by Surly1, Doomstead Diner
The Great Culling: They Don’t Give a Flying Fuck About You
“If people feel lost and alone and helpless and broken and hopeless today, what will it be like if the world really begins to come apart at the hinges?”
. . . ― Brandon Andress
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If you’ve made it this far all the way through Part 1, you had an opportunity to contemplate the many vectors of environmental ruin headed our way, at a time when collectively we are at one another’s throats with an enthusiasm and sense of purpose rarely seen since the last Civil War.
The current world population is estimated to have reached 7.7 billion people as of April 2019. It took over 200,000 years of human history for the world’s population to reach 1 billion; and only 200 years more to reach 7 billion. We are now faced with automation and AI, at a time of profound income (and thus power) inequality. connect the dots to see that robots and algorithms can replace a lot of labor, which is occurring as we speak. And what happens when any private industry takes over a public one? They slash payroll, loot pensions, and rid themselves of “useless eaters,” and redistribute the savings to “investors.” Wash, rinse, repeat. Thus, whether by design or default, the Great Culling is Coming To a Theater Near You. “The Great Culling” is not about putting fluoride in your drinking water so much as a plan to reduce earth’s population over generations.
RationalWiki calls this a conspiracy theory. And you won’t easily find much credibly written on the subject. Yet it is difficult to consider the toxic hellbroth of the rise of ethno-nationalism, climate emergency, the increasingly oppressive tone and tenor of life under increasingly straightened circumstances, the ethics of investment banks and the logic of the spreadsheet, and conclude that such a plan is not in effect as a practical matter. If this hurts, you can always get some Oxycontin from kids at your local middle school. Here are stories that moved in 20019 that illustrate the point.
Sackler Embraced Plan to Conceal OxyContin’s Strength From Doctors, Sealed Testimony Shows – ProPublica
Opioid epidemic may have cost states at least $130 billion in treatment and related expenses – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg
The blood of poor Americans is now a leading export, bigger than corn or soy
Good to know the FSoA can still make something that other people in the world want to buy. Besides arms, that is.
Harvesting the Blood of America’s Poor: The Latest Stage of Capitalism
When Medical Debt Collectors Decide Who Gets Arrested
Welcome to Coffeyville, Kansas, where the judge has no law degree, debt collectors get a cut of the bail, and Americans are watching their lives – and liberty – disappear in the pursuit of medical debt collection.
Just 100 Companies Will Sign Humanity’s Death Warrant
Digital dystopia: how algorithms punish the poor
Turkish Scientist Sentenced to Prison for Publishing Paper Linking Pollution to Cancer
The Secretary of Agriculture Just Came Out and Said America Is for Big Business
Interesting tack at a meeting of small farmers who are already in trouble.
How Capitalism Torched the Planet by Imploding Into Fascism
Why Catastrophic Climate Change Is Not A Problem For Fascists – It Is A Solution
Martial law masquerading as law and order: The police state’s language of force
The gloves are off: ‘predatory’ climate deniers are a threat to our children
“The Public Is Now Aware That the Elites Are Taking Them To Their Death!” Roger Hallam, Extinction Rebellion
NASA Study Concludes When Civilization Will End, And It’s Not Looking Good for Us
Pentagon Wants 16-Year-Old Kids To Fight The Empire’s Wars
I am among those who think that launching a gratuitous, meat-grinder war in spring of 2020 to self-anoint as a “wartime president™” is completely within Fat Orange’s capability. It may already be part of his campaign plan, given the sheer evil of his administration.
For me, here is the money shot:
If The Donald gets us into a big shooting war over in the Middle East or in the South China Sea, the mandatory servitude of conscription will be required. It won’t be a turkey shoot like Iraq or Libya. It will be an existential threat, so all males – criminally inclined or not – between 16 and 45 will be inducted, same as they were after FDR tricked the Japanese into invading Pearl Harbor, or Johnson said the North Vietnamese attacked our warships in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Anyone who thinks that Iran is going to do an “el foldo” like Saddam Hussein did in Iraq is sadly mistaken. Unlike Iraq, which was cobbled together via the Balfour declaration and held together by Saddam’s brutality, Iran has a long, continuous history as a people and are not going to be exterminated quietly. Since Iran is surrounded by American bases, the outcome will never be much in doubt, but the costs will be extreme and the fighting will be scorched earth. Victory will be had, at the cost of your last grandson or granddaughter, so there is little doubt that Uncle Cracker will be looking for fresh meat.
