NOTE FROM THE EDITOR:

Dear readers:

Have you ever felt overwhelmed and that you had wasted so much of your precious time on social media every time you check your notifications on your cell phone – but didn’t know why and what to do? The following article by research journalist show us all how all this technology is like a gun pointing to our head. – Marvin Ramírez

by James Corbett

Do you feel confused? Listless? Overwhelmed? Have you ever found yourself scrolling through news feeds and flicking mindlessly through social media posts with a strange mixture of outrage, dread, and boredom? Is your disgust at the thought of going online consistently overwhelmed by your compulsion to pick up your fondleslab?

Don’t worry. You’re not alone. More and more people are finding it harder and harder to put their devices down even though it leaves them feeling restless, angry or empty. As a result, some are seeking ways to disconnect and unplug from the 24/7 siren song of never-ending news feeds, instant messaging and social media distractions, whether by ditching their smartphone in favor of a “dumb” phone or taking device-free holidays.

Yes, we all succumb to information overload, and yes, we all need a break from the online maelstrom every now and then.

But what if this state of information overload—the malaise we experience when we find ourselves paralyzed by a ceaseless stream of noise and nonsense—is not a mere byproduct of this vaunted “Information Age” but the actual point of it? Has it ever occurred to you that these devices have been weaponized against us? Or that the confusion and exhaustion we feel after spending an hour mindlessly scrolling on our smartphone is the effect that this weaponized technology has on our psyche?

And, more to the point, what can we do to protect ourselves from these daggers of digital distraction?

First, let’s examine the problem.

Suppose you start your day by checking your friends’ social media profiles. The stream of dream vacation pictures and posts about happy relationships and fun parties leaves you feeling miserable as you head out the door for work.

Later that morning you take a break from your desk job (entering information on a computer, of course) to check the news. Clickbait nonsense battles with atrocity porn for your attention in the news feed. You finally find something interesting and informative only to scroll down to the comment section and find it populated by trolls bent on starting flame wars and disinformation operatives deploying every trick in the book to derail thoughtful conversation.

Closing the browser window you get back to work and discover an angry email from your boss in your inbox reminding you that your latest report was due yesterday and several messages from your coworkers asking for your help with their own projects.

Running to the one place you know you can get away from it all—the washroom—you lock the stall door . . . only to feel a buzzing in your pocket. You got a new message on Facebook! You pull your phone out of your pocket and start the whole process over again.

The worst part is that you know that this constant flow of information is making you miserable, but you can’t help yourself. It’s harder and harder to leave the phone at home when you go out to the store or turn the TV off when you’re eating dinner. You’ve become a slave to the technology that once promised to free you.

Now this may not be a description of your average day, but we all know people to whom this description applies. And if you use electronic devices on a daily basis, it’s getting harder and harder to deny that you’ve experienced the strange mixture of compulsion and depression that those devices bring.

This is not even controversial at this point. We hardly need a scientific study to tell us that social media is making us dumb, angry and addicted, but in case you missed it here’s a scientific study telling us that social media is making us dumb, angry and addicted. As you might expect, people who compare their mundane, humdrum existence to the idealized lives that people present online—fun parties, great food, perfect vacations, happy families—are more likely to develop depressive symptoms.

But it’s important to note that this state of affairs has not come about by accident. This technology has been weaponized against you. This is not conspiracy theory or conjecture; as I pointed out in my podcast on The Weaponization of Social Media, many of the founders of the social media giants don’t even use social media themselves and they actively keep it away from their children. If you haven’t seen it yet, watch Facebook co-founder Sean Parker admitting that they designed their product to keep you addicted by exploiting vulnerabilities in human psychology.

When you realize that all aspects of our online experience—like the red badges and phone buzzers that alert us to new social media notifications—have been precisely fine-tuned to keep you clicking indefinitely, you can at least appreciate that it is not merely a matter of weak will that has led you to this spot.

It is also important to realize that this is not merely a ploy to earn more advertising revenue for the big internet companies. It does do that, of course, but this addiction to (and, ultimately, enslavement to) the very source of our unhappiness if part of a much more insidious agenda. We are being groomed by the hucksters and charlatans of our era to accept the coming integration of man and machine. Or, worse yet, to embrace it.

