Skip to content

Clarifying Gainful Unemployability

Sometimes, although seemingly with increasing frequency, a story will arise from within the official narrative’s noosphere which the public takes entirely at face value, but which if one were to dissect and autopsy and rearrange the bits into a new beast, then one can better determine the story’s true form. This is one of those occasions where I could cognitively rag on how easy it is to upstage those mainstream journalists bringing in 7 figures a year, 6 figures, 5, hell, 4 and if we’re really being honest here, 3.

Apparently a long-time reporter from NBC just quit, and while flipping over proverbial furniture on his way out the door cussed and cursed and hollered out a number of scandalous accusations, such as noting that the entire Middle East is far more dangerous a place now than prior to our 9/11; and that all of commercial, corporate media is beholden to the Presidential administrations, thus proving the obviousness of the general public facing state-run media. He will probably never work in the industry again but I would hope that the right parties have the foresight to hire this man for hosting the next White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. I see you chuckle over there, girlie.

I bring this up only because nobody does totalitarian censorship better than the USA, and this is important to keep in mind as today’s essay actually concerns recent censoring as perpetrated by long-time allies of the USA, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. against a USA-based corporation.

The MBS referred to there is Mohammad bin Salman, current media darling and chief robe of the trillionaire Saud family who have been running all of Saudi Arabia for decades. The old-fashioned sorts of folk who keep private, underground bowling alleys and who think it’s a gas to behead a few dozen of their own citizens each and every month for such atrocious acts as feminism, journalism and sorcery. Crown Prince bin Salman, who is likely to enjoy Crown Royal whiskey with his Royal Crown soda-pop, took offense to a recent episode of comedian Hasan Minhaj‘s series for Netflix, in which the TEDx hopeful but funnier rained down fire and brimstone by masterfully explaining precisely what the Saud family are culpable of today across the world stage, right down to the children of Yemen being purposefully starved to death by the thousands. So, the prince ordered for Netflix to remove the program from Saudi viewership, the company rather quickly obliged and elements of social media had a field day for righteous indignation. All well and good.

Except that I believe everybody missed what was really going on there. As the twitter screen-grab above hints, it is indeed noteworthy how copies of the episode have since gone viral on YouTube. YouTube, owned by Alphabet, which is planning to construct a new hub to be located in NEOM, the utopian, half-trillion dollar smart city to be built from scratch by the Saudi kingdom’s head-lopping government. I’m supposing its purpose is to challenge Israel for the title of real Silicon Valley. Simply put, if the Crown Prince can so effortlessly intimidate Netflix from afar, one of the quickest growing and more influential companies on the market who already have production efforts in progress around the globe, wouldn’t he hold all the more sway over heads at Google, considering their planned business relationship expending hundreds of billions of dollars together over coming years to build a mecca for tech?

Much has been written about Google’s years of closed-door meetings inside the White House of the Obama administration, wherein they were probably not trading baseball cards. And if you now follow my strings pinned to newspaper clippings from one wall to the next, maybe some portions of the ceiling as well over in the corner, we see that today the Obamas oversee a production company with Netflix themselves. It’s public knowledge that Netflix has maintained additional connections with Obama’s circle of acquaintances going back some time, with Susan Rice, who served most of Obama’s first term as Ambassador to the United Nations and most of his second term as National Security Adviser, herself sitting on the Board of Directors of Netflix since March of 2018. The Syrian “civil” war was begat during her time with the UN, launched on behalf of Israeli oil interests. Her time at Netflix has also been plagued by shares of controversy. In August of 2018, she wrote an opinion piece published by the New York Times, condemning current golfer in chief Trump’s unquestioning loyalty to the Crown Prince. An admittedly sassy move.

Writing for Al Arabiya English, Mamdouh AlMuhaini asserted that Rice wrote that article specifically because the circle shared by she and the Obamas had fallen from grace with the Saudi royals, because…they went easy on Iran by not declaring full-on invasion? Under Obama’s watch however, Iranian allies in Syria were proactively cluster-bombed to morsels by USA-backed “moderate rebels” in an ongoing catastrophe which the Saudi royals are profiting from, as are business interests of the Israeli government. The Saudis love demonizing Iranians almost as much as do the Israelis, going back to when Kissinger was sniffing trade routes for moving opium out of Afghanistan to the distraught of already oil-robbed, neighboring Syrian and Iranian communities. In spite of supposedly being enemies going all the way back to Abraham’s sons by different mothers, Israeli Jewish leaders and Saudi Arabian Muslim leaders actually see eye to eye on quite a lot of policies, with their modern relationship being more along the lines of a competitive ordeal, rather than an I will blow you the hell up motherfucker deal. The one thing the Saudis could never compete with Israel on, however, despite all their wealth, is tech. That’s changing though, rapidly.

