Hello all! Greetings from Seattle, where we’ve been breathing smog for days now from the wildfires. If you live here, or in Oregon or California, my prayers are with you… Here is something annoying I’d like to express… even though there have been at least two dozen incidents of arson in the last couple months here in my city (which have often been categorized as caused by ‘mostly peaceful’ protesters), the media messaging I’ve noticed the last few days is this smug opportunity to politic… stating that it probably has nothing to do with the arsonists committing arson, but rather, it is global warming… ‘Arsonists wouldn’t go to the woods to start fires; they stay in the city!’ (Ah yes, the supposedly ‘ethical arsonists,’ who so far have only burned one, almost two, innocent people alive in the last few months. This inhumanity is actually what set me on the path to re-examine my thoughts on what the activists have been doing; so far I still have not seen an instance where any BLm protester has condemned this kind of violence that happens during some of their protests. I invite anyone to share with me if I’m wrong about this. Truly I would be happy to be wrong about the lack of condemnation of arsonists. As far as I’ve seen, there has to be a spark to start a fire (spontaneous combustion is extremely rare), which is why it is predicted that 85 percent of fires are human caused. So it’s perfectly natural to at least suspect it might be those darn arsonists. Btw, even the most rigorous green policy, if initiated today, would take a hundred years to have even the teeniest sliver of effect, so why we have to turn it into a talking point to get Biden elected seems incredibly shallow and shortsighted.

Update: the arsonist in Oregon has been arrested for starting fires, for the second time…

“The worst enemy that the Negro have is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros and calling himself a liberal, and it is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have. If the Negro wasn’t taken, tricked or deceived by the white liberal, then Negros would get together and solve our own problems. I only cite these things to show you that in America, the history of the white liberal has been nothing but a series of trickery designed to make Negros think that the white liberal was going to solve our problems. Our problems will never be solved by the white man.” Malcolm X

This is a link that I did not write, but it is relevant to our country’s current problem with people who don’t think for themselves and don’t confront the bad guys…

— Read on quillette.com/2019/06/30/antifas-brutal-assault-on-andy-ngo-is-a-wake-up-call-for-authorities-and-journalists-alike/

I did not write this, but it is relevant to the violent vibe of the protest I attend. I wish to protest any violence toward people. This story involves a gay Vietnamese journalist who appears to have been brutally attacked by antifa, which often creeps into BLM protests.

Read on quillette.com/2019/06/30/antifas-brutal-assault-on-andy-ngo-is-a-wake-up-call-for-authorities-and-journalists-alike/

Dear activist media, your lies of omission and commission have burned a bridge with me. In areas where recent protests have erupted, you have silenced the voices of fearful residents, parents of murdered children, and small business owners whose livelihoods have been destroyed by looting and arsons. Only a tiny treasured few friends believed my reports of what was going on in my city because your message of ‘mostly peaceful protests’ is too powerful to contradict. Most friends assumed I was somehow affected by ‘right-wing’ propaganda, a thought that persisted even when I told them I was there. This is what initially made me realize how cruelly you twist the narrative when truth doesn’t fit your agenda. Who can go against your narrative when you are flanked by the entire Democratic Party.

By not capturing the reality of what is going on in the cities, by telling all the liberals in the entire country that there are no bad actors, aside from cruel police officers, you are misleading everyone. This causes pretty much anyone who did not get caught in the crossfire of a protest to assume unaccountable police officers are the only dangerous elements. You leaving these people defenseless to address the other dangerous elements that are constantly accompanying the peaceful protesters (which in itself is a weird gaslighting, because if the ‘peaceful protesters’ don’t call them out, or at least speak against it amongst your journals, then aren’t they basically allies of the violence, therefore complicit?) when i attended the protests on May 30th, I encountered a ‘social justice warrior’ jumped my case for taking videos and furled her fist at me as I watched people in black pounding through windows like rabid creatures, stealing loot with blind looks in their eyes. And even speakers screaming at us for not doing more to help the BLm cause made anyone feel preemptively deserving of any violence that might befall them. After two months of being pounded with fake news, I started thinking maybe my memories were exaggerated. Only recently did I have the wherewithal to check the police report for the day I attended the protests and once again reminded of the chaos. Here I was able to confirm the number of Molotov cocktails that were thrown into cars, the number of small businesses that were destroyed that day, the number of businesses destroyed by looting. After a couple months, I thought I surely must have misremembered things, considering the fact you did not even report at all the worst day in Seattles history for as long as I’ve lived here. You are making people believe we need no safety force, and the ones stuck living in these areas are forced to buy weapons as their only way to have self defense. This ironically will work against your agenda of deweaponizing everyone. To push the defund and the disarm agenda is the most farcical and cruel agenda I could ever imagine. Forces people such as myself, a single woman living in the city, to feel totally alone and defenseless, waiting for the day when some violent person (in the name of protesting) attacks me in public. The worse part might not stop with the attack. It might stop with me being blamed or told I somehow deserve it for not being ‘woke’ enough. After all, as I saw recently on one of your headlines, why would 17 journals lie about something? The answer of course is that you are a many tentacled hydra, but all part of one beast.