Never mind that the Borg-like vision of the future propounded by these transhumanists is a nightmare beyond comprehension. Never mind that free will will be rendered meaningless in a world where we are nudged by devices along pre-determined paths. Never mind that privacy will be unthinkable when our every thought will be monitored and analyzed in real time. Never mind that dissent will be impossible when our ability to access the networks upon which our lives are built can be turned off at the flip of the switch. We’ll be able to surf the internet in our head! Where do I sign up?

If you think information overload is bad now, wait until you’re interacting with avatars of your friends in augmented reality while listening to music that only you can hear and ordering your Alexa to adjust the thermostat and order you a pizza for dinner.

So what do we do about this?

If this were just another clickbait listicle designed to give you some trite pieces of warm and fuzzy advice and keep you coming back for more, this is the point where I’d give you a few bullet points about setting a screen time limit on your phone or practicing mindful browsing (searching for something specific instead of scrolling and clicking aimlessly). These things are all well and good, as far as they go . . . but they don’t go far enough, do they?

Because if we really face up to the fact that these devices have been weaponized against us, and that they are leading us into a transhuman future, then we arrive pretty quickly at a conclusion that might put you into a cold sweat: Every time you pick up your device, every time you check that news feed, every time you scroll through your social media notifications, you are putting a loaded gun to your head.

Or, even worse, you are ingesting a little bit of poison. One or two doses won’t hurt. A thousand doses might make you sick, but you can probably handle it. The fatal dose might be the millionth. And if the poison is sweet enough, then, like any addict, you’ll convince yourself that it’s OK to keep taking it; after all, we’ll be able to quit before we get to that millionth hit, won’t we?

And what’s the alternative, anyway? Giving up on this tech altogether? Is that even possible?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are very real questions with answers that have very real consequences for our lives. And I’m not posing these questions from up in the clouds. I make my living online. My life right now revolves around the very information overload that I’m writing about. Will I know where to draw that line in the sand and stop using the tech before it becomes an implantable brain chip? Will you?

Feel free to tell me that I’m being overly dramatic and that there’s nothing to worry about here. But the next time you feel yourself reaching for your phone in a moment of silence or scrolling aimlessly through a news feed with a gnawing sense of emptiness in the pit of your stomach, take a moment to reflect on that sensation. And then see if you can put the phone down.

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR:

Dear readers:

Many of us know that discrimination in the past was terrible for Latino people in the US, but this article, written by Erin Blakemore, describes it in more detail and historically. I hope you enrich yourself in history that has been omitted in our school system. – Marvin Ramírez.

School segregation, lynchings and mass deportations of Spanish-speaking U.S. citizens are just some of the injustices Latinos have faced

by Erin Blakemore

Olvera Street is a Los Angeles icon—a thriving Mexican market filled with colorful souvenirs, restaurants and remnants of the oldest buildings in Los Angeles. But though the bright tourist destination teems with visitors, few realize it was once the site of a terrifying raid.

In 1931, police officers grabbed Mexican-Americans in the area, many of them U.S. citizens, and shoved them into waiting vans. Immigration agents blocked exits and arrested around 400 people, who were then deported to Mexico, regardless of their citizenship or immigration status.

The raid was just one incident in a long history of discrimination against Latino people in the United States. Since the 1840s, anti-Latino prejudice has led to illegal deportations, school segregation and even lynching—often-forgotten events that echo the civil-rights violations of African-Americans in the Jim Crow-era South.

The story of Latino-American discrimination largely begins in 1848, when the United States won the Mexican-American War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which marked the war’s end, granted 55 percent of Mexican territory to the United States. With that land came new citizens. The Mexicans who decided to stay in what was now U.S. territory were granted citizenship and the country gained a considerable Mexican-American population.

As the 19th century wore on, political events in Mexico made emigration to the United States popular. This was welcome news to American employers like the Southern Pacific Railroad, which desperately needed cheap labor to help build new tracks. The railroad and other companies flouted existing immigration laws that banned importing contracted labor and sent recruiters into Mexico to convince Mexicans to emigrate.

