an exposé of Pierre’s Intercept by the excellent Whitney Webb

(the ‘Bana’ psyop holding a bellincat T-shirt)

In my ‘All the Manufactured News That’s Fit to Believe™’, wd, Oct. 3, 2018; Café version, C99% version, I’d mentioned that the Intercept had done at least four four smears of Julian Assange, glorified the White Helmets psyop, and had featured this Tweet by Sharmine Narwani: “When @TheIntercept sounds exactly like the NY Times: Resident Syrian-nun-basher Jeremy Scahill interviews “leftist” Noam Chomsky who calls #Syria‘s jihadi-busting govt a “murderous regime” & thinks US troops should remain illegally in the sovereign state”  with this link to the Intercept.  I hadn’t checked the dates as to whether or not some were after WikiLeaks had published the CIA Vaults 7 and 8, come to think of it.  But certainly after those publications was when WikiLeaks was thrown off the anonymyzing donations funneled through the Freedom of the Press Foundation that Julian, Michael Ratner, and a couple others had started.

(I’d asked) How often have we seen reports from the UK that use Bellingcat as their only source?  the BBC, for certain (zounds, quite a list on just the first page of hits), the Daily Mail, the New Yorker, according to Bellingcrap’s Aric Toler: “(The New Yorker profiled one of our trainings in London. The Tbilisi workshop is a three-day training ran in Russian, free to all participants)”  (I’d updated the list with the Guardian in comments.

And laughing at the WaPo spawned PropOrNot list, provided the updated Prop list, and had jested: Whew; close call: the Intercept ain’t on it!  Now we know why.  But oopsie, I hadn’t noticed earlier the Related Projects on the right sidebar, including Bellingcat and Digital Forensics Research Lab.

From Whitney Webb at mintpressnews.com, Oct. 8, 2018:‘Omidyar’s Intercept Teams Up with War-Propaganda Firm Bellingcat’

Despite promoting itself as an “independent” and open-source investigation site, Bellingcat has received a significant portion of its funding from Google, which is also one of the most powerful U.S. military contractors and whose rise to prominence was directly aided by the CIA’

Given that Mintpress News content is all Creative Commons, I’m going to paste in the Webb’s entire piece, especially as it’s loaded with hyperlinks.

NEW YORK — The Intercept, along with its parent company First Look Media, recently hosted a workshop for pro-war, Google-funded organization Bellingcat in New York. The workshop, which cost $2,500 per person to attend and lasted five days, aimed to instruct participants in how to perform investigations using “open source” tools — with Bellingcat’s past, controversial investigations for use as case studies. The exact details of what occurred during the workshop have not been made public and Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins declined to elaborate on the workshop when pressed on social media.

The decision on the part of The Intercept is particularly troubling given that the publication has long been associated with the track records of its founding members, such as Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald, who have long been promoted as important “progressive” and “anti-war” voices in the U.S. media landscape.

Greenwald publicly distanced himself from the decision to host the workshop, stating on Twitter that he was not involved in making that decision and that — if he had been — it was not one “that I would have made.” However, he stopped short of condemning the decision.

Bellingcat’s open support for foreign military intervention and tendency to promote NATO/U.S. war propaganda are unsurprising when one considers how the group is funded and the groups with which it regularly collaborates.

For instance, Bellingcat regularly works with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which – according to the late journalist Robert Parry – “engages in ‘investigative journalism’ that usually goes after governments that have fallen into disfavor with the United States and then are singled out for accusations of corruption.” OCCRP is notably funded by USAID and the controversial George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations.

In addition, Bellingcat’s founder Eliot Higgins is employed by the Atlantic Council, which is partially funded by the U.S. State Department, NATO and U.S. weapons manufacturers. It should come as little surprise then that the results of Bellingcat’s “findings” often fit neatly with narratives promoted by NATO and the U.S. government despite their poor track record in terms of accuracy.

Bellingcat’s funding is even more telling than its professional associations. Indeed, despite promoting itself as an “independent” and open-source investigation site, Bellingcat has received a significant portion of its funding from Google, which is also one of the most powerful U.S. military contractors and whose rise to prominence was directly aided by the CIA.

Google has also been actively promoting regime change in countries like Syria, a policy that Bellingcat also promotes. As one example, leaked emails between Jared Cohen, former director of Google Ideas (now Jigsaw), and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton revealed that Google developed software aimed at assisting al-Qaeda and other Syrian opposition groups in boosting their ranks. Furthermore, Cohen was once described by Stratfor intelligence analysts as a “loose cannon” for his deep involvement in Middle Eastern regime-change efforts.

Under President Donald Trump, Google’s connections to the U.S. government have become even more powerful, as the current Trump-appointed Director of National Intelligence once worked as a corporate lobbyist for Google.

Synergy in the service of empire

Given the clear alliances between Bellingcat and the military-industrial complex, The Intercept’s decision to host a Bellingcat workshop in its New York offices may seem surprising. However, The Intercept has long promoted Bellingcat in its written work and its parent company has actually been associated with Bellingcat since 2015.

Indeed, Google-owned YouTube announced in 2015 the formation of the “First Draft coalition,” which nominally sought to bring “together a group of thought leaders and pioneers in social media journalism to create educational resources on how to verify eyewitness media.” That coalition united Bellingcat with the now-defunct Reported.ly – another venture of The Intercept’s parent company, First Look Media.

In the years since, The Intercept has repeatedly promoted Bellingcat in its articles, having called the Atlantic Council-connected, Google-funded group “a reputable U.K.-based organization devoted to analyzing images coming out of conflict zones.” Furthermore, prior to the recent workshop in late September between The Intercept and Bellingcat, both jointly participated in another workshop hosted in London earlier this year in April.

$250 million well spent? imagine if the Intercept actually had a team of people trying to poke holes in UK/US narratives about Russia instead of their own paid journalists promoting Bellingcat pic.twitter.com/QJyTXf4fp0

— Robbie Martin (@FluorescentGrey) October 3, 2018

Omidyar’s connections

In addition, the Intercept’s main funder – eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar – shares innumerable connections to the U.S. government and has helped fund regime-change operations abroad in the past, suggesting a likely reason behind the publication’s willingness to associate itself with Bellingcat.

For instance, Omidyar made more visits to the Obama White House between 2009 and 2013 than Google’s Eric Schmidt, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. He also donated $30 million to the Clinton global initiative and directly co-invested with the State Department — funding groups, some of them overtly fascist, that worked to overthrow Ukraine’s democratically elected government in 2014.

Even after Obama left office, Omidyar has continued to fund USAID, particularly its overseas program aimed at “advancing U.S. national security interests” abroad. Omidyar’s Ulupono Initiative also cosponsors one of the Pentagon’s most important contractor expos, a direct link between Omidyar initiatives and the U.S. military-industrial complex.

Such promotion of the regime-change wars has been reflected in reporting done at The Intercept, particularly in regards to Syria. Indeed, Intercept writers covering Syria frequently promote Syrian “rebels” and the opposition while also promoting pro-regime-change talking points.

Another former Intercept contributor and now Intercept “fact checker,” Mariam Elba, wrote a poorly researched article that sought to link the Syrian government to U.S. white nationalists, claiming that the Syrian government sought to “homogenize” the country despite its support for religious and ethnic minorities in stark contrast to the Syrian opposition. Notably, Elba recently praised the Intercept/Bellingcat workshop, which she had attended.

If that weren’t enough, last year the paper hired Maryam Saleh, a journalist who has called Shia Muslims “dogs” and has taken to Twitter in the past to downplay the role of the U.S. coalition in airstrikes in Syria. Saleh also has ties to the U.S.-financed propaganda group Kafranbel Media Center, which also has close relations with the terrorist group Ahrar al-Sham.

Furthermore, MintPress noted last year that The Intercept had withheld a key document from the Edward Snowden cache proving the Syrian opposition was taking marching orders from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Intercept published that document only after the U.S. State Department itself began to report more honestly on the nature of these so-called “rebels,” even though The Intercept had had that document in its possession since 2013.”

