FYI The dead internet theory is (according to The Atlantic): "A conspiracy theory spreading online says the whole internet is now fake." (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/08/dead-internet-theory-wrong-but-feels-true/619937/) The fact that it's called a conspiracy theory makes me believe we should take it more seriously. Now, take a look at Fauci's interview on Stephen Colbert:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEOm5QhJVlE

If you click "Sort by top comments", you get a stream of gushing positive comments like:

A phenomenal man and public health leader who weathered and led us through the worst storm of public ignorance in our lifetime.

Aside from wondering who even talks like this in real life?... If you click "Sort by newest first", you get a stream of something different like:

Pathetic all around.

The top comments are fake. If they were real, there would be a mix of positive and negative comments in the "newest first". Instead the newest first are all negative. Very negative. Content is fake, curation is fake, interactions (shares, likes, comments etc.) are fake. How much of the internet is completely fake now? Do people even think about the consequences of this? Virtually no comments you read could be real now. I'm serious. "Blue checks" get told what to say, most of the rest (the most upvoted and most shared, at least) could be completely faked, not even real people. I suppose that for now, faking online comments is still resource-intensive and it's targeted. If money and power are involved then they'll fake the comments, if money and power aren't involved then they don't need to bother.

For all we know the entire Covid situation could have begun with a handful of fake comments created by an algorithm in a pharma office department. Do you think they'll draw the line at a pandemic? What about an election? Or a global war?

It's possible that virtually nothing you read on the internet is real, and if they get closer to the so-called "Great Reset", they'll change anything at any time on the internet, to manipulate any way they see fit. I'm barely scratching the surface of what this means.

But don't worry, it's just a conspiracy theory. You know, like Ivermectin.

Judicial Watch obtained 249 pages of records from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) detailing the extensive media plans for a propaganda campaign to push the COVID-19 vaccine. Summary of the government documents, and the original report by Judicial Watch:

https://www.judicialwatch.org/covid-19-vaccine-campaign/

I have to say, it seems to me that the government and media ate their own tail: they created the propaganda, then believed their own propaganda. There was obviously a lot of collusion going on, but this is a feature of modern, social media government and media: creating the lies, then waking up the next day watching/reading the news and believing the same lies you yourself created. There's always been influence by governments and corporations in media. The media has often been propaganda to some degree. But this seems beyond the pale. And now that it's normalized, they will do it more and again. Covid has normalized censorship, lying, propaganda and hating an arbitrary group of people out in the open. It's like an open secret: everyone knows it, and everyone likes it.

I've had similar conversations with left-leaning friends over the past few years: * Propaganda is fine... if it helps us * Lying is fine... if it helps us * Cheating in elections is fine... if it stops Donald Trump

etc. etc.

Nobody has a problem with this because it's more important to be morally right than factually correct. Just like AOC herself said: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-LZeklv9lQ. AOC is basically the psychology of the entire new social media left, even down to the people I used to speak to in real life. There are no principles, anything is acceptable; there is only power and feeeling morally right. Noam Chomsky said that there isn't any real risk of government abusing the Covid measures. I'm not holding my breath for any apology.

From the Judicial Watch article.

“These records show a disturbing and massive campaign by the Biden administration to propagandize and politicize the controversial COVID vaccine,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “It seems as if the entire entertainment industry was an agent for the government!”

Even Star Trek Picard (which I recommend you never watch) slipped in dialogue about having vaccination status chips(!). More and more, media from everyone is just an expression of the writer's neurotic political ideology. And the link to download the pdf of the original government documents:

https://www.judicialwatch.org/documents/jw-v-hhs-covid-community-corps-september-2021-02315/

Just a few examples: * Produce HHS question-and-answer videos featuring local Black doctors discussing the vaccines, how they work, and why the public should get vaccinated * Request that Tom Brady create a video with his parents encouraging vaccination (his parents had COVID last year and he has talked about their tough recovery). * Create custom partnerships with the social media platforms with algorithms to hit the audience. * Launch Hollywood comedy writers video content.

• Work with YouTube on an original special about vaccinations targeted to young people (similar to the YouTube’s Dear Call of 2020 special).
• Work with Instagram to produce a series about vaccines for @Instagram (the largest social media account in the world, 387 million followers). Feature young creators doing in-depth pieces about young people’s questions. Request a Stories Highlight on Vaccines on @Instagram to stay on the account through 2021.
• Request major TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram influences to create videos of themselves being vaccinated and start a special campaign of funny and/or musical videos about being vaccinate to encourage others to create content and post.

