The Russians Are Hacking! The Russians Are Hacking!

Putin Authored Brexit
Italy Election Interference
US Elections 2016
Russia Election Warfare Worldwide

If you look at the above-linked articles, you'll start to notice a pattern. The pattern falls out like a rock. Wherever nationalism, populism and culture win out over globalism and progressivism, Russia is there tampering with the levers of power.

True or not, the accusation that Russia is promoting anti-globalism and a multi-lateral geopolitical world is only bad if you are a globalism swine.

For perspective, the US has provably and admittedly interfered in other nations' elections since at least 1948, in Italy, and most likely long before that. The US used to justify this interference as bringing "democracy" to the downtrodden masses and rescuing the world from "communism," whether those nations wanted it or not.

What makes the Russian situation rather comical is not only the fact that she is accused of destroying globalism - without actually ever saying that, but that Vlad Putin appears to be the busiest man in the world. On top of that, Putin is probably the greatest intellect ever in the history of everything and never makes a mistake or loses a contest.

When you pull back a get a little perspective on things, you realize that neither Russia nor Putin are capable of doing everything they have been accused of. We are asked to believe that Russia has the time, resources and desire to deeply penetrate the media, social movements and politics of just about every Western nation - and a few others - in the world. There must literally be a huge, dark, subterranean chamber in Siberia full of thousands of Russian hackers and advertisers working literally around the clock hacking every existing mind-control system out there.

Not only are the Russians capable of this, but they are master manipulators, insidiously guiding the though patterns of millions of people, particularly in the moments leading up to a vote.

In a plot worthy of the best Bond villain ever, Russia cleverly deploys RT articles and Facebook ads at just the right moment, using carefully selected trigger words to make you vote the way they want you to. Like a zombie, your mind has been taken over with anti-globalism thoughts because Russia, masters of the most subtle aspects of every Western language on Earth, can carefully craft messages that slide right past all your psychological and rational defenses and induce you to pull the voting lever against your will.

The whole thing is patently absurd, if not downright preposterous.

The underlying assumption in all this is that you and I are completely mindless idiots susceptible to anyone with a mastery of advertising and social media.

In short, it is good if we all blindly follow Uncle Sam's mental manipulations, but it is a crime bordering on genocide if any other entity is able to override and undo it. That is basically what Russia is being accused of.

The thing is, if Russia is wrong for doing it, then everyone is wrong - including a corporation or government near you. It doesn't matter how altruistic and noble the cause is, if any entity attempts to override an individual's thought processes, it is wrong.

That all media outlets everywhere are attempting to manipulate our dreams, desires and beliefs is a given. For more than a century, the mass media has been used to steer the populace this way and that - whether it is inducing us to buy products and images, or William Randolph Hearst taking the nation to war. The marketing and PR machine has infused itself into our most private and secure realm - our minds.

The wailing indictment of Russia in the Western mediasphere is equally an indictment of itself. The only real difference is the degree to which one side or the other is controlling our minds.

None of this absolves us from individual responsibility. We must be eternally vigilant against the invasion of our most sacred inner spaces. We must educate ourselves, recognize the manipulations and repulse the attacks, whether it is Russians trying to control our voting fingers, or the Western media-industrial empire trying to make us believe that our conscious choices are not ours.

And therein lies the crux of the matter. The Western political media and the corporations that own them are scared spitless by the huge wave of nationalism and the wholesale rejection of globalism and unbridled immigration, and the resulting destruction of national and cultural identity. The only way they have to fight it is to convince us that our decisions are not ours, but are the result of insidious manipulation by the evil Russians.

It's not working, but we must remain on guard, because the attack against the new nationalism will increase, and the methods and channels used to manipulate us will increase in number and strength. The globalists have spent centuries building up their command and control structures, and they will not just give up and walk away.

Today, it's Russians, but when that narrative fails - and it will sooner than later - there will be a new bogeyman. The more we, as individuals, assert control over our own thoughts and destinies, the more the attacks will increase. The only defense we have is knowledge. Learn how these systems work, and they will lose power over you.

One cannot fight an invisible enemy, and learning how it operates makes it clearly visible.

Onward through the fog...

