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This is not our regular edition packed with events and Folk-Americana music news. It's sumpin' TIMELY and special, in newspaper terms, an "EXTRA!" Our regular edition will be along soon.
THIS short-edition "extra" is here for a few very specific purposes:
1) TODAY, THURSDAY, MARCH 9th, there is an important "group call" at 5:30 pm Pacific, and you can take part. It's sponsored by the "fiercely cross-partisan" nonprofit organization working to pass a 28th Amendment to the US Constitution, to get money OUT and people IN and replace our corrupted political system. The info on registering for the call is in "The Detangler," in the section titled, "Fighting to overturn Citizens United? Get into action this Thursday," and that's topic "d" in "The Detangler."
2) We're sharing a reprint of the entire newspaper column, "The Detangler," written Tuesday night, because it also features (and was one of the first with) an early and concise look at WIKILEAKS "VAULT 7" release of CIA files. It PUTS IT IN CONTEXT about how YOU are the subject of cyberspying -- if not by the CIA, which CAN spy on you, then by countless commercial exploiters, who ARE spying on you. It's topic "b" in "The Detangler."
3) There's also an alarming feature for INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY, which, in America, is the centerpiece of "Women's Month." There's horrid sexism happening in the military, and it's in "The Detangler" as "THE FEW, THE PROUD... THE NAKED," as topic "a."
4) PLUS... We're bringing you a major excerpt from writer, thinker, and provocateur, JON RAPPOPORT, who you don't know, but should. On his own site today, Jon is discussing the power of CREATIVE IMAGINATION and how, applied, it can overcome any limitations. Here's a pulled quote that'll make you want to read it: "'The machine' is a metaphor for engineered consent on every level of life and consciousness, and at bottom the prime engineer is the individual himself. What is being engineered? Limitation. Lack of imagination. Normalcy."
See? We told ya you'd want to read it.
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Let's get started!
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# 1 feature...
THE DETANGLER:
WOMEN'S DAY, CITIZENS UNITED, AND THE VAULT THAT ROBBED THE CIA
(The column, "The Detangler," written Tuesday night, makes a special appearance in this edition of The Guide. The column "cuts-through the Big Media BS" with several brief topics each week. Mostly, it targets "important things that are being flippantly ignored, spun with an air of superiority, underreported with impunity, or otherwise manipulated—if they appear at all—in corporate mainstream media.")
By Larry Wines
We live in a nation where over 90% of our major media is controlled by just six mega-giant corporations. Their "news divisions," as wholly-owned subsidiaries, are tools tasked with profitably supporting the agenda of the parent corporation. It is a horrifying and dangerous betrayal of the Fourth Estate and a betrayal of the public trust. Too often, the truth is painted into a corner or paved-over for the "story of the week." Moreover, much of the news is being obfuscated, diverted, propagandized, framed into purposefully warped contexts, cherry-picked to omit salient facts, or put on a convoluted path to produce a particular deductive conclusion.
Quite an indictment? It's warranted. We aim to consistently prove that, a little at a time, each week.
Our purpose can also be expressed in the resonant words of venerable American humorist and writer Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936): to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. You may have heard that phrase applied to a few denizens of the pulpit, but Dunne was talking about newspapers when he first put it in the mouth of his character, Mr. Dooley. And yes, it was oft-voiced by those late icons of folk music, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, as each battled the tangles of social and economic injustices of their times.
Moreover, we confront things that are being authoritatively presented when that's being done without factual evidence. There is always a "narrative" in corporate mainstream media and too many elsewheres, and we'll call them out for it when it's necessary—and these days, that's all the time.
In short, we detangle. As always, we invite you to challenge us and let us know how we're doing.
Here are this week's topics.
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(a)
The few, the proud, the... naked
Today, March 8th, is International Women's Day. And here in the US, it's the nominal centerpiece of Women's History Month. If that sounds like something nice that will result in coworkers taking each other to lunch and sending flowers, consider the realities of ongoing struggle for equal pay for equal work, career-ending motherhood, and more. Plus the following, in a profession where lives are on the line.
