might seem more significant news to some, but to me the loss of key and singular voices like Downbeat is far more significant. Especially considering the power serving gruel the Washington Bezost so often offers us now.
One last point about monopolies, and how much our games seem new, but mirror the great game of old perfectly. Back in the very early days of micro-computing, when people like Wozniak and Bill Gates used to meet in school gymnasiums and community centres, there was a lot of dreamy talk about all of the (then entirely imaginary) industries which would soon arise, from their work. One excited keener exclaimed, “There will be room for dozens of important new corporations.”
Bill Gates (pimple-faced and turtle-necked as he still was) replied, “No, only one.”
So – what puzzle pieces have we got? There are creepy corporations, trying to force every last cent out of the economy, including all of the cents and dollars with which the working class used to be able to buy houses – in cities, no less! (mind-blowing I know, but ask anyone with grey hair, they will testify that it was once so – and no unicorns were required to achieve this!). The rich have got richer for decades, while everyone else has been losing ground steadily (now frighteningly rapidly, for many).
Lets also recognize that the west has spent the last quarter century on a globe striding killing spree. That old white hat has a whole lot of blood spatter at this point. Might be best not to flash it and preach to others quite so much, until those stains have at least had time to fade a bit, no?
And I’m pretty sure this is the exact place where I lose a lot of my sweet and intelligent friends who are too busy to look and question the official story for themselves.
Okay – I admit there are obviously powerful creeps pulling strings to make things worse for us, because it makes profits better for them, but how could they control that much of everything?
I get it, it really does sound paranoid. Like the media thing – too much order in a chaotic system.
Yeah maybe the press is broke, and the rich are trying to screw the world for money, but all of them lying together about things as important as Trump and COVID and War? Surely NOT!
(best have the fainting couch and smelling salts ready, I can sense a spell coming on).
That big weird corrupting class/critter which is often called the military industrial complex, but includes finance, media, malign administration and diplomacy also, actually does have some incredibly effective organs in the world, with which they can make things happen, or, when they prefer, make it seem as if something didn’t happen, even though it is important for informed democratic citizens to know it.
The key means by which they circumvent the restraints of law, which laws we citizens all rely upon, to prevent our most expert professional manipulation agencies from running their advanced psychological warfare campaigns against their own citizens (us), is weirdly simple.
The Five Eyes is a club of spies. USA, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. And what does this fun club do? Totally illegal (unconstitutional, in the US context) spying on each other’s citizens. You think Americans need a warrant to spy on American citizens? Sure, they might if they want to use the results in court, but if all they need is blackmail material, they just send one of their buddies to look into the guy they don’t like, so they can get the information, but still maintain “plausible deniability.”
This was how the dance which lead to the Russiagate fiasco was done (the best stories on this are on the PUBLIC substack, but it is mostly paywalled, I’m afraid). British intelligence “Bumped” (sent agents to contact befriend and unofficially question) several key Trump aides, in an effort to get one of them to reveal dirt they could use against him. They found almost nothing, but did trade many insults about how amateur and easy to fool, they thought Trump’s politically inexperienced team was.
If names like Carter Page or Michael Flynn still get you excited, they were both part of this back room boys club fit-up. Dislike them all you want (and I dislike them plenty, myself) the idea of criminalizing diplomatic outreach from a new administration (what Flynn actually did), is quite completely insane. This shockingly anti-diplomatic stance has contributed greatly to the level of hostility to the west in general, which is now felt by most of the (sorry, but they are now the civilized) world. What do we want most? End to poverty? Freedom and flowering of potential? Nope – kill kill kill! Clearly superior.
Okay so wait though, that might explain how a bunch of bad stories got started, but there must be something else which was keeping them in the air for so long. Aren’t professional journalists supposed to be experts at skepticism, and seeing through bullshit? What force could align them all?