A couple months ago, I thought Black Lives Matter was an organization that advocated for Black Lives. I went to one of the earliest protests, listened to local black preachers give inspiring speeches on striving to reach your potential and using any white privilege you have to expand compassion and tolerance. But then after that day, which later broke out into violence, I started investigating and tracking one murder after another, actually *caused* by rioting and looting, in the name of police brutality. Actual black deaths caused by rioting and looting, in the name of Black Lives Matter, meanwhile where is Black Lives Matter? Is this a real organization? Why do members of BLM not publicly speak out against Antifa, or whoever is causing arsons, rioting and looting at BLM events. I patently object to these forms or protest and do not understand why BLM has not spoken out against this violence.

To state the obvious, police brutality is absolutely horrific. And anyone with any soul ought to be horrified to watch anyone who is subjected to domination by another human being which leads to their death or dismemberment, regardless of what may have led up to that moment. It shocks the conscience that people are accepting anecdotal reasons when videos of violence toward someone appear in instances, when they occur at a ‘peaceful protest.’ People are so quick to assume the person ‘deserved it’ if it happens to be a person who allegedly showed up at a peaceful protest with a camera. Several things can be true at once, but when we see someone attacked by six or seven people, kicked and knocked unconscious then dragged, we ought not rationalize it by assuming he probably deserved it.

A hierarchical abuse seems especially egregious, and so all media is focused on it. There are many others, about 1000 per year, although about 900 do involve someone wielding a weapon.

Now we have access to videos of someone being overpowered and then killed or horribly maimed, without knowledge of what that person was doing previously that led up to that moment. We all rally to demand an explanation. However, Legacy media often has a different goal. I’m starting to see a pattern by mainstream outlets lately, of committing blatant lies of omission when it comes to acts of physical violence committed by non-police entities on residents, store owners, other peaceful protesters, with the intention of immaturely steering a narrative. And for strategic reasons which I could get into deeper if anyone is interested, this line of logic, I believe, could cost us Dems the election.

Lately, I’ve only shared posts that don’t fit the left-leaning narrative because there is plenty of accessible media, for people who vote blue, of which are most of my FaceBook friends here, with shocking stories about violent cops. But unless we hear both sides of any story, we won’t really be able to strategize a solution moving forward. I’m not pretending anything I say will have any effect on any of the violence hiding under the guise of ‘peaceful protest.’ But since our mainstream media has changed, since we can no longer rely on accurate news coverage from our historically ethical journalists, since they are dropping the ball on telling the full truth about the prolific and violent side of the recent protests, I feel ethically committed to dig deeper into local stories and share the missing pieces as best I can.

Good morning world! A couple days ago, I stumbled upon the Pew Polls and discovered something amazing: most Americans are quite similar in the unique diversity of their beliefs. We’re all snowflakes! The beauty is that in a collective way, through the binary voting system, polarity of majority views keeps pushing us toward more freedoms and more compassion. Collectively speaking.

Our conservative/liberal system allows a polar push toward progress on difficult issues. But underlying those issues, 99 percent of Americans wants freedom, compassion and safety for our society.

But when we forget we have one heart, and end up hitching ourselves to the left or right mainstream media, we will be victim of the notion that roughly half the people in our country are pure evil. Unless a person has hours of time to research, to make sure they are receiving correct information about their environment, they will be misled by our journalists, who invariably have lost most pretense of objective journalism.