Savage tick-clone armies are sucking cows to death; experts fear for humans.
Everyone’s Got a “Surveillance Score” and It Can Cost You BIG Money
Congress Targets Middle-Class Retirement Savings
A Stealth Levy on IRAs and 401K Plans to Pay for Corporate and 1% Tax Cuts. Because the Waltons Just Don’t Have Enough.
Humans consume the equivalent of a credit card worth of plastic every week
Mitch McConnell is Making the 2020 Election Open Season for Hackers
Millennials are ‘canaries in the coalmine’ for toxic economic trends, say Stanford scholars
A new report by Stanford scholars lays out the problems U.S. millennials face as a result of decades-long rising inequality. Problems they experience include rising mortality rates and increased poverty among those without college degrees.
Audit: Pentagon Cannot Account for $6.5 Trillion Dollars in Taxpayer Money
Banned bread: why does the US allow additives that Europe says are unsafe?
U.S. HAS SPENT SIX TRILLION DOLLARS ON WARS THAT KILLED HALF A MILLION PEOPLE SINCE 9/11, REPORT SAYS
From New York’s fake heiress to Donald Trump, we’re living in the age of the scam
Everywhere you look, there are people who have figured out ways to game our shoddy system
List of mass shootings in the United States in 2019
Our Towns: What Happens to Abandoned Malls?
Meet the precariat, the new global class fuelling the rise of populism
Suicide, alcohol, drug deaths reach all-time high
When the Interests of Monopolists and Authoritarians Coalesce
The U.S. is funding dangerous experiments it doesn’t want you to know about
No One Trusts the US Government, Not Even the American People – PaulCraigRoberts.org
Crumbling infrastructure is a hidden tax on all Americans
10 Mind-Blowing Pentagon Audit Reports All Americans Need to Know
Dutch historian Rutger Bregman goes viral after challenging Davos panel to talk about taxing the wealthy
Where he said, unforgettably:
I mean, 1,500 private jets flown in to hear David Attenborough speak about how we’re wrecking the planet.
“I hear people talking the language of participation and justice and equality and transparency.
“But then almost no-one raises the real issue of tax avoidance, right, and of the rich just not paying their fair share.
“It feels like I’m at a firefighters’ conference and no-one’s allowed to speak about water.”
He made the mistake of telling the truth.
USDA says filler once known as ‘pink slime’ can be labeled ground beef
E Coli is a vitamin under Trump.
“Beef trimmings are easily contaminated with bacteria such as E. coli or salmonella, so they need to be sterilized with “a puff” of ammonia…”
Bon appetit.
Lying Corporate Media
“Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.”
. . . . – A. J. Liebling
The news media in this country is under assault both from the political establishment and from the same market and technology forces that have disrupted other business sectors. Newspapers are shrinking, press jobs lost, and many towns are without a daily paper in print. And for those that remain are a hollow, shrunken version of their former selves. Smaller, fewer sections, reliance on wire service content: “yesterday’s news tomorrow.” Accelerating their demise is their adherence to a radically false doctrine, that of “Both Sides Do It” and thus “both sides” deserve to be treated with fairness and balance. But that doesn’t work when one side works in relentless bad faith.
The bad faith works as follows:
“We are not bound by what you call facts. We have our own, and we will proceed to put them out regardless of the evidence. We’re not trying to ‘win the news cycle,’ or curry favor with you. We’re trying to demonstrate independence from and power over you people, and stick your own rules up your nose. Your program is a theater of resentment in which you play a crucial part, and since our base hates your guts, we get to score points with them by displaying our contempt for you.”
Here’s an excellent analysis of the failures of Chuck Todd (and by extension, the rest of the corporate media opinion-manufacturing industry) by one of the country’s best observers of the press, Jay Rosen.
The Christmas Eve Confessions of Chuck Todd
After the better part of a career of allowing republican politicians to posit falsehoods as divinely-received wisdom, Chuck Todd had an epiphany:
Three years after Kellyanne Conway introduced the doctrine of “alternative facts” on his own program, a light went on for Chuck Todd. Republican strategy, he now realized, was to make stuff up, spread it on social media, repeat it in your answers to journalists – even when you know it’s a lie with crumbs of truth mixed in – and then convert whatever controversy arises into go-get-em points with the base, while pocketing for the party a juicy dividend: additional mistrust of the news media to help insulate President Trump among loyalists when his increasingly brazen actions are reported as news.
