I never go there anymore, unless I want to check if they have smeared someone whose work I’m newly interested in. If they have, it’s part of my triangulation that I have likely found a good guy.
I like working within some people’s slipstream. In this period, I’m in Jimmy’s peloton. Some of his videos, like the one in the masthead, have the effect of generating a bunch of ideas and threads that need catching and caging before they pass; in which case they might never have happened.
The first thing I thought of listening to Dore was Liam Scheff who called it the “CIA fact-book”.
Here are excerpts from Official Stories where Scheff refers to Wiki.
And now, a rant: I'm sorry, but how can anyone grow up to be President if we've got this list of Nazi-trading Wall Street banking clowns in front of us - two Presidents, one a V.P. and head of the C.I.A.? And look up Brown Brothers on the CIA fact-book (that is, “Wikipedia”) and find not a whiff of “Nazi” on the company's page. On the Prescott page, you get a hint of it - “Trading with the Enemy,” but it's lip-stickity glossed over. That is influence you and I cannot afford.
This one did: Iran-Contra. If you want to know how rogue CIA-sponsored military agents are punished, look up “Oliver North” on the Wikipedia (or as I call it, the CIA factbook). Answer, he's rich and famous and done with his community service. You think they send their own to prison? Why do I bash the Wikipedia? Try to get anything truly revealing or damning up on those pages; you'll meet the army of ghosts, paid hackers and counter-intelligence propaganda agents who waste your time and tell you that your input is not required or welcome. Some “free and democratic source of information” that turned out to be. But the CIA has a name for that too.
You can look up Amalgam Virgo, even on the CIA factbook (the Wikipedia) and download the PDF of its tactical exercises. You'll note that it says, “Predictions are that the U.S. may be operating as many as 2,000 UAVs [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles] in 5-10 years. The market is ready to explode.” It shows Global Hawks and other unmanned, flying, missile-launching, jet-powered robot planes. Gives you a little shiver, doesn't it?
To this day, the medical authorities consider this proof that a virus causes cancer. Go to the “CIA factbook” (the Wikipedia) and look up HTLV-I. There you will find it is called, “The first cancer-causing virus.” Sure, all relevant details are omitted, but don't sweat it. This is the rational for HPV, the virus that doesn't cause cervical cancer. (Which is cleared from the body naturally by almost everyone, say the experts and if not, is gotten rid of with a little seaweed - see “HPV” in the previous chapter.)
If you open your college textbook, or “CIA factbook” (the Wikipedia), you will be instructed that plate tectonics was a revolution in science that demonstrated, without issue, how the Earth works. You will also be told that Earth is the only planet that works this way. "Earth is the only planet where subduction is known to occur. Without subduction, plate tectonics could not exist." (Wikipedia: "Subduction")
Or, try this: the mainstream is so gummed up with this one, that they have to really sell it. The blighted Wikipedia – where the scientific elite posts their edicts, where information goes to die – is forced to say the following: “Earth is the only planet where subduction is known to occur. Without subduction, plate tectonics could not exist.” (Wikipedia: “Subduction”)
What I find interesting reading Scheff’s excerpts is the breadth of the subjects “interfered” with. The number of “Official Stories” that need protecting. That’s what has really taken me aback, just how many reality distortions there are. Important subjects veer into other lanes, they merge with other important subjects. If you have distorted one area, it will not survive if it wanders into someone else’s “honest” backyard, the “truth” will beat it up. So, that discipline will need a bit or a lot of capture and bending.
If you are bilingual (or multilingual) you will truly understand how manipulative Wikipedia really is. People who only speak one language don't even remotely understand the scope of the manipulation. I would constantly check wiki pages about the same topic in different languages and the information presented in each page is completely different. The sources are also never the same. This magnifies the differences between people who read these pages and works to provide more division. - @SpartiuS94
Here is an interesting passage, from section 11, of Jacob Siegel’s quite amazing:
Faced with an external threat in the form of Trumpism, the natural cohesion and self-organizing dynamics of the social class were fortified by new top-down structures of coordination that were the goal and the result of Obama’s national mobilization. In the run-up to the 2020 election, according to reporting by Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein for The Intercept, “tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Verizon Media met on a monthly basis with the FBI, CISA, and other government representatives … to discuss how firms would handle misinformation during the election.”