Anti-Latino sentiment grew along with immigration. Latinos were barred entry into Anglo establishments and segregated into urban barrios in poor areas. Though Latinos were critical to the U.S. economy and often were American citizens, everything from their language to the color of their skin to their countries of origin could be used as a pretext for discrimination. Anglo-Americans treated them as a foreign underclass and perpetuated stereotypes that those who spoke Spanish were lazy, stupid and undeserving. In some cases, that prejudice turned fatal.

According to historians William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, mob violence against Spanish-speaking people was common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They estimate that the number of Latinos killed by mobs reach well into the thousands, though definitive documentation only exists for 547 cases.

The violence began during California’s Gold Rush just after California became part of the United States. At the time, white miners begrudged former Mexicans a share of the wealth yielded by Californian mines—and sometimes enacted vigilante justice. In 1851, for example, a mob of vigilantes accused Josefa Segovia of murdering a white man. After a fake trial, they marched her through the streets and lynched her. Over 2,000 men gathered to watch, shouting racial slurs. Others were attacked on suspicion of fraternizing with white women or insulting white people.

Even children became the victims of this violence. In 1911, a mob of over 100 people hanged a 14-year-old boy, Antonio Gómez, after he was arrested for murder. Rather than let him serve time in jail, townspeople lynched him and dragged his body through the streets of Thorndale, Texas.

These and other horrific acts of cruelty lasted until the 1920s, when the Mexican government began pressuring the United States to stop the violence. But though mob brutality eventually quelled, hatred of Spanish-speaking Americans did not.

In the late 1920s, anti-Mexican sentiment spiked as the Great Depression began. As the stock market tanked and unemployment grew, Anglo-Americans accused Mexicans and other foreigners of stealing American jobs. Mexican-Americans were discouraged and even forbidden from accepting charitable aid.

As fears about jobs and the economy spread, the United States forcibly removed up to 2 million people of Mexican descent from the country—up to 60 percent of whom were American citizens.

Euphemistically referred to as “repatriations,” the removals were anything but voluntary. Sometimes, private employers drove their employees to the border and kicked them out. In other cases, local governments cut off relief, raided gathering places or offered free train fare to Mexico. Colorado even ordered all of its “Mexicans”—in reality, anyone who spoke Spanish or seemed to be of Latin descent—to leave the state in 1936 and blockaded its southern border to keep people from leaving. Though no formal decree was ever issued by immigration authorities, INS officials deported about 82,000 people during the period.

The impact on Spanish-speaking communities was devastating. Some light-skinned Mexican-Americans attempted to pass themselves off as Spanish, not Mexican, in an attempt to evade enforcement. People with disabilities and active illnesses were removed from hospitals and dumped at the border. As one victim of “repatriation” told Raymond Rodríguez, who wrote a history of the period, Decade of Betrayal, “They might as well have sent us to Mars.”

Others, like Rodríguez’s father, did not wait for raids or enforcement and returned to Mexico independently to escape discrimination and the fear of removal. His wife refused to accompany him and the family never saw him again.

When deportations finally ended around 1936, up to 2 million Mexican-Americans had been “repatriated.” (Because many of the repatriation attempts were informal or conducted by private companies, it is nearly impossible to quantify the exact number of people who were deported.) Around one third of Los Angeles’ Mexican population left the country, as did a third of Texas’ Mexican-born population. Though both the state of California and the city of Los Angeles apologized for repatriation in the early 2000s, the deportations have largely faded from public memory.

Another little-remembered facet of anti-Latino discrimination in the United States is school segregation. Unlike the South, which had explicit laws barring African-American children from white schools, segregation was not enshrined in the laws of the southwestern United States. Nevertheless, Latino people were excluded from restaurants, movie theaters and schools.

Latino students were expected to attend separate “Mexican schools” throughout the southwest beginning in the 1870s. At first, the schools were set up to serve the children of Spanish-speaking laborers at rural ranches. Soon, they spread into cities, too.

By the 1940s, as many as 80 percent of Latino children in places like Orange County, California attended separate schools. Among them was Sylvia Mendez, a young girl who was turned away from an all-white school in the county. Instead of going to the pristine, well-appointed 17th Street Elementary, she was told to attend Hoover Elementary—a dilapidated, two-room shack.