Here is where we get to the fangs of the beast. Or actually, the stock market darling FAANGs. F@cebukkake, A$$hle, Angrizon, N@tfix and Gobble. As users all around the world have noticed over the five years especially, every one of these services has become far less interesting and user serving than they used to seem, at their peak. Now that we’re all junkies, they are raising the price of a hit!
We should have expected this, from basic systems theory. Growth is not enough, they want growth of growth, which means they have to reach further and further into our heads, monetize our data more aggressively, bombard us with ads every few minutes (OMG is it ever hard to watch something serious on Youtube now, right?) While at the same time they have also been using their staggering cash reserves to buy up and swallow or kill-off competition, concentrating power and views.
What do they all have in common? (And Microsoft – perhaps even worse than those formal fangs) they are all classic monopolies. Unfair by design, anti free-market (and anti consumer) by practise.
One of the most important pieces of honest legislative work that anyone in power can ever do, is to craft legislation to effectively break up monopolies and restrain those seeking to establish them. Monopolies really are the most heartless and rapacious side of capitalism (too often confused with market forces, which are imperfect as heck, but do respond to social changes, instead of forcing them). These companies have entire divisions, dedicated to making your life worse and putting the difference in the pockets of their shareholders, one sad shaved cent at a time – click click click…
If the big tech monopolies actually were broken up and turned into citizen directed services, we would be able to take our profile and content, and move it anyplace the guidelines suited us best as people (instead of us being the monetized product, and the content we make being stolen for ad revenue purposes by Digital-Obnoxico). Soon, companies would be forced to show us respect, including data sharing limits, in order to compete in a market which would allow us to punish bad actors very easily.
Of course, these companies are all completely terrified about this very obvious and good thing coming to pass (the end of their monopolies). Sure, it would make life on earth better as a whole, but think of the lost profits – so tragic! And so they lobby – and behind the scenes, bargain and beg.
Every now and then, they are even hauled before congress for a ‘grilling’ in which someone corrupt and empty gets to pretend integrity, by yelling at a rich man for all of us, and saying they are bad, and then the rich bastards agree to censor on demand, to please those same back room five eyed jerks.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory – there is a mountain of hard evidence of multiple levels and agencies of the government making absolutely unconstitutional requests for big tech censorship. And calling this unconstitutional isn’t my personal opinion – the courts have already very clearly and sharply ruled against this censorship practise, which has really gone into overdrive under Biden, calling it perhaps the gravest case of violation of free speech protections by any government which any American court has ever seen.* Biden’s DOJ response? – appealing the ruling, because they want to keep being evil!
I even have fresh evidence which helps me prove they’ve all been lying to us – willfully – for ages.
Enter the most unlikely of heroes – the New York Times – which did something truly amazing over the last few weeks – SERIOUS JOURNALISM (I honestly thought they had forgotten how – too busy laughing at the awesome self regard and stupidity of Taylor Lorenz).
First of all, they published a piece about covid vaccines. Turns out they aren’t quite so amazingly perfect, and they did have risks which were hidden from us by force, instead of defeated by evidence and argument (the way we used to assume such things ought to be done). Normal people were prevented from sharing their real experiences. Those who were hurt, were utterly silenced. And everyone knows that silencing victims is the absolute best look there is, right?
I already wrote about how the lockdowns and school closures did enormous damage to children. Every government which is still putting their own electability ahead of investigating and understanding this extremely widespread error, and then learning serious lessons from it, is a child abuser.
I’m speaking from my special experience here. That is the precise quality of denial of responsibility which leads to MASS HARM. Having given themselves this right, they will not soon surrender it.
But it’s actually quite a bit more frustrating than that. Do you remember the chant “Trust the science!” which went along with a whole bunch of media people mocking the idea of doing your own research (how dare you think for yourself – what do you think this is, a democracy which relies upon informed consent or something?)