Yes, Wiki, in the runup to the hockey stick election of 2020 “…met on a monthly basis with the FBI, CISA, and other government representatives … to discuss how firms would handle misinformation during the election.”.
What do you call it when the government and business collude[i] against the citizen…?
“I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo.” -- President Harry Truman - @ScarlettFire341
Wikipedia In June of 2021, Wikipedia’s then Executive Director Katherine Maher appeared at a conference hosted by the Atlantic Council, where she was interviewed by NBC reporter Brandy Zadrozny about “how big tech can be as trusted as Wikipedia.” The thrust of the report was that Wikipedia had refused a request by the Turkish government to take down “two pages that they did not appreciate references to President Erdogan and his family and their involvement in the Syrian civil war as a state sponsor of terrorism,” which led to a ban of the site that was overturned to great fanfare in 2020. Wikipedia, like many tech behemoths, plays the role of a defender of free speech in certain circumstances, but lately it has become perhaps the most furious grindstone of digital conformity in Western media outside Twitter, Google, and Facebook, institutionalizing a system of blockages that increasingly only let through information reported on in an approving way by large corporate or academic institutions (it has been a great struggle to get Twitter Files material on the site, for instance). Wikipedia was once seen as one of the great experiments in open-source media, and identified with legal challenges to things like the NSA’s illegal domestic surveillance program, but has become just another member of the cartel-like “industry call” that includes the FBI, Twitter, and Facebook (the Twitter Files show the exact moment in which Wikipedia asks for a “disinformation” contact at the FBI), and has taken rigid stands on ridiculous issues like the definition of “recession.”
Former Executive Director Katherine Maher is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a World Economic Forum young global leader, a security fellow at the Truman National Security Project, and a fellow at DFRLabs at the Atlantic Council, the military-industrial complex’s favorite Think Tank. It’s amazing how far selling encyclopedias can take you.
Guys don't believe what he says [Jimmy Dore], he is a conspiracy theorist. It says so in his Wikipedia page. - @wanderlust0120
Dore mentions Information Warfare[ii]. Yes, he’s right.
What is it exactly? If we read a dummies guide on the subject it would say:
Components of Information Warfare
1. Cyber Warfare: Involves hacking, data breaches, and cyber-espionage to disrupt or manipulate digital infrastructure.
2. Psychological Operations (PsyOps): Aimed at influencing the opinions, emotions, and behaviour of individuals or groups through the use of propaganda or misinformation.
3. Electronic Warfare: Involves jamming, intercepting, and manipulating electronic signals to disrupt enemy communications and radar.
4. Intelligence Operations: Gathering and analysing information to make informed decisions and to counter enemy strategies.
5. Deception and Counter-deception: Creating or promoting false information to mislead the enemy, while also working to uncover such tactics used by the adversary.
Wiki is part of points 2 and 5.
The above description of warfare is true when two warring parties are fighting over something. You know, like when two countries fighting over a border.
Is “warfare” in this case an apt framing?
Yes.
Business and Government, around the world, have been brought together, against YOU. Yes, just YOU, and just ME and just every other person that thought their government “would never do that”.
What do they want? Everything.
Your mind.
Your obedience.
Your health.
Your money.
Your property.
Your mobility.
Your DNA.
Your privacy.
Your food.
Your conscious.
Your morality.
I’m sure I’ve missed something…but you get the picture.
Information is all about Reality (with a capital R, you can use TM also, as required).
Nobody talks about Reality better than CJ Hopkins, so I want him to have the last few words. Emphasis all mine.
There is nothing subtle about this process. Decommissioning one “reality” and replacing it with another is a brutal business. Societies grow accustomed to their “realities.” We do not surrender them willingly or easily. Normally, what’s required to get us to do so is a crisis, a war, a state of emergency, or … you know, a deadly global pandemic.
During the changeover from the old “reality” to the new “reality,” the society is torn apart. The old “reality” is being disassembled and the new one has not yet taken its place. It feels like madness, and, in a way, it is. For a time, the society is split in two, as the two “realities” battle it out for dominance. “Reality” being what it is (i.e., monolithic), this is a fight to the death. In the end, only one “reality” can prevail.