Roil, Roil, Foil And Fumble

It is amazing that anyone can take the Trump/Russia conspiracy seriously.  At the very least, for the US to accuse ANY other country of interfering with its elections is so disingenuous as to induce guffaws in any aware individual.  Furthermore, the story employs one of the simplest forms of deception - misdirection.  Finally, it is nothing more than a 100-year-old geopolitical effort to isolate Russia, as it sits squarely in the middle of nearly ever strategic location on Earth.

To quality my remarks, I hold no truck with Trump (score for triple-letter alliteration).  I think he is a bombastic blowhard who may be a wily real estate mogul and carnival barker, but has zero interest or sense when it comes to history and long-term effects beyond the bottom line of the annual report.

That said, for the US to get its panties in a bunch over election rigging is seriously funny.  The country that has interfered with elections in nearly every country on Earth has little room to call the kettle black.  Since at least Teddy Roosevelt's Cuban and Panamanian adventures, and certainly since the 1948 Italian elections, the US has begged, borrowed and stolen elections the world over.  In addition, the US Department of Homeland Security assured voters that the 2016 elections were secure on its say-so.  If not, then disband the DHS and put its officers in prison.

The Russian hacking story got legs after WikiLeaks released internal email it received most likely from Seth Rich and others on the inside of the Democratic Party leadership.  Other than firing Debbie Wasserman Schultz and killing Seth Rich, the DNC has opted not to address its internal pond scum, but rather keep everyone distracted with accusations of Russian interference.  The whole issue is little more than a case of sour grapes, combined with a panicked effort to keep everyone looking at the messenger, rather than focus on the message: the DNC is full of slime-sucking pigs.

In the final analysis, though, the US effort to create Russian bug-a-boos is a continuation of a century of more effort to isolate Russia.  With the largest land mass of any country on Earth, spanning Europe and Asia, with vast natural resources, Russia could easily threaten the US empire, and has for a long time.  The US considers Europe its plaything and is deathly afraid to have Russia exert any influence over it.  In recent years, Russia has cozied up with China, an economic monster created by the US in the 1970s, and together they are an existential threat to US hegemony.  The Russia-China alliance, which increasingly includes Africa and South America (see Brazil), could easily expand to surround the US in a way far more threatening than NATO pop-guns in Poland and the Ukraine.

All empires need an enemy to prop them up, and Russia fits the bill.  The US can't attack China directly, because most of its manufacturing has been exported there, so that leaves Russia by default.  Furthermore, greenies in the US have all but shut down oil and gas production in that country, making Russia the logical supplier of choice for Europe's energy needs.  The US desperately needs to keep Europe a vassal state, but Europe desperately needs Russia to survive.  Catch-22.

That Venezuela and Brazil are in melt-down mode is a perfect example of how the US manipulates countries for its geopolitical ends.  That the US can actually accuse Russia of interference with its internal affairs is laughable, at best.  We won't even get into Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, and Ecuador, much less the Central American republics that the US steadfastly stirred and shaken.

While the US implodes, the rest of the world watches with bemusement at the astounding duplicity and perfidy of its internal politics.

Come to think of it, Trump is exactly the president the US needs and deserves.

Playing Houdini At Home

Part of the reason I never worry too much about so-called "internet kill switches" and "government censorship of the net" is that hackers are a wily lot.

For one thing, there is no single switch that turns off the net.  It is a fabulously complex distributed network that would require the entire global power grid to fail in order to "turn it off".  There are, however, a limited number of backbones into and out of any given country.  They include fiber, cable and satellite T-3 pipes that enter, hit distributors, and then the data packets get distributed to wherever it is they are going.  It is quite possible for governments to sit on and control those ports.  They can filter and futz with the data streams all day long, making sure you only get what they want you to get, or at the very least, make detailed notes on what you are receiving.

Governments assume you are stupid because they do everything in their power to keep you that way.  That's why we here on the Far Side say that the 21st century form of government is "on, over and inside the people," rather than "of, by and for."  It's just a bit of mucking around with prepositions, really.

One other point before continuing.  In the Far Side lexicon, the words "government" and "corporation" are synonyms.  Thus, "law" and "policy" are equivalent, as well.  To carry this a bit further, "taxpayer" and "employee" are also the same.  Applying fractal geometry, corporations are but smaller, identical forms of the larger government form, from the micro to the macro scale.

