History, Security

American Cities Finally Start to Acknowledge “Death Corridors” Were No Accident

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It’s been documented extensively how the Nixon administration coldly and cruelly used “freeway” planning for cars to destroy non-white neighborhoods across America.

Many don’t realize an “Eisenhower” interstate system was in fact spearheaded by VP Nixon, who later unleashed wrecking balls and bulldozers on black neighborhoods in a racist campaign to destroy non-white power in America.

In short, federal funding was directed into tearing down successful businesses and peaceful homes in urban areas where many Blacks were thriving — a repeat of the 1921 Tulsa firebombing that destroyed “Black Wall Street”.

A huge asphalt project would run straight through the center of a community, destroying neighborhoods by dividing and devastating a local economy. It aimed to replace prosperity with rubble and prevent freedom of movement under the false campaign of improvement (“urban renewal”).

Moreover, data shows Nixon’s racist “transit” plan was not only immediately detrimental but delivered “death corridors” by directing high-speed vehicles with little accountability into areas with high numbers of unprotected pedestrians and cyclists.

Recent news carries just some of the heart-breaking stories, experienced for decades yet rarely reported. Here are just three of many examples:

  1. Deadliest street…in Chicago
  2. Rising US traffic deaths put focus on one Philadelphia road
  3. Somerville ‘Corridor of Death’…

The Philadelphia news has the money quote:

“You would not design a street or a road like that today,” said Christopher Puchalsky, policy director for Philadelphia’s Office of Transportation, Infrastructure and Sustainability. “It feels like an expressway, but it’s in the middle and between neighborhoods.”

It was in the middle and between neighborhoods by design. It was setup as a death trap by design.

Minneapolis news gives even more detail:

The federal government provided 90 percent of the funding in the Twin Cities to build I-94 and 35W. […] “The African American, the elders, and they were prominent African Americans living at that time in Minneapolis. They said they had no idea what was going on until a bulldozer came in tearing down trees and moving dirt,” he recalled from his research. Thousands of homes and businesses in the interstate’s path were destroyed or removed. “Every pocket of African American neighborhood, urban area, in the United States, you will find a highway border them, splitting them up or dismantled the entire community altogether,” Lloyd told FOX 9. “Why would transportation policy, which is racist in itself, would disrupt and destroy a neighborhood like this?” When asked if it was intentional, he replied, “To say that, was it intentional? It hurts me to say yes, it hurts me to say yes.”

The correlation set forward by President Nixon (keep non-whites poor, kill the poor) thus provides the simple explanation to present-day data analysis.

A recent Governing analysis found poorer neighborhoods record significantly higher per-capita pedestrian death rates — typically twice that of other communities. […] American Indians die in pedestrian crashes at approximately double the rate of other racial and ethnic groups, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study.

It is not an exaggeration to say Nixon hated Black people and wanted them disenfranchised and dead, using any means possible.

Like Ronald Reagan the national policy of Nixon was defined by high levels of racism, rolling out campaigns to excite a white power base desperate to prevent equality and freedom to all Americans.

Meanwhile some might try to assign fault on drivers (recklessness mixed with rising vehicle power) and others want to blame pedestrians for failing to stay inside a racist box (jaywalking is a fantasy crime).

Both of these mere symptoms miss the far more important underlying American history. And it’s perhaps most important to understand that before driverless cars surely will interpret as green light to kill and make far worse.

The bottom line is American road planning, grounded in Nixon’s white supremacist platform, was intended as state-sanctioned means to murder the poor and that’s exactly what it’s been doing.

Security

Facebook Profits From Killing American Children

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Advertising for domestic terror groups is a profit center for Facebook, implicated in mass murder by “great replacement” (e.g. white insecurity) extremism. Media Matters gives a simple explanation:

…white supremacist “great replacement” conspiracy theory that reportedly inspired the latest mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, helping to mainstream the hateful theory. In our latest study, we found that Facebook has profited from at least 50 ads from right-wing political candidates pushing the racist rhetoric, and there were hundreds of posts with similar rhetoric from right-wing media outlets, including Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze.

Even more to the point, Media Matters gives a simple list of those promoting violent domestic terrorism, which Facebook obviously could have done as well to prevent attacks.