Today, an estimated 54 million Latinos live in the U.S. and around 43 million people speak Spanish. But though Latinos are the country’s largest minority, anti-Latino prejudice is still common. In 2016, 52 percent of Latinos surveyed by Pew said they had experienced discrimination. Lynchings, “repatriation” programs and school segregation may be in the past, but anti-Latino discrimination in the U.S. is far from over.

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR:

Dear readers:

As you have been hearing the drum of war in the mainstream lately about the US about to attack Iran for doing this and doing that, well, if you don’t have an idea of your own of why should we attach the Persian nation, here’s a well-researched article written by investigative journalist, James Corbett, of what is really happening behind real deal in wanting war with Iran. – Marvin Ramírez.

by by James Corbett

corbettreport

“Be afraid!” say the repeaters of mockingbird media. Afraid of who? Afraid of Iran, of course.

Oh, haven’t you heard? The Iranian government’s stockpile of enriched uranium is about to surpass 300 kilograms! And Iran’s store of heavy water is about to surpass 130 metric tons! Don’t you understand? This will exceed the limits on these materials set out in the Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)! And the dastardly Iranian government is not only embarrassed by these actions, but openly taking steps to end (some of) their commitments under the JCPOA!

Sounds chilling, doesn’t it? But there’s one little disclaimer that seems missing from a lot of the MSM’s scaremongering coverage of these developments: None of this has anything to do with an offensive nuclear weapons program.

Confused? Of course you are. The highly-technical details of the 159-page nuclear agreement were never meant to be scrutinized by (much less understood by) the average Joe Sixpack and Jane Soccermom. Words like “enriched” and “highly enriched,” “heavy water” and “tritium,” “nuclear program” and “nuclear weapons program” are thrown around by the media as if these terms are all the same, even though they describe fundamentally different materials and processes. And the whole point is to make the public afraid of a nuclear weapons program that both US and Israeli intelligence has confirmed doesn’t exist.

So what’s the real story on the Iran nuclear deal?

Well, as I had cause to point out on The Corbett Report podcast quite recently, defining our terms is the first step toward understanding the world. So let’s do some defining.

First, “enrichment.” As the World Nuclear Association explains:

Natural uranium contains 0.7 percent of the U-235 isotope. The remaining 99.3 percent is mostly the U-238 isotope which does not contribute directly to the fission process (though it does so indirectly by the formation of fissile isotopes of plutonium). Isotope separation is a physical process to concentrate (‘enrich’) one isotope relative to others. Most reactors are light water reactors (of two types—PWR and BWR) and require uranium to be enriched from 0.7 percent to 3-5 percent U-235 in their fuel. This is normal low-enriched uranium (LEU). There is some interest in taking enrichment levels to about 7 percent, and even close to 20 percent for certain special power reactor fuels, as high-assay LEU (HALEU).

Note that there is a large difference between low-enriched uranium (less than 20 percent U-235) used for fuel in nuclear power plants and research reactors, and high-enriched uranium (over 90 percent U-235) used for nuclear weapons. One guess which kind Iran is producing. That’s right: low-enriched uranium! To be precise, 3.67 percent U-235 enriched uranium, also known as ” not even close to being used in a nuclear weapon” enriched uranium.

Sadly, if predictably, this distinction seldom makes it into media reports concerning Iran’s “threats” to break the 300 kilogram stockpile limit. For every article specifically noting that Iran is producing “low-enriched uranium,” there are a hundred articles that elide this fact by merely referring to it as “enriched uranium.”

Take this gem from the Big Brother Corporation, for example: “Enriched uranium is used to make reactor fuel but also nuclear weapons.” That kind of “journalism” is precisely what enables the war hawks to get away with their lies.

Then what about “heavy water?” As the Wide Asleep in America blog detailed in a post on misleading reporting about the Iran nuclear deal:

“Heavy water is actually just a denser form of normal water, containing a hydrogen isotope called deuterium, which acts as both a moderator and coolant in the nuclear fuel process. It is not fissile material. It poses absolutely no danger and has no military capabilities. It cannot make bombs, nor is it a necessary component of the bomb-making process. Heavy water can literally be consumed just as regular H2O, although that would be a particularly pricey way to quench one’s thirst.”

In other words, heavy water is not radioactive and, let’s reiterate, it “cannot make bombs, nor is it a necessary component of the bomb-making process.” It is, however, a key ingredient in heavy water reactors.