[one holy crow portion from her MintPress link above:]

“However, the Intercept article regarding the document is unusual for several reasons. First, the report inaccurately claims that the attack launched at the Saudis’ behest did not result in any confirmed casualties. Second, it states that the 2011 uprising in Syria was an organic, “peaceful” movement that led the Syrian government to wage “an open war against their own people” — a narrative that has since been debunked.

Yet, the largest oversight of all is the article’s failure to mention the U.S.’ role in funding the Free Syrian Army, as well as the CIA’s well-documented role in training the FSA and pumping tons of weapons into Syria in order to foment and exacerbate the conflict in its early days. In light of the NSA document’s revelation that the U.S. had been given advance notice of the planned FSA attack – on a civilian target, no less – Washington’s decision to let it proceed clearly suggests that the U.S. was involved in and well aware of the Saudi directives to the FSA. However, the Intercept piece chooses not to mention this crucial context.”

Even “anti-interventionist” Intercept journalists like Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald have come under fire this past year for allegedly promoting inaccurate statements that supported pro-regime-change narratives in Syria, particularly in regards to an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma. That attack is now widely believed to have been staged by the White Helmets.

Thus, while The Intercept has long publicly promoted itself as an anti-interventionist and progressive media outlet, it is becoming clearer that – largely thanks to its ties to Omidyar – it is increasingly an organization that has more in common with Bellingcat, a group that launders NATO and U.S. propaganda and disguises it as “independent” and “investigative journalism.”

Author’s Note | John Helsby contributed research, particularly in regards to social media, to this report.

(More in comments on PropOrNot and the recent vast Facebook purge.)

(cross-posted from Café Babylon)

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

Cohen must be a real peach.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

wendy davis's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

lol.

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

Furthermore, MintPress noted last year that The Intercept had withheld a key document from the Edward Snowden cache proving the Syrian opposition was taking marching orders from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

However, I do understand the difference between surmise and proof, so yeah, this is bad--but who the hell didn't guess this, am I right? Who else would they be taking marching orders from--unless it was the CIA or Mossad.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

wendy davis's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

is one thing, especially now at the end of 2018...but as she'd said, it could have made a huuuuge difference if published in 2013. i vaguely remember another: 'new snowden doc show assange has been targeted by ____, and i don't remember who or what. all these years later? wth?

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Ravensword's picture

@wendy davis I think they call it “faith.”

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@Ravensword Not always. Sometimes, rather than faith, it's called a hypothesis based on existing, but inadequate, evidence.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

that two things are always going on, systematically and endemically:

1.People who actually have spoken out in opposition in the past, honest dissidents, are being whipped into shape (see Keith Olbermann)--or bribed away from their morality (see Amy Goodman)--or, probably, both at once ("You can have one of the most powerful organizations in the world harassing your every move, or we could give you this multi-million dollar property for your very own and you could shut up. Your choice.")

2.People have been posing as actual dissidents for some time (see Markos Moulitsas and even David Brock), while actually working for those in power. The idea seems to be a strategy of herding dissatisfied citizens into specific places, grouping them there so they can be easily identified, observed, and to some extent managed. (This has been dubbed "sheepdogging"). Once you've gained people's trust, and made them feel safe, you can then do all sorts of psychological shit to them with ease: bullying, character assassination, sowing mutual distrust, subtly shifting the goalposts of what is acceptable in policy and politics: in short, perception management with a side of cruelty. You've also neatly and quickly identified several thousand, or perhaps tens of thousands in some very successful cases (like DKos), of people that I wouldn't exactly call troublemakers, but rather "the resistant." They're not troublemakers, because they're often not doing anything at all; still, their minds are to some extent functioning independently, which is not a good thing. They represent potential trouble, for one thing; for another, the powers-that-be seem personally offended by independent thought even when the purveyors of such clearly have little power to achieve anything.

Maybe they don't like seeing their own reflections in our eyes. Though why they should care, I have no idea. Do psychopaths care what other people think about them?

Anyway, the notion is to group people together, mess with their minds, and then make the place so toxic that everybody who still has a functioning brain cell leaves. Then you create another such place, and rinse and repeat.

That's why it's so important that c99 have its policy of being able to say anything as long as it's said with civility. That's not a perfect strategy, but it's better than anything else I've seen. It is unlikely that you will see that policy on a site that exists for the purposes of manipulation (though anything is possible). It also forces the manipulators to primarily rely on the old tactic of starting a flamewar.

I should add that the sheepdogging tactics I've described are primarily meant for the online world. Sheepdogging happens in the corporate media, of course, but they will never shut down CNN or MSNBC or Fox and herd people elsewhere. They simply rely on people's partisanship or loyalty to their ideological faction to keep them in whichever veal pen suits them. The more active sheepdogging I describe above is essentially rounding up the strays. A more active effort is required for those who are resistant to the tactics of the corporate press.

Although Orwell said that under certain circumstances, it is the first duty of intelligent men to restate the obvious, I've gone way too long in this comment which does just that, so I won't go on to discuss sockpuppetry and the obvious ways it is used to manipulate opinion.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

wendy davis's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

and of course it's not too long, just as long as you'd needed to make your case. thank you for it. 'rounding up the strays' and 'posing as dissidents' are both fine images.

but as a side note: i apparently started a flame war recently, so...there's that. but sitting on that particular nsa document since 2013: total bullshit, of course. i'm glad webb reads the Intercept so i don't have to. heh, some of the comments below her essay were challenging scaill and greenwald to 'consider cutting their ties to TI', as if they don't know what the site is...and is not.

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@wendy davis Well, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Smile

This stuff isn't easy to combat, or even to identify. That's why they keep doing it.

Also, it's sometimes debatable who starts a flamewar. It's not always the person at the center of the flames who starts it.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

wendy davis's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

i was quite incendiary; and yes, as i'd admitted, i should have engaged the author in more of a socratic dialog, but...no cigar for me on that count, lol.

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divineorder's picture

@wendy davis FWIW I taught high school in inner city school, so I'm used to being challenged and often learn from it.

Would love to have a peaceful online relationship with you .

We will disagree. I apparently am okay with activists and journalists and ngo's being less than perfect and not getting us to where we want to be fast enough.

So I will continue to post things by people you have no love for and you will probably do the same. Free range, organic, right?

Hope it was okay to put this here, wanting to threadjack in anyway.

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A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.

wendy davis's picture

@divineorder

and i'd rather have a peaceful coexistence with you as well. me, i'm anti-capitalist socialist, anti-imperialist, and can't abide shape-shifters as NGOs, including human rights organizations, faux-lantropists like bill gates and other industrial philanthropic foundations (for fun and profit), for the global rabble class second, third class citizens everywhere...is all. (shia muslims, africans, and palestinians, for three.)

heh. 'if you don't stand for something...you'll fall for anything.' and boy, howdy has the amerikan citizenry done that for decade.

mr. wd reckons it's gonna freeze tonight or tomorrow night, so he's carting in loads of what's unharvested but viable in our garden, including pails and jars of the last flowers of the year. sigh. but we had almost an extra month of frost-free nights this year, so there's that.

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WaterLily's picture

@wendy davis Frost warning here: yet my tomatoes and peppers and zucchini and broccoli seem to have believed it would be an endless summer, so I frantically ran around to harvest what I could ... even the immature, green things. (I should note that this year's insane squirrel population decimated much of my other veggies, especially the cukes. Huh? Who knew.) Currently have a bunch of herbs that would likely have survived the frost drying in the oven, just in case.

Way off-topic! But a bittersweet time of year. I do like that my kitchen smells like a pizza joint thanks to the slow-drying oregano.

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wendy davis's picture

@WaterLily

ooof! lots shocked and put away for pesto. tonight here it was chinese fried rice w/ the toasted sesame oil stir-fried veg, putting away curly japanese cucumbers, and the bittersweet scents and colors of the final blissfully beautiful flowers i'll spend a lot of the day tomorrow arranging in vases, even glorious cannabis branches as fillers. almost too much bounty to behold, even given the hailstorms and maelstroms they'd suffered this year.

i need to close down for the night, and let this be tonight's closing song from oakland commie hip-hop rapper boots riley. yes, such strange arithmetic; he said it right. i won't grab the lyrics, but i hope y'all listen... g' night, an than you all.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QSLlCCXfmw]

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WaterLily's picture

@wendy davis Adopted hometown connection.

