Useful Idiots
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Oppenheimer expert on what Christopher Nolan’s movie gets wrong
The blockbuster warns about the future of nuclear weapons, but gives notable passes to the people who dropped them in the past
July 28, 2023
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Now I am become Useful Idiot.

With the Hollywood blockbuster forcing everyone to remember the nuclear bomb again, Oppenheimer expert Greg Mitchell, who you can find on Substack here and here, joins the Useful Idiots to analyze Hollywood’s portrayal of the man and his bomb.

“Only four movies in 75 years” have really dealt with the bomb, he tells us. We have countless movies about World War II, but when the US becomes the killer, Hollywood has fallen silent.

So how did the fourth movie, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, do?

“What is included in the film is extremely accurate,” Mitchell says, but the details omitted tell a different story. “In the movie we don’t see warnings about the radiation effect, we don’t see the horror in Japan.” Nolan apparently leaves the audience with a grave warning about the future of nuclear warfare, but is he giving a pass to his characters who dropped the bombs already?

“There’s tremendous focus on the Trinity test,” he says, explaining something the movie does show. “Every filmmaker loves to focus on Trinity because no one died there and there’s great special effects and it’s a great moment of triumph and celebration.”

But what’s omitted: “They’d rather do that than look at happened when we killed 160,000 civilians.”

Watch the full interview with author and historian Greg Mitchell where he explains the faults of the “harm reduction” argument, the rising nuclear tensions in North Korea, and how the Ukraine proxy war has brought us dangerously close to nuclear war.

Plus, check out this week’s Thursday Throwdown: Congress Says the Aliens are Coming.

Watch the full interview here:

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Sanctions Are a Form of Warfare

“Sanctions are a form of war. They’re economic warfare. And they destroy people’s lives.”

Joshua Landis (https://twitter.com/joshua_landis), Sandra Mackey Chair in Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, is one of the foremost experts on Syria. This week, as Syria, along with neighbor Turkiye, grapples with the aftermath of the devastating earthquake, Professor Landis joins the Useful Idiots to explain the deadly consequences that sanctions pile on to the damage.

“America likes to talk about all its precision bombing and hitting someone with a drone to avoid collateral damage,” Landis explains. “But sanctions? It’s all about collateral damage. Very little of it is targeted.”

But if you read corporate media outlets like the New York Times or Washington Post, you’d find a much different story. Both papers this week published headlines that were hastily changed when they realized they were being a little too truthful. See if you can tell the difference:

The ...

00:01:17
"Shameful" New York Times Changes Headline to Protect Sanctions

“Sanctions are a form of war. They’re economic warfare. And they destroy people’s lives.”

Joshua Landis (https://twitter.com/joshua_landis), Sandra Mackey Chair in Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, is one of the foremost experts on Syria. This week, as Syria, along with neighbor Turkiye, grapples with the aftermath of the devastating earthquake, Professor Landis joins the Useful Idiots to explain the deadly consequences that sanctions pile on to the damage.

“America likes to talk about all its precision bombing and hitting someone with a drone to avoid collateral damage,” Landis explains. “But sanctions? It’s all about collateral damage. Very little of it is targeted.”

But if you read corporate media outlets like the New York Times or Washington Post, you’d find a much different story. Both papers this week published headlines that were hastily changed when they realized they were being a little too truthful. See if you can tell the difference:

The ...

00:01:24
Free preview: Matt Taibbi Exposes Russiagate Bots

With Matt Taibbi’s Twitter Files and Jeff Gerth’s new in-depth reporting for CJR exposing the years of lies spread by Russiagaters, bitter attacks from outed journalists are rolling in.

Gerth and Taibbi, who come from the old style of journalism where you fact check your work and don’t accept government officials’ claims on faith, have each shown clear, indisputable evidence of disinformation campaigns pushed by corporate reporters. And since the so-called journalists can’t argue the facts, they dig themselves a deeper hole with more lies and name-calling.

Jeff Gerth has been working as a reporter for decades and published, in the very mainstream Columbia Journalism Review, a 20,000-word report on his findings, only to be called a liar and misdirecting magician in the most self-important article by Mother Jones’ David Corn (“The true media failure is that Trump got away with it and that articles like this one that you are now reading are still necessary.”) And possibly worse ...

00:54:34

Has the Gaza Pier Been Beached? | Army Watercraft come ashore off Gaza and Israel

March 26, 2024

Good to be part of the community. I think that Aaron and Katie do a brilliant job in these hellish times when such great in - depth research and reporting are essential.

The full Video is now up on our Locals Channel; Truckers Roost.
Our intrepid reporter, Mr. Fat Flabbie Doobie, reports on the war between Russia and Ukraine in the former Crimean Khanate:
By around 800 a.d. the Kievan Rus was the dominant force in Rus culture, but the Crimea, and all coastal areas, were dominated by nomadic Turkic peoples, with ancient Greek port settlements scattered along the coast. In 1222 Ghengis Khan invaded the Crimea and defeated the Turks there. In the years that followed, his Golden Horde would conquer the entirety of the Crimea and the Kievan Rus. In 1441, the descendants of Ghengis Khan established a new nation, the Krimean Khanate, encompassing the Crimean peninsula and the Donbas region. In the meantime the center of Rus culture had shifted to Moscow and had slowly pushed the Mongols out of the greater Rus. In 1783, Catherine the great finally defeated the Khanate (ruled by Khans of Ghengis' Giray clan) and annexed it into Russia. For the next 134 ...