Hundreds of enlisted Marines are under investigation by the NCIS for posting thousands of nude photos of women Marines on a secret website, and on a Google drive used as a medium of exchange, and where it was revealed, on what's being called a "secret Facebook page." What's known so far is that intimidation and harassment played a role. The photos surfaced after women were first assigned to Camp Lejeune, NC, in early January. The male whistleblower, a civilian contractor who revealed it, has suffered death threats directed at himself and his family, with some threats to brutally rape his wife.
USMC veteran Loretta Gabaldon told KNSD, San Diego's NBC channel 7 [http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/Local-Female-Vet-on-Investigation-of-Marines-Posting-Nude-Photos-of-Collegaues-415445223.html], "I think it undermines all of us female veterans who have fought, struggled and worked perilously to prove we belong... It contradicts all the core values that every Marine lives by... I hope that the Marine Corps or the DoD takes action... so this kind of behavior does not continue."
In the post-9/11 age of military personnel being lauded, de rigueur, as "our heroes" and the multiplicity of "NCIS" TV shows depicting honorable and righteous behavior reigning supreme in the military, most Americans are oblivious to the possibility of things being otherwise. After all, it's been more than 15 years since the "Tailhook" sexual exploitation scandal, in which more than 100 U.S. Navy and Marine Corps "Top Gun" aviation officers were alleged to have sexually assaulted 83 women and 7 men—though only a few were convicted of anything. An important 2013 New York Times story, with a video accompaniment, traced more than a decade of continued aberrant behavior in uniform including and since that scandal. [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/booming/revisiting-the-militarys-tailhook-scandal-video.html]
Yet it seems our society's expectations—of dignified treatment for the women among us who sacrifice personal freedom to serve in our military—still are not being met by those in command of individual units or bases.
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(b)
"Cybersecurity" sounds better than "total theft of your privacy"
It's called "Vault 7," for the online name of the CIA insider who gathered and released information published on Tuesday by Wikileaks [https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/]. It's touted as a record of "the entire hacking capacity of the CIA" and it's the biggest-ever trove of top secret CIA documents to see daylight. All are related either to cyberspying and hacking for the purposes of covertly getting information or to weaponizing something electronic through introduced malware that fools protection devices and programs. The documents reveal that the CIA can infiltrate any wifi-capable or online device commonly found in every American household. And it can make it look like someone else did it. The law prohibits CIA operations within the US directed at American citizens, but if this proves to be in use domestically—and it seems certain it is—this will become the agency's most egregious of its many known violations of the rights of ordinary American citizens.
When the news broke yesterday, RT America [https://www.rt.com/news/379757-your-whole-life-is-hacked/] gave it detailed coverage with live-on-air analysis by two former CIA agents and another from Britain's MI-6. On the broadcast networks' evening news, only CBS made it the number-one story, though ABC's report, partway through their lineup, also took it seriously. But neither offered the meaningful insider expertise that RT had. By today, it may be sensationalized in Big Media's funhouse mirror, or spun by cable's cult-of-personality infotainment hosts to somehow be all about Trump's appointees or the dastardly Russians. Or it may be getting the cold shoulder in favor of some newly trumped-up scandal. So, we'll try to second-guess their coming coverage, or the lack of it, and offer some salient facts.
We'll start with the inconvenient truth, as background that was known before Tuesday but rarely reported by Big Media: US government intel agencies wiretapped 35 world leaders under President Obama, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, numerous prominent members of the Australian government, and the heads of state of other allies. And that was in addition to the shocking amount of still-ongoing cybersurveillance and data collection for sale, conducted daily by countless commercial enterprises and targeting ordinary American citizens—all of it known to, and some of it in conjunction with, our government's intel agencies.
Now, let's look at a few key points in the news that broke Tuesday.
Wikileaks' Vault 7 release [https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/cms/index.html] is the first installment of their "Year Zero" plan to release covert documents that, in the words of founder Julian Assange, go "well beyond the choice between cyberwar and cyberpeace," and are "also exceptional from a political, legal and forensic perspective."
Vault 7 is 8,761 individual files, in the form of 7,818 formal documents plus 943 attachments, all of them bearing CIA identifications. And Wikileaks says that it's just 1% of the secret CIA documents they have and will eventually publish.