For those people who were interested enough to bother actually reading the steady drip of hard science which was allowed to circulate (like me and millions of others) the questions were clear from a very early point. There was even public testimony before the European Parliament, in which a Pfizer executive admitted that they had never even tested the vaccine’s effectiveness at preventing transmission. The hopeful high nineties numbers they gave us, which absolutely all of us soon began to experience the falsity of, were only ever a mathematical extrapolation – based on math which has since been called into question. We weren’t trusting science – that was trusting MARKETING.
Most depressingly, there is even a paper trail about the debates over naming the treatments offered. The companies knew that if they were called gene therapy, they would seem new and scary, but if they were called vaccines, even though their technology was completely different, people would be reassured. Some pointed out that we might endanger trust in established and useful vaccines, if any future problems came to light – but that was deemed a risk worth taking. And so they were rebranded. (and so, we see diseases we had long thought conquered, returning to haunt us again).
Remember what conditional logic is? When thing B depends on thing A being true, and thing A turns out to be rather questionable, thing B can no longer be advanced as that which makes rational sense. It is no longer following the science (which means constant questioning and ever-better answering), but rather piling-on to fear, in mob fashion. An irrational state which the players of the great game know very well and absolutely LOVE. (What looks to us like panic desperation and crisis, looks to them like a bargain shopping bonanza)
The Times also published another very long piece that was approximately a thoughtcrime a few months ago, about how the CIA are now openly bragging about toppling the democratically elected government in Ukraine in 2014 (under Obama, but supervised personally by Ice cream/Genocide Joe), and then went to war against Russia, right away.
CIA themselves say they established a chain of a dozen bases right near the border where they trained assassins, gathered intel and ran many destructive operations against Russia. All of which refutes the ‘unprovoked’ part A of the official story that we’ve had shoved down our throats for two years straight. In a very similar Orwellian mind-f@ck, the demented head of NATO quite openly declared recently, that NATO expansion was always known to be and deliberately meant as, provocation – even while citizens who were saying that, were still being banned as conspiracists!
(When questioning war and advocating for peace earns you enemies on the left, you know the world is truly freakin’ mad). And please note that this still doesn’t consider the fourteen thousand civilians killed in the Russian speaking Donbas, where the CIA backed coup installed government suddenly banned them from using their own language, eight years BEFORE the Russian army crossed the border. Just try to picture fourteen thousand dead Americans in Mexico, and America waiting almost a decade to respond. (And note – that death figure is a UN number, not Russian propaganda)
Now I must be clear – I am not saying I approve of anything that has happened in this war – I do not, I grieve every single death, every smashed building and town, every single bullet, bribe and shell. Just as anti-war experts and former intel people predicted before this insane project was undertaken (by the exact same people who authored the Iraq war) Ukraine will not ever be the same again. This is an unutterably tragic outcome for everyone involved, and the uncountable injuries will last generations.
You will probably have heard of the recent fall of Avdiivka, a key stronghold city, from which Ukraine has been shelling the civilian areas of the Russian speaking eastern region for years (yes, despite all of their complaints about lacking ammunition to defend key areas of the front – they still keep finding shells to fire at unarmed civilians, even at this late stage of the war).
It seems very likely that the much beloved commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, General Zaluzhny, wanted to pull his troops back from Avdiivka in an orderly fashion to preserve them, because he recognized that the Russians had amassed adequate force for a successful attack.
So Zelensky fired him and hired a more loyal man, General Syrsky, who is known to his own troops as “The Butcher of Bakhmut” for his frightening willingness to send men to their death, during the unsuccessful defence of that now fallen city. Syrsky immediately sent for the best combat unit left in the AFU – the legendary Azov battalion (yup, them). Definitely fierce fighters, no question about that.
Thing is, as soon as the Azov guys got there and took a look around, they were like, wait, we get no cover, there are no serious defensive positions, no ammunition, no safe resupply lines, and no sure retreat? (considering the forces already threatening envelopment) “…No way!” – and they began to pull out, many say in advance of official orders, just as a matter of their own professional good sense.
