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Year: 2022

Amazon Censorship

David Martin

I posted this poem on my web site when the Internet was still in its infancy. Of Swords and Pens The pen may be stronger than the sword, But pens, like guns, can be bought. And battles of words, like battles with guns, Can be unfairly fought. Those who rule know all too well The power of the word, And so they ration carefully The ones that can be heard. In our land there’s little chance That virtue will prevail When “truth” is a consumer good And words are all for sale. That was on April 5, 1998, and the word battlefield has changed quite a bit since then.  Back then, control of the airwaves, newspapers, magazines, publishing companies, and…

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We Pulled the Plug on the Shah

David Martin

When I first wrote on this subject seven years ago, the title was in the form of a question, “Did We Pull the Plug on the Shah?”  With the help of a fairly recent but very obscure book by the American expatriate living in England, Arlene Lois Johnson, The Shah of Iran: Mohammad Reza Pahlavi: Victim of His Times I have accumulated enough additional information to write the title of this brief essay as a declarative statement.  The book was published in the United Kingdom by News Source, Incorporated.  No date is provided, but Johnson tells me that it came out in 2018.  The book is apparently not available on Amazon, and I couldn’t get it to come up with…

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Mark Middleton, Meet Daniel Best

David Martin

I posted the first version of what would expand into the Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression on March 7, 1998.  There were 13 originally, expanding in stages to 17 by the end of 1999, where it has stayed.  No changes were made in the original entries. The choice of “Dummy up” for the first technique is looking better with every year that passes, despite what would appear to be much greater difficulty than before in keeping a lid on important information, what with the numerous ways that one can be informed these days.  It’s beginning to look as though, similar to George Orwell’s 1984, what I wrote as a description is being taken more and more as a prescription. Take…

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Video on 9/11 Removed from YouTube as “Hate Speech”

David Martin

If for some reason you should find yourself at the Internet site with this URL, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJ7ojSe-wqg&t=21s, what you will find there is not a YouTube video, but a black rectangle bearing this message in white, in the manner of chalk on a blackboard: “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s policy on hate speech.  Learn more about combating hate speech in your country.”  Below that, in purple, is a “Learn more” click-on. Doing that, you get: Hate speech is not allowed on YouTube. We remove content promoting    violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on any of the following attributes: Age Caste Disability Ethnicity Gender Identity and Expression Nationality Race Immigration Status Religion Sex/Gender Sexual Orientation Victims…

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American Press Beating Familiar War Drums

David Martin

We didn’t have to look far to find the opening quote for this article.  It was right there on my AOL News.  Check it out: They are a distinct minority in their own party and, for that matter, their country: Republican holdouts amid an ever-widening consensus that Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine poses a mortal threat to American interests. A far right wing of the Republican Party tightly bound to former President Donald Trump is fighting to push the GOP toward the “America First” isolationism that underpinned his 2016 presidential bid. For the first time since Trump’s rise, his party is pushing back. These are the first three paragraphs for a pro-war-participation propaganda piece that AOL has picked up from…

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Important Assassination Movie Quashed

David Martin

Sometimes, not all “accidents” are accidental. (statement on the screen before the opening credits) Released for public viewing in October of 2021 after having been delayed because of the pandemic, the movie had already garnered 28 awards and seven additional nominations.  A 1962 movie with a similar title about the same person, Lawrence of Arabia, is one of the best known and popular of all time.  This one, Lawrence: After Arabia, deals not with T.E. Lawrence’s heroic exploits during World War I, but with his very suspicious death, supposedly in a motorcycle accident, in May of 1935 on a rural dirt road near his home in Dorset in England’s southwest corner.  Lawrence was just 46 years old. Just as Oliver…

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“John Lennon’s” Greatest Hit

David Martin

There was some excitement in my friend’s voice.  He had just stumbled upon what he described as a really extraordinary piece of rock music.  Even more interesting, it had been up on YouTube since November of 2019 and it had had only a little more than 1,400 views, which probably means that fewer than 1,000 people had listened to it, because many of those views had to be by people coming back for more.  The song is called “Don’t Believe,” and it’s rather deeply buried away as the tenth of eleven songs on an album called “Listen to the Picture” produced in 2010 by a band called Abracadabra.[1] The songs are ostensibly taken from the soundtrack of an obscure little…

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Deranged Court Historian, Douglas Brinkley, on Jan. 6

David Martin

One might think that the remarks of the well-known historian, Counsel on Foreign Relations member, Douglas Brinkley, on the occasion of the first anniversary of the breach of the Capitol Building, ostensibly mainly by people protesting what they perceived to be the theft of the 2020 Presidential election, would be embarrassing to the other members of his profession.  To compare that relatively mild dust-up to Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and even the Holocaust has to strike any sensible person as complete lunacy.  We have noticed, though, that those who practice his trade in the United States, at least in our lifetime, are really not very much interested in anything so bothersome to them as the truth.  Apparently, it has been the…

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