This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.
2014: The Year Of 'Proof-less' Accusations
Submitted by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,
Michael Moore once famously – though by no means famously enough yet, because he was so dead-on – said that ‘you can’t declare war on a noun’. If only Americans had paid better attention. That would have shone a whole different light on, if not outright prevented, insane, expensive and terribly deadly concepts such as the ‘war on drugs’ and the ‘war on terrorism’. Now it looks as if John McCain is fishing for a fresh noun to declare war on.
Talking about Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and James Franco’s ‘The Interview’ movie, and the hackers known as ‘Guardians of the Peace’ who made Sony Pictures pull the movie’s Christmas release, McCain told CNN’s State of the Union that “It’s more than vandalism. It’s a new form of warfare that we’re involved in and we need to react, and react vigorously.” President Obama earlier said the opposite, that it’s not war, but vandalism.
I’d say it’s neither, it’s a bunch of hackers who penetrated Sony’s digital systems quite deeply, encouraged by the apparent lack of true security used to protect the systems. In essence, I don’t understand what either Obama or McCain are doing talking about the issue in the first place. The FBI claims they are certain the hackers are North Korean, but they have provided no proof of that claim. We have to trust them on their beautiful blue eyes.
I think if anything defines 2014 for me, it’s the advent of incessant claims for which no proof – apparently – needs to be provided. Everything related to Ukraine over the past year carries that trait. The year of ‘beautiful blue eyes’, in other words. Never no proof, you just have to believe what your government says.
But so, maybe they were/are North Korean hackers. And then? Is it such a bad thing that a group of people show us that the US is not the world’s sole master of technology, that there’s a certain degree of democracy, or of equality if you will, when it comes to computers and high tech? Doesn’t seem all that bad to me. It would seem much scarier if one party controls it all.
It might be worse of those same people hack the Pentagon, or the control of nuclear weapon systems, but I’m thinking it wouldn’t be a huge stretch to assume those systems are better secured than Sony’s movie-related files. If not, you can’t really blame the hackers for that.
And I know, maybe I should shut up about the whole thing, it’s not really my field, is it, but then, shutting up is not one of my strong points. You see, there are a few things about the whole ‘The Interview’ issue that I simply don’t understand.
I have no idea why the American President goes on TV to simultaneously protect and chide a Japanese company. It just seems weird. Or why, now that Vladimir Putin, and Russia as a whole, have been declared such awful people and such terrible enemies of the US that they need to take the place of Cuba as the worst possible adversaries of the American Dream and suffer blinding sanctions, Obama still reaches out to Russia for help against North Korea and its alleged team of hackers.
I’m trying to find the logic in all this, and I fail. I also don’t understand why the board at Sony pictures agree to spend who knows how many millions of dollars to produce a movie that evolves around the assassination of a head of state. I mean, I’ll be the first one to agree that the Kim Yung-Il and Kim Yong-Un dynasty looks strange to our western eyes and standards, but still, we’re talking about heads of state.
So me, I start wondering what other people’s ‘funny’ assassinations Sony would have agreed to finance a movie about, and whose deaths Rogen and Franco would have found sufficiently amusing to make that movie.
I’m guessing, albeit with with a certain degree of confidence, that attacks on the Japanese royal family would not have been on the list, given Sony’s origins. I also very much doubt the movie would have been made if the Pope had been the ‘comedic target’, though that would also have been redundant, since The Godfather 3 already features the murder of a Pope.
Perhaps my questions are better explained by using as potential victims of a CIA murder plot examples such as Queen Elizabeth, or her adorable little great-grandson prince George, William and Kate’s firstborn and future king of England if that is God’s will. I think in those potential cases, and I could name many more, Obama himself is an obvious one, the humor factor would be way less than now that Kim Jong-Un is the – fantasy – victim.
And if such a movie would have been made not by Rogen and Franco, but by people from North Korea, or perhaps, ISIS, or Venezuela, or Russia or East Ukraine, I’m thinking ‘WE’ would not be amused at all, and John McCain would be on Sunday morning talk shows spewing his convictions that said movie was an act of war against the US, and/or the free world as a whole, whichever comes first, and ‘we need to react vigorously.’
I sort of understand why Rogen/Franco figured it was a funny topic, but I don’t understand why they thought so for more than two seconds, and I certainly don’t see why Sony gave the project the go-ahead. It all doesn’t look terribly smart to me, none of it.
America creates its own enemies out of thin air, because that keeps the empire going and the people obediently following that empire, I get that. But don’t get started about -artistic – freedom of expression, because if you want to play that card, let’s all laugh our socks off about little baby Prince George or his great-grandmother being killed. Or Malala, not a bad example either. That would make Seth and James real men.