Ads about the “great replacement” and “great reset” conspiracy theories come from organizations and individuals including:

  • True Texas Project
  • Greg Cook (candidate for Alabama Supreme Court)
  • California College Republicans
  • Republican Women of Madison
  • Truth & Liberty Coalition
  • Ruben Landon Dante (ran in Texas’ 14th Congressional District)
  • Bianca Gracia (ran in Texas’ 11th state Senate District)
  • Ed Humphreys (candidate for Idaho governor)
  • CPAC 2022
  • Turning Point USA
  • Brian Lenney (candidate for Idaho state Senate)

Ads claiming migrants are invading the border came from candidates including:

  • Gary W. Black (candidate for U.S. Senate from Georgia)
  • Rep. Yvette Herrell (R-NM)
  • Raul Reyes (candidate for Texas state Senate)
  • Michael Lee (president, Board of Supervisors in DeSoto County, Mississippi)
  • Jonah Schulz (ran in Ohio’s 7th Congressional District)
  • JR Majewski (candidate running in Ohio’s 9th Congressional District)
  • Jim Lamon (candidate for U.S. Senate from Arizona)
  • Elijah Norton (candidate running in Arizona’s 1st Congressional District)
  • Rep. Jake Ellzey (R-TX)
  • Mike Gibbons (ran for U.S. Senate from Ohio)
  • Blake Harbin (candidate running in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District)
  • Andrew Gould (candidate for attorney general of Arizona)

[…] After the shooting, right-wing media, political figures, and organizations continued to post anti-immigrant “invasion” rhetoric, despite its influence on the alleged shooter.

Facebook doesn’t just turn a blind eye to fringes of extremist domestic terror narratives that are killing American children, the platform seems to be completely full of it.

…right-leaning pages accounted for nearly 83% of related posts from news and politics pages and nearly 94% of interactions.

Nearly 100% of interactions were from right-leaning pages, which speaks directly to the activation of domestic terror cells and politically motivated shootings.

The centrality of American groups openly spreading domestic terrorism is a repeat of history in the late 1800s and early 1900s, which culminated in the platform of President Woodrow “KKK” Wilson leading directly to 1919 Red Summer of terrorism and Tulsa’s financial district firebombed in 1921.

Tactics were so brutal and violent that when Nazis in 1930s Germany studied these American “great replacement” political groups (both state and non-state actions, including gas chambers and concentration camps) they considered it too barbaric.

America was involved in a 1915 “war of extermination”, coupled with Zyklon-B gas chambers and even ovens burning groups of people in what was called a holocaust. No wonder the BBC ran an article that reported plainly in Spanish… “México sirvió como un centro de experimentación importante de esas ideas.”

Read that again, the Germans using “great replacement” theory to plan genocide thought America’s overt and messy domestic terrorism of the early 1900s under the rise of the KKK’s “America First” platform (let alone the 1800s genocide of President Andrew Jackson) was too extreme for Nazis.

On that note, Idaho and Texas both have history that predicts easily why politicians there today would promote the platform that murders children in America who aren’t white.

Ask yourself this: how old was Carmelita Torres when she was brutally murdered by American border officers in 1918? And why don’t more Americans know the “Latina Rosa Parks“ by name, after she died trying to protect non-white girls from being raped in America?

Click for full page. El Paso Morning Times (El Paso, Tex.), Vol. 37TH YEAR, Ed. 1, Monday, January 29, 1917 (Source: University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, Texas.)

Then ask yourself whether Facebook is just a sad repeat of the worst mistakes in history?

Or as Cosmopolitan put it recently…

New products are being weaponised against women, but is it just the tip of the iceberg as we enter a boom period for technology abuse?

Yes, we have been in a boom period of technology abuse for at least a decade already. Primary targets of abuse are women and children, especially those in minority groups.

I would even argue Facebook management in 2015 clearly turned a corner towards actively becoming the worst possible vision of technology — intentional profit from harm — never straying far from its awful origin story (a college student wanted to use the web to harm women for his personal gain).

Interestingly, in an article on how to help people get through “unspeakable horror” comes the advice give victims more control.

Encourage your kids to convert “passivity into activity,” Weissbourd said. If they feel strongly about gun control or school safety, let them get involved in political action or advocacy. “Anything that will help them feel like they might have an impact on this problem, that it will be less likely to happen again if there is collective action, is really important.”

And that gets to the heart of this issue. It’s a key to unlock the problem.

The “great replacement” platform is a dangerous domestic terrorism fiction. It is based on a non-existent victimization, which gins activation of Americans using propaganda to convince people to become domestic terrorists — assert control through mass murder of non-white women and children.

