Random Thoughts - Neglected Truths

by
       M. Richard Maxson                         

 "The truth will not be denied. The truth always wins. To the extent that we align ourselves with it, we thrive. To the extent that we deny it, we suffer."                                                               - Unknown

      Thomas Sowell wrote the column Random Thoughts. With his retirement we have combined his title with our version. Here are some random observations and truths for your collective consciousness.

• This is #FakeNews - Aleppo's last functioning hospital was reported destroyed by Russia no less than 12 times between August and November last year by the Western media.
• George Orwell once said that “in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Since he offered those words decades ago, we have seen deceit become a pervasive and global problem, where the general public really has no clue what is happening around the world.

• It is no secret that the U.S. is far from democracy, even in its own understanding. The American power vertical is riddled with numerous lobbyists, and media is monopolized by a few oligarchs who are so influential that they are independent from the government.

• Although racism has been gradually decreasing in the U.S., the left is attempting to portray it as rapidly expanding in order to keep minorities voting for Democrats.
• The people you see on cable news shows who are listed as “contributors” or “talk show hosts” or “strategists” have no more knowledge on the topic they’re discussing in authoritative tones than your dog does most of the time. It’s a problem because when average people watch these shows, they expect to get legitimate news. They speak with confidence to people who also don’t know, and the audience believes them because being on TV news programs confers credibility.
• Why do the police in America now have grenade throwers, a weapon that kills indiscriminately and is banned from use against the civilian population by international law?
•  How we have arrived at a point where supposedly respectable outlets have created a world where Vladimir Putin has managed to become the richest man in the world (Washington Post), who controls Donald Trump (Huffington Post) and masterminded his election victory (Vanity Fair) despite battling Aspergers (USA Today), and cancer (The Week)?
• Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, revealed that more than 400 journalists and news executives work for the CIA. They included journalists from the New York Times, Time, and the TV networks.
• If there’s one thing this election cycle has exposed it’s just how symbiotic the relationship between the Democratic Party and the media is. Newspapers might as well run Democratic press releases with reporters’ bylines at this point
• The "elite" media, the political class, Hollywood and university professors think their opinions are obviously correct, so they must forcibly educate us peasants.
• How can the NSA get instant access to your emails and phone calls? Quite easily. Both the Patriot Act and the USA Freedom Act unconstitutionally do away with the probable cause requirement for warrants. Those two laws permit the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to issue warrants based on the standard of "governmental needs" rather than probable cause. This is a profoundly unconstitutional standard, and one that has resulted in spying on all people all the time.
• It's not only the US Constitution that's being violated. This violates other countries sovereignty as well. In Germany, in testimony before the NSA investigation committee in the Bundestag, Germany's  parliament, heavyweight constitutional law experts Hans-Jürgen Papier, Wolfgang Hoffmann-Riem and Matthias Bäcker stated that it's own security agency, BND, is potentially violating the German constitution by working with data received from the NSA. Furthermore, they argued that basic constitutional rights such as the privacy of correspondence, post and telecommunications are being violated.
• A Pew Research poll released last week showed that 64% of Democrats believe that NSA surveillance is acceptable.
  

Hollywood - The Left's Propaganda Machine

By

      George Sontag

"Let me control the media and I will turn any nation into a herd of pigs”

                                                                      – Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels

      Like the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, big lies and propaganda are delivered through film and television shows with the precision of a metronome on a daily basis. Their goal is to radically change the culture through subliminal entertainment. They know that once you see, hear, or read something enough times, you start to think it’s actually true.

      Sitting down with your family to watch an evening of television the first thing you may notice is that every show has a prominent “gay character.” This is the ultimate media disconnect. Both news and entertainment bombard Americans with images of gay weddings, gay adoptions, and transgender triumphs, all claiming to be what NBC called ‘the new normal.” The scale of this is a lie. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently released a large-scale, first-of-its-kind government survey that stated that just 1.6 percent of American adults identify as homosexual, yet in our entertainment, that figure is ten-fold. The CDC numbers prove what we’ve been told might describe Hollywood, but not the rest of America.

