Gaslighted: What We Got for Christmas in 2016

We’re now on the very cusp of a new year, and there’s one thing about the passing one that I can say with certainty: THE news story of 2016 is that a huge swath of the American public, stretching from left to right, deeply distrusts both 1) establishment candidates from either party and 2) corporate media. That’s the news story of the year. Period.

But look what our political class and media are up to here at year’s end. For weeks now they been frantically trying to fill that media, both print and TV, with: "The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! They’re bombarding us with fake news!”

As a diversion tactic from the true Big Story, you’d have thought they could come up with something better.

To give bite to their claims that “fake news” determined the election, which is absurd on the face of it and absurd down to the bone of it, our leaders last week even passed actual legislation designed to cast doubt on alternative news organizations, legislation that is almost literally state censorship. In America.

What in hell are they up to?

To give yet more bite to their claims, the Obama administration two days ago kicked out thirty-five Russian diplomats, promising yet further reactions to the Russian “aggression” we’ve suffered.

This is major stuff, sure to grab headlines and keep the talking heads talking. Which is just what it is meant to do. Because at present Washington elites’ most important task is to keep us the citizenry from catching our breath and thinking clearly about the year’s real news--namely our widespread and reasonable disgust at these same elites’ decades-long systematic betrayal of our interests in favor of Whatever the Corporations Want.

And here I have to watch non-comatose, intelligent friends on Facebook and elsewhere still debating the question of whether Russia hacked the DNC or, if not, who Wikileaks’ source was. It's depresseing. Because it's irrelevant. It is a diversion from our real story, a strategic diversion that sadly is almost working.

Consider: What if the Russians did hack us? Really--what if? Would there be any surprise in that? Hacking is an integral part of intelligence work. We, the Chinese, the Russians--it's what we do, year in year out. And? If the Russians hacked us, the whole story should be on improving cyber security, not on the question of how evil the Russians are, and certainly not on the question of whether alternative media sources are trustworthy, which is an issue entirely unrelated to cyber security.

In fact the Russian hacking meme was launched in reaction to the abject horror Washington elites felt face to face with the unthinkable. Their chosen candidate, Hillary Clinton, lost. Which is not supposed to happen. They thought they were doing so well. And she lost.

In a breathtakingly hypocritical move, the hacking meme was launched simultaneously with the "fake news" meme. Note how these two were rolled out as virtual twins. The clear intent was to create a generalized impression in the public mind: “If we Americans didn't vote for Clinton, it was because the Enemy is manipulating our media!” Which notion is entirely false of course, and doesn't even logically follow from the premise of hacking. Though there may be some evidence of hacking, in fact there is no evidence Russia seeded our press with fake news. (The Washington Post, ever eager to please its masters, did its best to establish a link between the two memes, but failed miserably, as Glenn Greenwald demonstrates. The article is a staggering exposé of just how far journalistic standards have fallen among our corporate media.)

Our leaders prodded these two memes (“Russian hacking”; “fake news”) onto the stage simultaneously in order to make them sing as a duo. That the connecting logic is lacking, that they are not in fact a duo, is unimportant when it comes to manipulating public perceptions. We Americans are being subjected to a sophisticated gaslighting campaign; and frighteningly, to judge by how much media and mental bandwidth space it’s taking up, this campaign is near accomplishing its goal.

Gaslighting, if you aren’t familiar with the term, describes a particular style of psychological manipulation. It seeks to confuse the victim by overwhelming him/her with an ersatz version of reality, a version presented so aggressively and in such an offhand manner that the victim begins to doubt his or her sanity, or at least feels suddenly on unfamiliar ground. The gaslighter befuddles the victim by swiftly changing the focus of attention, and making her argue irrelevant points or swallow illogical givens so as to wear her out. Gaslighting originally describes sociopathic behavior in the context of relationships, but the concept is being used more and more in recent years to describe sophisticated state propaganda techniques. There are many useful articles on the arsenal of gaslighting techniques (here’s one for instance) and if you aren’t familiar with this arsenal, it’s well worth getting up to speed.

In this current instance, which we might call the Great Christmas Gaslighting of 2016, the clear purpose is to obfuscate and confuse the public on five fundamentals:

1) Americans rejected Hillary Clinton because she was the establishment candidate, and Americans had had enough of this kind of politics under the current president. Further, that the mainstream media so clearly sided with Clinton proved to many that she was not to be trusted. Ditto with her and the DNC’s treatment of Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primaries. That Clinton could lose to Donald Trump proves just how deep this distrust was.

2) If the Russians hacked the DNC, that in itself did not cause Clinton to lose the election. She lost, again, because Americans didn’t want another corporate-bought Washington insider in the White House.

3) The origin of the data Wikileaks received is not the main issue for most American voters, regardless of what the media says, and in fact it is almost as likely the data was received via a leak from within the Clinton campaign. But again, in relation to the real news story of 2016, whichever is true matters little to most Americans because . . .

4) No one has credibly disputed the authenticity of the emails Wikileaks published, and those emails, without any “fake” elaborations on their content, were already enough to prove collusion with the media, a conspiracy against Bernie Sanders, and pay to play.