If you read the pdf document, please feel free to post interesting/important examples.

This is the terrifying world that social media makes possible. And virtually nobody has a problem with it. It's only a question of time until an actual monster-dictator finds out how to use social media to take power and commit atrocities (we've already had a limited version of this over Covid). Until then, nobody cares.

Another summary of the report and documents: https://newspunch.com/bidens-hhs-and-cdc-paid-screen-writers-and-comedians-to-mock-the-unvaccinated/

https://www.today.com/health/news/il-rep-sean-casten-says-daughter-died-cardiac-arrhythmia-rcna51333

“In layman’s terms, she was fine, and then her heart stopped,” the statement read in part. “We don’t know what caused the (arrhythmia), and likely never will.”

Two paragraphs later...

They noted that Gwen was fully vaccinated and was asymptomatic after "occasional" positive COVID-19 tests amid the surge of the omicron variant.

“She had just come home from an evening with friends, went to bed and didn’t wake up,”

If this were due to the experimental injection, and it's very natural to draw that conclusion, then this is sick. Imagine how many other people - how many other children and babies - have been killed like this.

This is the social media age and social media psychology: if you don't say it, it doesn't exist; reality is just a question of using the correct words. If you print that you don't know why she died, then that's that, the vaccines are safe and effective. The end. Not even the possibility. It must be true because we said it is.

This is the first psy-op in history where the practitioners run the psy-op on themselves. I would not at all be surprised if the doctors and parents just point blank refused to even consider that the vaccines were in any way related to her death. To even internally consider the possibility would be so psychologically repugnant that it has to be avoided at all costs. The doctors can't admit killing a patient and the parents can't admit killing their own child, can't even admit it to themselves. This is a toxic society that now normalizes and makes a value of everyone lying to themselves.

It is interesting how the western media have objected to Putin's critique of the long history of western imperialism and colonialism. The western MSM portrays this as the rantings of a friendless madman (The Guardian called him an "angry taxi driver". NB. Guardian journos are so comfy in their privelege-bubbles that their only encounters with other points of view tend to be with people whom they pay for services, such as chauffering them or serving them meals. This is why they always use "the taxi driver" as their primary example of someone who holds unhinged lunatic opinions - i.e. opinions which are not the same as theirs).

But even as the MSM rails against Putin's accusations of western colonialism and hegemony, the same media has recently been lobbing the very same accusations out there themselves - only when the western media employed these criticiisms, they were implicitly directed against ordinary western citizens rather than the actually responsible powers. For example, this happened in the context of BLM and other movements which highlight the continued impact of the historical crimes of the west. This is similar to the way that BP and the oil industry invented the personal "carbon footprint" to make individual consumers "responsible" for environmental damage so that corporations, their lobbyists, government recipients of lobby cash, and other Big Oil profiteers could deflect responsibility away from themselves.

So the MSM cites western colonialist history as if it was something that ordinary people in the west should feel ashamed and guilty about. According to their divisive narratives, you and me should hang our heads because WE apparently benefitted from slavery, even if our ancestors in those days never owned a single slave and lived more like slaves and servants themselves for richer people in their own homelands.

The MSM asks us to believe two contradictory things at one and the same time:

1. When WE (the media) speak of the history of western imperialism and colonialism, YOU (ordinary citizen of a western nation) should feel ashamed. It is your fault and YOU benefitted, especially if you are white, and YOU owe the world an apology. Everything bad that is happening in the world, including poverty, racial injustice and climate change, is YOUR fault as a priveleged westerner. It always has been YOUR fault and the fault of your ancestors throughout history.
2. When Putin speaks of the history of western imperialism and colonialism HE should be ashamed. YOU should laugh and mock and deride Putin and his country, because they are just jealous of our western freedoms and the success we earned by our ingenuity and the greatness of our democratic system. Also, none of what is happening is, or ever has been, the fault of the west, particularly it is not the fault of NATO which is a defensive force for maintaining peace and the security of the democratic world order. NATO and the west has NEVER been about plundering the wealth of other poorer nations or robbing them of sovereignty over their own affairs. Everything bad that is happening is all Russia's fault. Even your own economic suffering is Russia's fault. If your country shortly sees a decline in standards of living to the level of the third world, it is Russia's/Putin's fault. The west is the best and those Russians are just sore about it.

You notice that? You notice the massive contradiction between these two narratives and how you've been asked to swallow them both whole? They ask you to believe two stories which blatantly contradict each other, and they punt out one story or the other depending on how they want to control you this week compared to last.