      The propaganda is working. A Gallup survey found that 52 percent of Americans believed that 25 percent of the population was either gay or lesbian. Only 4 percent of people surveyed at that time thought that the homosexual population was less than 5 percent. The problem with popular culture is that production and distribution of entertainment is concentrated in the hands of the few, and they are all Liberals. Despite one failed movie and TV show after another that sought to undermine American and Conservative values, Hollywood still hasn’t gotten the picture.

      What happens in movies, television, music, whatever, eventually makes its way into the political realm and that is no accident. When liberal politicians want to raise funds and seek help for their campaigns, Hollywood is the first place they turn. Dr. David Prindle, professor of government at the University of Texas, Austin, conducted a 1990 study of Tinsel Town movie, television, and entertainment business luminaries and found that "the leaders in Hollywood were overwhelmingly liberal in their ideology." Just 30 percent of the public said they were liberal, compared to 60 percent of Hollywood's elite. While 43 percent of the general public said they were conservative, only 14 percent of Hollywood leaders claimed the label.

      The Sony attack, released by WikiLeaks, sent shockwaves through the U.S. entertainment industry when hackers leaked sensitive corporate data. The archive details Sony Pictures’ ties to the White House and connections to the Democratic Party. On more than one occasion then president Obama also met with a who's who of film industry leaders, including the chief executives of Lionsgate Entertainment , Twentieth Century Fox Film, The Walt Disney Co , and Warner Brothers and the WikiLeaks archive, which contains 30,287 documents and 173,132 emails, sheds light on Sony Pictures’ relationships with government.

      Talk show host Ben Shapiro interviewed several major Hollywood primetime television producers -- the people who make the fare we see. One after another, they saluted -- even cheered -- their hostility toward conservative America. Some bragged about injecting liberal messages in programming, while admitting they refuse to knowingly hire a conservative. MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell, formerly a "West Wing" writer, explained why the show lacked sympathetic Republican characters: "You'll never, ever, get the Republican TV show. The Writers Guild of America, my union, is, at a minimum, 99 percent leftist liberal.

      "In Hollywood, if you say you're a conservative, the translation is you're a bad person," Ben Shapiro, author of "Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV" and host of "The Ben Shapiro Show,"

      We hear complaints all the time – patriots complaining about the messages coming out of Hollywood - “Hollywood is full of liberals.” This is true. Hollywood is a bastion of like-minded, unthinking liberalism. "They are very much to the left of the public in general on social, foreign policy, and economic issues," Shapiro said.

      “Conservatives need to engage in pop culture.” This is true as well. But what happens when they do? Recently, Tim Allen, relayed a dispicable truth, “You’ve gotta be real careful around here,” he said on Jimmy Kimmel Live. “You get beat up if don’t believe what everybody believes.” Allen jokingly added, “This is like ’30s Germany. I don’t know what happened. If you’re not part of the group, ‘you know what we believe is right,’ I go, ‘Well, I might have a problem with that.'”

      Allen had experienced a bit of backlash over his previous comments about Trump. “What I find odd in Hollywood is that they didn’t like Trump because he was a bully, but if you had any kind of inkling that you were for Trump, you got bullied for doing that. And it gets a little bit hypocritical to me.” 

      Thanks to an omnipresent, repetitive media and its virulent censorship by omission our nation's culture is changing. In today's America most writers, hosts and everyone else for that matter, make at least occasional references, if not flat-out word-for-word quotes of the Leftist agenda. This is not an accident. This is proof positive that Hollywood is a bastion of liberal politics. Pop culture is the fertilizer for the seeds from which the future sprouts. To many Americans the future looks grim.

Europeans, Russians, and Americans Speak Out About the Elitist's Plan for WWIII

By

Philip Todd

      We live in a world of manipulation and propaganda,

handed down to us by the global elite. Their agenda is quite simple – profit and power. To obtain their goals with the least amount of resistance, they use fear. Their main objective is a decades old dream to take control of Russia. The massive amount of untapped natural resources is the prize and they feel now is the time to push hard to obtain them.

      From the expansion of NATO eastward to the coup in Ukraine the encirclement campaign is charging ahead and the threat of a limited nuclear war is not a detriment to their cause. The elite now feel that is not only survivable but an acceptable consequence. We hear their narrative in our media but what do saner minds that are not being indoctrinated or controlled by the elitists think?

