The same agency which makes air travelers take their belts off at the airport so their pants fall down is aiming to create a blacklist of rogue journalists and bloggers, 290,000 in all; presumably to round them up as needed and put them into ‘camps’.

These are not the kind of camps where guests ‘practice’ needlework or canoeing but rather where fingernails are pulled out with pliers and inmates are beaten on the soles of their feet until they ‘confess’.

Presuming the process is serious rather than a handwaving gesture toward a single-party utopia … who is supposed to read all those hundreds of thousands of articles, at what rate and what would they be looking for? This seems like a punishment detail for wayward DHS staffers; there are so many cat videos, UFO conspiracies or sappy ‘Us Magazine’ articles anyone can take! Above a certain, relatively low limit there becomes too great a volume of crapola to digest; people in intelligence call this ‘information overload’ where analysts are overwhelmed with tsunamis of data. For the process to make sense, critical threads need to be teased from the background noise and compiled into a credible narrative. With too much information the narratives vanish.

Or rather, what emerges from the murk are colliding narratives; ‘content’ that makes no sense, is incoherent over-repeated clichés or obviously stupid. The inundated public has become cynical to the degree it is unresponsive to anything including pornography. This is normalization/gaslighting taken to its logical conclusion: anodyne fragments as parts of the amorphous piece whose sum total is less than zero, losses made up with volume. The ‘Great Problem(s)’ like the ballooning population of resource-gobbling machines or the planet’s vanishing carrying capacity are ignored, the public conversation is degraded from the bombardment of drivel from all sides. The social infrastructure has been molded around to the armature of finance capitalism and its need for collateral to cannibalize; the molding infrastructures have swelled to include government departments. In a culture where everything is distilled to dollars and cents, everything is For Sale; then — slowly at first then all at once — depreciated to worthlessness.

Incoherence, shoddily done: The Establishment finds itself under siege and cannot understand why. Who guards the guards, or rather “quis mensus est mensores?” who measures the measurers? A: nobody … The ebb and flow of marketing- plus ‘structural expectations’ equals garbled nonsense => the degradation of the currency of the political economy, the endgame is institutional bankruptcy. The Establishment strategy to flail: start more pointless wars so as to elevate leadership in the public eye, to rally the demoralized citizenry around the flag then sanctify our precious casualties … locking up scapegoats and throwing away the key.

The war part has always worked and looks to do so again. The war part works. It works again. It works every time.

Every single time … nobody bothers to ask if can we win. Punch a dirty, fucking hippie in the face to find out!

This is how we should think today about the threat of nuclear warheads delivered by ballistic missiles. In 1837 Britain unleashed pre-emptive “fire and fury” against a wooden steamboat. It is perfectly legitimate for the United States to respond to the current “necessity” posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons by striking first.

— John Bolton is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute

Looks like the Syria government will be ‘struck first’ but who cares about such details when there is an expert on every side of every argument: such as this one for US to support to al-Qaeda militants inside Syria.

Despite all of this, the U.S. and its allies must expand their support to Syria’s opposition. But in so doing, the inherent complexity of the situation needs to be grasped and not simply brushed over. Today’s immediate policy priority should be focused on healing deeply damaging divisions within the opposition coalition and its various supporters. Then, existing opposition bodies need restructuring to better incorporate impactful actors inside Syria. At this point, some of the deeply engrained complexity will have become manageable, allowing more reliable and sustainable opportunities to present themselves for developing a more effective military support program inside Syria.

— Charles Lister

For those with short memories, the “opposition coalition” represent the same folks who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center on 9-11 killing thousands of Americans, but that doesn’t matter, they’re the good guys now … maybe a payoff for triggering deeper US involvement against Damascus and its Iranian backers! Like Bolton, Lister won’t be on anyone’s blacklist anytime soon, as Wall Street Journal and Brookings Institution are the ‘running dogs’ of corrupt tycoons and the military-industrial complex. Patriotism distilled to its essence is a dollar sign wrapped up in the flag: war is simply business by other means.

The public conversation, deconstructed …

When everything is a non-sequitur, the term loses its meaning. It is context-dependent … from a distance madness follows its own internal logic, taking on the form of sanity;

Martín Ramírez, ‘Trains and Tunnels’ (detail).

We are so good at fooling ourselves we are convinced we can outwit physical forces holding the entire human science experiment over the fire. Who is in the camp and who is out? The answer is … it really doesn’t matter.