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wendy davis's picture

@WaterLily

or am i mis-extrapolating again? boots, he da man.

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@wendy davis And thanks Wendy D.

[Verse 3]
Social Studies is the goliath to tackle
Which turns into a sermon on simplicity of shackles
Physics is to school you on the science of force
'Cept for how to break the fuck out the ghetto, of course
Home Ec can teach you how to make a few sauces
And accept low pay from your Walmart bosses
If your school won't teach you how to fight for what's needed
They're teaching you to go through life and get cheated

[Chorus]
Teacher, my hands up
Please, don't make me a victim
Teachers, stand up
You need to tell us how to flip this system
Teacher, my hands up
Please, don't make me a victim
Teachers, stand up
You need to tell us how to flip this system

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wendy davis's picture

@peachcreek

and thank you as well. ; )

i like verse one, too:

History has taught me some strange arithmetic
Using swords, prison bars, and pistol grips
English is the art of bombing towns
While assuring that you really only blessed the ground
Science is that honorable, useful study
Where you contort the molecules and then you make that money
In mathematics, dead children don't get added
But they count the cost of bullets comin' out the automatic

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@wendy davis I tend to think Greenwald started as an actual dissident and fell 3-5 years ago--but definitely after he met with Snowden; I don't think Snowden himself, or that meeting, was a "work," as they call it in the pro wrestling business. I think they made efforts to bring it back under control, and did so pretty successfully, including, of course, bringing Greenwald under control.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

wendy davis's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

stands for in your construct. but while he was still at salon, GG wrote that citizens united had been correctly decided by SCOTUS, buckley v. valeo...i can't remember. but yes, in general to him having been a dissident, espcially as a constitutional scholar. i took a lot of hell from the commentariat at the café when i'd offer criticism of him. and the aukland town hall (ah, just looked in up: in 2014)

but the larger question to me is how many empire-busting files of the how many dozen thousand (ach, b at MOA had said the number a few months ago)...have they not published?

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@wendy davis "They," in that context, meant what people generally call the Deep State, or the security end of it. Think John Brennan.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

wendy davis's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

for thought, although what would brennan-as-deep state's leverage have been? they were already vetting all the nsa documents with the intel services and allowing redactions. complicated and shadowy history, for certain.

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@wendy davis I wish I could remember where I heard discussion of released documents that talked specifically about repressing Greenwald; the upshot was that he wanted to be successful, and would respond as they wanted if it became clear that his livelihood was threatened. I can't find it in searches and I can't remember where I read it, darn it.

I am really careless about keeping a file of things that might be important later.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

wendy davis's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

i do keep some things i've emailed to myself and might need later in a
saved messages, café file on my crap email provider's sidebar. but who knows if the discussion were speculative or an apologia in the end. i guess it just is what it is.

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@wendy davis Not an apologia; it didn't come from Greenwald but from somebody within the security state, taking his measure.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

wendy davis's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

i stand corrected.

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gulfgal98's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal Excellent analysis of why we must fight so hard to maintain a place that allows for a wide variety of ideas and opinions. We are watching our world rapidly shut down the free exchange of ideas and it is very frightening that so few among "we the people" are even able to see it happening.

Our freedom to speak openly without fear of retribution is imperative. Otherwise we are helpless in fighting against the massive evil forces that control our government and want to enslave us all.

The First Amendment is guaranteed under our Constitution. But the First Amendment pertains to the government only. Therefore, our government has found a way around it by using the MSM and social media to throttle down the flow of information. In 2013, the Smith-Mundt Act was quietly repealed, thus allowing the government to legally use propaganda against us. And most Americans are still clueless about that.

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

wendy davis's picture

@gulfgal98

in a recent kerfuffle here again, but as to shutting down dissent against the empire's doings:

Facebook carries out massive purge of oppositional pages’, Andre Damon, wsws.org, 12 October 2018

“On Thursday, Facebook removed some of the most popular oppositional pages and accounts on the world’s largest social media network, in a massive and unconstitutional assault on freedom of expression.

With no public notice or accounting, over 800 pages and accounts have been summarily removed from the internet. The removed pages include Police the Police, with a following of over 1.9 million, Cop Block, with a following of 1.7 million, and Filming Cops, with a following of 1.5 million. Other pages targeted include Anti-Media, with 2.1 million followers, Reverb Press, with 800,000 followers, Counter Current News, 500,000 followers, and Resistance, 240,000 followers.

Right-wing publications, including Right Wing News, were also removed.

The move has no precedent in the history of the internet. Workers throughout the United States and the world must be put on notice: the ruling elite is meeting a growing strike wave by workers with the expansion of censorship and police state measures.
In a blog post, Facebook announced that it was “banning… Pages, Groups and accounts created to stir up political debate,” referring to this as “coordinated inauthentic activity.”, etc.

Pages purged by Facebook were on blacklist promoted by Washington Post’, Andre Damon, wsws.org 13 October 2018 [PropOrNot] (self explanatory title)

it does not bode well for the coming increasing police state future, of course.

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WaterLily's picture

@wendy davis For reference:

California Typewriter (no implicit or explicit endorsement of where you can stream/download/view; I first saw it via RedBox, which I haven't looked into but is also probably a corporate parasite)

Typewriter Revolution

We can't be surveilled (or, at least, as easily as we can in our digital lives) with typewritten communications. Imagine Police the Police in typewritten form, communicated via carrier pigeon.

I find it slightly crazy that I just wrote that.

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wendy davis's picture

@WaterLily

it would be, i assume, like:

"Samizdat was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader. This grassroots practice to evade official Soviet censorship was fraught with danger, as harsh punishments were meted out to people caught possessing or copying censored materials. Vladimir Bukovsky summarized it as follows: "Samizdat: I write it myself, edit it myself, censor it myself, publish it myself, distribute it myself, and spend jail time for it myself."

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@WaterLily I've thought about this. Supposedly electric typewriters can be surveilled, so we'd be going back to old-fashioned manual ones. Nobody younger than me is likely to remember using them, and I admit I'm not looking forward to going back to that; still, I don't want to dismiss the idea, as it's tactically quite sound.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@gulfgal98 Thank you, gulfgal. Smile

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Big Al's picture

saw that's it's run by a single English dude specializing in the Syria "civil" war. Reminds me of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), also a one man operation out of Britain run by a single man. SOHR is funded/guided by MI6 and is part of the propaganda chain for the western/Israeli war against Syria.
So I guess enough about Bellingcat for me.

Relative to the Intercept, haven't read it since it started (maybe a few paragraphs here and there) and am no fan of Greenwald or Scahill. When they first started it I did my due diligence on Omidyar, found out about his connections, ascertained he was a dirty billionaire, and moved on. That happened when I was still going to Daily Kos and when I reported my findings there, I certainly got some shit for it. Not from the centrists dems but from the Sanders wing which didn't take kindly my criticism of their journalist hero Greenwald.

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wendy davis's picture

@Big Al

sofa acting as the SOHR, even the guardian had had to admit to that con finally. my opening diary has more, but the group essentially seems to see the outcome of their 'online investigations', then work backward from there. iirc, they began with concluding that russia had shot down flight MH17 over ukraine, FUCKUS joined in, sanctions laid...but now that those evil russians have been allowed to investigate, they discovered plane parts that indicate otherwise.

bellingcat on Twitter; their website.

they take a lot of ribbing on twitter, but some of it' not so funny when so many news organizations (including reuters) are using their...conclusions as gospel.

and i hear you loud and clear on the intercept and the journalists. i totally lost all respect when snowden and greenwald began calling julian assange 'the bad whistleblower' because he didn't vet every publication with the security state. i think that was as long ago as the aukland town hall with kim dot com, and all the rest, with assange on a big screen at the back of the room. he was not amused.