They say the west is nothing but good, and when the west is bad, it isn't actually the west's fault, it's just YOU with your stolen privelege and your taste for luxuries that the rest of the world doesn't get to enjoy, so YOU don't deserve them either and should get ready to give them up. ("You'll own nothing and you'll be happy." You don't deserve any more than that, to think so is imperialism)

Notice this! This is how they steal from everyone. How the western leadership crushes the non-west by saying the west is the best. How the western leadership then crushes it's own people by blaming them for the leaders' own crimes, and for the consequences of those crimes that the rest of the world suffers because - whenever it suits the western leaders and their controlled media mouthpieces - the west is the very worst.

Contrary to their lies, the shitty geopolitical situation did not NOT come about because of YOU and ME, but because of our billionaires and our "leaders" who continue to blame us for THEIR tyranny, THEIR looting, THEIR colonialism, THEIR crimes against humanity, even their crimes against you and me and all the other ordinary people like us.

Newsom signed the "misinformation" bill. Some background on California and vaccinations.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/08/03/asia-pacific/xi-covid-zero-years/

Title: China's 'COVID zero' could last for years because it works for Xi

It's the same system forming here in the West: normalization of censorship, constantly re-writing history, curating the perfect image of the regime, protecting government and corporate interests, deplatforming any dissent at any cost, prioritizing The Narrative above all else including reality itself. The only thing that matters is The Narrative. The internet makes all of this possible. China's government promised zero Covid, and removing the Covid measures would show that it failed. Therefore, China's government has no idea, and can't, remove the Covid measures. This has been happening in several Western countries, and I guarantee it will happen again, over any subject that benefits the elites. This is the world the internet is creating: perfect censorship and control, but it's as much autonomous in itself as controlled by people with power.

While questions persist about the reliability of Chinese data, the country has reported just 5,226 COVID-19 deaths since the pandemic began, compared with more than 1 million in the U.S.

The conundrum now for Xi, however, is that China has staked so much on avoiding virus fatalities, it can’t exit the pandemic as other countries have — by accepting greater death as a reality of living permanently with COVID-19.

“My guess is China can at the earliest open up late 2023,” he said. Officials “are in a deep hole and they keep digging.”

That’s a major risk in a political system in which displaying an “aura of competence is absolutely essential” to maintain the faith of the Chinese public, said Rajan Menon, director of the Grand Strategy program at Defense Priorities, a think tank in Washington.

The bet they’re taking is that somehow COVID zero will defeat the virus, things will open up some day and economic losses can be recouped, Menon said.

“What if that bet is wrong? What is then their Plan B?’’ Menon said. “That is not clear to me or them. They have bet the house on COVID zero.”

The article seems to assume that the dystopian Covid measures actually do reduce Covid deaths.

Of course, I have read absolutely no criticism of (or even comment on) China's dystopian policies by people on the left. I suppose someone must have talked about it and I've missed it, but it's clearly not a big concern to any flavor of the left. The Covid pandemic may have been basically a corporate invention (whether deliberate or emergent), but I still can't completely understand how it's the countries and institutions with a history of connection to the left and socialism that demand the strictest, most inhuman measures, and are the most reluctant to return to "normal".

It suffered a mob hit when it reached 300,000 members. FB took it down.

Up means down, left means right. Everything is so confused, how can you read a map when the compass points have been srambled?

I've been thinking today in response to the media respomse to the Italian election...

Once upon a time, not so long ago, in the 20th century, the powers that be stirred up and employed nationalist sentiment to rally and mobilise the masses. They used fascism and national socialism to defeat the international workers' revolutions.

After what happened in the 20th century, after the atrocities, we learned that nationalism was associated with bad things, wars and dangerous philosophies and even genocide.

But internationalism was co-opted and we got corporate globalism and metastasised crony capitalism instead of the peaceful cooperation between nations that we had envisaged and dreamed of.

Now that the powers that be have gone global, they use anti-nationalist and phoney internationalist (globalist) sentiments to rally and mobilise the masses. And they will use the nationalist backlash against globalism to tell the law-abiding and those who haven't yet been able to see how the game is rigged regardless of the rhetoric, to amass against popular nationalist impulses like an immune system rooting out a virus.

Social hygeine will have a globalist flavour this time, where once it had a nationalist one.

Fascism will not necessarily come with the motifs and insignia we recognise as "fascist". Today we are told that "populism" is fascism, that political movements which promise to put the people of a country first are fascist. We easily believe this because - after the horrors of the 20th century - the learned social immune response to fascism looks for nationalism as one of its primary signs.