5) The “fake news” scare is itself hollow. “Pizzagate”, the only fanciful conspiracy theory resulting from the Wikileaks releases, was not an elaborate piece of Russian disinformation, but merely the product of a conspiracy-hungry western blogosphere. Westerners don’t need Russia to concoct conspiracy theories, and such theories have always been around. Some elements of the public are always vulnerable to BS claims, but that in itself is no excuse, in America, to support programs of state censorship. Yes, we’re looking at you, Mr. Obama. It will be nice to see you go.

And so: What connection does fake news even HAVE to Russia? There is no connection, even though our establishment pundits are babbling overtime to imply one. I guess they know on which side their bread is buttered.

With the level of public disgust at Washington Business As Usual, our government and corporate media elites are now in panic mode. They are, after all, a class of many thousands of individuals whose very lucrative careers are at risk if they lose public trust, and they see they are losing it fast. Their goal at present is to dominate the conversation with an ersatz version of reality and hope the public changes its focus. They turn to gaslighting as a tactic.

Gaslighting:

1) If they see the public doesn’t trust them and their own political leadership, quick--Point to the leadership in Moscow as a dangerous threat that needs to be dealt with.

2) If they see the public doesn’t trust the media they use to direct public opinion, quick--Concoct a “fake news” epidemic to make the public return to trusting to only mainstream media.

3) Do this all at the same time so that the public will get the vague impression that Russia is behind the “fake news”.

So what did we Americans get for Christmas this year? We got gaslighted. And we’re still getting gaslighted, more so with every passing week, because gaslighting depends on bombarding the victim with false claims, repeating them so often and so fervently that the victim starts to repeat them in his or her sleep.

That the concept grew out of the study of unhealthy relationships with sociopaths is perhaps helpful. The American public has long been in a relationship with a lying sociopath, and that sociopath is the corporatocracy in Washington. For decades, our leaders in both executive and legislative branches, from both parties, have allowed corporate interests to outsource our jobs, military-corporate interests to drag us into one unnecessary war after another, and Wall Street elites to rig our financial markets so as to make us, the population, the big losers whenever those markets crash. And if we react in a sane way, by flatly rejecting more of same, we seem them now battering us with 24/7 propaganda about how our real problem is in Moscow.

Under this constant and systematic abuse, if we are to keep ourselves sane, and keep struggling for a functional democracy, we must not forget the real news story of this year. And so I’ll repeat my first paragraph:

THE news story of 2016 is that a huge swath of the American public, stretching from left to right, deeply distrusts both 1) establishment candidates from either party and 2) corporate media. That’s the news story of the year. Period.

At the start of the new year, then, our questions should be: WHY has this distrust grown so deep and what are we going to do about it? Has it grown so deep because of “Russian operatives”? The suggestion is laughable. Are we going to return to trusting the mainstream media and mainstream politicians, are we going to shun “fake news” sources that don’t look and sound like Anderson Cooper? We’d be insane to do so. So HOW shall we proceed to ensure that we’re not systematically manipulated over the years to come by the same band of corporate predators and fake progressives (Hello, Hillarack Obinton) that have been playing us since the 1990s?

Whatever we do, we must keep thinking and talking about our REAL story. It is only on such solid ground that we might think clearly to change the dynamic that has brought us to where we are. Which is not the best of places.

But at least, as 2017 begins, the establishment is in panic mode. Let’s keep it that way.

Eric Mader

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A Durationist Theory of Art

Introduction:

These few paragraphs offer a basic theory of art. I attempt to define what humans do when they make art, what sets apart artistic activity from other activities which, according to this theory, would not count as art. My main concepts are mimesis, as classically formulated by the Greeks, and defamiliarization, as formulated by Victor Shklovsky.

The Theory:

All art is a dialectic of mimesis and defamiliarization.

Though any instance of art may privilege mimesis over defamiliarizaiton, or vice versa, no art can exist except in tension between these two poles.

Certainly defamiliarization cannot exist without mimesis. But the contrary is also true. Though some might claim that mimesis can exist purely, in fact even the most representational forms of art entail a degree of defamiliarization if only through the act of framing or the choice of subject: the artist represents this rather than any of the other possible subjects. And so even the most mimetic work defamiliarizes through the very choice of representing what it does. It makes what it represents stand out from all that was not represented.

Via the dialectic of mimesis and defamiliarization, art renews experience. It memorializes the experience of this or that while altering the angle from which this or that were originally, or are usually, experienced. Of course memorialization largely takes place through the work of mimesis, but defamiliarization may also be a manner of memorialization, or re-memorializing through the shock of an altered angle.

Varieties of Art:

Literature represents and defamiliarizes everyday language and the world evoked by that language. Individual works of literature may focus more on defamiliarizing the signified or the signifier, but literary work in general defamiliarizes both.

Though music also represents the sounds of the world, it most essentially represents human voice, and defamiliarizes it. That we normally hum remembered music (the half-voiced humming of music stuck in our heads) suggests the link of even instrumental music to voice. Our voices, primally, imitate both the sounds of language and the sounds of the world; musical instruments artificially extend the range of human voice.

Painting, photography, graphic art all represent and defamiliarize visual experience.

Sculpture represents bodies and objects, most classically defamiliarizing human and animal bodies (which are capable of movement) through stasis.

Dance represents the movements of the body in the everyday, and defamiliarizes these movements through repetition, exaggeration, etc.