In great detail, we now know that the CIA has the ability to break into any smart phone, Android or Apple, and it's possible that 85% of the world's smart phones have already been implanted with CIA weaponized malware. Plus, they can use the flat screen TV in your home as a microphone, and enable any other web or signal-activated camera or microphone on any device, all without you knowing. In addition to obvious things like your phones, security cams and baby monitors, any "smart" device, from your hi-tech refrigerator to your thermostat to your laptop's camera, can be activated at will whether the device is seemingly unresponsive or functioning normally or in a "turned off" state.
The CIA was running its own in-house and unknown version of the NSA that has been escaping any government oversight, and has therefore been unaccountable outside the agency. Vault 7 reveals they can grab and read, see or hear any and all info from your phone, tablet, or other device, and encryption programs are no obstacle. They grab the data before it is encrypted for transmission, bypassing your peace-of-mind encoded security and the scrambled message apps you think are secure. They can alter the effectiveness of your Norton-Symantec or McAfee or Panda or any other malware detection program to make your safety net ignore whatever spyware has been remotely planted in your devices, and make it immune from updates you download from the anti-malware manufacturer.
And they are at least working on an ability to remotely take over critical systems of any modern automobile, a capability that would enable acceleration, brake failure, engine fires, locked doors and windows that could not be opened, and undetectable assassinations.
There are many international dimensions. Frankfurt, the center of the EU banksters who brought-down the Greek economy, is now revealed as the center of the CIA's foreign cybersurveilance/hacking/malware operations. Vault 7's revelations of CIA spying on NATO-ally France and interference in French elections are being dubbed "a nuclear bombshell." And it seems the Stutznet virus, developed by the NSA and Israel's Mossad to destroy Iran's nuclear fuel centrifuges, has a lot of company in the CIA's arsenal of malware. That includes numerous weaponized spyware and malware programs developed by foreign governments, stolen by CIA hacking, and ready for use with embedded false-flag foreign fingerprints.
Suddenly, all those allegations—repeatedly parroted by msm with no evidence—that foreign hacking determined the US election? They soon might be... explainable. And the stuff that made Trump sound like a raving lunatic a few days ago—those Tweets that his phones in Trump Tower had been bugged by the Obama Administration—don't sound quite as crazy.
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(c)
Yet another US war in the Middle East, and...
The Pentagon confirmed Monday that Yasser al-Silmi, a former Guantanamo detainee who was released, was killed last week in a US airstrike on Yemen. Corporate mainstream media minimizes or ignores the rapidly increasing role of the US military in that country. If reported at all, such airstrikes or missile attacks by US Navy ships are labeled, without exception, as "strikes against terrorists."
"Terrorist" is also the consistent euphemism when msm reports the deaths of Yemeni civilians, including children, at the hands of the US. Or when civilians die at the hands of any US-backed rebel faction in Syria, or by the Iraqi army, or when they're killed anywhere by the Saudi military. Saudi Arabia, champion buyer of US- and British-made arms and "weapons systems," has been conducting a proxy war in Yemen on behalf of the US for years. It's part of the world's worst-kept secret, the decade-and-a-half-old US covert regional regime-change policy. If it's an Iraqi or Syrian or Israeli kid who gets wounded or killed, Big Media is all over it, parroting the Pentagon or State Department press release, sometimes verbatim. But all carnage is not equal. Dead Yemeni and Palestinian kids don't qualify for press releases, so they're omitted from msm coverage.
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(d)
Fighting to overturn Citizens United? Get into action this Thursday
The crickets reign supreme in the Democratic Party when it comes to a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College. Or to launch an autopsy to determine the real reasons for the 2016 election losses (like the Republicans' mea culpa after 2012). Or to do anything other than become the grumpy obstructionists they hated when the Republicans did it.
But, thanks in part to a key nonprofit organization, things are happening in the movement to overturn Citizens United. That group, American Promise, was founded in 2016 to propel and win passage of a 28th Amendment to the US Constitution. That amendment would assert, in the highest law of the land, that people—not money—govern America. The group calls itself "the fiercely cross-partisan, citizen-powered organization" built to win the amendment, and it wants "to set reasonable spending limits in American elections, reverse the damage of Citizens United v. FEC, and restore human liberty, equal citizenship, and responsible self-government."
This may be the only current progressive cause with victories to celebrate. So far, 18 states have passed resolutions for a 28th Amendment, and numerous states have similar legislative resolutions or statewide ballot initiatives in the works for their 2017-2018 cycles.