Why, then, does the Iran deal set a limit on heavy water storage? Because at the time that the JCPOA was being negotiated, the Iranians were working on building a research reactor, the Arak Nuclear Plant, which was to be a natural uranium heavy water reactor. While the heavy water itself is not militarily capable, the concern at the time was that the then-still-under-construction Arak reactor could be used to breed weapons-grade plutonium from non-enriched uranium.

So there you go. Clearly the Iranians are stockpiling heavy water as part of their plan to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons, right? Wrong. Firstly, the Arak plant never had a so-called “hot cell facility” that could separate plutonium from the reactor’s irradiated fuel. And secondly (but rather more importantly), Iran removed the reactor core from the Arak plant in 2016 and filled it with concrete. That’s right, they don’t even have a heavy water reactor, let alone the ability to separate plutonium from such a reactor, let alone the intention to do so.

So why are they “stockpiling” heavy water and uranium, anyway? Because they can’t get rid of it anymore. As the Moon Of Alabama blog points out:

“When the Trump administration left the nuclear agreement a year ago it renewed sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program. But it also issued waivers for the export of heavy water and enriched uranium. Iran continued to sell these products or to stockpile them outside of the country.”

But then, in May of this year, the US State Department suddenly stopped issuing these waivers. As a result, for the past two months Iran has had no legal way to offload its extra heavy water and uranium.

This is why we are now inundated with the “Iran hell-bent on breaking the agreement” stories. What’s more, Iran’s current conundrum is the perfectly predictable result of State having halted those waivers. Pompeo and the war cabal knew that these pressures they exerted would force Iran into non-compliance. That’s precisely why they did it.

So let’s get this straight:

• Iran is “stockpiling” uranium and heavy water not by choice, but because they are legally forbidden from doing anything else with it.
• They are not “stockpiling” highly-enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb, but low-enriched uranium for power plants.
• They do not even have a heavy water reactor, let alone the facilities that would be required to separate plutonium out of that reactor.
• Iran is in violation of the JCPOA because they literally cannot comply with it anymore.
• The US pulled out of the JCPOA anyway, which raises questions as to why the US is interested in Iranian compliance with the deal at all.
• Oh, and let’s not forget that not only has the IAEA repeatedly confirmed that Iran never diverted any nuclear material into any military program, but the US intelligence community itself conceded in 2011 that Iran was not trying to build a nuclear bomb. (Bonus: even the Mossad made an assessment in 2012 that Iran was “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons.”)

Alright, enough of this nonsense. We all know that this is not really about the JCPOA or Iran’s compliance or non-compliance with that agreement. Nor is this about the threat of a non-existent nuclear weapons program. No, this is about ginning up another phony casus belli—a convenient excuse for war that the public might buy into more readily than the recent ridiculous false flag shenanigans in the Gulf of Oman.

For those who may still be naïve enough to think that we can be saved from the warmongers by a cool and level-headed Congress, here’s a reality check: Congress has completely abrogated their constitutional authority to declare war. Famously, the US has never formally declared war since WWII (despite having been in a few “kinetic military actions” since then), and since 2001 and the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), whatever warmongers happen to be populating the White House have had carte blanche to use any excuse to go after any perceived terrorist threat anywhere in the world at any time with whatever military response they like.

And don’t think the current clique of neo-neocons in the Trump administration won’t abuse this power. As Heather Brandon-Smith notes in her article on the subject:

“Now we know that the Trump Administration is looking to use it [the AUMF] for its own means as well. After a grilling by Senator Rand Paul during an April Senate hearing, Secretary Pompeo refused to concede that the 2001 AUMF would not apply to Iran. Despite President Trump’s State of the Union declaration that ‘great nations do not fight endless wars,’ with every passing day the administration continues to inch towards conflict with Iran—and using the 2001 law to justify it.”

It’s hard to talk about the imminent “kinetic military action” with Iran without sounding like a broken record. Many have been warning about it since the days of Bush 43 and the original neocon crew. But just because you’ve heard it before doesn’t mean it’s not worth talking about anymore. On the contrary, as I argued 12 years ago and as seems even more evident today: WWIII Starts in Iran.

Don’t fall for the simplistic tricks that are being used to lead the public into that war.