Theater represents social encounter, choosing to frame and thus distance specific encounters, or types of encounter, in re-enactment. Theatrical framing is in part a technique of defamiliarization (all artistic mimesis entails defamiliarization: cf. above). Theatrical re-enactment, essentially a form of memorialization, may work in service to catharsis, ritual, or celebration, all of which entail renewal of experience.

Film represents the visual and sonic experience of the world and defamiliarizes it through the myriad techniques developed over its short history.

Conclusion:

All art is a dialectic of mimesis and defamiliarization.


Eric Mader

Victor Shklovsky, portrait by Yuri Annenkov, 1919

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Taiwan Succumbs to Same-Sex Marriage

Protesters for and against meet face to face in Taipei.
Next year Taiwan will become the first Asian nation to legally recognize same-sex marriages. With the passage of relevant amendments by a legislative committee two days ago, the outcome is all but certain when the proposed amendments get their final reading next year.

It is no surprise that Taiwan is the first Asian country to go this route. A mid-sized democracy of 23 million people, the country’s culture is a blend of Chinese, Japanese, aboriginal and western elements, but in recent years its political elites take most of their cues from the West, and since democratization in the 1980s and ‘90s, generations of Taiwanese have returned with advanced degrees from western universities, deepening the western influence. Taiwan is also a staunch ally of the US, and the changes in American marriage law brought by Obergefell played no small role in convincing many here that Taiwan should follow suit.

I’ve lived in Taiwan as an American expat since 1996 and love the culture and people. Though I have been for much of my life an advocate of gay and lesbian rights (which I understand as rights not to be harassed or discriminated against in employment or education) I am against this change to the country’s laws, which is happening in unfortunately familiar ways.

Familiar is the top-down manner in which the new definition of marriage is being imposed. Rather than allow for a referendum on the issue, which most opponents of the change demanded, the legislature is seeking to pass the new marriage law on its own. As in Australia, supporters of same-sex marriage here do not want to take the risk of allowing the citizenry to weigh in. The citizenry, after all, might give the “wrong” answer.

So there is widespread suspicion of a betrayal of the will of the people, as we saw also in the US when the Supreme Court decided the marriage debate on its own in Obergefell.

Also familiar are the crowds of mostly young protesters surrounding the Legislative Yuan, the energy and moral certainty of these crowds, and the crowds of protesters on the other side, mainly from Christian, Buddhist and Taoist organizations, firmly against changing the meaning of marriage. Whereas the former are celebrating the joy of their certainty with the élan of attendees at a pop concert, the latter, to judge by their looks, seem mainly to be saying: “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

To talk to Americans in the pro-LGBT camp, one often gets the impression that they believe Christians and Muslims are the only staunch opponents of same-sex marriage and gender ideology. This is myopic of course. Most of the world’s cultural and religious traditions, across Asia and through Africa (whether Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, or the myriad African and more local traditions) understand that marriage is between male and female. Thus the Buddhists and Taoists protesting the new marriage amendments in Taiwan. Their opposition, interestingly, surprised a few of my western peers.

“Aren’t Buddhists more progressive?” one asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Their ideas of progress are not yours.”

Familiar also is the arrogance of those pushing the law through. They know what human rights are, they just know, and if anyone opposes their proposed redefinition of marriage, it has to be because of a lack of knowledge.

One of the legislators active in pushing the amendments, Yu Mei-nu, was quoted at length in the Taipei Times, an English-language newspaper that solidly supports the changes (and that recently ran an editorial prodding Taiwanese to reform their “archaic ideas” of marriage):

“The public can rest assured that the legislation will not change heterosexual marriage in any way, but it will extend [the rights and obligations of] such marriages to same-sex couples,” she said. “The legislation will not destroy the family or abolish marriage.”

The legalization of same-sex marriage does not cause civic unrest in the Netherlands, which was the first country to legalize same-sex marriage, Yu said, urging marriage equality opponents to exercise tolerance.

She rejected proposals to launch a referendum to decide on marriage equality, saying a human rights issue should not be put to the vote.

“We are not God. How do we have the right to decide on other people’s human rights?” Yu asked.

That too is depressingly familiar. Legislator Yu is part of a cadre of lawyers and politicians, largely from one party, seeking to railroad through legislation that offends against the basic male-female understanding of marriage common to all the cultural traditions that have made up Taiwan since time immemorial, yet somehow it is she who is warning people against pretending to be God.

Blindly assume that whatever you assert human rights to be must therefore be human rights, then accuse those who disagree of being arrogant and judgmental. I’m saddened to see this kind of SJW demagoguery here in Taiwan, but on the marriage issue, it looks like the die is cast.

Check out my book Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.

Hey, Clintonites: A Christmas Message

Hey, Clintonites. Why not finally recognize where you're at? Shoulder deep in mud and cognitive dissonance. And still digging. Really, isn't it time to put those shovels down?

First we had all the talk from the liberal press of election rigging, then Stein's recount push. Result: Trump only gained a larger lead in Wisconsin. And as for evidence of possibly systematic rigging, there was some in Detroit: Clinton territory. It didn't make for good optics, as they say.

Then you got yourselves into this faithless electors campaign. Result: Trump lost two electors, Clinton lost five.

What's next? Try to airlift Hillary onto the stage at the inauguration?

Here are the two hard pills you folks need to swallow: 1) Hillary lost this election, as did her party generally. 2) Had you insisted early on that Bernie Sanders be the candidate, rather than Miss Wall Street Baggage, Trump would now be launching a new reality show rather than preparing to move into the White House.