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@Big Al

the Dembots. Obviously, Dembots hated Greenwald, who hate the temerity to disagree with Obama. In fact, Dembots hated everyone who disagreed with Obama. Or with almost any Democrat.

Hero worship is a funny thing. Throughout the time Snowden was a hot posting topic, one side was demonizing Snowden and Greenwald because they idolized Obama and/or the Democratic Party, while the other side was worshipping Snowden and Greenwald because they had pulled aside the curtain on the NSA under Obama, making Obama look bad. That kind of discussion on both sides substituted for what Snowden had disclosed. I was about to type "and what we could do about it." However, currently, I am in "ordinary Americans can do diddly squat about the US government," so I just put a period after "disclosed."

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Not Henry Kissinger's picture

Google has also been actively promoting regime change in countries like Syria, a policy that Bellingcat also promotes. As one example, leaked emails between Jared Cohen, former director of Google Ideas (now Jigsaw), and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton revealed that Google developed software aimed at assisting al-Qaeda and other Syrian opposition groups in boosting their ranks. Furthermore, Cohen was once described by Stratfor intelligence analysts as a “loose cannon” for his deep involvement in Middle Eastern regime-change efforts.

Well OK then.

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The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?

wendy davis's picture

@Not Henry Kissinger

'google is not what it seems', julian assange (an excert from his book; the photos are worth a thousand words, as is so often said.

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@wendy davis Google is exactly what it seems to me. Heh.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

wendy davis's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

it was an eye-popping exposé for me at the time (2014). and...here we still are w/ the power of google quashing dissent w/ their vaunted #fakeNews algorithms. my stars.

well, just bingled, and b had said only 5% of the pages have been published, although not all would be important. but he opines:

"The Intercept pieces are usually heavily editorialized and tend to have a mainstream "liberal" to libertarian slant. Some were highly partisan anti-Syrian/pro-regime change propaganda. The website seems to have no regular publishing schedule at all. Between one and five piece per day get pushed out, only a few of them make public waves. Some of its later prominent hires (Ken Silverstein, Matt Taibbi) soon left and alleged that the place was run in a chaotic atmosphere and with improper and highly politicized editing. Despite its rich backing and allegedly high pay for its main journalists (Greenwald is said to receive between 250k and 1 million per year) the Intercept is begging for reader donations."

he has another one saying that 'The Intercept Mistranslates Assad Speech - Smears Syria As Neo-Nazi', but i think whitney webb had alluded to that, and iirc, bellingcat's said the same thing. scanning, yes: mariam elba.

but i also remember GG saying he'd had no idea that Pierre's paypal had blockaded wikileaks from receiing contributions. wot?

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wendy davis's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

a title for this diary, i admit i'd pinged his larger book 'when google met wikiLeaks', and had thunk: 'when the intercept met bellingcat'.

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magiamma's picture

Right just imagine...

$250 million well spent? imagine if the Intercept actually had a team of people trying to poke holes in UK/US narratives about Russia instead of their own paid journalists promoting Bellingcat pic.twitter.com/QJyTXf4fp0

Great to have a breakdown of all this.

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Stop Climate Change Silence - Start the Conversation

Hot Air Website, Twitter, Facebook

wendy davis's picture

@magiamma

whitney brought many things i hadn't known about before, and she has another piece up that i'm not sure whether to bring or not, as i'd be tempted to commit yellow journalism and bring the most...damning parts. ; ) i'll think about it.

i'm so glad she reads the intercept so i don't have to, save for the pieces that i'm steered toward by (i hate to say it, lol) a few folks i check with regularly on twitter.

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magiamma's picture

@wendy davis
me too... glad she read it so we don't have to.

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Stop Climate Change Silence - Start the Conversation

Hot Air Website, Twitter, Facebook

wendy davis's picture

@magiamma

the tweet in...er...person? whitney webb retweeted:

youch. she caused me to see that Pierre's place is far worse than i'd known. lord luv a duck.

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lotlizard's picture

I had, I was given a used flat-screen TV by friends when I moved to Dresden.

Over the last few months, I resumed doing something I’d abandoned 25 years ago — watching the evening news programs on German state-funded broadcasters ARD and ZDF, channels every German household is forced to fund through a compulsory fee (= tax) of $265 per year.

I’ve been disappointed and disgusted to find the ARD and ZDF uncritically and relentlessly propagating the U.S. neolib-neocon world view, no different from their corporate competition, the globalist-owned private German TV channels.

Including, a few nights ago, playing up Bellingcat as the go-to source re the Skripal affair.

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mimi's picture

@lotlizard @Wendy Davis @Snoopydawg @CSTMS @Anabashed Liberal @JtC

the news broadcasted by CNN, MSNBC, FOX, NBC and ABC anymore. YMMV, but ARD and ZDF evening news are way less hyperactively sensationalizing in their way they word their reports than comparable US TV evening news broadcasters and their talking head hosts. If you had to watch US TV news outlet as part of your job (meaning to get a paycheck to pay your bills as a member of the poverty-aligned tribe), I think you would be glad to not have to do it 10h/d. I am at least.

It's all relative and dependent from where you come from, imho, and what the reasons are one watches and follows the news to begin with.

The discussing here leaves me asking what a "follower" is supposed to be and at which point a "follower" is supposedly a "fan". At the same time I ask myself, who are the dogs that gather the sheeps into a herd? I ask myself what motivates many of the folks who write here or at their own blogs, to do just that?

Their work - I believe - is a fulltime job they deliberately chose, independent who might have funded them or will fund them or happened to decide to fund them. Why would Wendy Davis, Snoopydawg or Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal or the Anabashed Liberal have any other personal motivations to write and do research and comment than a Glen Greenwald or a Taibibbi or whoever else of those 'in-the-know' folks.

To me the 'It's the Russian, Russia did it" folks market-shouters are not worse than the "No, no, it's all fake, you sheeps, it never could be the Russians" anti-market-shouters shouters.

If anyone believes humans and animals are not tribal, then explain to me why the horse never does it with the zebra naturallyy and if some humans make them do it, all they produce are sterile and infertile Zebroids?

Tribalism and herding together with anyone who one decides is his clan, is in the genes. And nobody is free of those genes that make them so.

If I read some articles from Glen Grdeenwald, what does it make me, a follower, a fan or a sheep or a dummy, or a member of a clan?

If I don't watch TV or don't read TOP or do oaccasionally do it, why is that in any way a plus or a minus in the way I try to inform myself or willingly skip them and rather risk disinformation or do nothing?

It is quite obvious that music, photos, weather chats and other niceties are skillfully used to try to de-escalate potential tensions among C99p folks. I mean I like it a lot, that doesn't mean the intent in offering emtotional relief valves via music, food and art isn't a tool used here. (I like the tools better than the news)

I just wonder how so many folks know so many details that everyone of them seems to be a deep state insider or a spy from mars trying to figure out how venus' mind works.

Darn, where is my clan when I need one?

Nichts für Ungut.

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lotlizard's picture

@mimi  
over 40 years ago.

In the beginning years, I really liked the German public TV and radio.

But as in so many other facets of life, Americanization took over and Reaganesque developments I was fleeing from caught up with me.

The private TV channels especially seem to want to drown viewers in U.S. movies and TV series — the same old shallow uniformity of pop-culture product and point-of-view that, I was hoping, Germans, at least, would be wise enough not to subject themselves to.

When there is some German-produced programming about ordinary Germans living in today’s Germany, it seems restricted to crime-thriller series and soap operas (Gute Zeiten, Schlechte Zeiten, Alles was zählt).

Yes, the tone in ARD and ZDF news programs is still relatively sober and not yet fully Americanized. And I do like a lot of the nature and geography documentaries I see on 3sat and Arte. MDR, the third public channel for Saxony, makes a lot of token gestures of inclusion towards older former East Germans (DDR) and their memories.