Now, they merely look pretty dumb. But I know, that’s just in my eyes, and for many other people it will be different. But people laugh to a large extent because their ideas have been shaped by the images, ideas and pictures the media feed them, whether it’s about Kim Jong-Un, Obama, Malala or little Prince George.
Murdering people is hardly ever a reason to laugh, and murdering heads of state, no matter what you, or your media, may think about them, is even a little bit less so. It has a lot to do with respect. So if you try anyway, don’t be surprised if there’s a bit of a backlash.
One last thought: if The Interview had not been about a head of state, but about an ‘ordinary citizen’, what do you think the odds would have been of the US head of state getting involved in the whole mess? Maybe there is some respect after all… And now we return to our regular scheduled programming…
- 9536 reads
- Printer-friendly version
- Send to friend
- advertisements -


Distract, obfuscate, lie - same as it ever was.
First casualty of war is truth. Combine that with .gov in free fall, and you got yourself a propaganda machine in overdrive. Sorta same as it ever was, except the other side of this financial repression will be very welcome.
Just another day at the office for some of us.
Fuck morality!
BUY BITCOIN!!!
https://btc-e.com/
Amen. Because when the SHTF and the lights go out... Oh wait...
Fookooo! We have the emergency BitBurner available from Wallys!
BUY NOW!!
Can i get one on layaway?
We taking pre-orders!
16bY6d2wisEZ78pU6UaYf6fedmN4fBhsfF
We are at war with, uh, someplace.
We have always been at war with someplace.
Or something.
Fuck morality!
BUY BITCOIN!!!
https://btc-e.com/
BitCoin. The only 'investment' that makes silver look a bit boring.
That's the only reason that some of the silvers hate the satoshis. Because they used to be crazy town. Sometimes we like to take bath salts, PCP or DXM and trade Bitcoins for maximum experiences.
Stupid sheep don't need proof.
It's even worse than that. They still cling to their beliefs in spite of all real world evidence to the contrary. The US alone set over 60,000 record cold temps, the Great Lakes were frozen ALL year, a first, it snowed on the Sphinx, a first in over a century, every study to date says there has been no warming for at least 18 years (but they won't admit that the trend is rapid cooling), the Arctic and Antarctic have record ice both in thickness and volume, and I could go on for pages, yet people still cling to global frauding which is so fucked up they keep having to rename it. Climategate is the biggest most coordinated scientific fraud in the history of humanity, and their climate models are off 3000%. Can anyone here fuck up their job on a magnitude of 3000% and still keep their job, not to mention still be respected in their field? By the way, can anyone tell me what one unit of "climate change" is? A stupid? A fucktard? They climate changed three fucktards this past decade?
Oh, and I fully expect the religious zealots of climate change to thumb me down. They can't refute, they just spit at those who trash their god.
Well, their god has something you don't have. A Nobel Prize, ffs.
Most people have been indoctrinated to believe in things there's no evidence for......
It's called religion.
Yes, but religion can come in the form of something so unGodly as statism. We are vulnerable more than ever to propaganda as there are far too many truths for a human to be able to process and really prove. Science has done this to us by piling on more and more "truths", that may sound perfectly plausible but also so complex that 99% will never be able to really understand. We know our smart phone works but most have no idea how. Take this huge blanket of "truth" and layer it with even more political and ideological "truths" and how is anyone supposed to be able to figure it out.
So. they educate us to see things in a certain way, much a religious schools always have done, so when the proper truths are put before us we just naturally accept them, especially given the research to proof these truths is an advanced degree in itself.
As with all things this represents power, and power can be used for good or evil...but ultimately evil always wins out. The thing that has muted religions evil is size, that their ranks have shrunk, meaning they have less power and influence and also reflecting a certain level of rejection. Many of governments goals are laudable, but with size comes corruption and evil intent to use that power for its own means. They are defining truth and openly calling "deniers" of stated truths a threat to society. The pressure will build demanding that we follow and believe...or else. How much liberty will we surrender to be inside the safe walls of the castle, especially knowing that to be outside labels you as a threat?
The difference is that if you spend the time and effort, you can make sense of things scientific.
Religion, not so much.
As kids we believe in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny and Santa, but fairly soon we see through such bullshit.
Thing is, religion should also be on that list - it's just as plausible.
Yeah, and Prsident Drone-bama has a Nobel Prize for peace. Shows ya how meaningless those things are.
Syrin. I would I could just crack jokes about it.