It takes many more people to form effective collective action among real targets and victims to prevent yet another violent killer, than for a false victim to grab on to some technology designed to harm and start using triggers (e.g. assault rifles and Facebook).

Poetry, Security

Video Review: U.S. Army PSYOPS Recruitment

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The 4th PSYOP Group of the U.S. Army has released a short video, which seems to be generating a lot of attention among circles that seem to aspire for more power, more authority, more control.

Hopefully it’s easy to see why so many people have been saying “please recruit me”.

This is entertaining as a conforming exercise yet unfortunately misses the mark. I mean shooting into a barrel doesn’t equate in my mind to catching fresh fish, let alone clever ones.

I’ll drop here the various issues I see as time will allow…

Let me start by saying the video immediately contradicts itself. It begins with a trite quote “pretend to be weak, that your opponent may grow arrogant” yet quickly leaves behind any attempts to appear weak and instead comes across with repeated arrogant displays of power.

In that context then let me point out that the “we are everywhere” message dumped here is hardly pretending to be weak. It’s a kind of raw message very popular among dictatorships and generally considered toxic to democracy.

Privacy, for example, shouldn’t be inconsistent with psyops because if you are actually able to be “everywhere” and destroy privacy then do you really need psyops?

Likewise being a “ghost” could have been a nice play on concepts of transparency (highly desirable in democracy), or even weakness (ghosts allegedly lack physical power so they depend on “soft” measures). Here the message instead seems to be that a group wants to avoid accountability.

Vintage-looking patches sold today pretend to be from The U.S. 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, activated in 1944. Inspired by Britain’s 1942 Operation Bertram it was a secret group only declassified in 1996. The moniker “ghost army” was thus later acquired and such poorly designed patches started selling perhaps as ironic.

Again, by messaging that a sniper or a drone can kill without being targeted the new Army recruitment video pushes down hard on an arrogance of having “untouchable” power, implying ephemeral ghosts are great like rebellious children who slip away from morality of parental authority without accountability.

Maybe I’m splitting hairs on impression and meaning of icons, but this seems to me a giant leap from the byline for “The Ghost Army” PBS documentary of 2003: “Illusion Was Their Ultimate Weapon”.

…talented young men, many recruited from art schools across the country, who used their creativity to ultimately save lives.

Source: PBS

The Army recruitment video might as well have flashed a nails-on-chalkboard sounding “we get away with things” like “we grab’em by the pussy” or “we shoot someone on 5th Ave” to continue the theme of such feckless arrogant power projection. Who aspires to that instead of WWII ghost’s being talented artists who played with illusion?

And where’s the hope in all this? Where’s the positive measures “to ultimately save lives”?

So much of the imagery emphasizes actions for an outsized impact and causing chaos, like a 12 year old boy thinking he’s invincible and can do anything with abandon.

And that reminds me of the “Ghost” Camaro story of Boznia.

Everything is a stage is another way of saying integrity is low such that harms won’t trace back to the actor wearing a costume.

Track-suit wearing kids storm the streets, haul the leader from his family at dinner time and the country falls into disarray and chaos. Is that really the scene we want to close on?

Proper psyops would align with something that compels actors to join to help, do the right things, lift-up, restore, rejuvenate. Find a balance and keep things calm while breaking through log jams.

Freedom from oppression shouldn’t center around the excited moment riots are toppling statues, if they can instead be clarifying who put statues up and why/where they should be removed as a matter of common sense without fanfare.

Someone saying they don’t want credit, or don’t need compensation, is different from saying they want no responsibility or can’t be held accountable. Subtle, I suppose, yet a very important distinction for De Oppresso Liber.

Security

Lara Logan Switched from News Reporter to Extreme Right Propagandist

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Way back in January 1946 the American-born William Joyce (known as Lord Haw-Haw, and who infamously started his Nazi propaganda broadcasts with “Germany calling”) was executed by Britain for treason.

…being a person owing allegiance to our Lord the King, and while a war was being carried on by the German Realm against our King, did traitorously adhere to the King’s enemies in Germany, by broadcasting propaganda.

A similar fate came to a extreme right “spin” broadcaster in France, Paul Ferdonnet, as I’ve written about here before.

How far have we come? The explanation given by those who worked with Lara Logan is that she used to have editors and producers filtering noise to keep her away from dangerous extremes and conspiracy, but she lost access to them when she pushed harder faster and fell too far off the rails.