So it’s time to climb out of the neoliberal pit you're all in. Put those shovels down while we can still see the tops of your heads.

And Merry Christmas! It's the holiday where we celebrate the birth of Jesus, by a long shot the most hardcore social justice warrior of the ancient world (INCLUDING on women's fundamental equality) aside from being, of course, the Messiah.

Sincerely,

Eric Mader

Check out my book Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.

PANIC: Washington Elites in Full Propaganda Mode

CNN before the election; CNN after the election.
by David Hammond

Well, I honestly thought we had dodged a bullet involving war with Russia by not electing Hillary Clinton, but it looks like I was wrong. Given Clinton's defeat in the presidency, her controllers are now simply attempting to advance the timeline. Never mind the absurdity of the CIA complaining about election meddling, when that's been their particular specialty, in foreign governments, for at least the past seventy years. Never mind that our government has the gall to lie to us about "fake news" when our own Supreme Court has ruled that the mainstream news media is under absolutely no obligation to tell the truth. Never mind that the CIA has a documented history of infiltrating our news media through Operation Mockingbird and who knows what else, and has been called out by the highest members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, decade after decade, for being inherently deceitful from the inside out. Never mind that Julian Assange, top US intelligence officers, and even former UK ambassador Craig Murray have all explicitly stated that the expose of corrupt DNC activity was a leak, not a hack.

I suppose it may also be relevant that exactly twenty years ago TIME magazine proudly reported on the feats of American political consultants who manipulated the Russian election to ensure a Boris Yeltsin win, using a covert plan that involved specialized polling (similar to the Clinton campaign’s weighted polling that split Independents in half, giving her at least a constant 10% bump nationally) a negative ad campaign, propaganda, and other tools of the political manipulation trade.

This latest media propaganda blitz isn't so shocking on its own because similar tactics have presaged every war of choice America has ever been in. But to see so many intelligent people hysterically lap it up while apparently salivating for war with Russia and decrying "fake news" is getting a little creepy.

And the craziest part is that nearly every cheerleader is on the so-called left (of which I have been a lifelong member) when aren't we the ones who are supposed to see through government BS and lies as they goad us into yet another war? Surely such hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance can't be simply because our president is a Democrat, can it? Not even sure if I want to know the answer to that.

America, you are being lied to, yet again. You are being herded into yet another war of choice by powers that will say absolutely anything to get you to believe whatever they want you to believe. As Rahm Emmanuel infamously put it: "Never let a good crisis go to waste." Unfortunately, the establishment candidate's loss is just such an opportunity and they are capitalizing on it fiercely. How can this even happen? They are basically eliminating alternative news media with HR 6393, which was just quietly passed in the House, a bill that is quite literally the beginning of government censorship, with all of social media onboard. And, of all organizations, they're using Snopes as one of their go-to judges of what is “fake”, a widely-discredited source that routinely serves up misinformation, disinformation, and flat-out lies. Germany is even following suit by threatening to sue Facebook for €500,000 for every "fake" post allowed to stay up for more than 24 hours. When this kind of law can pass muster, it really doesn't matter which side of the aisle you are on. It should send a chill down the spine of anybody who appreciates their First Amendment rights. And as always, who is watching the watchers? This is nothing short of a open gate straight to tyranny.

Yet their technique has always been to point frantically to a threat so big and so encompassing that people will be clamoring for whatever medicine they want to sell. Its called problem -> reaction -> solution, and it's been their modus operandi for as long as anyone on the planet has been alive. Of course, they create the problem, fake the reaction, and then enact their preplanned solution, but is anyone really paying attention?

Right now, our government and their pliant mainstream media are engaged in a full-on fake news blitz, telling a lie so big and so outrageous that you'll have no choice but to believe it, or risk thinking the whole world has gone insane. This is called gaslighting, by the way. Look into it because it's one of the newest forms of mass manipulation in the book, and it's being aimed directly at you. Essentially a spin-off of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels' famous quip “Tell a lie big enough and loud enough, and people will eventually believe it,” contemporary gaslighting adds subtle techniques of psychological manipulation to disorient the populace into submission.

Of course if Hillary Clinton had won, and the Trump camp were making these same ludicrous accusations, based on the same dearth of evidence, the left would be howling and scowling and ridiculing them day and night. When are people going to realize that, left or right, we are being repeatedly played to acquiesce to the establishment agenda? Naturally, I did not vote for Trump and I do not support Trump. But I have a very big problem with glaring hypocrisy and selective outrage--especially when those playing such games dangerously throw all logic and common sense out the window while risking war with a nuclear power.

The same goes for the idea that we need to overturn this election. Caveat: Unless you are personally willing to fight in a civil war, then please stop immediately. Unless you are willing to throw this country into blind chaos and bloodshed, then please stop. And again, just think: if Trump supporters demanded overturning the election, the left would climb over themselves to use that as evidence of crazed depravity, leveling every possible insult imaginable, and very likely threatening violence. Don't expect that the same thing wouldn't happen if Clinton supporters get anywhere near actually overturning this election.

And isn't it ironic that an establishment complaining about "fake news" was all in for a candidate who openly stated to Goldman Sachs that “You have to have a public position, as well as a private position”? The message is quite clear: It's basically okay to lie to you, the public, as long as we're the ones doing it. But if somebody exposes our lies--Russia for instance, or some recently-murdered DNC staffer, namely Seth Rich, then it's clearly not okay.