But the content of ARD and ZDF TV news — and, from what I watched of its 2016 election night coverage, Dutch NOS news too — seems to be extremely disposed towards presenting the Foreign Affairs magazine (i.e. Council on Foreign Relations) / New York Times / Washington Post / CNN version of constructed consensus reality to its German audience as the gospel truth.

German mainstream media certainly impress me as having abandoned any pretense of neutrality and objectivity. Basically, since 2015 at latest, they appear to me to have gone all-in on selling the public a pro-war, pro-migration, pro-multiracial-society, anti-Euroskeptic, anti-AfD, and anti-Trump “party line,” in parallel with their American ideological counterparts.

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mimi's picture

@lotlizard
and don't remeber anymore how German TV news broadcasts had been. At that time I had other stuff in my head, but tribalism I am familiar with for fifty years. I came to the US in 1982 and had no exposure to German TV news coverage. I remember only my first shocking TV experience in the US, that was looking at a guy with the name of Jimmy Swaggart and some lady with fake eyelashes at his side crying crocodile tears openly on TV. Great introduction to the US back then...

I remember listening to a news anchor back then and geor in a little fight with my uber black husband. Because he said I should listen to that black news anchor and I looked at him and was unsure if he still had his marbles together, because that news anchor to me was clearly a white guy. Whereby I was lectured by my husband that to be black in the US, you really don't have to look black, it's enough to have a couple of drops of black blood in your veins. Another great introduction to the US for me.

So, I have lots of blank pages and black holes in my lifetime's timeline, times, during which I neither quite understood or could follow US TV news, nor see or watch German TV news and especially not anything that related to Germany's reunification times and the former DDR.

Since 2007 I watched and followed more closely the news in the US. I got angry on march 20/21/2003, when my then German employer of a conservative think tank asked me not to watch TV during work hours at my desk, when the first shock and awe pictures were on US TV. He was a pitiful little jerk. I had my son flying into the war theater at that day towards Kuweits AFB and my son told me later how he could see all the explosions and fire from the plane.

I think I started reading TOP then some time after that in 2004. That's all I have to offer as an excuse for not knowing more.

I remember someone said at TOP once that German weekly magazine 'Der Spiegel' is neo-liberal and I didn't understand what that was supposed to mean. The guy liked Robert Scheer (from truthdig). I started reading truthdig then. I still can't stand everything that starts with 'neo', because it's vague and not clear to me.

What I just feel today, being back in Germany since 2017, is that everything is americanized here, subtly but more than I expected. I fear the hatred bubbling under peoples skins. Germany is small and overpopulated and the US is not. So, I feel that haters here in Germany are more dangerous than in the US. I didn't expect to find that. I like lots of documentaries and political discussion panels here nevertheless.

And I don't like places like Democracy Now being thrown out to the curb side.

I am a pig lover, but I don't like "Pigs" and "Dreck" as a way to describe political talking heads.

Someone used the word "Dreck" somewhere here recently, I am too lazy to look for that comment, and all I could think of reading it, was that the word "Dreck" used by some Uber-tribalist at TOP in relation to Joe's EB was the last drop that made my cup run over and made me run away from TOP to the EB.

So, now, do I join the 'Dreckige Pigs United' clan or what exactly should I do?

I love pigs because I regularly visited them in the Berlin Zoo, when my son was still a toddler. So cute these piglets, right? Darn I had a cute image, but can't find it anymore. So you just have to live without them pigs...

Smile

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lotlizard's picture

@mimi  
And I read the Freddy the Pig series by Walter R. Brooks.

And when I was very little I listened to a song called “Cincinnati Dancing Pig” on the big console radio.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cincinnati+dancing+pig&iax=videos&ia=videos

The Max Planck Institute of Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg has the address Saupfercheckweg 1 (“One, Pig-sty Corner Way”). The story goes that, because of the institute’s prestige and international renown, the city wanted to change the name of the road to something more dignified. The scientists at the institute said no, they liked the name and were amused to be associated with it, and made the city keep it.

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@mimi Democracy Now moved themselves to the curb side.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

mimi's picture

@lotlizard @lotlizard

on selling the public a pro-war, pro-migration, pro-multiracial-society, anti-Euroskeptic, anti-AfD, and anti-Trump “party line,”

I think one can not be 'pro-migration', because folks who migrate do so on their own and don't care what some political talking heads think about them migrating. You can't sell what you have no control over.

I think one can be for a pro-multiracial society without being mocked about it.

Of course I can be euro-skeptic without being anti at anything, Europe is not the US. Totally different pairs or shoes. The US is way more homogeneous, their states are nothing but little green pees in a pot, each similar, but for some reason apparently each very proud over their own greenish shiny specialty. Europe is a fruit basket and which apple likes to be told to be a banana or an orange, by some Uber European overlords. Sigh.

Anti-Afd, I certainly am and their weasel words won't cut it.

Anti Trump party line? Didn't know that Trump represents a party with a line. To me he represents some overcooked spaghettis he tells us to swallow without a sauce other than his
narcistic blah blah.

Ok. Now I am confused. I will join my Dreckige Pigs United clan now.

Sigh. That is so tiring. Sorry for being blunt.

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lotlizard's picture

@mimi  
Why wouldn’t a backlash form when it seems like every newscast, every talk show, every kids’ cartoon, and every U.S.-made movie and TV series is slanted in a particular political direction?

“See this? This is goodthink. See that? That is badthink.”

That reminds people of the old East German system and how media was used to impose a particular “progressive” ideology then.

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lotlizard's picture

@mimi  
I will stand with the AfD if I have to, and against the Left and Center, when the latter’s attitude towards their own country is Deutschland, du mieses Stück Scheiße! (“Germany, you lousy piece of shit!”) — as in the banner Bremen soccer fans are holding in this photo.

The Greens and “progressives” also lost me when, on the day commemorating the firebombing of Dresden, they marched with people promoting the slogan, “Bomber Harris, do it again!” and arguing that every single individual German was responsible for Hitler and therefore there were no innocent victims in Dresden (or Hiroshima or Nagasaki either, presumably).

Didn’t I pledge allegiance to the American flag every day as a kid? Don’t I still love America and feel myself part of the American people, even if I know that as an institution, the U.S. has always been a fascist system, one that annexed Hawaii against the will of the Hawaiian people and whose greatest modern president, based on people’s ancestry alone, sent folks who look East Asian like me to concentration camps?

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Pluto's Republic's picture

@lotlizard

They still are.

german-ancestry.jpg

About half of all Americans, right now, are of German descent. Whether they know it or not.

I suppose there were too many to send to internment camps during WWII. Too big to fail, unlike the Japanese. German-American groups were huge at that time in the US, but they melted away or were driven underground. They were definitely conflicted about the war against Germans, considering the Germans were driven to the point of despair by the collective punishment delivered by the victors in WWI. But it always gave me pause when I think of all the Nazis we smuggled back into the US — and how everything suddenly became so anti-Russian, to the point of the severe mental illness over communism that Americans suffer from today. There's no greater example of the grudge that will not die than the spectacle of the post-WWII hysteria that paralyzed DC in the 1950s.

And then there are the parallels between the German Empire of the 1930s and the PNAC Empire, today. Not to mention the cavalier Genocide in Israel — the predominant obsession of the Neocons that endures like it's genetic.

It makes you wonder.

The Nazis killed tens of millions in the East, with the intention of exterminating the Russians on their own lands. In a two-year period, some 3.1 million Soviet prisoners perished in German captivity: about 500,000 were shot; the remaining 2.6 million were starved to death. More Soviet prisoners died in German camps on any given day in autumn 1941 than American and British prisoners did during the entire war. As of December 1941, more Soviet POWS had died in occupied Poland than had either Jews or Poles.

And yet, the Neocons still hold their sick grudge — and where the Neocons go, the US blindly follows. The American people pay for this daily in diminished wages and social services.

By the way, the second largest ethnic group in the US are the descendants of the Native Americans. They are depicted in Orange and Brown on the map.

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____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
lotlizard's picture

@Pluto's Republic  
still simply want friendly relations with Germany — which they could have, to the enduring benefit of both peoples — if only it weren’t for NATO’s grand strategists, the Atlanticists and neocons.