      Here, are real quotes from real people, not unnamed sources, about the true state of the West and the U.S. led NATO policies that the people who are pushing the agenda would rather you not know. These are views that are just not seen in the U.S. media as they run counter to the elite's agenda.

• "If the tit-for-tat deployment of missiles continues at the pace and trajectory that it has done over the last few years the Polish-Russia border will become the equivalent of the North-South Korean border – a no man’s land. And then how do we get back from that cliff edge; what are the levers in place to try to rein in the escalating tensions? It’s a very serious situation."
  

                                        - Daniel Kawczynsky, member of Foreign

                                     Affairs Select Committee in the UK Parliament

• "Russia understands as well as China (and U.S. strategists, for that matter) that the U.S. missile defense systems near Russia’s borders are, in effect, a first-strike weapon, aimed to establish strategic primacy — immunity from retaliation.”

                                  - NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg

• "The pretext for stationing these missiles in Poland was to deter a threat from Iran, but their nuclear problem has been solved. From Iran, there is no threat and there never had been,The only reason that was used by U.S.—to start building the Missile Defense Shield—disappeared. We [Russia] might have expected that a system of MDS development to be halted. Some days ago, the first tests of USA’s MDS were conducted in Europe. What does that mean? It means that when we were arguing with our American partners we were right. Russia was right from the beginning that the American Missile Defense Shield program was being developed with the goal to destroy strategic balance and to have a way to dictate her power to everyone. They were trying to deceive us, and the whole world, once again. And, to put it simply, we were lied to.”

                                                           - Vladimir Putin

• "... the situation between the U.S. and Russia today is more dangerous than it was during the Cold War. For Russia, a Ukraine dominated by a third power, with forces deployed in Ukraine, represents a fundamental threat to its national security." 

                                   - German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier

• "Over the past 25 years, we haven't been able to establish stable relations with Russia, but Russia is our neighbor, it's an EU external border, it is important... to go on working in the framework of the Russia-NATO Council, and the common fight against Islamic terrorism.”

                                                            - German Chancellor Angela Merkel

• "It's NATO, not Russia, that has deployed tanks to Poland & Baltic States"
                                                    

                                                            – George Galloway

• "What kind of relationship do we want with the US? One [based on] pragmatism, mutual respect, and an understanding of special responsibility for global stability. NATO's expansion has led to an unprecedented level of tension over the last 30 years in Europe. Russia is not looking for conflicts with anyone, but will always be able to protect its interests.”

                                    - Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov

• "....the United States is inciting a deadly war against Russia that “could result in total destruction” of both countries. The growing conflict between the United States and Russia over the Ukraine conflict is a result of Washington struggling to maintain its hegemony and making extremely provocative moves in Eastern Europe.“

                            - Former American Congressman Ron Paul

• "The conflict that Washington has created with Russia is entirely Washington’s doing.”

                                                   - Paul Craig Roberts

      The good news is that more and more people across the globe are starting to wake up to all of the misinformation being spread on a daily basis, and that includes the agenda of those behind it. Even a decade ago, the mass populace was not as aware that all is not as it seems, and as a result of this mass awakening, our perception, our thoughts, our collective consciousness is beginning to shift. We no longer see the world the way it has been presented to us, and we are starting to realize that simply waking up to all of the propaganda that surrounds us is creating big problems for the global elite. The very first step to changing a problem is to first recognize that problem, and we are still in that process. The more people recognize what’s really happening in our world, the more people will take a stand and do whatever they can to change it.

* Philip Todd in the European columnist for The American Constituionalist.

Professional Propaganda Flows daily in the United States

By

      George Sontag

     Who is really controlling the United States? Most drones would say Donald Trump and they would be wrong. They are those who believe everything they see and hear on the media soundbites. Soundbites were invented for a reason and it was not to bring the truth of a situation to the public. It is to deprive them of most all of the facts and shape the story to fit their agenda.

      The media sets itself up as righteous and fair and maybe at one time in our history this was true but the fact is that they have become George Orwell's Ministry of Truth, presenting the public their own reality. Question the validity of a report and you will quickly be slandered and persecuted for your individualism and independent critical thinking. Your version (understanding) of the facts will be labeled “fake news”(thought crimes) that must be corrected by the news media (thought police.)