And while the mainstream media implicates everybody not named Hillary Clinton for her loss, we're suddenly pretending it's the 1950s again and there's a Russky hiding under every bed and anybody who disagrees with the establishment's deceitful narrative is a Kremlin operative. The fact that our current Democratic Party's primary allies are the CIA, Internet censors, and McCarthyist hacks should strike the sane left observer as alarming, but then this is 2016 I suppose, so God only knows what's possible.

Who can be blind to the painful irony in the fact that the evidence for this supposed “election hacking” is nothing more than "a secret report, leaked by an anonymous insider, backed by no proof whatsoever, from an agency with a history of lying to the public." (Thank you, Estela Jordan, for that concise summary.)

And doesn't it seem a bit odd that the Orwellian NSA, which tracks every detail of our personal lives, somehow can't quite manage to trace this hack? “Of course they can't trace it,” sanity says, “because it's a leak, not a hack.” But plain sanity isn’t going to stop the government and its mainstream media lackeys from telling you otherwise.

According to CNN, our current president warned: "Mr. Putin can weaken us just like he is trying to weaken Europe if we buy into notions that it is okay to intimidate the press or lock up dissidents."

Oh really, you mean as in writing off all alternative and investigative news media as "fake news" while threatening to lock up true patriots like Edward Snowden, thus forcing them into exile? This from the same guy who promised to champion whistleblowers--then went on to prosecute more than all other presidents combined?

And isn't it getting a little hard to stomach that, even if Russia did hack the emails, their only crime was exposing the monumental lies and deceit that have become the hallmark of Clinton, Inc. and the DNC--yet never a single word about that is mentioned? So does this now mean that we shoot all messengers for delivering bad news? That exposing a lie fully implicates you in that lie or makes you a greater threat than the liar? What kind of upside-down, backwards, bizarro logic is that? Even if Russia did it, their only real "crime" would simply be exposing the truth about our so-called leaders.

There's no way the government can pull off this blitzkrieg of deception unless Americans abandon all logic and reason and allow the cognitive dissonance to fully take over. That again is part of the strategy of gaslighting. In insistent and logical tones, the manipulator repeats illogical things. And so our Washington elites continue screaming "Fake news from Russia!" over and over again, screaming it in the face of the universal recognition that the Wikileaks emails are entirely authentic, screaming it and waiting for us to grow uncertain of our mental footing and begin screaming along.

And as always, the final choice here is ours. No, we do not have a truly representative government, but we do still retain some influence. We can take their word for it and simply acquiesce, just like we did with the Iraq war, or we can stand firm and hold them to somewhat sane standards of accountability while boldly calling them out on their clearly illogical lies and propaganda. I pray that Americans make the right choice this time.

Russian Interference in Wisconsin Recount: Experts

Eric Mader, The Disassociated Press, Madison, December 13, 2016

Evidence of Russian interference in the recent Wisconsin recount is mounting, according to experts interviewed by the Disassociated Press.

Election and polling experts cite “abnormalities” in the outcome of the statewide recount, and point to Moscow as the likely source of organized meddling that occurred in several key counties across the state.

Final tallies announced Monday showed that Hillary Clinton still had not won the state, and that Donald Trump picked up an additional 131 votes. Final totals put Trump’s count at 1,405,284 votes, 22,748 more than Clinton.

“It is my firm belief that advanced mind-control techniques were employed by Russian-trained agents to throw off this count,” David Swishe, an election expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"Agents of the Russian state were deployed outside county clerk’s offices as the recount unfolded," Swishe said. "They used telepathic mind-control to make election workers visualize Clinton ballots as Trump ballots."

“In Waukesha County, at a Starbucks just next to the clerk’s office, a very Russian-looking man was observed reading Dostoyevsky on more than one day during the recount,” he added. “It’s very suspicious.”

Lisa, a Women’s Studies student and self-described polling expert, agrees that the recount was hacked.

“I conducted exit polls on Facebook the day after the election,” she said. “Every single one of my friends voted for Hillary. Really there is no way Trump won. It's scientifically impossible.”

Both Swishe and Lisa conclude, based on their evidence, that Clinton won the state by at least a couple hundred thousand votes.

“We’re starting a petition to push for a redo of the recount,” Swishe said. “And we’ll be placing Mind Protectors around all the sites where the recount is happening.”

“I had to read Dostoyevsky myself in a lit class,” he added. “The Brothers Raskolnikov. Let me tell you first hand, that book sucks. And these Russians we have today suck even more.”

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CATS: Unspeakably Evil Pseudo-Animals from Outer-Space

Cat, stage 4 projection: about 2029
[The following Public Service Announcement is taken from my book Idiocy, Ltd. Pick up a copy today and save yourself a world of trouble. --E.M.]

Re: CATS

They’re onto me. It happened again today. Not long now and I may not even be here to warn you.

But does it even matter? How many of you are listening anyway?

Still I will give it one more try. For humanity.

Until now I’ve usually kept my warnings polite and indirect, focusing on the relatively unimportant issue of dogs vs. cats as pets. Everyone knows the world is divided between “dog people” and “cat people”. Up to now most of my efforts have been aimed at making cat people see reason--to help them rethink allowing felines into their homes.

