I think that the American oligarchs, whose money and power have always run the
country, direct whether or not there are wars, and where those wars are
fought. American military action has always served the business interests of
the country. The pentagon may be powerful, but it fights wherever it is that
American financial interests require it to fight. And sometimes, the location
and the people fighting are irrelevant. What is relevant is that the arms
industry can sell its products to whichever customers want those products. So
our oligarchs encourage war because they profit from it.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Friday, September 06, 2019 10:41 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Pentagon Wants More Control Over the News.
What Could Go Wrong?
Matt Taibbi is right on target...just a few decades behind.
It's time to pull our heads out from under our earphones, put down our cup of
Brute and smell the gun powder. Long before the term "Fake News" came to be,
there existed a world of Make Believe/Let's Pretend that was passed off on the
American People as "Reporting the News".
From the beginning of the exploitation of this "New World", a Landed Gentry,
made up of landed, white, prosperous men, directed the news to suit their
dreams of power and wealth.
Currently, in my humble opinion, the control of the nation is in a tug of war
between the Mega Corporations(the present day Oligarchy)and the Pentagon(War
Czars).
And without listening to history, and with short gain profits as their goal,
the American Oligarchy is following the pattern established from the beginning
of recorded history.
Emboldened by the ease with which the Corporate Capitalists confuse and control
the minds of the Masses, even they fall under the magic piping of their Pied
Pipers and reach incredible heights in their use of Miss Information.
While some reporters reach back to the events in Europe back in the Thirties,
leading up to the Second World War, to illustrate just how foolish the Greed
driven Masters build their fortunes and then loose control to their very own
military protectors, you have only to open your front door or tune on your
favorite FOX news channel if you want to know how it works.
Look at our "Most Powerful Leader", Donald Trump. Look at the way he treats
the people working for him. Watch how he treats Information.
Donald Trump is no accident, he is the visible face of America today.
In Donald Trump is the universal image seen by the world, representing all of
us.
For some time I have suggested that the United States of America has undergone
a quiet coup by the Pentagon. Yes, the Oligarchy is still in control of the
Mass Media, but we should ask ourselves just who it is that controls the
weapons. The American Oligarchy has built the world's most monstrous military
might to protect it, But just like Aladdin's Genie, promising untold fortunes
until released from the Lamp, control quickly changes hands.
Carl Jarvis: wondering if it was Aladdin's Lantern or Pandora's Box?
On 9/6/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Pentagon Wants More Control Over the News. What Could Go Wrong?
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
05 September 19
The Pentagon is using a moral panic over "fake news" to gain influence
over the domestic news landscape
If there's a worse idea than the Pentagon becoming Editor-in-Chief of
America, I can't remember it. But we're getting there:
From Bloomberg over Labor Day weekend:
Fake news and social media posts are such a threat to U.S. security
that the Defense Department is launching a project to repel
"large-scale, automated disinformation attacks," as the top Republican
in Congress blocks efforts to protect the integrity of elections.
One of the Pentagon's most secretive agencies, the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is developing "custom software that
can unearth fakes hidden among more than 500,000 stories, photos,
video and audio clips."
Once upon a time, when progressives still reflexively distrusted the
military, DARPA was a liberal punchline, known for helping invent the
Internet but also for developing lunatic privacy-invading projects
like LifeLog, a program to "gather in a single place just about
everything an individual says, sees, or does."
DARPA now is developing a semantic analysis program called "SemaFor"
and an image analysis program called "MediFor," ostensibly designed to
prevent the use of fake images or text. The idea would be to develop
these technologies to help private Internet providers sift through content.
It's the latest in a string of stories about new methods of control
over information flow that should, but for some reason do not, horrify
every working journalist.
From the Senate dragging Internet providers to the Hill to demand
strategies against the sowing of "discord," to tales of hundreds of
Facebook sites zapped for "coordinated inauthentic behavior" following
advice by government-connected groups like the Atlantic Council, it's
been clear the future of the information landscape is going to involve
elaborate new forms of algorithmic regulation.
Stories about the need for such technologies are always couched as
responses to the "fake news" problem. Unfortunately, "fake news" is a
poorly-defined, amorphous concept that the public has been trained to
fear without really understanding.
The term surged into public view three years ago. Experts insisted
Macedonian troll farms and pranksters like the late Paul Horner (who
once conned Fox News into doing a story that Barack Obama was funding
a Muslim culture museum) had an enormous impact on Trump's victory.
Had they? When "fake news" first became "a thing," as media critic
Adam Johnson put it in The Nation three years ago, I was skeptical.
