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The Media’s Addiction To COVID ‘Fear Porn’ Is Perpetuating An Ever-Worsening Cycle Of Societal Damage Across The World

Via Zero Hedge

Over the past year and a half, hysterical media reporting on matters Covid-19 has reduced some people to a fearful state of unquestioning compliance – including a great number of otherwise critically-thinking journalists.

With screaming headlines in bold and large font such as, ”Will this nightmare ever end?” and “Mutant virus skyrockets…” and ”Fear grows across the country: VIRUS PANIC,” and ”Coronavirus horror: Social media footage shows infected Wuhan residents ‘act like zombies’,” it is no wonder many people are in a state of panic.

In times when many are suffering mentally and physically under unnecessary and prolonged lockdowns, the incessant fear porn is causing excessive anxiety, which in turn will affect the health & mental well-being of some, if not many.

In government documents from the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) dated from March 2020 advice was given saying:

“The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging… This could potentially be done by trained community support volunteers, by targeted media campaigns, social media.”

I’d say the UK media campaigns weren’t so much “targeted” as “blanket” but they certainly did the job, and other Western nations got similar directives. The UK government also became the nation’s biggest advertiser in 2020, make what you will of the potential ramifications that could have on cash-strapped newspapers and their supposed “independence.”

Having myself been deeply focused on exposing war propaganda and other media lies around Syria, Palestine, Venezuela, and elsewhere over the years, my default position has become one of deep cynicism on mass media reporting. Yes, you can find nuggets of truth, or even excellent journalists in mainstream publications, honestly challenging the narratives.

But those are few and far between, generally you find copy-paste propaganda emanating largely from the bowels of the USA and the UK.

A study by Swiss Propaganda Research (SPR) noted, “most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris.”

Those agencies are AP, Reuters, and AFP. SPR notes:

The key role played by these agencies means Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording. In addition, governments, military and intelligence services use these global news agencies as multipliers to spread their messages around the world. MORE.

Is China’s Social Credit System Coming to the US?

Via The Epoch Times

The Chinese social credit system is a form of data-driven tyranny. It’s social engineering in its most technologically advanced form—a Great Leap Forward for despotic rulers, but a Great Leap Back for broader society.

Resistance, as the Chinese citizens know only too well, is futile; participation is mandatory.

Could a similar system be rolled out elsewhere? Most definitely. The Spectator UK’s Ross Clark warns that the British government is set to introduce an expansive app that seeks to monitor a person’s purchasing habits, exercise routines (or lack thereof), as well as their “intake of fruit and vegetables.” The government will reward the obedient with “virtue points.” The disobedient, meanwhile, could find themselves punished.

When does the nudge effect become abuse? When citizens of a country are “monitored like pieces of an industrial plant,” to quote Clark. Although the slippery slope argument has its critics, it’s not difficult to imagine how such an app, overseen by government officials, could be used to punish the rebels. Clark fears that it’s only a matter of time before employers start “demanding that their employees use the app, and to see diet and exercise history before giving someone a job.”

The National Health Service (NHS), warns Clark, will most likely “use the app for rationing healthcare.” To qualify for certain treatment or medications, an individual may first have to prove that they “are leading a healthy lifestyle.” Clark, clearly concerned, tells readers that the only way to “avoid vaccination passports and health apps from developing into nightmarish constant surveillance” is by rejecting them now.

Although the British government’s desire to implement such a system might surprise some readers, it really shouldn’t. As I have discussed here before, China and the UK have an incredibly close bond. A Beijing-inspired surveillance system was always in the cards.

Meanwhile, Across the Pond

Like the UK, the United States is also flirting with the idea of a digital dictatorship. In a recent article for The Hill, the journalist Kristin Tate discussed a rather worrying partnership between PayPal and the Southern Poverty Law Center. The pair, she writes, will soon investigate and report “white supremacists” and supporters of “anti-government rhetoric.” What metrics will be used to identify white supremacy? Remember, we live in the age of “Black Lives Matter.” Also, what exactly does “anti-government” rhetoric sound like? Furthermore, the Southern Poverty Law Center, for the uninitiated, has a very strong left-leaning bias. One needn’t be Nostradamus to see how this partnership will play out.

Not to be outdone by PayPal and the Southern Poverty Law Center, Facebook, spearheaded by Mark Zuckerberg, recently asked users to report their “extremist” friends. In Tate’s words, “considering the platform’s bias,” such measures seem “mainly to target the political right.” With the convergence of Big Data and Big Government, the panopticon is fast becoming the “panoptechon.”

The “potential scope of the soft social credit system under construction is enormous,” Tate warns. It certainly is. Not only can the likes of Google and Facebook “track your activities,” they may soon be able to “utilize their powers to block transactions, add surcharges or restrict your use of products.”

In the United States, failure to hold certain political views could see an individual blocked from social media and, even more worryingly, unable to conduct financial transactions. The Chinese social credit system works in the exact same manner. In fact, a blacklist exists, and those who find themselves on it are prevented from traveling, purchasing property, and entering certain professions. Let’s hope a similar method of discrimination doesn’t enter American society. But if it does, don’t be surprised. As the editorial board at the Wall Street Journal recently wrote, “The modern progressive speaks the language of high-minded purpose but always ends with coercion.” What’s more coercive than a social credit system? MORE.

Afghanistan and the Sham of Democracy Promotion

By James Bovard

Americans finally recognize the military lies that pervaded the success claims of the 20-year war in Afghanistan. But democracy promotion was an even bigger sham. Afghanistan was Exhibit A for the triumphal crusade to spread freedom and democracy.

