 You ordered health care you got airstrikes notes from the edge of the narrative matrix Americans health care, please Biden sorry did you say airstrikes on Iraq and Syria? Americans no health care Biden all right. You drive a hard bargain, but here are your airstrikes on Iraq and Syria It is journalistic malpractice to parrot US government claims about acts of military mass murder being defensive The only strikes near the Iraq-Syria border that could accurately be called defensive are those launched by the inhabitants of those nations upon the invading Western military occupation The only actual defensive action that the US could legitimately take to protect troops in the Middle East would be to remove US troops from the Middle East Those who said we can push Biden to the left get criticized every time this administration takes another rightward turn But they don't get criticized enough for the fact that they never even try to push Biden to the left At no point have they ever even tried Nobody in America had any idea the parliamentarian existed until the Democrats needed an excuse not to advance progressive causes The Biden administration is killing people around the world and ramping up Cold War escalations while eroding civil rights with new domestic terror Policies so naturally Republicans are focused on worrying about dying in imaginary death camps during an imaginary white people Holocaust Yeah, okay, let's give control of the world to the nation built from slavery and genocide and founded by which burning Puritan lunatics What could go wrong? It's a safe bet that if the world found all the profoundly evil things the US government and its allies did in Syria It would damage US imperialist consensus building far worse than Iraq That's why so much narrative management gets poured into ensuring this never happens The whole intercept slash TYT foreign policy shtick is going It's possible to promote all CIA CNN narratives about every US targeted government and Give meaningless lip service to opposing war against those governments. You can do both Mehdi Hassan built a whole career on this Many right-wing conspiracy theories began as left-wing conspiracy facts. I Started saying US intelligence cartel a while back because the cutesy label US intelligence community was like saying the ISIS capades Isn't it weird how we've learned that the US Prosecution against Julian Assange relied heavily on false testimony from a diagnosed sociopath and convicted child molester Yet Assange is still in prison We haven't seen anything like the complete mass media blackout on Stundin's revelation that the Assange prosecution relied on false Testimony since the complete mass media blackout on the OPCW leaks in the information age the powerful put emphasis Not just on managing what information gets out to the public But how that information is received and perceived Now legit bombshells like the Stundin story and the OPCW leaks can come out without having any impact Just due to perception management In this new paradigm investigative reporting and whistleblowing are still important But just as important as obtaining the information is addressing the problem of getting it unfiltered into public attention It doesn't matter what information you get if no one sees it And even if it is seen you still need to deal with the imperial media spinning what's seen in a power serving way Today you could publish solid indisputable proof that the FBI was behind the Capitol riot for example And the narrative managers would quickly manipulate it into a nothing burger Almost all good business practices are terrible human being practices To be a good businessman you have to harden the humanity out of you This is why capitalism creates and elevates terrible humans and why we are being led into extinction by assholes Even seemingly benign business practices like maintaining cash flow are inherently corrosive to human nature You need to break something good in you in order to hold back from paying people for as long as possible While chasing people to pay you asap to keep your cash flow up Interrupting criticisms of capitalism to yell that's not real capitalism is like interrupting a magic show to yell That's not real magic Okay, it's not the imaginary fantasy thing you have in your head But it's also the only way the thing we're discussing has ever existed and ever will exist It's not just that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence As bakowski said It's that people with empathy and humility can be shamed and intimidated into silence by the crowd While narcissists just dismiss the crowd as irrelevant insects The result is that the real artists and visionaries with solid grounding in their inner deaths are often brutalized into silence by those who Throw rocks at things that shine While those without functioning empathy centers rise to positions of significant influence And I think maybe the lesson here is that we must become so very awake That we have the inner spaciousness to tolerate and heal our way through a bombardment of attacks Certainty that humanity is doomed is not a reality-based position We barely know anything about our universe our minds or our world Anything is possible Rigid pessimism about our fate is grounded in ignorance and intellectual arrogance not realism Doesn't mean things aren't bad, but there's no rational reason to give up hope or stop fighting It is true that we are plunging headlong into a continuum of exponentially expanding weirdness and familiar patterns are evaporating very rapidly But that's not necessarily a bad thing To paraphrase krishna murti. It is no measure of health to preserve normality in a profoundly sick society