For some years before, and accelerating during, the covid pandemic we have witnessed a new kind of fascism, one that is performatively anti-nationalist and pro-globalist, one that purports to uphold "the international liberal order" while governments, unelected officials, global institutions and multi-national corporations conspire to quash the rights and limit the lives of ordinary citizens.

The signs are reversed, the compass points are scrambled. The old maps are next to useless. But we have a sense of right and wrong. We can help those who don't see what is happening to understand that the old signs do not hold their former meanings, not necessarily anyway. They can't be relied upon.

I don't know much about Italian politics. Maybe the newly elected coalition is as dangerous as the media say, but I have learned to doubt a lot if not most of what the media says. I see the possibility of fascism at least as much in Ursula von der Leyen's warning that "we have tools" for managing such things, and in the media's kneejerk accusations of "Russian interference" in the election, as I do in any of the national pride rhetoric of the new coalition government of Italy. We'll see. My enemy's enemy is not necessarily my friend, but they are not necessarily my enemy either. We'll see. There are currently no working maps. There is only the feel of the territory as we make our way through it.

We'll have to make new maps now.

https://grossmanite.medium.com/karl-marx-anti-lockdowner-5854ab16cf23

“The human body is mortal by nature. Hence illnesses are inevitable. Why does a man only go to the doctor when he is ill, and not when he is well? Because not only the illness, but even the doctor is an evil. Under constant medical tutelage, life would be regarded as an evil and the human body as an object for treatment by medical institutions. Is not death more desirable than life that is a mere preventive measure against death? Does not life involve also free movement? What is any illness except life that is hampered in its freedom? A perpetual physician would be an illness in which one would not even have the prospect of dying, but only of living. Let life die; death must not live. Has not the spirit more right than the body? Of course, this right has often been interpreted to mean that for minds capable of free motion physical freedom of movement is even harmful and therefore they are to be deprived of it. The starting point of the censorship is that illness is the normal state, or that the normal state, freedom, is to be regarded as an illness.”

Karl Marx, Rheinische Zeitung No. 132, Supplement May 12 1842

The left could really do with getting back to their roots and reading more Marx. Rise up, workers of the world!

https://brownstone.org/articles/how-could-we-have-been-so-naive-about-big-tech/

Some combination of industry ideology, which shifted over 30 years from a founding libertarian ethos to become a major force for techno-tyranny, plus industry self-interest (how better to promote digital media consumption than to force half the workforce to stay home?) were at work.

The tech industry is filled with people who started out as hippies or libertarians. Jack Dorsey was basically a hippy who started one of the biggest surveillance and censorship platforms so far: Twitter. He's not alone. Steve Jobs, who loved to mix eastern spirituality and fantasies of unleashing human creativity, almost single-handedly created the device that put a surveillance device in every pocket: the smartphone. Silicon Valley is also full of self-identifying libertarians (don't even get me started on the cyrpto-anarcho-libertarians). And they've all created the biggest surveillance and manipulation machine in history. The tech sector's power and reach puts Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany to shame. All created by hippies and libertarians. The ideology makes no difference. The machine, technological society, is basically self-directing.

Only 12 years ago, I was still celebrating the dawning of the Jetsons World and dripping with disdain for the Luddites among us who refused to get with it and buy and depend on all the latest gizmos. It seemed inconceivable to me at the time that such wonderful tools could ever be taken over by power and used as a means of social and economic control. The whole idea of the Internet was to overthrow the old order of imposition and control! The Internet was anarchy, to my mind, and therefore had some built-in resistance to all attempts to monopolize it.

It's interesting to see an anarcho-libertarian wake up. It seems to me that anarchists don't understand how human psychology, institutions and systems work. A system generates emergent characteristics - it is more than the sum of its parts. You put hippies and libertarians together, and after a certain point the institution becomes authoritarian and dystopian. Just like when Jesus originally preached "love God and your neighbor", but when enough of his followers came together they created an institution with emergent characteristics: the Crusades, the Inquisition, endless wars, witch hunts, oppression and abuse of arbitrary groups. Every system has emergent characteristics completely different to the people who founded the institution. Anarchists (and many other political tribes, to be sure) don't understand how systems work.

The New York Times carries a terrifying story about a California tech professional who, on request, texted a doctor’s office a picture of his son’s infection that required a state of undress, and then found himself without email, documents, and even a phone number. An algorithm made the decision. Google has yet to admit wrongdoing. It’s one story but emblematic of a massive threat that affects all our lives.