“Cats are loving and intelligent companions,” they’d say. “Besides, they’ve got more personality than dogs.”

Uh-huh. And mashed potatoes are a tasty alternative to duck à l’orange.

These pet-related discussions usually followed a predictable pattern. I'll give some idea before I get to today's more serious issues.

“Look,” I’d begin. “Let’s do a little thought experiment.”

“Sure.”

“Imagine you’re at home in your living room, about midnight, and some drugged up kid breaks in. One of those fluke break-ins by an addict in sore need of drug money. He’s got a tire iron and his plan is to smash your head in and rifle your place for cash. Now, for this experiment, I want you to imagine you have a dog as pet. Okay?”

“Sure.”

“So--what would your dog do when the kid came at you?”

“He’d bark like mad!” the cat lover says. “He’d bite him.”

“I think you’re right. Now imagine the same situation, but you’ve got a cat instead of a dog. What would your cat do when it saw the intruder coming at you with the tire iron?”

“Uhhh . . .”

“Not sure? I’ll tell you what your cat would do. It would sense danger and dive for cover behind the sofa.”

“Well . . .”

“Then after the intruder had killed you and left with your cash and credit cards, after the coast was clear in other words, your cat would come out from behind the sofa and check you out. And then it would proceed to laze on the sofa."

"You're sick."

"Well, what do you think your cat would do? I think you know. Your precious cat would do nothing to protect you. It would watch out for its own fuzzy little ass by ducking behind the sofa. And what does that tell you about cats?”

“I dunno . . . They’re smart?”

“Agent Smith is smart. That doesn’t mean I’d want him as a roommate.”

“Whatever. It’s not gonna happen!” the cat lover concludes. “And I’m not so sure my cat wouldn’t defend me anyhow. You never know!”

“Right.”

Sometimes I’ll raise a different scenario, in which the cat lover is in her living room with her cat, watching TV, but this time there’s a witch hovering outside the window who decides to shrink her down to six inches tall. Suddenly there she is on the sofa next to Mittens, but now six inches tall. What would dear dear Mittens do?

Of course I usually get the same evasive “Uhh . . .” for answer.

“Your cat that loves you would look at you for four or five seconds, a bit confused maybe, then smack you one with its right paw, then smack you again with its left, then break your spine with its jaw, and it would keep playing with you like that until dinner was finished. Doubt it?”

“My cat would never do that.”

“Give me a break. But what would a dog do in this situation? Imagine it. Really: try to imagine. The reaction would be very different. A dog seeing its owner suddenly shrunk would start to panic. It would whine, its tail would wag nervously, it'd run around frantically trying to figure out what to do. In short: A dog would do pretty much what a human would do. That’s the gulf between dogs and cats--same as the gulf between dogs and lizards.”

Having presented these scenarios, having pointed to the other obvious disadvantages of cats (hair stuck on everything, the LITTER BOX) by the end of the conversation the cat lover would still usually insist there was nothing perverse about living with cats. Instead, he or she would typically go away convinced I was a jerk for coming up with such scenarios in the first place.

That’s mental illness for you, hey? Try to help people with their problem and they turn on you. Is there any getting through the kitty fog that blinds them?

But that was the old days. Things are different now. Now I’m taking the gloves off. No more pet talks. This is about the fate of humanity. So I’ve decided to come out with the full truth about cats. Someone has to, and frankly, I’m sick to death watching what’s happening. And personally, again today, I was almost undone by one of these vicious creatures.

I was walking in a lane near my apartment in Taipei, where I live. In recent days I’d noticed a new cat prowling the neighborhood, slinking behind parked cars, glaring at me as I headed to work. Nasty butterscotch-and-whitish thing--what do they call it, "tabby"? I paid it no mind, except to glare back.

I should point out that these Taipei lanes are often abuzz with traffic, usually motorcycles and scooters. Kids fly down the lanes at a pretty good clip too, and it’s a wonder more of them don’t get killed, except that it isn’t really a wonder because plenty of them do get killed.

Anyhow, heading home from work, walking down the lane, two young women on a motorbike were flying toward me at high speed, nothing to worry about, they’d simply fly past, except that this time that tabby street cat decided to dash out from under a parked car and right into the line of traffic.

So what do you think the Taipei girl driving the motorbike did, run over poor kitty? No. She swerved straight at me. Better to injure a walking man than harm a street cat.

I leapt just in time and landed on the ground, my glasses flying off my face as the girls skidded to a stop ten meters away.

The girl on the back jumped off and ran to check--on the fucking cat! The driver gave me a non-committal sort of smile and said: “Sorry. You OK?”

“No, I'm not OK,” I said, sitting up on the pavement. “First, you’re going three times too fast for a lane. Second, you could have put me in the hospital. If I hadn’t dived, I’d have broken bones.”

“Well, sorry. As long as you’re alright. I mean, I saw the cat but didn’t see you.”

Which of course made no sense, given my size relative to the cat.

“The cat’s alright!” the other girl said, coming back breathless and smiley. It was then I noticed the Hello Kitty helmet.

“Pssh!” I scoffed. I stood up, dusted myself off, limped away.