On Thursday, the organization is conducting a "Core Team Call" that's open to all who are interested in getting "into action" for the cause.
"Progress doesn't just happen on its own. It all starts with simple actions like a phone call, email, or letter to the editor," says spokesman Ben Gubits.
He adds, "That’s why we’re continuing to train and gear-up for the Citizen Uprising in every single state, and help give citizens like you the tools to either spark or sustain the movement in your own communities."
The group call is this Thursday, March 9th, at 5:30 pm Pacific time.
Register for the call here. [http://myaccount.maestroconference.com/conference/register/QKZ1DPULR8PQFES]
We recommend you register directly through the American Promise site, rather than using the offered options for Google, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, since social media sites spy on and sell to commercial interests the metadata and more about all you do while you're on them.
Gubits continues, regarding Thursday's call, "A lot of people across the country feel like they want to make a difference right now, but don’t know where to start. This is the perfect opportunity to gather up a group and have a fun and impactful activism night together!"
We'll add that we received a nearly simultaneous appeal to sign a petition to congress to legislatively overturn Citizens United. It arrived in an email from Joe Kennedy III, a candidate for congress in Massachusetts.
The petition campaign Kennedy supports is being paid for by a who's-who list of old-line Democrats and a few young ones, all of whom hold or are seeking elective office: Blumenthal for Connecticut, Cory Booker for Senate, Bob Casey for U.S. Senate, Friends of Maria, Chris Coons for Delaware, Catherine Cortez Masto for Senate, Donnelly for Indiana, Gillibrand for Senate, Maggie for NH, Martin Heinrich for Senate, Heidi for Senate, Friends of Mazie Hirono, Kaine for Virginia, the Angus King for U.S. Senate Campaign, McCaskill for Missouri, Menendez for Senate, Peters for Michigan, the Reed Committee, Shaheen for Senate, Whitehouse for Senate, Friends of Don Beyer, Bonamici for Congress, Friends of Cheri Bustos, Tony Cárdenas for Congress, DeFazio for Congress, Himes for Congress, Joe Kennedy for Congress, Ruben Kihuen for Congress, Kuster for Congress, New Mexicans for Michelle, Grace for New York, Schneider for Congress, Kyrsten Sinema, The Committee to Elect Mike Stack, One Commonwealth PAC, CHC BOLD PAC, Democratic Action, Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, Democrats Win Seats PAC, End Citizens United, Equality PAC and Grassroots Victory PAC.
Ben Gubits and his "cross-partisan" American Promise will argue persuasively that this must transcend partisanship, and only a 28th Amendment will cure the problem. But, unless you want all your eggs in one basket, intermediate steps can't hurt. Here's the link for the petition being touted by Patrick Kennedy. [http://petitions.signforgood.com/endcitizensunited]
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See you next week. Meantime, don't get tangled in "the narrative."
(If readers of "The Guide" would like to see "The Detangler" featured here each week, let us know. We could arrange that.)
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# 2 feature...
OUTSIDE THE REALITY MACHINE
By Jon Rappoport
I'm making a few assumptions.
You have your own idea about what "the reality machine" is. It may not be a perfectly formed idea, but it's there, and you know there's something very important and interesting about what sits outside that machine. You know the machine has something to do with imposed limitations on the mind. You think about offloading those limitations.
You consider the possibility that imagination is relevant to what sits outside the reality machine. Imagination isn't preoccupied with what already exists in the world or in the mind. That's a clue. Imagination journeys into untapped realms. You wonder about just how powerful imagination can be.
In the course of your life, you've had moments when limitations went away. How and why that happened may not be clear, but the experiences were vivid, and you can still remember some of them. The clouds parted. The gates opened.
And what I keep saying, in one way or another, is: imagination is the key. It's the key to offloading limitations.
That's because imagination doesn't care about repeating, over and over, what is already known and understood and perceived. That repetition doesn't disclose what sits outside the machine.
To exit the environs of the machine, you need to deploy the faculty you've always had, the faculty that never goes away, the faculty that leads you into unexplored territory. It's not enough to "try to change what you perceive," in order to see beyond the machine. You need to invent.
Imagine.
When I put together my collection, "Exit From The Matrix," invention was my target. All the imagination exercises in that collection were designed to bring this faculty front and center.