Anyway, a great number of governments/corporations filter what their subjects/employees can see.  Only approved information from approved sources are allowed through the pipes, whether you are at your desk or at home.  Oh sure, the pipes are usually controlled by companies, but since companies must file with government for permission/license to operate and gain 'legal' status, they are nothing more than branches of government.

Here's were hackers step in.  Hackers are the 21st century equivalent of revolutionary freedom fighters.  To the government/corporate Boards of Directors (BoD), these people are 'terrorists' because they bypass and undermine the imposed system of controls.  Hackers view information as neither good nor bad, simply bits and bytes to be accessed or not.  Obviously, the more a gov/corp doesn't want you to see something, the more interesting it is, which can be both a danger and a weapon to the BoD.

Information can be dangerous to the BoD because it turns off the mental control mechanisms that they spend decades installing through 'schools'.  However, it can also be a weapon because the BoD can declare something off-limits, thus enticing employees to take a look using the Forbidden Fruit Theory of behavior modification.  It's a two-edged sword that requires a great amount of discernment on the part of renegade employees.

So all of this ranting brings us at long last to the point.  Please keep the cheering to a minimum.

Pirate Bay has released their version of the Firefox browser.  Called the PirateBrowser, it uses the Tor system to circumvent blocks and censorship.  Basically, Pirate Bay assembled some off-the-shelf add-ons with the Firefox browser to create a pret-a-porter app that runs circles around censors.

The Onion Router (TOR) system was developed by the US Navy to trade information secretly.  Think of it as a network of gopher tunnels all through the internet by which folks can trade info packets without being visible to above-ground viewers.  The technology got out into the wild sometime back and its used by gov/corps and us real people all the time now.

Harry Houdini had a remarkable trick.  He would have a literal, physical brick wall built on stage.  Of course, a heavy floor cover was needed so as not to damage the stage floor.  Houdini would raise a small curtain and *POOF*, he'd appear to pass through solid matter.  What the audience didn't see was the trap door opening under the heavy floor covering, allowing just enough slack for a limber fellow to weasel under the wall.  That's TOR.

So this is all fun and cool, but what does it have to do with this article?  Glad you asked.

The genie is out of the bottle.  The internet has matured far beyond anything the gov/corps could have imagined or wanted.  Whatever obstacles they throw up, someone finds a hole.  If they kill the Big Pipes, folks set up Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks.  Thousands of people, like us Far Siders, have built massive libraries of information as a bulwark against it disappearing.  And the old "conspiracy theorist" label has worn thin, now that folks have seen so many of them proven correct.

This situation has led meatpuppets like John Kerry (SecState USCorp) to remark, "[T]this little thing called the Internet ... makes it much harder to govern."  First off, notice the use of the pejorative 'little thing,' as if his shiny white ass is far superior to the puny hordes out here in reality.  Second, you should have automatically replaced in your mind the term 'govern' with 'command and control'.

At any rate, we Far Siders are busy assessing the new PirateFox, since porn sites and words like Essex and sextant and sexagenarian and breast self-exam are banned in Indonesia because the members of Parliament spend all their time surfing screw films instead of doing their jobs.  I mean, good Lord!  If the BoD can't control themselves, we slimy, morally inferior little employees sure can't.  (Note that we are allowed, at any age, to surf all the violence, horror and beheadings we want - just no loving and kissing!)

So there you have it - a new subversive toy to play with in your spare time because we here on the Far Side are always at the forefront of employee rights!

Just a side note: we recently started uploading Radio Far Side to YouTube, since they gave us permission to offer things longer than 10 minutes.  As a result, EMI started banning RFS "in certain countries" because we use one minute of Wall of Voodoo's four-minute long song "Mexican Radio" in the opening titles.  As a consequence, the two (so far) videos that have met this resistance are the two most popular.  I guess banning them makes people all the more curious.  Hahahahahaha!  (that's a maniacal laugh kind of like Dr. Frankenstein when the Creature's hand starts twitching)

You may recall that EMI were the asinine bastards who tried to make it illegal to listen to your radio in your car with your windows open because a song they represent may get played and heard by folks casually passing by.  Sounds like EMI has too many lawyers, too much money and too little to do - outside of jacking money from the poor musicians who are fooled into listing with them.

So quitcherbitchin' and start yer twitchin'!