Who, you say?

     It is the inner circle of powerful international bankers [who] virtually run the United States government and all of it's agencies for their own selfish purposes, controlling both parties and the majority of newspapers and magazines. They use the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of office public officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government. We live in a world of manipulation and propaganda, handed down to us by the global elite. The use of the U.S. military and the CIA in disbursing the false narratives has been known for decades.

     

The mis-information began directly after WWII when the defense contractors had to tool down it's production of war materials. Facing a huge loss in revenue the idea to manipulate the media to keep the American public fearful was instituted by using the CIA as it's “reliable source.” Thus began the “War for Profit” industry and the factories revved up and economy flourished. The cold war had begun. Perpetual Fear = Perpetual Wars = Perpetual Profits, and it continues to this day.

Want facts?

• The United States Senate Select Committee to Study
  
  Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities found in 1975 that the CIA submitted a huge amount of stories to the American press:

• After 1953, the network was overseen by Allen W. Dulles, director of the CIA. By this time, Operation Mockingbird had a major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. The usual methodology was placing reports developed from intelligence provided by the CIA to witting or unwitting reporters. Those reports would then be repeated or cited by the preceding reporters which in turn would then be cited throughout the media wire services. The Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) was funded by siphoning off funds intended for the Marshall Plan [i.e. the rebuilding of Europe by the U.S. after WWII]. Some of this money was used to bribe journalists and publishers.

                                             

• Famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein wrote: “More than 400 American journalists … in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations. Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were [the heads of CBS, Time, the New York Times, the Louisville Courier-Journal, and Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include [ABC, NBC, AP, UPI, Reuters], Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune.”
• A CIA operative told Washington Post owner Philip Graham … in a conversation about the willingness of journalists to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories: “You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month.”

• When Newsweek was purchased by the Washington Post Company, publisher Philip L. Graham was informed by Agency officials that the CIA occasionally used the magazine for cover purposes, according to CIA sources. “It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from,” said a former deputy director of the Agency. “Frank Wisner dealt with him.” Wisner, deputy director of the CIA from 1950 until shortly before his suicide in 1965, was the Agency’s premier orchestrator of “black” operations, including many in which journalists were involved. 

• One of the best examples comes from 2016, when the Pentagon was caught paying a PR firm more than half a billion dollars to create fake terrorist videos.

     There are thousands of examples of these covert operations running right under the noses of an unsuspecting -mind controlled public. Newly-declassified documents show that a senior CIA agents and the Deputy Director of the Directorate of Intelligence worked closely with the owners and journalists of many of the largest media outlets.

      There had been a longstanding federal law that made it illegal for the US Department of

State to share domestically the internally-authored news stories (American propaganda) that was been sent to American-operated outlets broadcasting(American propaganda) around the globe. All of that changed effective July 2, when the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) was given permission to let US households tune-in to hear the type of programming that has previously only been allowed in outside the United States.

      Since the Smith-Mundt Act was effectively rendered obsolete by US lawmakers on July 2nd 2013 the use of so-called “news” to distract the public's attention away from the reality is rampant. The problem exists wherever the western elite have control, not only in this country, but in western Europe as well. The past election of an outsider to the U.S. Presidency who has called out this abomination has brought to light how bad the situation is.

     The good news is that more and more people across the globe are starting to wake up to all of the misinformation being spread on a daily basis, and that includes the agenda of those behind it. Even a decade ago, the mass populace was not as aware that all is not as it seems, and as a result of this mass awakening, our perception, our thoughts, our collective consciousness is beginning to shift. Many no longer see the world the way it has been presented to us, and we are starting to realize that simply waking up to all of the propaganda that surrounds us is creating big problems for the global elite. You can see them fighting back with the massive amount of anti-Russian stories that spew forth daily.

  

      The first step to changing a problem is to first recognize that problem, and we are still in that process. Many of our fellow citizens have been well programed to keep drinking the kool-aid, but the more people recognize what’s really happening in our world, the more people will take a stand and do whatever they can to change it. This starts with you and me. The more we try, and the more we ‘wake up,’ the closer we get to actions that may change our world.