Governments Lie, Media Deceives... What to Believe

we'd like to believe that our governments and institutions are run by good people, or at least normal people, people like us;

but they are not;

normal people, good people, people like us do not get the opportunity to be in their place

we are ruled by psychopaths

if that sounds too harsh, its just because we don't want to believe it;

if it helps, think of them as sociopaths instead; 

(sounds less bad; doesn't mean less bad; psychopaths are mass murderers that maybe kidnap and maybe use torture, perhaps even chainsaws, on their 1, or 4, or handful of victims; sociopaths use drones, or MOABs (the Mother of all Bombs), or Fat Man and Little Boy, or economic (starvation) sanctions, on their hundreds of thousands of victims)

the sociopaths that rule us are MUCH worse than the psychopaths we fear

in any case;

there is so much utter B.S. that it has become very hard to figure out what is true;

I grew up believing what Dan Rather told me on CBS News, or Tom Brokaw on NBC, or Peter Mansbridge on CBC, or just about anyone, with their cool accents, on BBC;

I watched the Gulf War on TV from my first year university dorm room;

so naïve at the time, believing what I was told, captivated by the light show on the TV screen

10 years later, I still hadn't taken the red pill

like most, I too was glued to the TV on that fateful morning, watching as the towers came down

it was only in retrospect that I thought:

how did that 3rd tower, WTC7, come down?

for that matter, how exactly did the Twin Towers come down in the fashion they did, at freefall speed, into their own footprints?

then later...

how exactly did they find the culprits' passports in the debris of the Towers' wreckage?

are you f'g kidding me?!

so many more questions (my questions)

so many B.S. pronouncements,

so few real questions (from the media, not digging into any of the questions that I was asking/thinking)

Red Pill taken

20 years later, I'm so tired of it;

so tired of the naïve complacency of the public believing the 4th Estate;

so tired of the lack of critical thinking;

of the lack of skepticism about the latest B.S. despite all the past BS;

so tired of those features of the public allowing the perversions of justice, the absolute evil, the perpetuation of grotesquely unsustainable practices that are destroying the biosphere that our civilization, nay, our species, depends on

so tired of the public arguing on Twitter about the trivialities... like which corrupt evil con-man should (pretend to) rule the world next, Trump or Biden (while the powers that be behind the scenes really direct the play)... that we keep missing the forest for the trees

its all a mess

and, honestly, we don't really want to know how bad a mess it is, do we?

its better to just believe the lies and try to do our best going on with living our lives

while rainforests get bulldozed,

while species after species goes extinct,

while we keep belching GhGs into our atmosphere,

while we keep acidifying our oceans,

while the coral reefs die,

while keystone species are imperilled, from bees and insects to oceanic plankton

..

while Yemenis starve,

and Venezuelans starve,

and Iranians, who can't be starved b/c of their own agriculture, are deprived of medication for their children,

and Libya has an actual slave trade with active slave markets

...

all because of the evil U.S. warlords (from Trump to Obama to Bush to Clinton to Bush to Reagan to …)

fxck

so...

first rule - don't believe either the government or the media just because they are the government or media -- they are to be distrusted -- instead of believing everything they say is true, we'd be better off believing everything they say is false, unless and until it can be substantiated and proved

how so?

b/c of all the preponderance of lies

what lies?

oh, oh so many

• Guantanamo, illegal rendition, torture
• Osama bin Laden's supposed capture and death
• Saddam's WMD
• the War on Terror
• the War on Drugs
  
• Assad's chemical weapons
• US drone strikes against civilians over and over again
  
• Russia shot down MH17
• Skripal affair
  
• attempted coups and character assassinations of any and all socialist-leaning Latin American leaders, from Venezuela's Chavez to Maduro; from Brazil's Lula to Bolivia's Morales
  
• color revolutions, including to install Nazis in Ukraine
• Russiagate
• DNC server "hack"
• Assange's rape case
• Snowden and Manning persecution
  
• Bezos in bed with the CIA
• Epstein's child sex blackmailing scheme on behalf of the CIA and whomever
• the NSA's surveillance state
  
• WTC7's collapse
• Twin Towers' collapse at freefall speed into their own footprints
• Project for New American Century
• etc etc etc
  

or, how about govt allowance of corporate malfeasance

• corporate capture of EPA
• safety of fracking
• Monsanto's toxic legacy
• tobacco, DDT, PFAS & PFOS
  
• FEMA - Katrina - disaster profiteering
• Halliburton - Blackwater - Afghanistan Inc. - contractors - war profiteering
• etc etc etc
  

how about we go further back?