EVERYTHING. Literally EVERYTHING professed in the MSM is a lie. EVERYTHING.
The PR, the sock puppets, the psyops, the drive by media--- they lie so much that I wonder how they even find themselves credible. I dont' know how they even trust their own two feet to walk themselves to the door- their perception on basic reality is THAT fucked up.
We KNOW that the markets are a high market cap/volume robbery funneled by the Mudrabah-aka. "Federal Reserve". It is not an economy, only some white boomers are benefitting from this.
Carbon credit exchange is 10% owned by goldie sachs, collateralized with--- a lot of hot air from Al Gore's pipe.
Yes they lie about the warming. perhaps so people eventually find out it is a lie and stop worry about carbon burning.
What isn't a lie is what this pollution does to our air, water and food and ultimately to our health. That is what the whole global warming scaremongering is all about. To deflect attention from what is really killing us.
I agree with you. With all the shit that the human rae pumps into the enviornment, which is for all intents and purposes, a closed system, there has GOT to be some kind of impact. I'm not smart enough to know what that impact is, mind you, but I know there has to be some impact. The powers that be would much rather have you thinking that the exhaust from your car is what's doing in the environment than to tell you that it's really the shit belching out of Fukushima, the poisons that were used after Deepawater Horizon or the contaminated wastewater from fracking that was dumped in pristine aquifers that's killing you. No, it's your little internal combustion engine that's destroying the planet.
Climate change = Lysenkoism.
Science & Academia have been reduced to whore-dom.
"We don't need no stinking proof!"
You folks just got "Pyongyankeed" (Found Guilty w/o Due Process).
Next... "You folks will get 'Assaded' or 'Putined'." (Leader isolated and slandered, then deemed as having to be replaced)
And then "You folks will get 'Kieved/Maidaned'." (coup d'etat via bribed insiders and paid mercs, organized by the CYA).
The global bloody warming scam was a test - "trust me, I'm a scientist, its my business to know" - yes business allright
Its the new norm. Accuse and convict without cause or reason. Defer to the court of public opinion.
Still waiting for the comedy about assinating a certain Middle East leader...
I want to see King Abdullah molested on a camel by a blue bellied Nazi
To the stupid FBI and CIA bad ass wannabes, these are my own words- not reflected by ZH. Since you and your drive by media dont' get the difference between sources if you're going to defame character or anything.
I had to put up with racism as a minority when i was born and raised a US Citizen (paying taxes and abiding by the law) and also being profiled by your ugly system despite racism and junk.
AFTER all of that, I'm supposed to die in a freeloaing draft dodger's oil war as a mercenary for some ugly Arab who apparently enjoys gawking at the misery and troubles that we go through ont their behalf so the tweaker racist economy killing baby boomer voting majority elected trash can get their bribes.
Suck it.
This is tripe.
Forgiving the starting quote from the hypocritical blow-hard that is Moore, the article started of trying to legitamately question the authority of government in providing us information.
Then he took a hard left turn and began to parrot the left's narrative that the United States is the source of all the ills in the world. If only we weren't war mongering imperialists, the entire world would already be in an anarcho-communist utopia and we'd all have FREE MACBOOK PROS!
Garbage.
.
Ah, goes good with potato.
& a little pancetta & pinot grigio ~ MWAH!
Raul Ilargi Meijer took a left turn??
Really??
strange
Wow. 14 downvotes. ZH never fails!
Yeah, why is Obama talking about Sony, but not Staples, Target, Best Buy or Home Depot ?
I think your question is rhetorical, but to give an answer anyway, Sony Pictures is part of the Ministry of Truth. That makes it critical infrastructure. The other companies you mention sell junk (mostly manufactured in Asia) for the 99%. Sony manufactures the propaganda that keeps the population numb enough to accept the status quo, in which they are wage slaves for their superiors. That is a security issue that cannot be tampered with.
As does Apple, which is why anything Samsung makes is always blasted in the media, even though it is technically superior to Apple.
Burden of Proof; the only recourse for the law to be law in a republic or constitutional monarchy.
When a nation does not believe in truth but in dictat : blind faith in "reason of state" or obscurantist dogma, the republic is dead and feudalism is reborn.
On this issue of North Korea superhacking : we have the news about South Korea's nuclear plant breaching; allegedly linked to Sony type hacker hanky-panky.
Burden of Proof stays the rule. Not Gulf of Tonkin type false flag or bay of Pigs porky grunts.
"Burden of Proof"? LOL, good one.
In a Feudal Society, the Burden is on the ACCUSED. Didn't you get the Notice?