Now maybe in all this you see an everyday little traffic mishap: a cat spooked by something runs into the street, driver swerves and knocks someone down. But that’s not how I see it. No. Because this isn’t the first time this kind of thing has happened. The simple truth is that that cat tried to kill me. And it had come into my neighborhood on orders to do just that. Yes, my accident today was actually a case of attempted murder. And this is why I’m finally going to reveal what I know about cats. Because the truth must be told. Before it’s too late.

Cats are an alien species of life that has come to our planet to take it over. They are a parasitic life form that has learned to impersonate mammals so as to attach themselves to us, their hypnotized human hosts. My research suggests they are making rapid progress in this takeover. I believe they will soon be moving on to Stage 3. Once that happens, we're finished.

For whatever reason, cats have chosen to infiltrate us by first hypnotizing and subjugating the female half of the species. They’ve done this mainly through their supposed cuteness. Consider: It used to be that women who had trouble with men would turn to religion or volunteering or some other kind of charitable work. But look what’s happened. Community service or prayer or knitting clubs are all passé. Most of these women will now become cat ladies. Instead of doing anything for other people, they spend their days taking care of feline parasites from outer space. Is it any surprise the parasites are multiplying?

Did I mention religion? Have you noticed how cats have become objects of almost cult-like worship for these women? They’ve replaced the role previously held by Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the Buddha. It’s little wonder either. The cats have done it by design. They're leading us to worship them.

Did I say hypnotized? Actually that's to put it mildly. It is now known that cats carry a brain virus called Toxoplasma gondii which they transmit to humans via human contact with their excrement. Cute, huh? And think about it: contact with cat excrement is pretty much a sure thing when they’re shitting inside your house in a little sandbox, then tramping the shit-laced sand dust everywhere with their designed-to-transfer-shit-dust puffball paws. Shit dust on tables and chairs, shit dust on sofas and counters, shit dust all over. Is it any surprise people with cats become carriers of the Toxo virus, which has been linked to schizophrenia and brain cancer by the way, but which also, and this is key, has been shown to warp other mammals’ brains so as to make them attracted to the smell of cat urine.

Don't believe me? Go look it up. Scientists suppose that cats and the virus evolved in symbiosis so as to draw rodents to the odor of cat piss, the virus thus offering cats a little protein perk for hosting it. And guess what, cat lover: In this equation you’re the rodent. Virally mesmerized by the smell of your cat’s pee, you slavishly feed and care for it day after day while it sits there glaring at you, waiting for the day when it can give up all pretense of being a pet and take over.

Yes, scientists say evolution explains the virus, but I know differently. Though I support evolutionary theory in general, in this instance I smell intelligent design. Alien intelligent design. Toxoplasma is in fact a high-grade bioweapon installed in the cats in pursuance of total human enslavement at the hands, or paws, of these stinking pseudo-mammals and their alien overlords.

An estimated sixty million Americans currently carry the Toxoplasma virus. House cats should be banned. Period. I’m thinking industrial-sized burlap bags with bricks. Or the way we deal with cattle that have mad cow disease. But instead of sane public policy, what do we get? A worldwide onslaught of pro-feline propaganda.

Do I even have to mention the Hello Kitty brand again? It’s perverted the minds of tens of millions of young girls globally, many becoming office women who tote Kitty cell phones or key chains, then soon after that going full-on cat lady.

I can still remember the shudder I felt arriving in Asia back in the ‘90s when I saw how saturated the culture was with this mouthless little vermin, the Kitty icon. At the time I didn’t understand what was behind my shudder. Now I do. I was experiencing a premonition of the slow infiltration that was just then entering a new stage.

Two decades on, Kitty has infiltrated the West too. In the States I see Kitty girls all over and cat ladies popping up on every corner. Start with Avril Lavigne and work your way out.

Here north of Taipei in the park where I go for a smoke break from work there’s a dotty-looking cat lady who walks round every evening putting down little plastic bowls of Friskies for the strays. They wait for her under parked cars and glare at me with their alien eyes as I smoke my mini cigars. They know me. They know I’m onto them.

But as for the homeless woman missing one arm who hangs out on the other side of the park--does our cat lady ever bring something for her? Never. I chat with the homeless woman and put change in her bowl a few times a week. Meanwhile the cat lady feeds these alien parasites, raising up the next generation.

I watch her as she makes her rounds, the distracted air, the nervous twitch on her face, brain eaten away by the Toxo.

When is the world going to wake up? How obvious does it have to get? It’s to the point that these invaders have begun hardwiring humans to work for them.

Did I say humans? Maybe I should say fakes, androids.

Years ago I read The Facebook Effect, David Kirkpatrick’s book on the conception and founding of the world’s first major social network. Kirkpatrick focused on the strategies behind Facebook’s advance and the brilliance Mark Zuckerberg showed every step of the way, overcoming obstacle after obstacle, foreseeing problems months before they came up. It was an amazing story, and before I’d finished the book, as I was reading the last chapters in a local cafe, it dawned on me: “This Zuckerberg guy isn’t actually human.”

And he isn’t.

Mark Zuckerberg is an alien plant, an android. He was put here by the cats. You doubt it? Skim Facebook feeds and you’ll see. Photos of cats, cats used as profile pictures, endless videos showing the skills and “cuteness” of these adorable “animals”. Nonstop visual atrocity!

As a psy-op, Facebook sure was genius. You gotta hand it to these despicable aliens. “Zuckerberg”, that supposed smart Jewish kid from White Plains, New York, created a portal through which the cats could invade ever more of our human consciousness. People are now actually using cat faces for their profile pictures. Can you beat that for propaganda? People identifying themselves with the aliens that will soon enslave them.

