The Obama administration & the media want to keep American's living in fear
President Barack Obama says he wants to “see if we can institutionalize” in Washington the community spirit that sometimes emerges after a terror attack or an industrial explosion.
The president made the comments during a fund-raising trip to New York, shortly after leaving Washington, D.C. in an uproar over an explosion of scandals, including last week’s revelations of politically motivated IRS investigations and the White House’s editing of reports on the lethal terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya.
Shortly after Obama flew north, D.C. was rocked by another political explosion when the Associated Press said the Justice Department obtained two months of phone records from several of its offices, including its office on Capitol Hill.
“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters … The records disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know,” said a statement from AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt.
In New York, however, Obama was welcomed by a community of big-dollar donors from the Big Apple’s fashion, culture and banking industries.
The first event of three was held in a five-story mansion owned by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. The roughly 60 guests included singer Justin Timberlake, actress Jessica Biel, and fashion-industry mogul Tommy Hilfiger.
“More than anything, what I will be striving for over the next three and a half years is to see if that spirit we saw in Boston and West Texas, to see if we can institutionalize that [and] if we can create a framework where everybody’s working together and moving this country forward,” he told the community of wealthy donors, according to the pool report.
The reference to Boston likely was intended to remind donors about the city’s reaction to the bomb attack by two Muslim Chechens that killed three people and injured more than 200. The other reference was to a large industrial explosion at an impoverished small town in Texas last month.
As Obama referred to the positive effects of these catastrophes for an audience of millionaires, Timberlake, “wearing trendy glasses with thick black plastic frames,” according to the pool reporter, looked on with “his hair…parted on the side and slicked back.”
http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/13/obama-hopes-for-extended-crisis-atmosphere/?goback=.gde_62979_member_241056336
Why do American's still live in fear?
America is nearly as safe as your mother's arms. Violent crime has dropped by 50 percent since 1993, and gun homicide is down the same - 3.2 gun deaths per 100,000 Americans in 2011, contrasted with 6.6 in 1993, according to FBI statistics. There were actually more gun suicides (18,735) than homicides (11,493) in 2009, the last year reported.
We are living in the safest times since the 1960s - and the plummeting gun-murder rate happened without new federal gun-control laws.
This is not to argue against them: As a gun owner, I strongly supported the criminal-background check. These are facts, whether you find them convenient or not. A recent Pew Research poll found that only 12 percent of Americans think gun violence has decreased.
If America is safer, why don't we feel safer?
Even recent multiple-victim massacres - whether Virginia Tech or Aurora or Columbine or Sandy Hook - although high-profile, are few in number. There were more mass murders in the 1920s' Prohibition-sparked gang wars.
One difference between then and now is that we live in an electronic fishbowl. It starts with TV, and gets worse.
"Social networks allow us not only to receive news of gun violence during our local television broadcast, but extend the coverage," says clinical psychologist Julie Gurner. "Twitter, Facebook and other social media allow us to join in hysteria."
In the big picture, "all crime is local, and 'Do I feel safe or not safe?' " is local, says David LaBahn, president of the Washington-based Association of Prosecuting Attorneys.
The media inadvertently are responsible for fanning fear, but as a member of the media, I see no easy cure. I dislike censorship, even self-censorship. Newspapers do what they always do, the best of them finding answers and providing in-depth coverage. Radio is pretty much benched, and the broadcast networks generally give the right amount of coverage to gun crime, with some slipups.
Gurner mentions social networks. In addition to fanning fear, they too often pump out bad information. If you like the idea of "citizen journalist," why not go to a "citizen dentist" when you have a toothache?
Thanks to TV - especially cable, with its ceaseless airing of gruesome crime scenes - a sense of America under siege emerges. Pictures possess us in a way that print can't.
Those are external factors acting on us. Jamie O'Boyle, senior analyst at the Philadelphia-based Center for Cultural Studies & Analysis , studies internal factors, what we ourselves bring to the table.
Why don't more people know the facts, when the facts are available, I ask him.
One factor is "confirmation bias," he says. We tend to hear things we agree with - guns are bad - and ignore, or not even hear, anything that disagrees.
"We make almost all our decisions unconsciously." Our brain "lights up" when it senses "dangerous stuff."
The brain, O'Boyle continues, "searches constantly for danger," like an app that's always running. It reacts to perceived danger, even when it knows it is not real. "That's why you get scared in the movies," he says.
http://articles.philly.com/2013-05-14/news/39230993_1_gun-violence-illegal-gun-gun-sales
Mainstream media & our gov't. label any opposing views of the party line as conspiracy theories
Article first appeared in storyleak.com:
It’s a tried and true method. It has worked for a long line of question-dodging politicians, with both Bush and Obama each speaking out against ‘conspiracy theories’ and those who warn against corruption and tyranny in government. As I detailed last week, in fact, Obama recently spoke to the graduating class of Ohio State University and repeated such warnings. He told the class to ignore and reject those warning of government tyranny, and went on to praise the new United States government system he called ‘brave’ and ‘unique’.
The easiest way to deal with real issues certainly isn’t to refute the questions or discuss the information. No, it’s to brand those asking questions as conspiracy theorists. That, or just censor them altogether. Even Google employees have issued warnings on the official company blog regarding the continued requests initiated by governments around the globe to ‘pull’ content from Google’s massive search and blog service. From Google Plus (their Facebook equivalent) posts to legitimate search rankings, Google says that governments are demanding all forms of government criticism be taken down immediately.