We be Full Feudal now, bitchez.
you can’t declare war on a noun
In my opinion Orwell successfully demonstrated one can, as on any other part of languages.
Kafka wrote beautifully about facing a power that you cannot question. The major difference I see now is nukes. TPTB can't seem to figure out how to get a WW3 going without the destruction being so overwhelming that even they will be unable to hold on to power any longer. What a dilemma!
First off, Michael fucking Moore, who would would not have gone to war over a "noun," would happily instead start an equally fruitless "war" on "guns" and / or "Global warming" so fuck his statist ass.
AS to this:
I don’t understand why they thought so for more than two seconds, and I certainly don’t see why Sony gave the project the go-ahead. It all doesn’t look terribly smart to me, none of it.
Wake up, the movie is a propaganda piece! It's conditioning American people to get mentally prepaired to deliver "freedumb" to the North Koreans 10,000 LBS at a time. Fucking joke.
Propaganda should at least be free or low cost. Not only have ticket prices gotten too high but you can't even get popcorn for less than $5. You'd think that with the outrageous sums that the "defense" contractors make they could chip in.
Oh yeah, and when you ask for proof regarding allegations made by .gov (like the "Russians shot down flight MH17") more often than not the reponse is; "We can't provide any proof because of national security reasons". What a bunch of BULLSHIT!!
'We can't provide proof, because we are lying to you'
Applies to EVERY government on the planet.
Government is the problem, not the solution.
anything goes, nothing matters - this is how it works now
They have been imprisoning people indefinitely without trial and without proof for years, why is 2014 so different?
On a long enough timeline, those left holding the guns are the ones who write the history and make the rules!
If you can't declare war on a person or place, what can you declare war on?
The more-descriptive phrase says that "you cannot declare war on an abstract noun"
I keep telling everyone and this goes all the way to the White House, people confuse virtual world values with the real world and I've written about the White House doing it with their email bot, but in the meantime the media can use the click bait I guess.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.fr/2014/03/virtual-worlds-real-world-we-have....
Here's an older post to where the White House email bot put out projections on numbers nobody can predict..augh..
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.ca/2014/06/junk-science-appearing-everywhere-...
The murder of heads of state is not a laughing matter.
It is, however, quite worthy of applause....
Amen. Hollywood is a propaganda machine for the banksters. Remove "Kim" and replace with "Jamie Dimon" and see whether Franco and Rogen make a movie. No way. Because the purpose of the War is to replace every nation's bankers with the banksters. Once one gets control of a nation's banks, one controls the entire nation.
not advent, actually the culmination of 22 yrs of a hedonistic trailer-trash miscreant, an unqualified prospective ITT tech matriculator let alone Yalie and race-crazed mulatto marxist boob.
BINGO !!!
"you can't declare war on a noun"? Forgive me if I am wrong, as I am not an English major, but isn't 'Germany' a noun? Did we not declare war on them when they bombed Pearl Jam?
Apparently Michael Moore flunked 8th grade English.
"you can't declare war on a noun"? Forgive me if I am wrong, as I am not an English major, but isn't 'Germany' a noun? Did we not declare war on them when they bombed Pearl Jam?
Strictly speaking, they may have declared war on Germany, but they actually waged the war on Germans.
The proper phrase is "you cannot declare war on an abstract noun."
I have no idea about the attribution...
"Believe Nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see." ~ first internet user.
dear ZH- how many halliburton shares did Michael Moore own? OR those draft dodging hippies?
Am I going to lose sight of your credibility based on what their mind candy flavor of the month is?
Because I don't know you, all I know is content. You're dwindling.
Raul,,, logic is no longer required. Just look around, no logic anywhere to be found. Bevus and Buthead's everywhere.
Stupid has won,,, hands down, and the u.s government pretty much has the market cornered!
I think "Weekend at Un's" would have been a much funnier movie.
what about
Here lies Kim Jong Un
One slug from a sniper's gun
Oppression Un-done.
I'll still love you in the morning.
There was a film about killing the Pope, it just got a different name in the US
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pope_Must_Die
I never have understood why people would believe anything a politician or central banker says.
They are proven, professional liars.
That is why I couldn't care in the least about politics and voting. Living in an oligarcy as we now do in the U.S., your vote means absolutely nothing.
Voting is nothing but a waste of time and emotion.
Da tribe runs hollywood, the media, and the central bank. That there is what they call a trifecta. You will believe what we tell you to believe.
I think this modern ballad sums up it up nicely.
-Kurt Cobain c1991
Excellent commentary
This generally occurs after the population is sufficiently dumbed down.