Of course, the effect of that decision on the morale of the remaining defenders, already badly worn down, exhausted, underfed undersupplied and most of them unrested for months (no time at the rear, to get your head back together) was utterly devastating. They left so fast, they didn’t even have the time or resources to evacuate their wounded, they just left them to Russian hospitals instead.
When Avdiivka fell soon after, the exhausted citizens of Donetsk city were hugely relieved that the years of shelling would finally end. But the very next day, the Ukrainians used one of their multi million dollar Western Supplied missiles to destroy a library in downtown Donetsk City, as if they really felt a desperate need to say, we still hate you people even more than we want to win this war.
The doubly tragic thing about all of this is that the entire war was avoidable. It was the west, not those dastardly Russians, which was negotiating in bad faith, all along (Merkel has openly admitted the Minsk process was just a stalling tactic, to arm Ukraine, and no one ever intended to sign it). Of course, had they signed the Minsk treaty, the Donbas would still belong to Ukraine. Now it is lost.
The really frightening thing, that we westerners really want to buy an indulgence so we can ignore, is that this was just one of a depressingly long line of such engineered great-game tragedies.
As Kit Klarenberg made clear in an outstanding recent piece (link below), the Democrats are just as fond as the Republicans, of blowing up other people and their most important stuff, and then taking a skim (cut) from the investment and reconstruction grift. Just as W made use of evil schemers from Nixon and Reagan days, this administration has plenty of old Democratic hands who have run this evil game before, and since Congress is pretty much one hundred percent corrupt at this point, why not let them corrupt every single other branch and office associated with government while they’re at it? After all, there is money to be made (and we really are willing to pay an awful lot in freedom and prosperity, for the sake of that precious – not my problem – indulgence).
Colin Powell related a story from when he was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (under Clinton), and Madeline Albright visited, remarking, “What’s the point of having such an amazing military, if you never use it!” To his credit, he said he just about had a heart attack, the sentiment was so shocking to him. Which at least says backhanded good things about some previous civilian leaders (Powell made his bones covering up MyLai, remember – so he’d seen some stuff for sure).
OMG – so wait, we’re going all the way back to the sixteenth century, we’re being lied to by techno monopolists, and we’re up to our elbows in blood and coverups – and this is your idea of HOPE? DUDE!
I know, I know, and I’m sorry, I really am. I don’t do comforting denial. I’m into hope based on clarity and vision.
But I swear, in untangling several extremely popular power serving lines of mythology, we have already seen a lot of hope, which is being actively hidden and fought against by monopolists and malign power in concert, every second of every day.
First thing first – and this is incredibly important. That was never a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Bodily fear is the easiest way to make a mellow person turn into an authoritarian (and boy did it work), but the fact is that the offered medications just weren’t that great at transmission prevention (we lived it).
Lockdowns made the curve last longer, just as surely as they flattened the peak (may still have been worth it, but the question must be investigated deeply, considering the many harms entrained).
What really confuses me is how many in the west continue to base their ideas about the pandemic on official statements from widely incompetent politicians. People who they trust on no other file.
I’ve been reading newspapers from around the world this whole time, so I understand how the peak worked in those African countries which were denied vaccines at the height of the emergency, by our own unhinged western fear greed and buying power (shockingly less shocking death rates than we would expect, were our wunderwaffens really so spectacular).
I also read many peer reviewed medical research papers (the Japanese medical Journal “Vaccine” has been a real stand out, but there has been great data from Singapore, Switzerland and many other places also), which investigated such questions as natural immunity and multiple doses, in ways that we in the west weren’t told about – FOLLOWING THE ACTUAL SCIENCE – that is.
So here is the real nasty part, past which we can see hope for real. My wise ass socialist mentor always used to call Canada “The Polite Police State” and we are now seeing just that – and the same sorts of anti-citizen measures are being implemented all over the world – from Germany to Brazil!