With all this going on, how long can it be before they make their move--before they reach out their paws for total control? Perhaps there won’t even be a coup. They’ll achieve ascendancy slowly without us even noticing. It will be a silent takeover, not a whimper of protest. One fine day most of the planet will wake up and realize they’ve been reduced to sweat-shop conditions, working in huge cat toy factories or grinding up lobster and fish carcasses to fill truckload after truckload with cans of Friskies Captain’s Platter. Meanwhile the cats will be feeding us intravenously. We’ll be chained body and soul to the fishy grindstone of their pussy utopia.

OK, that last line didn’t come out right. But anyhow, after the takeover will come the physical change, Stage 4, when the cats shape-shift to reveal their true appearance. Some fellow researchers in this area have managed to get images of what this next stage of cat will look like. It isn’t pretty.

Of course I realize some of you may be skeptical. You may have doubts that cats are actually an alien species sent here to enslave us. You may suspect I personally just don’t like cats and am making all this up because I’m allergic to cats and my grandma’s cat scratched me up bad when I was four and I still haven’t forgotten it. But I’ve a few more facts I think will cinch the deal.

First, when I say that cats are here to reduce us to groveling submission I am referring to house cats only. I have nothing against the larger cats: lions, tigers, panthers, cheetahs, cougars--these all can be fine animals, especially the latter. No, it’s only house cats, those that pose no apparent threat to humans, that concern me.

Because if you research the history of these smaller cats, you will find something very strange. Paleozoologists actually have trouble explaining it.

Consider: Cats were first domesticated in Egypt around the time the pyramids were built. It is in Egypt we first find cat bones buried in ways that indicate they were pets. But interestingly, these cats are of a type and species that can’t be found in the zoological record. There's so far no evidence of any similar-sized wild species of cat that the Egyptians domesticated. In other words, the zoological record shows that this species first showed up in Pharaonic Egypt as human pets. The species didn’t exist until it was already living in Egyptian households.

How is that possible? It’s nothing like the case with dogs or other animals, whose domestication can easily be traced from wild forebears. What does it mean?

I have told you.

House cats are an artificial species. They are fake animals. They were genetically engineered precisely to be taken in by us. The alien intelligence that engineered them used wild cats as a rough model (they wanted to create a convincing mammal) but made the soon-to-be-domestic cats smaller and more deviously intelligent. The Egyptians fell for the bait: they took the creatures in, and the demented practice of keeping house cats spread from there around the world.

It’s little surprise the Egyptians were the first to host this parasite. As noted archeologists like Erich van Däniken and Zecharia Sitchin (the former was nominated for the Nobel Prize, but didn’t get it because of the machinations of Swedish cat lovers) have pointed out, there is evidence the Egyptians, in their technological advancement and in the construction of the pyramids, were using techniques taught them by aliens. In fact is likely that, like the Nazca lines in Peru, the pyramids were important markers of some kind for alien landing strips. One can imagine how it went. Hyperintelligent cat-faced creatures arriving in their UFOs, landing in the Egyptian desert and meeting with the Pharaoh to tell him what to do. And the Pharaoh, he's like: “Okay. Whatever you cats say.”

This is how it happened. Van Däniken deserved that Nobel Prize.

Yes, I know there’s a lot of info here and maybe you’re having trouble digesting it. But the point is, something must be done before it’s too late. I’m trying to get the warning out here, and I'm tired of getting blank stares. So if you're reading this and are not yourself infected by Toxo, you might help me. Share this as widely as possible.

Eric Mader
Taipei

This and 42 other important public service announcements can be found in my new book Idiocy, Ltd.

Clinton Sheep: Non-Stop Baaaaiiiit and Shift

Our CLINTON SHEEP with their blah blah blah she won the popular vote blah blah electors save us blah blah blah it was the "fake news".

Really these people are the sorest losers in shepherding history.

Both Trump and Clinton campaigns ran in order to win the electoral college. And Clinton lost. If the rules of the game had been different, say if winning had been based on taking the popular vote, there's no telling who would have won this election. How many Trump supporters in solid blue states didn't vote because they knew Clinton would take their state anyway? Likewise how many Clinton supporters in red states? We will never know the tallies. The electoral college is how our elections are decided, and there are good constitutional reasons for that. Election 2016 is over.

But not for these pissy Clinton Dems. It's like two teams played a game of baseball and then the losing team came out whining "If it had been basketball, we'd have won. Let's pretend it was basketball."

With each passing day, I am gladder I didn't vote Clinton.

On "Fake News"

I have devoted my life to language and understanding how it works and doesn't work. And really, I say the following with utmost seriousness: ALL news is fake news.

We should not fall into the trap of pretending we can draw a line between real news and "fake" news. Even those who seek utter objectivity in reporting cannot achieve it, because they are already choosing to underline certain facts and ignore others, which is one of the most determinant levers of bias. The existence of intentionally misleading news stories is nothing new. It should sharpen our critical abilities and prod us to check sources, rather than push us to declare which news providers are "fake".

Making blanket declarations--"That site is all fake news"--will only lead people to give more credence to news providers that are already FAKE ENOUGH to warrant suspicion and deeper checking. Cf. CNN, or any of our other mainstream news sources.