To understand it (which it would behoove us to do), we need to understand global-capitalist ideology, which isn’t as easy as it sounds. Global capitalism has no ideology … or, rather, its ideology is “reality.” When you have no ideological adversaries, you don’t need an ideology. You’re basically God. “Reality” is whatever you say it is, and whoever disagrees is a “science denier,” or a “conspiracy theorist,” or a “malinformationist,” or some other type of deluded “extremist.” You don’t need to argue ideology with anyone, because you have no ideological opponents. Society is divided into two fundamental groups, (a) “normal people,” who accept “reality,” and (b) the “deviants” and “extremists,” who do not. Your political and ideological opponents are pathologized, preemptively delegitimized. After all, who would argue against “reality” except liars and the clinically insane?
OK, before somebody calls me a “conspiracy theorist,” GloboCap is not a bunch of guys in a room conspiring to do all this. Global capitalism is a system. Systems function according to their own structures and logic. What I'm talking about is not individual people conspiring (although individual people certainly do, and that is part of it). I'm talking about the logical evolution of a global-hegemonic ideological system, i.e., a system without external enemies, which has nothing left to do but consolidate power and eliminate internal resistance. If you understand the last 5-6 years (actually the last 30 years) that way, as I do, this shift to a less democratic, more ideologically monolithic, more totalitarian social structure (i.e., the “New Normal”) is not at all surprising. On the contrary, it is the next logical step.
And finally, this has to go down as one of the most piercing insights ever written.
Capitalism is a value-decoding machine. Its objective is to completely decode society of any values that impede the free flows of capital, rendering everything and everyone a de facto commodity, transforming societies into markets. It can adapt to totalitarianism and other varieties of despotism when necessary, but left to its own devices, or … you know, granted dominion over the entire Earth, and every creeping thing that creeps upon it, it sets about decoding and destabilizing values, destabilizing value and meaning itself, until, ultimately, everything means anything, or nothing, or whatever the market determines it means or is worth at any given moment.
Back in 2007 I was taking my son on college tours to high end schools and my son always wanted to check out the libraries. I was fascinated with the books they had, copies dating back from books hundreds years old. I went back to the school and those old history and philosophy books are gone. I asked the librarian what happened with the books and they said they were in the basement, who needs books when you can just go online. I told her that the internet is controlled by the government, the books aren’t and then she asked me if I was a student and when I said no she called security to have me thrown out. It’s funny because when I was there in 2007 they said it was great that I was there and had interest in the library, I just could not check a book out. - @JH-rk9gd
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If you want to help someone, give them a book. Official Stories by Liam Scheff. Point them to a safe chapter (here and here), and they will find their way to vaccination.
Information warfare refers to the use and management of information to gain a strategic or tactical advantage. This can involve the collection, analysis, and dissemination of information, as well as efforts to deny, degrade, or manipulate the information used by adversaries. Information warfare is not confined to any single domain; it spans across cyber, psychological, and electronic warfare, among other areas.
Components of Information Warfare
1. Cyber Warfare: Involves hacking, data breaches, and cyber-espionage to disrupt or manipulate digital infrastructure.
2. Psychological Operations (PsyOps): Aimed at influencing the opinions, emotions, and behaviour of individuals or groups through the use of propaganda or misinformation.
3. Electronic Warfare: Involves jamming, intercepting, and manipulating electronic signals to disrupt enemy communications and radar.
4. Intelligence Operations: Gathering and analysing information to make informed decisions and to counter enemy strategies.
5. Deception and Counter-deception: Creating or promoting false information to mislead the enemy, while also working to uncover such tactics used by the adversary.
Types of Information Warfare
1. Offensive: Aimed at attacking the enemy’s information systems and infrastructure.
2. Defensive: Aimed at protecting one’s own information systems and infrastructure from enemy attacks.
3. Civil: Targeted at civilian populations to influence public opinion or to incite action.
Real-world Examples
1. Election Interference: Manipulating social media and spreading disinformation to influence electoral outcomes.
2. Corporate Espionage: Hacking into databases to steal sensitive business information.
3. Military Operations: Using electronic jamming techniques to disrupt enemy communications during a conflict.
References
1. Libicki, M. C. (1995). What is Information Warfare? National Defense University.
2. Waltzman, R. (2017). The Weaponization of Information: The Need for Cognitive Security. RAND Corporation.
3. Lonsdale, D. J. (2016). The Nature of War in the Information Age: Clausewitzian Future. Routledge.
4. Harknett, R. J., & Goldman, E. O. (2016). The Search for Cyber Fundamentals. Journal of Information Warfare.
Wikipedia