The machine says: "Here is what reality is, and there is what reality is, and over there is more of what reality is, and what I show you is all that reality is. There is no other reality."
The faculty of imagination says: "There is no limit to what reality is, because you can invent new realities at every conceivable level of life and perception and experience."
Obviously, what I'm talking about here is not found in any text book. It isn't widely disseminated knowledge. This isn't psychology in any traditional sense of the word. It's not part and parcel of what society is.
I learned a great deal from reflecting on my experiences as a painter. I realized I could file that knowledge away or base my life on it. I could make it "dead data" or the wellspring of my own future.
What I'm discussing here, in this article, is not a principle implicit in the universe. People might like to say it is because then it takes the focus away from them. What I'm discussing in this article is implicit in the individual.
"The machine" is a metaphor for engineered consent on every level of life and consciousness, and at bottom the prime engineer is the individual himself. What is being engineered? Limitation. Lack of imagination. Normalcy.
"All human accomplishment has the same origin, identically...Imagination, imagination, imagination. It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!" (Saul Bellow)
"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." (Albert Einstein)
"This world is but canvas to our imaginations." (Henry David Thoreau)
"Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got." (Philip Jose Farmer)
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." (Lewis Carroll)
"The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself." (William Blake)
"We lay there and looked up at the night sky and she told me about stars called blue squares and red swirls and I told her I'd never heard of them. Of course not, she said, the really important stuff they never tell you. You have to imagine it on your own." (Brian Andreas)
"The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless." (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)
"Imagination isn't a thing. It isn't an object you can look at and measure. It's more like a secret language you've always known how to speak. But then they taught you the standard language. Nothing wrong with that, except you forgot the first language. You took the magic language and put it on a remote shelf in a faraway room. And now you look for it as if it were a chunk of gold. But that secret language has no boundaries. You can make it bigger. You can expand it without end. You can try to describe this language and characterize it and even define it, but then that limits what you'll do with it. All the trouble starts with the limiting. You settle for a smaller version of the secret language. You play with the smaller version. After a while, you've drained and explored it. What then? You need to expand and extend the secret language. Keep going. When you do, you find that this world, the physical world, makes more sense. You can see it more clearly. You can deal with it more successfully. That's good, because you and I and everyone else operates in this world. But that's not a reason for dropping the secret language..." (The Magician Awakes, Jon Rappoport)
-- Jon Rappoport
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The author of three explosive collections, "The Matrix Revealed," "Exit from the Matrix," and "Power Outside the Matrix," Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world.
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You can find this article and more at Jon Rappoport's "Outside The Reality Machine" on his website, www.nomorefakenews.com
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Stay tuneful! See you next time!
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LEGALESE, CONTACTING US, 'N SUCH...
Boilerplate? Where's the main pressure gauge? And the firebox?
What "boilerplate"? Who came up with that goofy term for the basic essential informational stuff...
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Pssst – Hey, kid. Yeah, YOU: It won't be so "basic" when we add all the links for the global network of music news / music education sites that we're joining; THAT'LL be here very soon, as an ESSENTIAL COMPONENT of the Guide returning to being a MUSIC NEWS journal!
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♪ The ACOUSTIC AMERICANA MUSIC GUIDE endeavors to bring you NEWS – and views of interest to artists everywhere – more specifically to musicians and the creative community and music makers and fans of acoustic and Folk-Americana music. That includes both traditional and innovative forms. From the deepest roots to today’s acoustic renaissance, that’s our beat. We provide a wealth of resources, including a HUGE catalog of acoustic-friendly venues (now undergoing a major update), and inside info on FESTIVALS and select performances in Southern California in venues from the monumentally large to the intimately small and cozy. We cover workshops, conferences, and other events for artists and folks in the music industry, and all kinds o’ things in the world of acoustic and Americana and accessible classical music. From washtub bass to musical spoons to oboe to viola to banjo to squeezebox, from Djangostyle to new-fangled-old-time string band music, from sweet Cajun fiddle to bluegrass and pre-bluegrass Appalachian mountain music to all the swamp water roots of the blues and the bright lights of where the music is headed now.
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The Acoustic Americana Music Guide. Thanks for sittin' a spell. The porch'll be here anytime you come back from the road.
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