What’s the key? The connection? What makes this a thing worth getting over ourselves and getting along with our traditional enemies, in order to challenge and then defeat in a popular front, so that we can all build better lives afterward? (without that stifling load of the parasitic skim of financialism)
Well, those Great Game players went and did it again. They invaded a territory they didn’t understand, very recklessly, extracted tons of wealth in the early going, got in big trouble with the angry locals who were actually using that wealth to live, and then called home to mommy state – Help, we’re being besieged by the natives – come rescue the capital at stake!
It is really important to understand that it is always about saving the national (but actually private) capital which has already been invested in evil. If they just said come save us, then you could write-off the foul project and move on, perhaps even having learned a thing or two about hubris.
But save the capital means – we private wealthy citizens have secretly gambled on theft and lost – and now we want the nation to sign its name to our theft, back up the evil to the hilt by making it our official national policy, so that we can keep sending home someone else’s wealth, to prop up our domestic economy (their already bulging pockets most of all, of course).
Are you scratching your head yet? Wondering where is this strange country? What is this capital which they’ve invested in evil, which must now be saved by luring the state into full commitment to that evil?
The mysterious country is your attention, the evil capital is the modern internet domination of it.
I’ll attach one of the most brilliant essays I’ve come across in years below, because he makes the case with great elegance (and more formal footnoting habits). But the simple breakdown is that the first generation web was sponsored by five-eyed western intelligence, and it gave them some data, but it turned out to be too crude and unfocussed. They could gather, but only rarely actually use it.
Web two point oh – where all the social media things started happening – was much more useful to them, because it was designed with their needs (and those of advertisers) in mind. I am from the original microcomputer generation, which felt sure the internet would be the ultimate democratizer, so watching this hope not just smashed but coopted and corrupted, is especially heartbreaking for me. (Not that I envy my younger friends who escaped this heartbreak, only because they were born into an age of established cynicism).
But the great gamers could never leave a tool that powerful on the table, without playing with it. Funny thing is, the information the advertisers gathered was just as useful to the intel people, as the stuff they originally thought they wanted. Soon they began to learn how to outright weaponize social media, to destabilize foreign regimes they didn’t like. (Colour revolutions, Arab springs). The players were riding high – all in.
Then came Brexit – and the public made what was to the power elites, the WRONG decision.
Rather than taking a lesson about EU arrogance (which is terrifying) and shifting their policies to respond to the public, they instead began to attack the public as defective. Not just wrong, but bad.
And to give people that bad the power to choose policy was surely also bad. Democracy had to be suppressed, in order to preserve the power games they had already invested in, in the glorious name of Democracy Incorporated (long since swallowed up by a weapons contractor).
Yup – their own favourite new destabilizing weapon, bit those great gamers on the ass!
Enter Trump – the ultimate example of power player backfire. And OMG were the players outraged!
I want to be clear here, I didn’t like his show (or what it said about his character) his statements, or his development projects – gaudy and weird – not my style. But I understood exactly why he was elected, because I have never lost touch with the working class, and they have been getting more and more screwed, and more and more justly angry, for forty straight years, as the rich pilfer harder.
Did anyone really think that the dam would never break? That the working class would smile and be complicit in it’s own destruction forever? That THE PEOPLE would never get mad enough to topple the whole damn thing, because that had finally come to feel more dignified than the servile yoke?
Bernie offered an outlet for that impulse too (though his later grotesque sellout behaviour calls his character into question no less than the Donald’s), his suppression by the Democrats (for which revelations they remain determined to outright KILL Julian Assange – a hero to the entire world) was not only a tactical mistake, as it is so often described, it is the proof that they were always heroes of saving capital, not us useless powerless obsolete and ignorable voters.
Seriously people. Stop it with the sports team nonsense. Your corrupt psychopaths are not better than their corrupt psychopaths, and until we recognize this, we can’t hope to elect anyone sane.