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wendy davis's picture

@Pluto's Republic

i've read in a long time, amigo. then add in the estimated 20-26 million soviets who died fighting in WWII, both soldiers and civilians. when was the last president who mentioned *that* on VE day?

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wendy davis's picture

@lotlizard

had to look up bomber harris of the RAF. i've never understood love of one's country, myownself, though 'love' might be defined differently by anyone. i've loathed much of it since protesting the viet nam war, when folks chanted "amerika! love it or leave it".

when i used to commemorate the most hideous war crime bombing of dresden at firedoglake, boy, howdy did i take flak by the outraged 'progressives'. this of course, is billy pilgrim in a passage from kurt vonnegut's slaughterhouse five. he was a POW beneath the city as the bombers came.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUhMzmeW3Qw]

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lotlizard's picture

@wendy davis  
that — feeling that Germany’s history gives them license to denigrate the people and nation — they get carried away.

That confirms the stereotype of a Left that hates its own country and puts other ethnic and religious groups first. It also turns a lot of ordinary folk against the Left who might otherwise have been receptive to progressive ideas.

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wendy davis's picture

@lotlizard

kurt vonngegut as well, but if love of one's country is hurting the left, count me among them, i guess. i took a break and thought of this song, which can be heard in several ways.

but oppression is at the root of it all, by my lights.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5djVrVsI7W4]

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lotlizard's picture

@wendy davis  
The ones now in their forties grew up under the old Russian-oriented system. No idea what reputation Vonnegut enjoyed in Soviet-bloc culture or curriculum.

I just texted my 19 year old quasi-granddaughter to ask whether she’d heard of Kurt Vonnegut or Schlachthof 5 / Slaughterhouse-Five.

Could have been that the novel and Vonnegut’s personal experience surviving the firebombing were mentioned in school or as part of city history somewhere along the line.

But she says no.

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lotlizard's picture

@wendy davis  
unless and until I remember to temporarily white-list YouTube.

That’s why I didn’t watch the Vonnegut passage you wanted to show me till just now.

Thank you very much for that. It touches my heart.

Thank you for the Judy Collins song as well. I always wished I could sing like her. Back when I had LPs — ah, Wildflowers, and Who Knows Where the Time Goes.

I would sing “My Father” and change the words. “We lived in Ohio Hawaii then, he worked in a mine . . .”

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wendy davis's picture

@lotlizard

but i'm pretty sure i'd linked the wiki to the book. it might say how many languages it's been printed in. but if you haven't read it, nor your quasi-granddaughter, you might appreciate it. vonnegut is one of my favorite authors, and this is hands down his best. when i was younger, herman hesse was another favorite. the steppenwolfe? a war on machines? ; )

magister ludi? oh,my, breathtaking back in the day. sorry to have been so long, but eeep, it must be 2:30 a.m. in germany.

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lotlizard's picture

@wendy davis  
One thing that annoys the heck out of me is the revisionism re the number of victims who died in the firebombing of Dresden.

For decades — starting with my German teacher in high school in Hawaii who was originally from Dresden — every source I came in contact with pretty much agreed, “no one knows for sure, but 200,000 is probably realistic and the true total could be even higher.” The city was full of people fleeing the advance of the Red Army.

Now revisionist historians commissioned by the German government itself — cited by the Wikipedia article on Vonnegut — insist the total is only 25,000.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/death-toll-debate-how-many-d...

For Dresdeners — and for me personally — this is about as popular as suddenly revising Shoah numbers downward would be with Jews.

It was one of the very first issues where I reacted strongly and found myself thinking, “You know, I hate to say this, but the ‘extreme Right’ source is right.”

https://www.compact-online.de/die-feuerhoelle-von-dresden-in-zahlen-chro...

Because we Aspies tend to recall more clearly than most people everything we ever read or were told while growing up. And I had to admit that what best squared with my memories was this review of the question in a right-wing magazine — not what the establishment and mainstream sources now seemed to want everyone to believe.

My strong impression is that it’s still true that nobody knows the actual number and nobody will ever be able to know for sure.

I think it’s pretty clear they got historians to revise the number drastically downward because commemorating the firebombing has become a thing on the Right.

It’s surprising sometimes, the lengths the Powers That Be will go to in Germany. Anything, anything at all, as long as it results in denying the Right a talking point.

Updated to add: And yes, with a few keystrokes, thanks to Wiki they can now easily revise everyone’s encyclopedia on the fly, just as Orwell imagined.

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wendy davis's picture

@lotlizard

i hadn't even looked at the wiki death count, but 25,000 is absurd. i've read up to 600,000,
but the worst parts are that it was the reich was already going down, and that dresden was chosen to demoralize germans, as if they had a say in when the reich would concede. i'd forgotten 'florence on the elbe', but by all accounts it was one of the most artistic and cultural centers in the world.

much like kit carson cutting down all the fruit trees in canyon de chelley to demoralize the navajo to give up, not that i'm conflating the two tragedies.

kewl you can watch the film version; to say the truth, i'd never known there was one until the wiki. but oh, my, craig murray has (in his words) become rather obsessed with the fact that his, and a few other dissenters to the realm, have had their wiki pages doctored so many times in ugly ways recently.

aspie as in Aspergers? i was trying to remember that word this a.m., thinking of how i blurt things out so easily any more.

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lotlizard's picture

@wendy davis  
via some kind of media streaming service she subscribes to.

Alas, quasi-granddaughter is out of town with boyfriend’s family for autumn holidays.

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@lotlizard This issue seems terribly complicated to me--the issue of what "turns people against the Left." Mainly because people aren't exactly reacting organically and independently to any political faction, are they? Their perceptions are always being interfered with from the get-go. In fact, the definitions of left and right have been fiddled with so much (more like mangled) by people who are well-paid to do that kind of thing, that it's really difficult to say "Well, if you (left, right whatever) didn't say or do this (hate your country, love your country whatever) then people (who I guess aren't right or left?) would like you better." Difficult, not impossible; I've said it myself about the "Resistance," #MeToo (at least the way it plays out online), and other forms of supposedly left-wing activism. The revised feminist movement we have now seems, and has always seemed to me, practically designed to ensure a backlash. But then again, that's the point, isn't it? All these ideas are being manipulated.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

wendy davis's picture

@mimi

"Darn, where is my clan when I need one?" but one of the things i was chastised the most vociferously for saying on that thread of divine orders' was that yes, C99 is nonpartisan, but still tribalist. i've rethought that term, even though i named a few 'tribes', but now i wonder if 'affinity groups' or 'identity politics groups' might have worked better. and one i hadn't named that divine order reminded me about is 'incrementalists', as in...baby steps to getting closer to where we want to go.

but i wouldn't even imagine that reading here or there would mean anything much more than curiosity if you can handle one venue or another. the trick would be to peek behind the curtain/s to try to suss out 'malarkey' (read bullshit) from 'reality', a silly and nigh onto impossible term in the end.

well, as to motivations fro writing, money is a darned good one for greenwald and taiibi, no? for amy and juan at democracy now!, they seem to have become adherents to the imperium in some respects, but it may be down to the fact that (many who claim to know) are funded by george soros now.

and many sites' owners ask for contributions. some time ago when the café was busy, i'd mentioned 'if you'd like to contribute to this site, click here. never was but one taker, a man in berlin who'd said: "now that's evil!" (we were having a discussion about...evil at the time.)

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wendy davis's picture

@lotlizard

but it sadly makes total sense that your stations report bellingcat's Imperial take.

have your channels mentioned the disappearance/death of jamal khahoggi? it must have been at wsws that the author had said that germany's been strangely silent on it, and then offered a quote by (iirc) the german foreign minister a week earlier close to: "saudi arabia plays an important part in keeping the peace in the middle east".

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lotlizard's picture

@wendy davis  
https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/fall-khashoggi-tuerkische-beweise-fuer-er...

When German mainstream media aren’t doing the Sgt. Schultz thing — “I see nothing” — the rule seems to be like on Wikipedia: “reliable” (meaning U.S. establishment) sources only, and “no original research.”