Fake news has a long history in America. Its most pernicious
incarnation is never the work of small-time scam artists. The worst
"fake news" almost always involves broad-scale deceptions foisted on
the public by official (and often unnamed) sources, in conjunction
with oligopolistic media companies, usually in service of rallying the
public behind a dubious policy objective like a war or authoritarian
crackdown.
From the sinking of the Maine in 1898, to rumors of a union-led
socialist insurrection before the Palmer raids in 1919, to the Missile
Gap in the late fifties and early sixties (here is the CIA's own
website admitting that one was "erroneous"), to the Gulf of Tonkin lie
that launched the Vietnam War, to the more recent WMD fiasco, true
"fake news" is a concerted, organized, institutional phenomenon that
involves deceptions cooked up at the highest levels.
The other "fake news" - the dubious panic over which began in
November-December of 2016 - is a strange, hybrid concept that mixes
fear of fever-swamp conservative lunacies with satire, Russian
propaganda, legitimate dissent, and other content.
The most infamous example usually cited is Pizzagate, in which Hillary
Clinton and campaign chief John Podesta were falsely said to be
running a pedophile ring out of the basement of a Washington pizza
restaurant. The hoax carried import because a 28 year-old North
Carolinian named Edgar Maddison Welch was idiot enough to shoot up the joint
in response.
But the other specific examples cited of "fake" news most often cited
are patently absurd: that the Pope or the Amish endorsed Donald Trump,
that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS, that an FBI agent
investigating Clinton had died in a house fire (a story broken by the
nonexistent "Denver Guardian"), that the Democrats paid protesters to heckle
Trump events, etc.
The idea that these fake tales had a major impact in 2016 is absurd on
its face. They didn't change things any more than ALIEN BACKS CLINTON
swayed the
1992 election.
It was laughable beyond belief to see stories in outlets like the New
York Times and the Washington Post taking seriously the notion that
small-time hoaxers like Horner - who was trying to sucker Trump fans
to websites so he could make maybe ten grand a month off click ads -
were a major threat to national security. (That some cited Horner's
own claim of responsibility for Trump's election was even more
preposterous).
When officials calling for a crackdown talk about "fake news," you'll
often see them conflating examples of provably false stories with true
stories circulated or interpreted in undesirable ways: the Clinton
email scandal, the Uranium One story, the Podesta email leak, etc.
Even a controversy about Hillary Clinton's health, cited by Ohio State
University researchers as an example of the pernicious impact of fake
news, was an amalgam of true and fake.
There was indeed wild speculation on the Internet and by goons like
Sean Hannity about Clinton suffering from seizures or dementia. This
was mixed in with real events like a 2012 collapse that caused a
concussion, the subsequent discovery of a blood clot in Clinton's
brain (ABCnews.com called it "life threatening" in a headline), and
Clinton's September, 2016 collapse at a 9/11 memorial event.
The New York Times, CNN, CBS, the Washington Post and other reputable
outlets covered the latter episode in great detail. As Vox noted at
the time, this turned an online conspiracy theory into a "mainstream debate."
If there's a fake news story out there, it's the fake news panic
itself. It has the hallmarks of an old-school, WMD-style propaganda campaign.
It includes terrifying pronouncements by unnamed "intelligence officials,"
unprovable, overblown, or outright fake statistical assertions about
the threat (like the oft-cited claim that fake election news had more
engagement than real news), open conflation of legitimate domestic
dissent with foreign attack, and routine dismissal of experts
downplaying the problem (here are two significant studies suggesting
the "fake news" phenomenon is overstated).
Of course, the final, omnipresent ingredient in most major propaganda
campaigns is the authoritarian solution. Here, it's unelected,
unsupervised algorithmic control over media. We've never had a true
news regulator in this country, yet the public is being conditioned
now to accept one, without thinking of the consequences.
The most enormous issue posed by the modern media landscape is the
industry's incredible concentration, which allows a handful of private
platforms - Facebook, Twitter, Google - to dominate media distribution.
This makes it possible to envisage direct levers of control over the
public's media habits that never existed back when people got much of
their news from local paper chains with individual distribution
networks. We've already seen scary examples of misidentified foreign
subversion, from the Washington Post's repeat editorials denouncing
Bernie Sanders as a useful idiot for the Kremlin to the zapping of
hundreds of domestic political sites as "coordinated inauthentic
behavior."
What if the same people who can't tell the difference between Truthdig
and Pravda get to help design the new fake news algorithms? That's a
much bigger worry than the next Paul Horner or even, frankly, the next
Russian Facebook campaign. While Donald Trump is in the White House,
progressives won't grasp how scary all of this is, but bet on it: In a
few years, we'll all wish we paid more attention when the Pentagon
announced it wanted in on the news regulation business.
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