Note that the very guy who has made a living inviting pathological Republican liars to be on his TV show continues to feign shock at the discovery that they pathologically lie when they’re on his TV show. Since taking over the Meet the Press chair from David Gregory, Chuck Todd has displayed the sense of “both sides” faux balance that has made him one of the Republican party’s favorite towel boys. This it would be amusing to see ol’ Chuck protesting and trying to push back with his atrophied, baby arms now that the Republican grifters and Trumpsuckers who come on his show for the purpose of extruding the propaganda do so with the same impunity that he has provided them.
Since 2007 Todd has been NBC’s political director, which means he has influence over all coverage the in-house expert and decision-maker. You don’t get to claim you are naive about politics in such a role. Well, that’s the job. The truth is It’s not naiveté. It’s a willful blindness to what the Republican Party has become.
As such Todd provides a template for most the mass media, whose behavior can be observed (and predicted) though the filter of a quote by Noam Chomsky:
The major media-particularly, the elite media that set the agenda that others generally follow-are corporations “selling” privileged audiences to other businesses. It would hardly come as a surprise if the picture of the world they present were to reflect the perspectives and interests of the sellers, the buyers, and the product. Concentration of ownership of the media is high and increasing. Furthermore, those who occupy managerial positions in the media, or gain status within them as commentators, belong to the same privileged elites, and might be expected to share the perceptions, aspirations, and attitudes of their associates, reflecting their own class interests as well. Journalists entering the system are unlikely to make their way unless they conform to these ideological pressures, generally by internalizing the values; it is not easy to say one thing and believe another, and those who fail to conform will tend to be weeded out by familiar mechanisms.”
Oc course, none of this is new. It was observed by muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair in The Brass Check, a book few of us have ever read, let alone heard of. For those of us who virulently distrust corporate media, it’s good to know that one of the pillars of the muckraking era exposed it all a century ago and despite being on elf the literary lions of the era, had his book constructively buried and erased from history.
A brass check was the token purchased by a customer in a brothel and given to the woman of his choice. Sinclair implies that, in a similar fashion, the owners of the mass media purchase journalists’ services in supporting the owners’ political and financial interests.
Sinclair criticizes newspapers and the Associated Press (owned by newspapers) as ultra-conservative and supporting the political and economic powers that be, or as sensational tabloids practicing yellow journalism, such as newspapers run by William Randolph Hearst. In both cases, their purpose is to promote the business interests of the paper’s owners, the owner’s bankers, and/or the paper’s advertisers. Clearly, some things never change.
For his trouble, Sinclair challenged those who charged him with inaccuracy to review his published facts and to sue him for libel if they found him wrong. None did. But because Sinclair was denied access to the mainstream media to refute such charges, they assumed an aura of truth and gave the book a reputation for inaccuracy that have caused it to be largely forgotten.
Those who reviewed the book found The Brass Check‘s analysis of the media accurate and valuable, “astonishingly prescient in its critique of the coziness of big media and other corporate interests.”
The stories:
Newsweek Journo Quits After Editors Kills Report On Syria Chemical Attack Scandal
The Media Yells Cut Whenever Trump Challenges War and Militarism
Who Will Tell the Truth About the Free Press?
The False Balance Between Fascists and Antifascists
Former Israeli Intel Official Claims Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell Worked for Israeli Intel
A former high-ranking official in Israeli military intelligence has claimed that Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual blackmail enterprise was an Israel intelligence operation run for the purpose of entrapping powerful individuals and politicians in the United States and abroad.
The Incredible Belief That Corporate Ownership Does Not Influence Media Content
The Pentagon Wants More Control Over the News. What Could Go Wrong?
The Pentagon is using a moral panic over “fake news” to gain influence over the domestic news landscape
Corporate Media Filled With Nameless Voices Attacking Progressive Democrats
Of Two Minds – It’s Not Just the News That’s Fake – Everything’s Fake
Tiptoeing around Trump’s racism is a betrayal of journalistic truth-telling
Asymmetry between the major parties fries the circuits of the mainstream press – PressThink
Per one source, Russia has seen 42 Journalists killed during Putin’s Rule
Trump and Putin Joke About ‘Getting Rid of Journalists’ on Anniversary of Capital Gazette Shooting
Some Real News About Fake News
It’s not just making people believe false things – a new study suggests it’s also making them less likely to consume or accept information.