• JFK, MLK and Robert Kennedy assassinations
• Operation Gladio
• Gulf of Tonkin
• Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile crisis and Operation Northwoods
  
• Nagasaki and Hiroshima
• Pearl Harbor
• the Spanish-American War and other Banana Wars
• the Civil War
• etc etc etc
  

so, I've become convinced that the official stories about all of those events are bullshit;

so, now I'm suspicious about so many other things as well, though perhaps not yet convinced one way or another

like what?

• Boston Marathon bombing
• Sandy Hook shooting
• Vegas shooting
• San Bernardino shooting
• Charlie Hebdo shooting
• Paris shooting
• any accusation made by US against Russia
• any accusation made by US against Iran
• any accusation made by US against China
• etc etc etc
  

and, most recently, George Floyd's death

at the end of the day, I am very much in favor of the social justice movement and very much in favor of reining in the unlawful and egregious actions by the police, (which, in my opinion, is a phenomenon that has certainly been exacerbated by racism, but is mostly about brutality and abuse of power by bullies and sociopaths);

so perhaps it shouldn't matter to me that the trigger for the BLM movement these past few months has been orchestrated on false premises

it sure looked on that video as if George Floyd was slowly asphyxiated by the knee of Derek Chauvin

BUT was that really what happened?

(and I wouldnt be surprised if Chauvin was nonetheless a nasty cop, a brutish cop, a dirty cop.... but, did Chauvin really kill Floyd?)

we saw video of planes crashing into the Twin Towers and the towers then later collapsing; but did the (2) planes really cause the THREE (3!) Towers' collapses?!

I don't always agree with Paul Craig Roberts (I think most particularly when he discusses race issues), but I have come to entirely trust his honest pursuit of truth, wherever that truth may take him/us. He, like me, thinks that if the facts don't fit the story, then there is something wrong with the story. That was true about JFK, 9/11, and his view on mask-wearing now to decrease transmission of COVID (yes, wear them... but not any and all masks are designed to prevent the transmission of virus); and it seems to be the case also with what happened to Floyd, which triggered the social uprising that we've seen in the U.S.

Here's PCR:

Should we be protesting about George Floyd or Julian Assange? Paul Craig Roberts. July 31, 2020.

(Don't let the first 3 paragraphs dissuade you from reading the rest)

if you truly want to know what is going on in the world, you can't choose the blue pill; 

if you want to take the Red Pill:

read less / none of the mainstream media

read more of 

Caitlin Johnstone

Ian Welsh

Chris Hedges

Also (perhaps more selectively than the 3 above):

Paul Craig Roberts

And:

Edward Curtin

Glenn Greenwald

Aaron Mate

Ben Norton

Yves Smith and her contributors at naked capitalism

And also:

Guy Crittenden

John Pilger

Noam Chomsky

Howard Zinn

John Perkins

David Ray Griffin

Oliver Stone

William Blum

Amy Goodman

Abby Martin

Jimmy Dore

Lee Camp

James Corbett

Jeremy Scahill

Sharon Lerner

Krystal Ball

Eva Bartlett

Vanessa Beeley

Finnian Cunningham

Cory Morningstar

Pepe Escobar

Matt Taibbi

Dylan Ratigan

Eric Margulis

Michel Chossudovsky

James Howard Kunstler

Mike Krieger

Dmitry Orlov

John Michael Greer ('s older stuff; i.e. archdruid report rather than ecosophia)

Cognitive Dissonance / Two Ice Floes

The Saker

Moon of Alabama

Chalmers Johnson

Michael Klare

Tom Engelhardt

Andrew Bacevich

My advice, fwiw:

Read the first 4 regularly

Johnstone and Welsh in particular are consistently fantastic

Roberts and Hedges may have some differing views but are candid, honest truth-seekers

Read the rest when you come across them or when you can

 

p.s. update

this from Caitlin Johnstone on Aug. 3:

Here is a link to an article full of tips on how to punch through the obfuscations of propaganda and make sense of things, and here is a link to a Twitter list of my favorite news-gatherers and dot-connecters which you can bookmark and scroll through daily.