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weaponising social media for the government, by the government.....Billionaire Twitter owner Elon Musk has claimed he was shocked to find out the true scale of US government involvement and access to Twitter communications when he purchased and took full control over the social media giant last year. “The degree to which government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on on Twitter blew my mind,” Musk told Fox News host Tucker Carlson, claiming he “was not aware of that” until he eventually purchased Twitter for $44 billion last October. Musk confirmed that “everything” includes users’ supposedly private direct messages, but the brief Sunday teaser of the upcoming interview did not show whether Musk went on to call out specific agencies or their methods. It is also unclear what, if anything, has since changed to limit the scope of the government’s access to people’s private communications. Since purchasing Twitter in October and installing himself as the platform’s CEO, Musk has been releasing regular batches of internal documents and communications in a bid to shed light on its previously opaque censorship policies and ties with federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, enlisting independent journalists to break each document dump. Journalist Matt Taibbi, who reported on the first batch of files back in December, recently described the collusion between social media platforms, non-governmental organizations and the US government to suppress information they did not like as the “censorship-industrial complex,” calling it “a bureaucracy willing to sacrifice factual truth in service of broader narrative objectives,” and the exact opposite of a free press envisioned in the US Constitution. Last month, along with fellow Twitter Files journalist Michael Shellenberger, Taibbi was called to testify before the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
READ MORE: https://www.rt.com/news/574846-musk-twitter-government-full-access/
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facebook's bumface
BY Henry Kamens
A Facebook* friend has been having trouble with the platform for his business page, which has been screwing up lately. He can’t get any help from Facebook*, and believes this is because Mark Zuckerberg has fired many of the employees.
Allegedly, on their way out, the fired support staff infected the site with a range of viruses and bugs, which screw up business pages and other applications. As they were especially hard hit by the company’s economic realities, the support staff were fired and the first to go out the door.
My Facebook* former employee informs me that “FaceBook* is utterly ignoring known bugs and isn’t going to lift a finger to fix anything”. Business owners are now leaving in droves to other platforms which are actually interested in keeping users.
This may be an exaggeration by a disgruntled former employee, but it does give us a glimpse into the dismal mindset of America and the corporate meltdown that may be coming to a head, with many ticking bombshells ready to inundate American Society. However, by the time the populace wakes up it may be too late to do anything about it.
I am sure many other US businesses are also imploding—that is something worth looking into. But in terms of real threats, (at least) US citizens are only being told about things coming from far more insidious parts of the world, such as the source country of Tik Tok, and little real debate is ongoing over recent legislation, the RESTRICT ACT being introduced to ban it, as it is from EVIL China
The bill to ban Tik Tok gives enormous new powers to the federal government to punish American citizens, fine and jail them, and to regulate how they communicate on the internet. Is this real or something from a science fiction, black mirror series, or ripped from the pages of 1984 or Brave New World?
Far beyond cracking down on TikTok, the RESTRICT bill envisages creating frightening powers to control citizens’ access to what the US government, or Biden Administration, deems as ‘unwanted’ information.
No Sex in the USSR
But it is easier to swallow the Blue Pill with the following line of reasoning, “I know that Americans could spoil the world, but Russians are worse” – that’s the end of the story, and I should not spread such things for “non-informed” people or they can’t understand that Russia, just as much as China, is the Evil One.
It is complicated when simple foreigners want to compare Russia to the USA. It is because they don’t understand English. Some even have Soviet memories of “NO Sex in the USSR” and they believe every piece of bullshit presented.
This phrase originated from a Soviet woman on a talk show, who was referring to the Soviet journalist Vladimir Pozner and his American counterpart Phil Donahue. A joint American-Russian TV summit is where the trope “We don’t have sex in the Soviet Union” came from. Someone in the audience yelled out at end, to try to clarify, that there was love instead, but it was too late.
A meme was born on that day in 1986, and “so started the path of misunderstanding between the USSR-Russia”, now Russia-China-etc., and the so-called US, collective West.
However, people are starting to wake up, and not only in terms of the dream of being politically correct and swallowing everything hook-line-and-sinker for the sake as being “woke”. Mass shootings are on the rise, almost daily, and are barely front page headlines anymore.
This is like in the SciFi movies, where to take the blue pill means to go back to the life before, and forget everything about the series of events which brought us to this moment in history. Its counterpart is the Red Pill, through which the true nature of the world is revealed, as it has been with the most recent intelligence leak from the US Pentagon. Who knows what, when and who is spying on whom, and how – and not only about Ukraine and how that is turning out.
Not Intended for Public Consumption
As Geoffrey M. Young, who is running for the governorship of Kentucky, shares in response to a recent short article about the recent Pentagon leaks: “The main problem is not that the Biden Regime lied about Ukraine’s chances of winning, and that everything the US has done in Ukraine since 2014 has been illegal aggression against Russia. Obama, Trump and now Biden should all have been impeached for illegally waging war against Russia, especially since January 2022.”
Even the unwashed masses are beginning to wake up, freeing themselves from the Matrix of Deception, over vaccines, mandates, lockdowns and wars of convenience/aggression on the part of the West. Now they are being dubbed as having been taken as fools, and being based on self-reflection, a far cry from self-realisation.
This is not an easy pill to swallow in the “world of lies, deception, false flags and false hopes”, as we must open our eyes to the reality that surrounds us. The world we think we live in is a facade created by those who wish to control us. The time is now to peel back the illusion, remove the blinders of deception and take back our lives. They even tell us that what we are hearing about leaked documents should not be made public.