The thing is that the moment the American people proved they could not be steered into backing the capital play of the game players, but actually used social media themselves, in all kinds of creative ways, to actively resist the master’s leash, the American people came in for an astonishing amount of demonization. (Just as their Brexiteer British friends had, shortly before).
Even as a highly politically interested Canadian (we do have an unhealthy inclination toward snark in that direction) I was really honestly shocked. They can’t mean the whole working class, how is that kind of grotesque class attack any better than racism? But they did mean it, and they still do.
Instead of responding to generations of well founded citizen anger in the underclass with sound new policy to restrain monopolies and raise the living standard of those stuck at the bottom far too long, in a sensible and a reasonably rapid way – the establishment has decided to attack the populace itself!
Reminds me a lot of offering assisted suicide to a depressed person, instead of care. (Much cheaper, for sure, but there is the whole absolutely unutterably evil part of the deal to think about also, right?)
These creeps would rather use their media monopolies to deliberately stoke a civil war (which only authoritarian measures will be able to control, of course – all hail the glorious state) than simply act as responsible representatives of the people who elected them. Because that just isn’t what they are anymore – they serve power, not people. The great game, not the great planet and our great hearts.
We can do better – so much better. But only when we start listening to each other, instead of their nasty spiteful psychological operations mind-bots. Turn the computer off, talk to a stranger. LIVE.
The fight isn’t fifty-fifty, left versus right – that’s the game they want us to believe we’re playing. Hopeless stalemate – bitter and endless – every neighbour against the next. (House divided, hint hint!)
The real fight is actually ninety-nine to one – and we are not only on the side with overwhelming numbers, we grow all of the food and do all the damn plumbing, too! We can take them, easily, my friends, and we’ll begin to feel that for real, the moment we get them out of our heads and start making friends with each other across every false tribal line there is, instead of falling in love with our own toxic indignation.
One handy tool to keep in mind? Analysis is not the same as strategy. Just because someone is insightful, that doesn’t mean they know what to do with the insight. (Marx/Freud/Hayek/Bateson/Chomsky and a thousand more).
What can we actually DO – to start making things better? Simple.
Stop Being A Wedge – Start Being Glue.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A note about the flippers
I was going to do a whole section about the Guardian PBS and Mother Jones, in which I would coyly tease the reader to imagine what they would do if they faced the greatest anti war protests ever (2003 just before the invasion of Iraq) – these protests were world wide, (not just in the US), and they had a vast secret budget to work with, to try to make this sort of embarrassment less frequent in future.
I would then cut back to the game Catherine and I used to play, while watching the news in the eighties – trying to spot the CIA plant, on each major national anchor team. Our breakthrough there came from a brilliant David Mamet story, which talked about the all time best poker strategy he’d ever seen, (and as a devotee of underground Chicago, he had some experience).
Be the nice guy, the considerate one, who brings the kind of beer that Joe likes, and the chips Gene prefers. Be the one who never minds helping with the clean up, or giving a pal a drive. And by being the most reasonable and intuitively trusted one, you become in effect “The House” – the one the whole group trusts to settle disputes fairly, because haven’t you proven your disinterest by your sustained caring about everyone?
Of course this sort of subtle points-shaving advantage only counts if you use it sparingly. If you start settling every dispute in favour of your best pal, your trust is quickly lost. But if you do use the advantage of gathered trust sparingly, you get to deploy it at those times which are most important for whatever greater project you might have in mind.
Margaret Warner (PBS NEWSHOUR) wasn’t ashamed of revealing she was an American nationalist, and seemed much quicker to harsh judgement, so our early odds picked her – but after reading that Mamet story and talking it over with Catherine, we both went for Judy Woodruff instead. Who do you love?
The flipper analogy was meant to describe the functional effect of these organs which have established trust with the left and with people who think themselves rebels, in particular. (I could add the New Yorker and The Atlantic – but if you haven’t yet figured out that they are corrupted, I give up!)