But would this imply that the Obamas are more beholden to Israel than to the Saudi kingdom? More problematic, who does Trump love more? And why would Obama, during his own Presidency, try to block USA citizens, surviving families of 9/11 victims explicitly, from suing the Saudi government over the small fact of most if not all of the 9/11 hijackers originating from Saudi Arabia? Because, in keeping with the 9/11 Commission’s official report, any perceived conflict of interest between Obama or any other administration and the Saudi royals is a charade. And I’m insisting this extends to Saudi royals and Obama’s current business partners at Netflix. The censor of the comedian’s show was orchestrated controversy, possibly even unbeknownst to the comedian himself. I’d actually rate his work much higher than any of the former Daily Show people who continue to swipe talking points and hot takes from Abby Martin’s old series for RT News, Breaking the Set, which ended years ago. I mean word for word in so many shameless cases, from John Oliver and Samantha Bee both. So many Neoliberals and Neocons, but where are the Neo-Abolitionists?

Earlier in 2018, prior to Rice’s opinion piece, it was announced that the Saudi royals were heavily investing in a number of cutting-edge technologies, including VR/AR startups. I suspect that if Rice was truly bothered by the Crown Prince, it was for these investments, rather than the murdered journalist mentioned in her opinion piece. I mean, there were also American journalists murdered locally under mysterious circumstances during the Obama administration, such as Michael Hastings, which she never seemed too concerned about. It is my belief that she wasn’t really upset with the Crown Prince in the slightest though, but by Trump’s business alliances competing with those of the Obamas. Months later, Netflix insiders blogged verbosely on the importance of experimentation in what they do. That blog includes this little but important paragraph:

How are we to measure the impact of the change? Usually, we’d like to run a classic individual-level randomized experiment but randomizing which individuals see a billboard ad, as an example, is not possible. However, while we cannot randomly assign individuals, we can randomly choose some cities within which to show billboards and other cities to leave without.

And then goes on to express how they basically already had the technological means in-house and in place for censoring their own product in the same exact manner which the Crown Prince would later demand. Fast-forward to now and critics are still digesting the Black Mirror interactive movie Bandersnatch, concerning a choose your own adventure-style story presented as interactive as certain acid trips, even applied VR/AR. Only, with the very real possibility that the entire production served the ulterior purpose of collecting audience data-sets in an all-new, all-different way, with shades of Fight Club’s inserted frames and other subliminal antics and hypnotic suggestions to toy with and record behavior and perception. For experimentation.

All of which brings to mind the real world concerns of “deep fake” presentations online, namely news videos assembled from nothing but pixels and algorithms, where real people might be convincingly shown to say and do things they themselves never in reality actually ever said or did, just to promote whichever agenda trending on twitter that hour or whatever. What bugs me with such news is how little consideration is given to the smaller degrees for how such tech might be exploited by virtual key-masters. Used for the whole-cloth falsification of news is a thing to clearly dread, but used nonchalantly to fine-tune with a flourish here and a fake identity there, real stories for broader audience susceptibility, is another beast, one that has quite possibly lived among us now for a decade or more. Netflix announced a two-billion dollar marketing strategy for 2019. That’s just for one year’s marketing. Meaning they were by happenstance well-equipped and ready to counter whatever bad publicity might come from the Crown Prince’s censoring of their shows. Evidently, a couple of years back, Google hid at least 23 billion in a Bermuda tax haven, largely to dodge EU Parliamentary investigations into Google’s long-running tax avoidance schemes across Europe. Multi-billion dollar corporations with international ops are decreasingly subservient to most nation-states. Especially the biggest tech firms, regardless of proven Intelligence Community origins.

And conveniently, as so many media persons are otherwise focused on Saudi Arabia censoring USA programming, the USA Senate engaged in a bipartisan measure to make it illegal for their voters to ever boycott anything to do with Israeli business interests, literally asserting the rights of foreign businesses before the constitutionally-assured free speech rights of their own domestic, tax-paying citizens. Republican and Democrat Senators felt this was important enough to do not only during the holiday break, but during their own government shutdown, which is forcing thousands of lower ranking governmental employees to experience unpaid vacation. Which happens to be what the dead in name only TPP, TTIP and TISA global trade deals spearheaded by Obama sought ultimately to empower, for corporate entities to be granted the ability to rewrite international laws. For the sake of ratings, were we presented the exact opposite scenario as a charade of a distraction.

And the unwashed cry out in response, “This is not the reality we longed to have augmented!”