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Here’s What We Found Inside Harvard’s Antisemitism Report
Bari Weiss's Free Press think they found the smoking gun

This week Harvard released it’s final report from the Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias. In a video released by The Free Press, a site which once fought censorship and blasted cancel culture, the worst crimes of antisemitism are listed, given as reasons to cancel and censor students.

We will restate their list here:

• Some Jewish students reported that they have been “ghosted” by longterm friends for expressing sympathy for Israel

• One student was told by another that “Zionists are not welcome at Harvard Medical School

• A professor began a class about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by telling students that “the discourse is saturated with the Israeli narrative” and that she had decided to, “with a heavy heart, remove Israeli sources from the syllabus.”

• In a Harvard-run privilege training, Jewish students were deemed to be privileged not only for being identified as white, but also because they were Jewish

• When Jewish students reported concerns about bias, they were asked “Who is more marginalized, Jews or Palestinians?”

• A student was asked: “Do you believe in decolonization in theory or in practice?”

None of these top examples are antisemitic, and certainly aren’t considered illegal speech on a college campus. But cancel culture grifters like Bari Weiss and CNN’s Dana Bash are using them to justify President Trump’s draconian crackdown on free speech, and are part of the larger cause of dehumanizing Palestinians to justify the US-funded genocide of children in Gaza.

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Also in this week’s Thursday Throwdown: Trump makes a strange deal with the Houthis, Fox News mocks the dolls of poor children, and a former-marine-turned-GOP Congressman pretends to get assaulted.

It’s a funny week filled with the most ridiculous people in the world – watch with Katie and Aaron so you can laugh instead of cry at it all. Thanks for supporting independent media, subscribe to watch the full episode here:

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What are They planning?
With Mike Waltz out as National Security Advisor, Trump and Rubio have begun a new phase of foreign policy

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Dystopia Now: Why Tech Bros Want a Master Race
Transhumanists have brought eugenics into the tech world – and they plan to digitize your mind

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The new podcast Dystopia Now, hosted by comedian Kate Willett and philosopher Émile Torres, has been unveiling a disturbing new story from the tech world that comes straight out of The Matrix. It involves transhumanism, a tech-bro update to eugenics, in which billionaires can digitize their minds with AI, transcending humanity and achieving immortality.

If this sounds disturbing, just wait until you hear our full chat with Kate and Émile.

Useful Idiots: Can you define transhumanism?

Émile Torres: The key idea is this techno-utopian vision. And transhumanism is this ideology that says we ought to develop advanced technologies to radically re-engineer the human organism, ultimately creating a new and supposedly superior post-human species. Elon Musk is a transhumanist. His company Neuralink is all about merging our brains with AI. Mark Zuckerberg is a transhumanist. Peter Thiel has invested millions and millions of dollars into radical longevity research. The goal then would be to attain immortality.

Useful Idiots: Can you talk about network states?

Kate Willett: They wanted to have these little anarcho-capitalist communities. It was all about getting out of the United States to do this. But what seems to have changed recently is that a lot of these billionaire dudes seem to have decided that maybe the best way for them to realize their illiberal, anti-democratic vision of running the government more like a business is making the United States that versus leaving.

Curtis Yarvin talks about this idea he calls RAGE: Retire All Government Employees. And now we have DOGE, which is also a four-letter acronym for getting rid of the administrative state. It just seems like these dudes are making a lot of progress. Their previous vision was leaving somewhere and having these little tech utopias, network states. Now they're trying to do it here.

Émile Torres: DOGE seems to be RAGE in action.

Useful Idiots: What are some of the craziest, scariest ideologies, that come out of this movement?

Émile Torres: The one thing I would want people to know is that part of what it means for us to bring about utopia, to transition from our current human era to this paradisiacal post-human era, is for our species to be disempowered, marginalized, or eliminated. I think that at the heart of this ideology is a pro-extinctionist view.

They say once we create post-humans, our digital successors, then we should bow out. Because we're just going to be inferior beings that are using up valuable resources on Earth. So really, at the heart of this idea is this eschatological end times vision that we're going to transition from a biological world to a digital world. And our species is going to disappear.

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Subscribe for the full interview with Kate and Émile where we discuss the pseudo-utopian autocratic book Abundance by the New York Times’ Ezra Klein and the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, how older billionaires are cryogenically freezing themselves to be revived once the immortality AI is ready, why that tech may be ready a lot sooner than we think, and what the relationship is between transhumanism and Zionism.

Plus, catch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: Morning Joe Comes Out as a Bernie Bro

Thanks for supporting independent media. Subscribe for the full episode here:

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