Where there's smoke... A second airline CEO (Marc Dugain) has claimed MH370 was shot down near Diego Garcia. With more to lose than gain why would these people admit this, how much BS are our leaders feeding us?
http://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/former-proteus-airlines-bos...
next thing you know this guy will doubt that we hit bin Laden and buried his ass at sea, or that Iraqi WMD didn't drop the two towers.
LMAO.
As though 2014 is somehow a significant departure from the norm.
Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lybia, Afghanistan, NKorea, Benghazi, bin Ladin, Malaysian planes, Ukraine, Boston, Sandy Hook, OKC, TWA800, WTC (twice), Waco, Ruby Ridge, Viet Nam, climate, vaccines, marijuana, etc., etc., etc....
Tylers need to come up with a list of ZH conspiracies that have been proven fact.
Whatever the cause we can all be happy that that movie will never see the light of day.
I think the answer to the question why NK has to take the beating is in this :
"Imagine if General Shoigu and Premier Li Keqiang were discussing North Korea. Background: Putin has been reaching out to Glorius Leader Kim’s regime, and we know the deal Putin would want to get done with Pyongyang’s regime: Give up the nukes, and the Double Helix will protect you. Give up the nukes and we’ll force the U.S. to leave the Korean peninsular. Give up the nukes and China and Russia will develop your infrastructure. Give up the nukes and begin integration with the South economically and that process will include Russia and China. Give up the nukes and you will never walk alone.
North Korea could look at Iran and see that Russia and China have shielded Iran. And if Iran moves away from nukes, the Double Helix protects her. Syria has given up chemical weapons and Syria, for all the ISIS and NATO chaos, stands because of Russia and China.
Let us take a look again at General Shoigu’s itinerary. Who did Shoigu go to after Beijing? Pakistan. Who aids North Korean nuke program? Pakistan. Shoigu was not traveling this route in this sequence by happenchance. (35) China is drawing Pakistan away from the U.S. and wants to coordinate anti-terror operations with Islamabad. There also is the withdrawal of NATO and the U.S. from Afghanistan. Russia, China and Pakistan will take on this burden in order to get development of the Eurasian Silk Road and Economic Belt established. Everything is changing in South Asia. China and Russia will fill the vacuum. (36)
It is quite the nature of China to encourage Russia to send symbolic messages to those who might need another tap on the head. Iran and North Korea are regional and global threats that the Double Helix wants to turn into partners and markets.
Tough Cop?
Shoigu went forward with that “portfolio”. He represented ‘the base-paired one’. The Chinese know their limits and their weaknesses. They might bully the Southeast neighboring fishermen and even cut off an American naval ship. But they are not the tough cop Russia is. The Chinese are the soft interlocutor, the mollifier. The only time China gets tough is in business negotiations or if you insult the Party or the People.
However, this nuclear disarming or chemical weapons disarming small regimes is the rough and tumble of the street and alleys, something Russia knows and China does not aspire to. It takes a 8th Dan martial arts President who destroys opponents with his armed forces in real world combat to get the focused attention of Pyongyang and Islamabad. He did in Syria and is doing it in Iran. He generally uses military protective shield with economic development deals.
North Korea is desperately trying to weaponize their atomic devices. (37) Pakistan would be the bearer of this technology. It is conceivable Pakistan’s military assistance deal with Russia, signed by Shoigu, would have ‘rewards’ for staying out of North Korea’s nuclear program.
The meeting in Beijing just may have been to assure Shoigu that all the financing needed to stabilize the Korean peninsula will be available if and when Putin gets Kim to join with the sovereignists and force the Hegemon off the Korean Peninsula.
Putin invited Kim to Moscow for the 70th anniversary celebration of the Soviet victory over Germany. This follows Putin’s meeting with the special envoy of Kim, Choe Ryong-hae, who was invited by Putin one month ago, in November 2014. (38) Personal meetings and messages are going back and forth and it’s not about victory day next year.
Regional Effect
What this would mean for China and Russia beyond safety and security is a new market, more easily exploited mineral resources, a fast developing economy that can use what both nations have. North Korea can add additional military as regional reserve forces should the Hegemon linger in Asian Pacific. Nuclear disarmament automatically means South Korea is actively drawn into the Eurasian Economic Belt. It leaves the region with no threat against the Hegemon’s allies, Japan and Philippines. America’s Pacific Century ends when the nukes go away in North Korea."
I don't care about these irrelevant bogus distractions. Humans need continuous war, weapons technology development, destruction & rebuilding, kulling the overbred herd, etc. We need a lot more war - and a draft, expecially focused on all the cowardly pot-head anti-war limp-dicks.