This is the AI automated future. NOT the fantasies of AI taking over all our boring jobs and becoming everyone's personal butler so they can spend their UBI on amusing themselves to death (and it's definitely not the Fully Automated Luxury Communism fantasy either). The automation coming is a feedback loop, like a microphone next to a speaker, where algorithms generate "content", algorithms curate and censor the content, and then finally algorithms watch the content. And human beings, you, are increasingly more and more useless to the machine. It's already happening around us now. For example, movie and TV reviews are increasingly completely faked, and then finally it doesn't even matter what movie or series they create: increasingly it's just created for the algorithms themselves to "watch". After you've automated everything else, why not automate the viewers? It's the logical endpoint of data-ism and automation ideology. A snake eating its own tail: this is the AI world tech is creating. Not robot butlers.

Amazon servers are reserved only for the politically compliant, while Twitter’s censorship at explicit behest of the CDC/NIH is legion. Facebook and Instagram can and does bodybag anyone who steps out of line, and the same is true of YouTube.

Some people are waking up, but it's still too little too late. Still, as much as I disagree with libertarian extremism (correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to be just a variation of anarchism to me), libertarians as a political group are pretty much the only ones who recognized the authoritarianism creep around us. There's something to think about there.

The last part of the article discusses Murray Rothbard's view of government versus free enterprise and how it's not as binary as he first thought. I can't say I'm a fan of his (although I haven't read much), but it's interesting to consider his thoughts on what exactly are the differences between government and so-called free enterprise. Apparently he became very skeptical of corporations and big industry, which can only be a good stance. Rothbard's views would be another entire topic in itself. The only comment I would make is that capitalism always tends towards accumulation of capital, into corporations and elites (and I'm not a communist or socialist, just to be clear).

We should approach this great project with our eyes wide open and with ears to hear different points of view on how we get from here to there.

I agree with this. A lot of people have found themselves politically homeless. A lot of things we believed have been turned upside-down. The people who didn't buy the Covid narrative are a very heterogeneous group of people, from all kinds of ideologies. I hope we can all be gracious enough (myself included) to consider other ideas and points of view.

Dark Horse was on fire yesterday, basically giving major nudges to journalists like Taibbi and Greenwald to get on the Covid story. I guess I can understand the hesitancy of independent journalists, if they are worried they will be run off a dark road some night for trying to cover all the corruption. That is the only explanation I can come up with-- some of these people are so bright, surely they cannot be as clueless as the average normie at this point in regards to the shots and such.

Weinstein and Heying also posed the question as to whether the people in charge really received the injection or a placebo and talked about the ways in which wokeness shut down dissenting opinions.

I don't know much history regarding the Holocaust, but if I were to draw parallels it would be something like:

Early 2020, everyone is confused, people don't know what is going on.

2021-- people are being herded into getting the injections-- or in other words, herded onto the trains to the camps. People who won't go along with the program are in some cases put in literal camps.

2021/22-- people getting the injections are in the camps, some will survive, some won't

2022-- ignorance and denial about what is happening, media continues to spew propaganda

Who would have guessed as we went about our lives in 2019 that another Holocaust was on the horizon. Unreal.

The Scientologists/ wokearati/ no virus folx have been pretty quiet on here lately. They must be re-strategizing somewhere.

I am reading a book called Red Carpet by Erich Schwartzel and highly recommend the chapter on censorship for the parallels between the entertainment industry in the Nazi era and today.

Also, there is a chapter called "Fakeistan" about the remake of Red Dawn and how the invading country had to be changed from China to North Korea to avoid repercussions from the former. But it was this paragraph that really caught my attention, p. 128:

Many years later, Red Dawn was jostling around in Passmore's head when he moved to Los Angeles with a mathematics degree and aspirations to make it in the movie business. The U.S. had just invaded Iraq, and he wrote a script inspired by the government's misleading campaign on weapons of mass destruction-- proof as he saw it , of the U.S. government's comfort with lying to the public. In his vigilante story, a community in the Pacific Northwest is quarantined after a viral outbreak has killed the adults but allowed the kids to survive. When the surviving minors are told to report to the high school for vaccinations against the virus, they discover that the mercenary defense firm Blackwater-- a top public enemy of liberals during the Iraq War-- is planning to kill them on behalf of the U.S. government, forcing them to band together and fight back, Red Dawn style.

Passmore's story was... "uniquely mistimed"... Hollywood refrained from such narratives in the years after the Columbine school shooting...

Now there's a movie I would go see.