Don’t think about the Guardian because George Monbiot is mad about something you like being mad about too (he used to get me all the time, I can’t blame you one bit).
Think about the Guardian that ran a sustained relentless and groundless smear campaign against the most serious leftist candidate in British politics in generations – Jeremy Corbyn. Kier Starmer is a hollow technocratic aristocratic poser. Corbyn was the real thing, and trying to imagine the difference in the path of history, had he been backed and elected instead of utterly destroyed, makes one cry.
As for PBS – they just welcomed Jeffery Goldberg to their team! The man behind the lie that Saddam Hussein was involved with 9/11 – as murderous a propagandist as the planet has ever made.
Anyhow – by the time I was done the essay, this last flipper point just didn’t fit anywhere. I add it here not because I am reluctant to “murder my darlings” (excise superfluous text in the name of the whole), but rather because the damn thing really does have these flippers – which use our trust in them, to flip us into taking the sort of positions the CIA would like us to take about the world. More war please!
Since it is a functional part of the “how come they all lied?” thing – it had to be included someplace.
Once again I have an especially rich haul of sources for your further investigation.
This essay “Political Conflict In The Age Of Psychic Warfare” is beyond brilliant, and helped me put together many of the separate insights I just wrote about in this piece. I depart from the author on several philosophical points, but his analysis is extraordinarily revealing (puts so many pieces together)
This quote really nails it:
“The Regime is parasitic, not symbiotic, on its host society. It is purely extractive, providing nothing of value, existing solely for itself. It is composed of people who are not brave, or honourable, or intelligent, or competent, or benevolent, or possessed of any of the virtues with which a ruling class is expected to be blessed. As such it is a curse upon humanity, and deep down it knows this. It understands perfectly well that everyone would be much better off if it simply shuffled away into the unlamented oblivion of history. It doesn’t care, mind you, because it sees people as livestock of no moral importance. But it’s self-aware about this disconnect between its interests, and those of the human species at large.”
Ted Gioia is one of my favourite writers working today. Genuine humane insight and precision science and economics (such a rare and delicious combo). This piece about our modern Dopamine seeking culture is again, a real must read (and a heck of a lot less work than the one above)
Here’s just one of the sharp and thought provoking graphics from his piece
I also want to point people back to Norman Spinrad’s brilliant 1987 novel “Little Heroes” and his prescient description of “Wireheads” and “People Kibble” (which thankfully, tastes better in VR)
I have mentioned Matt Stoller, who investigates and writes about monopolies, a few times, this piece – Did Google, Facebook, and Amazon Endorse Jim Crow? – is a great example of what he does (and OMG do these usually hidden power plays reveal a lot about the true face of big tech).
This timeline on the deep state roots of the internet (originally (D)ARPANET – after all) is fascinating
And here is a much more detailed breakdown of the internet’s creation by the spymasters
Even more important is Klarenberg’s story about Kosovo, and the bipartisan neocon/neolib model of destroying countries deliberately, so that the killers can profit from the reconstruction like shameless vampires!
Here’s a direct report from Donetsk city (in case you thought I was making up the library story)
If you still have a hard time believing our governments will go to extremes to kill truth, try this one
Lee Fang did us all a service here, reminding us how many other things Assange’s work revealed
In case you are still too overcome by the tragic death of Navalny, to even consider our own evil
And should you still doubt that ‘our betters’ have gone insane, try this piece America’s Super-Elite Disconnect from Simplicius
Once again – this single graphic from the essay, makes the basic point very strongly.
Finally, this piece from my favourite modern stoic writer M. C. Bowen – Class and the Illusion of Shared Sentiment – has some very tasty insights about AI, Class and the inverted (bourgeois) structure of the culture war.
* The extraordinary Glenn Greenwald got into media to stand up for civil rights, he remains especially great on this beat – check out his free Rumble show whenever you can – digging into all the OTHER news you aren’t supposed to think about – (of which there is a frightening lot these days).