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wendy davis's picture

@lotlizard

how great. but even w/o knowing a lick of german, if it's quoting the wapo and nygrimes, we know... thank you.

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mimi's picture

@wendy davis
a simple search on google.de gives you plenty of German print newspapers who write about it.
TV news casts in the evening produce 1 to 3 minute clips, for which journalists have five hours time - at most - to research them, shoot them and cut them. Oh, those bad boys. They quote US news papers? They really read them? That is a shame.

They must be members of the Dreckige Pigs Clan.

ok, I think this is all way over the top. I am sorry. I feel not comfortable going on to respond and think this is a way to propagandasize readers.

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lotlizard's picture

@mimi  
I’m giving one angle, you’re giving another! You’re providing a corrective to my remarks where you think they need it!

What’s not to like?

Reading the exchanges between us probably provides a much better starting point for other people’s understanding the complex situation in Germany, than just reading one of us alone.

I’m trying to push back against a German media establishment that makes me feel frustrated and helpless. You’re pushing back against my pushback! That’s good, isn’t it? Isn’t that good?

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mimi's picture

@lotlizard @lotlizard
the exchange is a good one, because I learned (and wouldn't have thought so before) on selling the public a pro-war, pro-migration, pro-multiracial-society, anti-Euroskeptic, anti-AfD, and anti-Trump “party line,” that you feel very helpless and frustrated by the German media establishment. I wasn't aware that to many Germans the news coverage by ARD German TV would feel like 'being told what to think' and that it reminded former East German folks at the propaganda they were exposed to in the DDR.
I remember the DDR Volkspolizisten telling us West Germans who passed through the DDR were not allowed to have any West German newspapers in their cars and were asked to hand over "Der Spiegel" and all the newspapers in our cars. I was a younger teenager at that time and it stuck with me my whole life.
As far as I am aware of ARD German TV has never told anyone what to read and what not to read.

Anyhow, lotlizard, right now it's really a very confusing time in Germany, and for me more so than for those who have always lived there. Election results in Bavaria make me dizzy. What the heck.

I learn a lot from you and for that I am thankful.

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Pluto's Republic's picture

@mimi

So much is devised to divide, and hiding in plain sight. That is the textbook theory behind psycho-political propaganda. More eyes are needed.

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____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
lotlizard's picture

@mimi  
but I do really think I notice ARD and ZDF not so subtly “nudging” its audience towards certain perceptions —

People in former East Germany are to be thought of as kind of backward (Mississippi in 1963) and unable to embrace democracy and multiculturalism the way enlightened Wessis do;

Pegida was portrayed as bad ever since it was founded. Now commemorating victims of violent migrant crime is also automatically bad (Chemnitz) and anyone who does so is to be regarded as a neo-Nazi or a dupe;

On the entertainment and talk-show side, German media and their celebrity caste have been pretty blatant about how it’s all good citizens’ duty to get out there — concerts, marches, wherever — and unite gegen Rechts (“against the Right”) . . .

Now maybe — as in the U.S., with silencing Alex Jones and promoting Russiagate to try to get rid of Trump — the correct “progressive” attitude is to be glad that German public TV and other mainstream media, along with Google, Facebook, and Twitter, have thrown objectivity, impartiality, and free speech overboard. It’s Zivilcourage! It’s taking a stand, like wasn’t done enough in the 1930s!

Hm.

Well, the East German authorities’ official term for The Wall was always “the Antifascist Security Barrier” . . .

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mimi's picture

@lotlizard @lotlizard
basically because I haven't experienced the Wessi-Ossi 'Verdummung' between the two sides in real time and only vaguely heard about it while I was in the US. I have in my extended family marriages between Ossis and Wessis. It caused puzzlements among the parents, as the Wessie now wants the old DDR back and his Ossie wife regrets it too (though they are doing fine in Wessie Berlin, have house and kids. inherited and had not worked too hard for it). Other than that I think I have a family of know-nothingers and don't trust any of them when it comes to their 'political insights, views and perspectives'. They are way too secure in their living conditions and have no clue about what it means to not have it. All Wessies.

Hm. ... I feel a little lost. I wished you would feel safer and more protected than you are.

As for the nudging ... well, I was working with the nudging folks on a daily basis, they couldn't nudge me into any direction and we had all species in there, including extreme right wing to very liberal to the ones who were open to what they were exposed to in the countries they reported from. So, I also know what they really thought about a situation they reported on and in how far the verbiage and political evaluation of what they reported was 'nudged into appropriate thoughtfulness' during their morning or editorial sessions.

Often they personally didn't fully stand behind what they had to report on and how. But Socialists among them? No, not one. I think most were too much influenced by what they actually saw in foreign countries (and many of them have reported from the US and Eastern European countries and Western European countries before). I would say most didn't have a fixed ideology either. I don't think that would be their task either to have one and most were 'capitalist by default' or in fact apolitical.

hm. ... I feel really lost now and don't know what to say. I am sorry that the media coverage frightens you so much.

So, you say it's a matter of 'Zivilcourage' to stand up and fight along with those Ossies that some consider as extreme? Aren't the differences that exist caused by social unfairness? The Ossies have a lot of reasons to feel treated unfairly, at least that is what I learned through the documentaries I watch on German TV. Do you feel that the 'Zivilcourage' you had in the DDR to fight against that regime, is not enough repsected and understood by the average Wessie guys and gals? I have never thought about that aspect.

Jeez, I am so lost here in Germany. I can't catch up filling the holes I have caused by my 35 years of absense.

hm. ... that makes me a coward then. Oh well, may be I am one. Sorry for that. I am also tired of politics. Too many people who hurt everywhere. Not good.

Be well.

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lotlizard's picture

@mimi  
living in two different dramatic universes and acting out two different movie scripts.

One camp has the neoliberal, globalist elites and most of the popular, wealthy celebrities on its side, and accordingly dominates mainstream media. This camp is acting out a script in which Pegida and the AfD are racist and xenophobic — basically an incipient Nazi movement resurrected.

According to this first script, whenever such “Nazis” try to assemble, publish, speak — or even simply maintain a booth at the Frankfurt Book Fair on the same terms as anybody else — it’s a praiseworthy display of Zivilcourage to deny them free exercise of rights that, in any other context, adherents of this camp would claim are universal.

The other camp includes supporters of Pegida and the AfD, but also many ordinary people who don’t like the way things are going and no longer trust mainstream media and the political institutions. This camp is acting out a script in which, as in East Germany, an elite pretends to be running an open, democratic system while actually being intolerant of, and moving to crush, any deviation from whatever that elite at any given moment deems to be “politically correct.”

According to this second script, what is really a praiseworthy display of Zivilcourage is when ordinary people stand up en masse for views the more powerful, majority camp condemns and tries to repress as ideologically beyond the pale. Adherents of this camp say large numbers of citizens marching peacefully to bear witness to their dissent is what brought down The Wall and the Stasi, and that’s what will force the system to change this time, too.

This script sees all the “legacy” parties — CDU-CSU, Greens, SPD, FDP, and Left — as the new equivalent of the DDR “bloc parties,” since no matter which one you vote for, they all end up delivering the same things. “More national identity lost. More sovereignty lost, to the EU melting pot. More Web censorship. More sabre-rattling. More arms exports. More troops abroad. More migrants. More expenditure and effort spent trying to coax migrants to assimilate. Less spent on schools. Less spent on infrastructure.”

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mimi's picture

@lotlizard

I think I got it this time. This paragraph

According to this second script, what is really a praiseworthy display of Zivilcourage is when ordinary people stand up en masse for views the more powerful, majority camp condemns and tries to repress as ideologically beyond the pale. Adherents of this camp say large numbers of citizens marching peacefully to bear witness to their dissent is what brought down The Wall and the Stasi, and that’s what will force the system to change this time, too.

did it.
I need to study the East German's demands. The whole history since the late eighties of what happened in Germany is missing for me. It is really a shame and horrible to realize it and admit it.

