Now that the messengers have been dealt with

Since we now know that the "Russiagate" story was concocted for nefarious reasons, what will Congress do?

To hear the Republicans tell it, they were right (a novel sense of "right" for them), Hunter's Laptop was real, No. 45 is vindicated about everything.

The so-called Democrats are just imploding, unable to rise above partisan abuse, name-calling, and outright threats against all journalists, everywhere. One of them actually said "tinfoil hat." Another said "threesome" implying some kind of sexual impropriety among the journalists. The Ranking Member called them "a threat to all who oppose them."

About the same time all this is unfolding, another Select Committee is dissecting Dr. Fauci and finding that maybe Covid came from a "lab leak" in China. So again, 45 vindicated, "liberals" zero.

Context: the Washington Consensus, which has by now made Russia a very likely nuclear adversary, is loudly and beligerently ramping up for all-out war with China. This could not be made any more clear, so I won't bother to cite the many saber-rattlings and accusations of Chinese "aggression" (I think there was some of that, in 1957 or so).

Nobody serious buys that baloney, except people whose careers and bank accounts swell with every new false alarm. Which is almost anyone that can influence policy. Oh dear.

In this rapidly heating context, Taibbi and friends are seen as handing the Republicans the next election on a platter, and journalists like Glenn Greenwald, and commentators like Russell Brand, are being attacked by the self-styled "left" as turncoats; and all of this fans the flames for the return of Shock and Awe.

It should be noted that the substance of Greenwald's and Taibbi's reporting has little to do with either the "Chinese Threat" or MAGA vindication. The current administration is still at least as underhanded and mendacious as all of their predecessors, and the media is still writhing ecstatically in the arms of the nashaskirtystate.

And of course under cover of all this noise, the state of Israel is still killing as many Palestinian people as it thinks will go unnoticed. Which is a lot more innocent dead than usual, and climbing. Slaughter continues elsewhere in the region, and in parts of the African continent that have been so drained of their natural wealth that people are left sitting in the dust with nothing. What's the EU doing about this? Building higher walls.

When the NYT announced that "unnamed government officials" had announced that "a pro-Ukraine group" had "probably" blown up the Nordsream pipeline, there was nothing to the story whatsoever. No "group" was identified except as a question. It was pure nothingburger. A NYT front-page trial spy-balloon airware hallucination. And timed to avoid any mention of the detailed, obviously accurate analysis of Biden's fingerprints on the plunger. You would think nobody knew who Seymour Hersh is.

This is just what Taibbi and friends were calling myopic Congressional attention to, government media manipulation. This covert operation had already been turned on them, including from the FTC or FCC (sound quality not good) which made their presence on the so-called Hot Seat doubly surreal.

And from a presumptuous presidential hopeful from Florida stumping the hustings: "Parents have a right to know what their children are being taught, and if it's pornography, it should be removed from the curriculum!" Another ground nothing sandwich. But a virtual whopper with real poison. Now a calculated percentage of the public is thinking that blowing up the pipeline was just a dumb move by some crazy Ukrainians against their own self-interest. And a larger, equally calculated percentage of voters is thinking children in public schools are being taught to become drag-queens. And an even larger slice of the public is getting a peek at how terribly unified are the political parties that we supposed were so polarized. The Möbius Party, with a little twist, has only one side. And it's against all of us. So practically everybody thinks we are going to nuke China over Taiwan, after Putin is sent yelping back to his kennel.

It should be obvious by now, why this happened in America. Today you can create scary ghosts the way banks create money. Just ask a question, like, what happened to those UFO reports? It's all attentional credit: if somebody asks about it, it pops up in our minds, where it's real, kind of, at least for a moment. Or just put Covid and China in the same sentence. Presto: instant, truth-free, to-die-for campaign issue. Because the internet puts this stuff directly into billions of receptors in the public mind, in seconds. There's just no way to understand how unprecedented and devastating this is. It's like we drove into the river, and we're still stomping the brakes. It isn't working. We're still sinking.

Politicians are riding the ambient terror that's now normal in America for all it's worth. We are led by opportunists and con-artists drumming up business among the most uninformed. Not "misinformed" or "disinformed" or yet "malinformed" but just benumbed and hypnotized with fear, ripe for plucking. This has bankrupted democracy, and thrown public discourse into chaos.

Uninformation is the logical consequence of the displacement of information by monetized aggregated attention. The automated algorithmic dosage it takes to arouse us now is so terrifying that humanity's ability to respond to real threats is destroyed. Real threats like petrochemicals killing off the biosphere (part of which is us), plastics displacing our hormones, threatening fertility, weather only getting weirder until we're baked, frozen, drowned, or just blown away.

Our only hope lies in seeing beyond the tropes and memes ginned up in pursuit of power and money, in a system designed to enhance consumer sales. That is, sales both to consumers, and of them. There is very little time left before we will only be able to watch helplessly as everything collapses around us, and on us. We won't know how bad it is until the internet crashes for the last time. In some places it's already that bad.

We're better than this. Everyone I know is better than this. I'm guessing everyone you know is better than this. Everybody is better than this.