After the U.S. invasion in 2001, the U.S. government spent more than $600 million to support elections and democratic procedures in Afghanistan (part of the $143 billion the U.S. spent there for relief and reconstruction). Washington bragging points were always more important than Afghan preferences. “In 2002 and 2003, when Afghan tribal councils gathered to write a new constitution, the U.S. government gave [bribes] to delegates who supported Washington’s preferred stance on human rights and women’s rights,” the Washington Post reported in 2019. President George W. Bush boasted in 2004: “Afghanistan has now got a constitution which talks about freedom of religion and talks about women’s rights…Democracy is flourishing.” Though Bush’s reelection campaign speeches were larded with such lines, women in many parts of Afghanistan continued to be oppressed even worse than characters in American country music songs. One international aid worker commented that during the Taliban era “if a woman went to market and showed an inch of flesh she would have been flogged—now she’s raped.”

Hamid Karzai, the slick operator who the Bush administration installed to rule Afghanistan after 9/11, won a rigged 2004 presidential election. Karzai approved a law that entitled a husband to starve his wife if she refused his sexual demands.

During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama labeled the conflict in Afghanistan the “right war.” By the time Obama took office, the Taliban were vigorously reviving and Afghans were shunning the corrupt puppet regime the U.S. installed in 2002.

President Obama justified his 2009 troop surge in Afghanistan to bolster its democracy. When Obama spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in August 2009, he boasted that “our troops are helping to secure polling places for this week’s election so that Afghans can choose the future that they want.” In reality, Obama effectively sent American soldiers to serve as bodyguards for Karzai’s minions to steal the election. At first glance, Karzai won a narrow victory. But two weeks after the election, the New York Times reported that Karzai’s operatives set up as many as 800 fictitious polling sites “where no one voted but where hundreds of thousands of ballots were still recorded toward the president’s re-election.” In some Afghan provinces, pro-Karzai ballots outnumbered actual voters by tenfold. Peter Galbraith, a senior United Nations official in Afghanistan, was fired after he estimated that a third of Karzai’s votes were bogus. Galbraith wrote, “No amount of spin can obscure the fact that we spent upwards of $200 million on an election that has been a total fiasco” which “handed the Taliban its greatest strategic victory.”

Despite the shenanigans, the Obama administration praised Karzai as if he had won fair and square. The Obama administration told Congress that the decision to send far more U.S. troops to Afghanistan depended on the Afghan government’s “ability to hold credible elections,” among other tests. After the 2009 Afghan election turned into a sham, Obama decided it was “close enough for government work” to democracy. Thanks to Obama’s surge, 1,400 American soldiers died in part to propagate the mirage of Afghan democracy.

Afghan officials conspired for more than 15 years to both multiply and ignore election fraud. As early as 2009, U.S. Admiral Mike Mullen, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that the result was that the Afghan government’s legitimacy “is, at best, in question right now and, at worst, doesn’t exist.” An analysis by the U.S. Agency for International Development of the 2014 Afghan election noted that “several prominent election officials associated with fraud during past elections were promoted or given ministerial appointments.”

Behind closed door, D.C. poohbahs admitted their Afghan charade. At a confidential 2015 National Security Council meeting, President Obama admitted that the U.S. would never “transform Afghanistan into a semblance of a democracy able to defend itself,” the New York Times reported. But that didn’t deter Obama from publicly bragging the following year that U.S. troops and diplomats had helped Afghanistan “establish a democratic government.”

To buttress the new democracy, the U.S. government spent a billion dollars to promote the “rule of law” and justice reform in Afghanistan. But such programs were as wasteful as the rest of the U.S. dollar deluge on that nation. As the Christian Science Monitor noted in mid-2010, the Obama administration’s Agency for International Development “created an atmosphere of frantic urgency about the ‘burn rate’—a measure of how quickly money is spent. Emphasis gets put on spending fast to make room for the next batch from Congress.”

One American contractor received $35 million to promote the rule of law in Afghanistan in part by distributing kites and comic books to kids. The New York Times reported that the contractor “arranged an event to hand out kites and comic books to children. The kites were festooned with slogans about gender equality and rule of law that most of the attendees could not read. Police officers guarding the event stole many of the kites, beating some of the children, while fathers snatched kites from their girls to give to the boys.” A 2015 report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) report found that the Afghan “rule of law” spending had been a dismal failure.

Afghan democracy was a bigger fraud than almost anyone wanted in D.C. would admit. MORE.

Biden Deploys Military Back To Afghanistan After Realizing They Left Behind Millions Of Masks
World

Via The Babylon Bee

KABUL—With only one day remaining until the Taliban’s deadline for American troops to leave Afghanistan, the Biden Administration deployed 22,000 troops back to the area after it was discovered they had left behind millions of precious life-saving COVID masks in warehouses across the country.

“Look—here’s the deal, we have to get those incredibly valuable masks out of harm’s way,” said Biden to a dead squirrel on his front porch. “Masks are our most precious commodity, and we can’t let them fall into the Taliban’s hands. We have no choice. We gotta go get them back!”

Marines will be retaking territories and airstrips throughout the country, securing them and opening up safe passage for the masks to leave the country unharmed.

“Read my lips,” said Biden from behind a COVID mask, “we will leave no mask behind, no matter the cost.”

The military will also be making contact with Americans stranded in the country to make sure they get their second dose of the Pfizer vaccine.

Check out all of the Bee’s takes on a world gone mad HERE.

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