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lotlizard's picture

@mimi  

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vizu9YTCcB0]

 
The Dutch VPRO one is particularly thorough and even-handed, not hobbled by preconceptions.
 
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwJS49MRcCg]

 
(A reminder for people who want to watch the videos, but don’t understand the German-language parts, that they can switch on English subtitles during those passages.)

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mimi's picture

@lotlizard

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mimi's picture

@lotlizard
it is a very good documentary. What it shows and says makes me very sad. It would have been nice Germany hadn't the problems it has now.

I am not anymore at home in Germany. I don't want to deal with these issues ahead in Germany. So, it will leave. I am not a masochist and chose to live through what I foresee coming deliberately.

I will now read through the other comments which I haven't read yet. Thank you for opening my eyes about what people think and feel in former East Germany.

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wendy davis's picture

@mimi

i was trusting the wsws and what i'd assumed deutchland funk (LOL) might have featured from the papers of record™. that's all, but point taken.

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mimi's picture

@wendy davis
your verbiage soemtimes and the way you express yourself. Sometimes it frustrates me. I think I have said so before and of course, that's my problem and not yours. It's also not important at all. I just couldn't hold back when you concluded that German journalists reading NYT and WP were ... whatever you think they are ... Smile

All I know is that their day starts at 8am in the US, by 9:30 there is the editorial decision making morning conference, by 1 pm the video broadcast for the ARD or ZDF German evening news has to be produced, filmed, cut and narrated to make it into the broadcast at 7pm or 8pm German time. That's very little time. And of course, they use US print media and TV broadcasts to produce their own clips for the German audience. I think reading foreign newspapers is part of their job description, so your somewhat lax remarks about them reading US newspapers were not so 'cool'.

The only German news outlets Joe uses sometimes in his EBs are the English Deutsche Welle videos. May be I should search for more English written German media sites and link to them some times, so that people have a better view of what's available. But it's really not important for most here on this blog or for most issues discussed here.

I like Joe posting English language France24 videos sometimes and like to listen to what they have to say too. I like most what is selected and posted on the EB or the Sunday Weekly Watch by lookout. And I like a lot of authors, especially if they write so clearly that it's suitable for dummies. Smile

Noting for Ungood (this is a literal translation of a German saying 'Nichts für Ungut' and means more or less that I mean it well and with good intentions.

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wendy davis's picture

@mimi

and i have no dog in this fight, so to speak. all i did was say it was believable to lotlizard's "Only as a direct New York Times / Washington Post quotation.", and as far as i could tell there was no english version after i'd asked if wsws was correct that germany had been strangely silent on the likely murder of jamal khashoggi. oh, and by the way, the turkish police are now reporting that he'd set his apple watch set to record audio and video, which was streamed to his phone held outside by his fiancé. and the wapo said...they hadn't heard or seen it, but that their contacts in turkey had, and it was clear he was tortured before...all that followed.

the neo-nazi uber-nationalists marching in germany was another Q i'd asked her earlier (having seen headlines), but we seemed to be talking past one another in the end.

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mimi's picture

@wendy davis
and have no clue about all the sources you quote. I have simply no knowledge and have not the nerves to go and check them out. It is obvious that you do a LOT of research and know how to do it. My problem is that I don't do the research and don't know how to do it and simply are not that interested anymore: It's too much for me. The reason why I allow myself to still be here and sometimes open my mouth is because I think people in the know need to be able to handle people who are not in the know. We dummies are humans too. ...

I am sorry to have let my tongue hang out and did my blah blah as a spontaneous reaction more with regards to the tone of the music than the music itself that broadcasts from your essay.

Let me go now. I don't want to participate in it anymore and would be happy to be silent.

And I would be happy to leave this behind me in peace with you. In fact I think the whole shebang is not important and material ready to be forgotten.

Thanks.

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wendy davis's picture

@mimi

amiga. i haven't taken any offense, so please contribute as you will; i am totally at peace with you. i suppose my use of language might be as quirky as my brain is now, and i'm sorry that gets in the way for you.

as far as what's important, what's not, that's in the eye of the beholder. and yes, i often imagine that one of my self-imposed 'jobs' is to be an iconoclast, or 'brand-buster', as in: let's look behind the curtain to see what's really afoot with entity x, y, or z, including of course the political class and candidates for office. all too often the Brand get confused for the Product for so many of us, yanno what i mean?

whooosh, i ain't got but half a brain any longer, way more lacunae than brain cells. yep, i do a lot of research, too much in fact, which is why some of my diaries are too long for a lot of folks to want to read. i also forget most things ten minutes after i read them, but can recall how to find them again if they've given me more...visual...i guess i'd say, images to ping from. heh, oh, and i email things to myself and file them for later use. simple example: william blum's lists of nations amerika has bombed and elected leaders amerika has overthrown or tried to.

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mimi's picture

@wendy davis
things I run into and want to retrieve later. I will do that in the future, it's a great idea. Thank you for the tip. Smile

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wendy davis's picture

@mimi

create labeled subfolders on your saved messages on your e-provider, but even our POS microsoft allows for that. i have about six subfolders, but kinda forget to keep the café one cleaned out, so still have to hunt sometimes.

after having had a hellish lot of brain damage a couple decades ago, it took a lot of work to try to rewire my brain, but i reached a plateau some years back and now i'm going backwards, down, down, down. the main thing i'd noticed, and notice again, that i see thoughts a bit like helium balloons with strings hanging down from them. it's hard once again to try to twine those strings together to make any sort of coherent whole out of them, as so many here can accomplish without even thinking about it; as in: thoughts seem to flow easily.

but the corollary, of course, is that i now know how crucial memory is to intelligence, not that intelligence isn't over-rated as far as i've seen. instinct is better, as is imagination, so sayeth uncle albert einstein. ; ) mental acuity (considers focus, memory, concentration and understanding) is different, but i may substitute passion for some of those qualities. as kurt vonnegut is wont to repeat...and so it goes.

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mimi's picture

@wendy davis @wendy davis
I have over 48 subfolders in my email account ... I built a web site 24 years ago using the subject category catalog of the Library of Congress and had hard coded several hundred pages containing several hundred hard coded linked pages to the subcategories of the categories. I think I still have a floppy disk with all those subject categories and I sorted around 300 000 booktitles accordingly into the subject categories.

And then some idiot was smarter than me and built his website and .... blew my idiotic project off the table, which I consquently gave up. It was the right decision. Some basics I learned and I drew my conclusions and faced the consequences. I was the best lesson I learned though it crashed my job, hopes, dreams, livelihood and sanity (well...not really, but it was bad enough for me).

See, I just don't want to do much anymore , I don' want to think much, don't want to read much, just want to be alone and sleep. What the heck for would I do all those things?

Wow, you fought a lot considering your damaged brain from yesteryears. Amazing what you accomplished. Kudos to you for the healing process you put yourself through.

I have no idea what happened to my brain, nor how it works. I forget more things than I want to. But many things I don't like to think about and am therefore ok if I can forget them.

Just don't ask me to bring some order in some other peoples' messy data. I won't. I am done.

Be well, take care of your brain, and thanks for putting up with me.

Good Night from over here in Germany.

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wendy davis's picture

@mimi

that sounds like an epic endeavor. i'm sorry you'd felt it necessary, then life-crashing. how nice you have the sub-folders available and know how to use them. i confess, each time i need to make a new one...er...i kinda have to relearn how to make one. ; )

ah, yeah, it won't be long until i need to close the café and get a real life, lol, whatever that is. kinda old and in the way already for much, but i had a hella good run multi-tasking and organizing with kids for decades while i could get out and about.

but it's officially fall now, so much feels bittersweet. 17 degrees at sunrise here chez, davis. the garden is black, mr. wd's picking the last of the apples for friends with a cider press, i've en-vased all the last glorious flowers, need to take the next couple days to prepare and tithe food. the tithing began on obomba's Terror Tuesdays on which day he'd decide which Terrorists in his deck of cards to kill by drone. sounds goofy as all giddy-up, but by now, i just do it for those in need, and to try to make up for some of the shitty things i do in life.

good night to you over there in germany.

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