Fake Has Become Realer Than Real And The Dogs Of War Are There To Keep It That Way
This is long; you may want to pack a lunch, but it is well reported, and I’ll bet you’ve never heard a bit of it. By design.
Economic Fix is In
“The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing.”
. . . . – Frank Zappa
“If you sit in on a poker game and don’t see a sucker, get up. You’re the sucker.”
Crony capitalism that in which businesses thrive not as a result of risk, but rather as a return on money amassed through a nexus between a business class and the political class. Typical tools include permits, government grants, tax breaks, or other forms of state intervention, especially where the state can confer public goods. Think “looting of the commons.”
America’s economy was a success in the 19th century due the plunder of a pristine environment and abundant natural resources. Before the frontier was closed, all one had to show up and build wealth using what was at hand. The world wars finished off Europe as an economic dynamo, bankrupted the British empire, and put economic and financial supremacy in Washington’s hands. The US dollar became the world reserve currency, enabling the US to pay its bills by printing money. And enabling the US to plunder foreign resources the way vanishing American resources had once been plundered. We plunder in a more sophisticated way now; see John Perkins in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man for how that works.
As it gets harder and harder for corporations to make an honest buck, they have to go “where the money is,” much like bank robbers did before credit card fraud. And tht means you: your pension, your Social Security, your 401K. They want it, and they’ll get it. Meanwhile, economic life in the “Home of the Brave, Land of the Free” means death by a thousand cuts for too many people. Here are 2019 stories that make the point:
The US Economy Is a System of Plunder
We Can Only Choose One: Our National Economy or Globalization
The world is sitting on a $400 trillion financial time bomb
Why the middle class can’t afford life in America anymore
Fed Ups Its Wall Street Bailout to $690 Billion a Week as Media Snoozes
Connecting the Dots to the Budding Wall Street Crisis
The Dirtiest Secret Capitalism Doesn’t Want You to Know
Have the Slow, Catastrophic Costs of Capitalism Exceeded the Long-Term Benefits? Or, Why Capitalism Failed Spectacularly as a Global Economy
The Repo Loan Crisis, Dead Bankers, and Deutsche Bank: Timeline of Events
This is (just another) absolutely terrific review by the Martens. If you read nothing about money, read this. The timeline is particularly telling, especially this gem:
May 19, 2019: The New York Times’ David Enrich writes the bombshell report describing how a Deutsche Bank whistleblower, Tammy McFadden, and four of her colleagues, had their efforts blocked by the bank when they tried to file suspicious activity reports on bank accounts affiliated with Donald Trump and his son-in-law/advisor Jared Kushner. The suspicious activity reports (SARs) should have been filed with the Federal agency known as FinCEN (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) but were quashed by a unit of the bank that manages money for the super wealthy. The article appeared in the print edition of the New York Times on Monday, May 20, 2019. The stock closes that day at $7.43.
We’re back to counting dead bankers. It may be that having HIV is safer than working for Deutsche Bank.
Day After Trump Said ‘Inequality Is Down,’ Federal Data Shows US Income Inequality Highest Since Census Began Measuring
How Much (Money) Does America Really Have to Invest in its Future?
The answer, of course, is the triumph of libertarian PR. Every man an individual, in the endless war of all against all.
America’s Collapse: An Economy Based on Plunder
Noam Chomsky: “Worship of Markets” Is Threatening Human Civilization
Revenge of the Power Grid
The ‘giant sucking sound’ of NAFTA: Ross Perot was ridiculed as alarmist in 1992 but his warning turned out to be prescient
New Survey: 69% Of U.S. CFOs Believe That A Recession Will Start “By The End Of 2020”
The Wealth Detective Who Finds the Hidden Money of the Super Rich
Social Security Benefits Have Lost 33% of Their Buying Power Since 2000
Economic Hitman John Perkins reveals US-led Blueprint for Acquiring Countries
The Coming Generation War
Russia tops global gold buyers list as it turns away from US dollar
Deep adaptation, post-sustainability and the possibility of societal collapse
The Internet Knows You Better Than Your Spouse Does
Found this article on Scientific American this morning while compiling the paper. Gives a glimpse at the sort of tools already in use to track us, sift and resell our preferences, for purposes unknown. What could possibly go wrong? The traces we leave on the Web and on our digital devices can give advertisers and others surprising, and sometimes disturbing, insights into our psychology
“Middle Class” Once Meant Stability and Now Means Fragility
What Don’t fit
This is a grab-bag where a number of doom- and collapse-related stories of note that don’t fit the other categories have gone to die.