John Kirby: “There is no excuse for these kinds of documents to be in the public domain. They don’t deserve to be in the public domain
So they do, by this very statement, and it is the same MO. Another thing keeping Americans so engaged that they ignore everything actually going on is the argument over “wokeness”. That started with the BLM movement, due to which white people are now required to be overly sensitive to whatever might offend African-Americans (or any minority of colour).
Now some schools appear more preoccupied with being sexually correct in terms of pronouns, sexual identity and re-teaching history from a different perspective than teaching what were once deemed as shared and basic American values. Correction is all very well, but it cannot be an end in itself or there will be no way of knowing what needs correcting.
Now the process has extended into a discussion over transgender people. Americans are outlawing drag shows, with bills to do so have been introduced in more than 30 states, and even public schools are cutting Drag Queen Storytelling hours for young children.
Also, lawmakers are making any kind of abortion illegal, and saying the rights of the embryo outweigh the rights of the mother. The transgender argument going on now is switching to corporations fighting for control, putting children in the firing line, vaccines, child rights, etc. However, neither side really cares about the children.
Almost “Everything” is a Distraction
The New York Times summarises it well: the magic of waving away a “distraction” is that it lets you minimise and dismiss something without having to explain why. Take another noteworthy distraction amongst these: the new fad of book banning.
Democrats want to ban older books that are not sensitive to minorities, Huckleberry Finn for instance, and Republicans want to ban all books that discuss gender, transgender, LGBTQ issues, etc. They should be more concerned over global warming than nuclear warming, a term recently coined by Donald Trump. He was mocked for this statement in the mainstream press.
Foreign affairs always provide a convenient distraction, simply because you can interpret everything however you want. The same circumstances can be interpreted in vastly different ways, and some claim or other can be reignited to stir the pot when you are trying to hide what is inside it.
It is also still debatable whether the hype of leaks of top-secret classified material is done as a distraction. This has been recognised as such by journalists for decades, with “budget leaks” an issue which always arises when the actual content of the budget is suspect.
All the while the US economy is on the edge of a cliff, with deficits adding zeros to accounts from the Federal Reserve. Both sides of the aisle are trying to close ranks as to who is more to blame, another argument essentially circular but serving a purpose.
More attention is being placed on increasing the US defence budget than solving any real problems. Thanks to inflation, home ownership is becoming an impossibly for many Americans, who are now having to learn to live within their means, and not be debt slaves.
There are also always the standby distractions of choice – election meddling by foreign governments, the latest virus and its “real or alleged” source, border controls, immigration policy and the idea that masks work. The point is that the system is so accustomed to avoiding facing real issues, such as financial responsibility, that social and foreign policy, including distraction by military means, are being used to cover a multitude of sins, especially those of omission.
The seductive lure of your mobile phone or social media account is just part of the problem. The roots are deeper, as if people want to be distracted, not to face reality, take responsibility and hold their governments and elected officials responsible.
Lone Stars
Texas is working on creating its own gold-backed money. That would, in essence, make Texas its own country in the financial sense. Legally it already is its own country—at least it was before the American Civil war, the Republic of Texas. It claims the right to secede any time, but it would never fly currently.
Sooner or later the US will have to wake up and understand that problems must be addressed and solved rather than pretending they don’t exist and then looking for something to fix the blame on. The federal government would clamp down if Texas were to try to secede, but perhaps China, Brazil and Mexico will support self-determination, or be alleged to so the US can run away from creating the situation.
Manufacturing “Consent-Dissent, or Discontent?”
There is no apparent end to this in sight. Everybody is part of the problem and should be part of the solution, however that is wishful thinking. It is the same MO, over and over again, and does anyone remember the Pentagon Papers?
I hope it will not take a life altering experience, perhaps the collapse of the US or World Economic System, for the unwashed masses to wake up and focus. However, the present indications are that even that wouldn’t do.
The same MO can be seen in Canada as well. Here a student has organised some protests at a public Catholic School, opposing transgender ideology on religious grounds. In the US more attention was given to a Chinese weather balloon and a train derailment than this, or anything which would have long term consequences and a GREAT impact, like child poverty.
Even bloggers and podcast hosts are caught up in this, for instance, “Donbas Devushka” – or Donbas Girl – who is described as a Russian Jew from the Ukrainian city of Luhansk. It is stated that she has been faithfully broadcasting Kremlin propaganda for months, and has been outed as some deep agent of disinformation by the powers to be.
What does being Jewish have to do with her political opinions and personal views? That only matters if you are the president of Ukraine. Her case is the most recent example, and perhaps one of the most interesting cases, of why the news is no longer the news, and why what was once trusted as a source is more preoccupied with distractions than anything that resembles the old-fashioned unbiased news.
Even the Pentagon leaks are highly suspect, as only what we already known has been leaked. But now it is only for large scale public and provides both a scapegoat and exit ramp for the US to turn its back on Ukraine and walk away.
The system of mass-scale psychological brainwashing and conditioning is so developed that is likely much too late anything can be done to reverse it. As the quote by Thomas Sowell goes: “People will forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right—especially if events prove you right while proving them wrong.” With enough distractions, right and wrong will no longer exist, merely attention, for which no one can be held accountable.
Even AI can sum up what I am trying to say about brainwashing and conditioning, and perhaps better. “Instead of engaging in speculation or fear-mongering, it is important to focus on reliable sources of information, critical thinking, and respectful dialogue to address societal challenges and promote positive change.”
*Facebook- is banned in Russia.
Henry Kamens, columnist, expert on Central Asia and Caucasus, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”
READ MORE:
https://journal-neo.org/2023/04/28/facebook-tik-tok-msm-americans-much-2-far-distracted-to-see-the-forest-for-the-trees/
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