One former CBS producer who worked with her, Peter Klein, said in an interview that the structure of a large newsroom was a moderating influence. “There’s a system in place in newsrooms that offer checks and balances,” said Klein, founder of the Global Reporting Centre in British Columbia, a nonprofit. “Most of us need that system — but she really needed that system. And we knew that from the beginning,” he said. “Now she’s just unfiltered,” Klein added.

Now instead of being ignored she found a rapid rise to prominence by abandoning integrity, feeding into paranoia, removing quality and espousing extreme right propaganda.

The switch most likely began soon before she very loudly refused to accept basic truth in 2013, as that same article details.

Sounding more like an advocate for the military than a reporter, Logan told her [2012] audience in Chicago that she hoped the government was getting ready to deploy its “best clandestine warriors” to “exact revenge.” The world should know, she added, that the United States would not be attacked and then “stand by and do nothing about it.” And she accused the Obama administration of playing down the threat from the Taliban, and of lying “about who they really are.” Then, about a year later, she began telling people she was working on a story that “was going to blow the lid off Benghazi,” according to one person’s recollection. The story she came up with was the kind of work known inside “60 Minutes” somewhat dismissively as a “book report” because it was based in part on a forthcoming book. Logan interviewed the author, a security contractor stationed in Libya, who said in a segment that aired on Oct. 27, 2013, that he had helped defend the compound on the night of the attack. He described in harrowing detail how he came face to face with the enemy. The New York Times reported several weeks later that the contractor had, in fact, told the FBI that he was not inside the compound that night. After initially defending Logan and the report, CBS News retracted it and apologized. Logan and her producer were placed on a leave of absence, and she acknowledged having made a “disappointing” mistake. The network’s chief and executive producer of “60 Minutes” at the time, Jeffrey Fager, later called the story “the worst mistake on my 10-year watch.”

She really, really wanted to believe a vulnerability narrative and push a hard-line military perspective, so much that she let it divorce her from even simple facts about actually who was inside a compound being attacked.

Now she has transitioned into false victimization paranoia market, marrying a defense contractor and moving to Texas, where the extreme right operates most dramatically to excite and agitate social conflict.

More to the point, back in 2010 she had been flagged for “misfire” and showing poor judgment. CNN’s former chief military correspondent, Jamie McIntyre, said what General McChrystal and his aides did was so egregious that Logan’s defense of them…

…unfortunately reinforced the worst stereotype of reporters who ’embed’ with senior military officers but are actually ‘in bed’ with them.

Ouch.

Wait, it was even worse for Logan as she gets called out for being a direct threat to real journalism by trying to replace it with militant fetishism.

…Logan implies that somehow military service trumps the journalistic tradition of truth-seeking. If critics, who are already predisposed to believe the worst about the media, are looking for evidence combat reporters are too dazzled by the shiny stars on the commander’s epaulets, this is their smoking gun.

CBS was thus late to send her packing, as they could have avoided “their worst mistake” of a decade.

Ironically after Logan was held to account for highly-politicized positioning in opposition to the U.S. government she decided to become a vocal critic of journalists as propagandists if they didn’t fall in line with her own political views.

And her views have been exposed as becoming more and more preposterous, unhinged conspiracies with no factual basis.

In the below video note how she describes an “aha” moment growing up in South Africa. As a white girl she says she believed Black people are bad, then credits those people for instilling in her a belief anything can be true (she was forced to accept after the end of apartheid that Black people in prison were in fact not bad).

Her victimization views are truly so deranged they’re being promoted in Russian propaganda in an attempt to help invasion of Ukraine.

Let’s be clear. Russia has inherited the mantle of Nazism and Ukraine is defending against it. Logan is upside down and backwards, which I guess is obviously why RT is promoting her.

This is a repeat of years ago when Logan attempted to undermine science and promote baseless paranoia when (during Hanukkah no less) she falsely tried to equate a modern U.S. government officials’ expertise with disease eradication to… Nazism.

Lara Logan, a host on Fox News Media’s streaming service, compared Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, to the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who worked at Auschwitz during the Holocaust.

These absurd and shrill comments make her whole career seem like it has been a slow-moving attempt to restore white power after being confused by the fall of apartheid.

She brings to mind a bigger issue in America.

Why are white South Africans of her particular age becoming such large-scale proxies for right wing extremism in the U.S. trying to amass power through military, financial markets and media (e.g. Thiel, Musk, Logan…)?