The Ultimate Doom Post | Just kidding, it’s worse than that.
2019 hasn’t been easy and the word of the year proves it
The mainstreaming of Occupy Wall Street: How rethinking American capitalism became the most important debate of the 2010s
Fleecing the Flock: A Snapshot of America’s Richest Pastors
Even among people who observe and measure how the wheels are coming off the wagon, plenty of disagreement. An old Diner friend Ugo Bardi makes an appearance in this article.
The Collapse of Civilization May Have Already Begun
Scientists disagree on the timeline of collapse and whether it’s imminent. But can we afford to be wrong? And what comes after?
All Great Civilizations Fall. Is America Next?
Read Sacha Baron Cohen’s scathing attack on Facebook in full: ‘greatest propaganda machine in history’
We’re running out of time to stop killer robots
A new report warns that they’re coming sooner than you think
CIA, the Real Lords of The Poppy-Fields & Striking White Gold in Afghanistan
‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations
How America Failed to Understand its Own Collapse
Google Is Coming for Your Face
Personal data is routinely harvested from the most vulnerable populations, without transparency, regulation, or principles – and this should concern us all.
Did a large meteorite hit the earth 12,800 years ago? Here’s new evidence
Democracy Is Now a Hindrance to the Imperial State
Democracy is the coat of paint applied for PR purposes to the Imperial State.
White House Pressed Agency to Repudiate Weather Forecasters Who Contradicted Trump
Why “Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself” Became a Populist Battle Cry
‘This Will Teach You Next Time,’ 911 Dispatcher Told Arkansas Woman Who Later Drowned.
Debbie Stevens was delivering morning newspapers in her S.U.V. when she was swept away by floodwaters in Fort Smith, Ark.
‘We are moving into a new, controlled society worse than old totalitarianism’ – Zizek on Google leak
Study Finds Rise In ‘Doomsday Prepping’ Due To Mainstream American ‘Culture Of Fear’
The Granddaddy of American Conspiracy Theorists
Decades before QAnon, false flags, “crisis actors” and Alex Jones, there was Milton William Cooper.
Long before there was a Diner, long before 9-11, there was Milton William Cooper. His book was an underground sensation. The Hour of the Time radio program was also circulated and downloaded long before podcasts existed; I have them all. Cooper was right about so many things, including 9-11, and the fact that he knew that by telling the truth, they would come for him and kill him. Which they did.
First human-monkey chimera raises concern among scientists
Researchers reprogrammed human cells before injecting them in the monkey embryo
This is what algorithms see when they spy on you in public
They see a lot more than you think and can make inferences about everything from personal relationships to life expectancy to “social worth.”
Why an “AI Race” Between the U.S. and China Is a Terrible, Terrible Idea
‘Years and Years’ is TV’s most haunting show
Foreskin reclaimers: the ‘intactivists’ fighting infant male circumcision
The U.S. Military Will Have More Robots Than Humans by 2025
We spoke to survivalists prepping for disaster: here’s what we learned about the end of the world
ARE WE LIVING IN THE DAWNING OF ALFONSO CUARÓN’S CHILDREN OF MEN?
The Unimaginable Reality of American Concentration Camps
China forcefully harvests organs from detainees, tribunal concludes
Organ transplant trade is worth $1 billion a year.
Senators get classified briefing on UFO sightings
Tennessee Pastor Who Repeatedly Raped Daughter, 14, Gets Light Sentence Because Jesus
Was Shakespeare a Woman?
A thousand guns were found in an LA mansion. Then the mystery deepened
Trump Wants to Make It Legal for Debt Collectors to Text You “Where’s the Money, A$$hole?”
Ethiopian Bible is oldest and most complete on earth
Scientists Call for a Moratorium on Editing Inherited Genes
Amid a controversy over gene-edited babies, leading researchers want to call a halt and install a global governance process.
Opium-Addicted Parrots Are Terrorizing Poppy Farms in India
The Inconvenient Truth of Modern Civilization’s Inevitable Collapse
Medieval Letter Reveals Bawdy Nun Who Faked Her Death to Escape Convent
When the Trucks Stop Delivering, ‘The System’ Will Collapse
And that’s a year’s worth of doom. As we head into a pivital year of impeachment, elections and the usual schemes, here’s hoping we’re together back here next year “pretending that the downside doesn’t exist.” Enjoy your new year!
Read Part 1.
Appeared on Doomstead Diner 29 December 2019.
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