Right now, over 24,000 pieces of content may disappear if Google caves. That’s 24,000 pieces of content that likely includes my articles and other alternative news pieces that criticize our ‘brave’ new government. And expect thousands to be added to that list very quickly.
But of course we must ask: What do they have to fear? I mean after all, if the questions I ask regarding the mega banks admittedly funding the Mexican drug cartels and terror cells are fake (even though NBC reports it’s confirmed along with other news sources), then why be worried? If it’s all just ‘conspiracy’ bunk, then it sure would be easy to go ahead and dispel the rumors once and for all. Obama himself could go on air and break down how ‘conspiracy theories’, like the well-respected eyewitness coach asking questions about the Boston bombing drill that occurred the morning of the race (and not even slightly insinuating anything) are not real. But, of course, it is because the media cannot refute legitimate questions regarding mega banks and government corruption. Instead, they lump them in with things that no one in the alternative news actually believes like conspiracy theories about Elvis and other silly things. It all ties in to the well-scripted media theater that must run without interruption — no questions allowed!
http://www.storyleak.com/mainstream-media-tactic-label-all-opposing-views-as-conspiracy-theories/
Is our government inventing terrorism?
Article first appeared in alt-market.com
The debate over what actions actually constitute “terrorism,” I believe, will become one of the defining ideological battles of our era. Terrorism is not a word often used by common people to describe aberrant behaviors or dastardly deeds; however, it is used by governments around the world to label and marginalize political enemies. That is to say, it is the government that normally decides who is a “terrorist” and who is a mere “criminal,” the assertion being that one is clearly far worse than the other.
The terrorist label elicits emotional firestorms and fearful brain-quakes in the minds of the masses. It causes the ignorant and unaware to abandon principles they would normally apply to any other malicious enterprise. They begin to reason that a criminal should be afforded justice, while a terrorist should be afforded only vengeance, even though the act of branding a person a “terrorist” is often completely arbitrary. This vengeance is usually pursued by any means. Thus, the terrorist moniker becomes a rationalization for every vicious and inhuman policy of the establishment, as well as for the citizenry.
Historically, the expanded use of the terrorist label by governments tends to coincide with the rising tides of despotism. A government that quietly seeks to dominate the people will inevitably begin to treat the people as if they are the enemy. Those citizens who present the greatest philosophical or physical threat to the centralization of power are usually the first to suffer. I do not think it is unfair to say that any system of authority that suddenly claims to see terrorists under every rock and behind every tree is probably about to rain full-on fascism down upon the population.
The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is the legal extension of this process, with a vaporous gray language that allows the government to interpret it in any manner it deems useful, which conveniently allows it to interpret a wide range of “offenses” as acts of war against the state.
The Department of Homeland Security’s “If You See Something Say Something” campaign is the social extension of the process, by which it creates the framework for a paranoid self-censored surveillance culture.
The fusion center network is the enforcement extension designed to surround local and State police with an atmosphere of indoctrination and federalized dogma, teaching common cops to profile according to a template that is so ambiguous that literally any activity could be considered suspicious or terroristic.
All that is left for the establishment is to force the vocabulary of fear into mainstream consciousness. This means constant propaganda. This means furious hype. This means an utterly shameless barrage of false associations, misdirections and fantastical fairyland lies.
This means that we have reached a point in the grand totalitarian scheme in which the American populace is about to be bombarded with an endless drone of terrorism brainwashing — not demonizing a foreign enemy, but demonizing the hypothetical extremist next door. In fact, the Boston Marathon bombing seems to have been the signal for an escalation of such rhetoric. The high-speed conditioning has already begun.
What started as an appeal to the average American’s sense of Islamophobia after the 9/11 attacks has now evolved into the full-spectrum theater of random domestic terrorism that culminates in what the establishment calls “self-radicalization.”
The concept of self-radicalization is a very interesting propaganda tactic. Rather than limiting the public’s fear only to some outside foreign enemy like Al Qaeda or some domestic activist organization like the liberty movement, the establishment has now composed a narrative in which each and every one of us might one day catch the extremist virus of dissent, defiance or ideological violence and suddenly decide to kill, kill, kill.
The more naïve subsections of our society will accept unConstitutional methods against the “radicalized” out of fear and conditioning, without realizing that the machinations of bureaucracy being used against those they hate could just as easily be used against them in the future.
If the elites achieve the social endgame they desire, legal and political wordplay will become so broad that anyone could be targeted. If you are a citizen who defies the establishment power structure, then you are an extremist. If you are an extremist, then you are a terrorist. If you are a terrorist, then you are an enemy combatant. And, under the NDAA, if you are an enemy combatant, you are no longer a citizen and you no longer deserve Constitutional protection. The circular logic is maddening, not to mention outrageous. But it is also very useful when an abusive government needs a pretext to silence or destroy dissent. Under totalitarianism, all people become terrorists. It starts with the mistreatment of the worst of us, and it ends with the mistreatment of the best of us.
http://alt-market.com/articles/1501-lions-and-tigers-and-terrorists-oh-my