Until the 2016 election, I had a totally naive view that our major news outlets will at least tell the truth about basic facts of events that occur. But recent events I could not turn a blind eye to have led me to realize just how willing contemporary journalists have become to bend the truth, through lies of omission or commission. I literary heard a journalist, whom I’ve previously quite respected, speak the following words recently in regard to the ‘changing’ definition of ‘violence.’ He said, when it comes to that line, ‘the ends justifies the means.’ This was in response to criticisms that journalists have recently been willing to overlook rioting and looting that ends in their reporting, or broadcast the rioting and looting, but call it ‘mostly peaceful.’ Now that language is so rapidly changing to fit the narrative of the political party with which a media outlet is affiliated, i feel ethically obligated to start spending some amount of time each day to figure out the ‘true’ story of any given event, and try to reach as many people who may be pursuing the same goals, so that we can together build an alliance to work toward building a better future. How can we do this if we are depending if distorted representations of reality to show us the world?

Good morning everyone! Wow has the world gone insane! With the election coming up, this country is more divided than ever. Rifts between friends and family, constant tensions, fights breaking out, looting and rioting becoming an everyday occurrence in major cities.

Under these conditions, it is getting more and more tempting for journalists to abandon truth, either through lies of omission or commission. In no time is it more tempting to do this than in an election year. This twisting of the truth, in the name of the means justifying the ends, may be hurting your political cause.

Recently I’ve started to stumble upon some major confirmation biases within my own mind. If we are letting journalism do our thinking for us, it might behoove us to step back a moment…

Under duress, confirmation bias can become very alluring. Something upsetting happens, being the social creatures that we are, we bond with and reinforce each others’ biases. What we think we saw, and how we feel about what we saw… it takes energy to question our perspectives, so we often become complacent in siding with our ‘team.’ We make any differing perspectives our enemy, and we create a fortress around our side, shutting out dialogue with others.

As I’m sure my readers know, news outlets have become major corporations, and major corporations have corporate personhoods https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

Personhood, say you? But how can a company become a person? A media company is only representing the truth. I’m sure my readers are clever enough to know that any company is just providing a service or product. What could be corrupt about that? The Profit and Loss sheets, that’s what. Since a corporation, unlike a person, does not have a soul, it only produces cost benefit analyses. The service it provides is determined by what sells the most. But you know all that. Still, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded. We are relying on the principles of the company, advertisers and shareholders as the stopgap that keeps newspapers honest. But they are imperfect! Throw in the concept of ‘Ends justifying the Means,’ esp when there’s an election coming up, and you could have a real Frankenstein’s monster on your hands. And you thought you were just watching the news!

So let’s walk through the process of creating a story, what any journalist goes through any time an event is covered.

Something incendiary occurs. The video is broadcast. Everyone who sees it has a powerful, and usually same emotion about it. Anger, sadness, joy, etc. If we are a Republican, we refer to one news source, if we are a Democrat, we refer to a very different news sources. But upon first viewing, when we have that first emotion, we are more often united. We are having that same experience. Aside from rare and truly pathological people, when we see an event, we are united in our shared emotional experience. Upon witnessing the event, before the journalist has breathed a word of narration, we are unified, having a natural reaction.

But then the journalist brings the words to tell you what you are seeing. This is when they can start sowing seeds of discord, or bring us together to overcome or celebrate the same value. My following postings will be an attempt to unify our perspectives as Americans. I will try to point out that in spite of those bad players who want to win all the gold and hoard it in their castles, we can keep progressing forward as an amazing nation. Each day I will explore a different news event, invite us all in the spirit of democracy to explore what we are seeing, and then invite you, as part of a collective think tank, to help us work toward making this world a more compassionate and loving place.

I’m excited for anyone who wants to join me in this journey:)

Good morning everyone! I just literally woke up and having first cup of coffee of the morning.

After about a month of having my conscience tugging at me about a perspective I wanted to communicate, and the fear that stating them would get me shunned in some way, I started posting some excerpts from news articles. This got me defollowed on FaceBook by a good friend (which apparently was actually a defriend since he signed the letter “best of luck to you.”)

Later that night another friend called me out of the blue (incidental play in words, by the way). And then the conversation got extremely heated.

Here are some of the points she was making:

My ‘viewpoints’ seemed to be ‘coming out of nowhere,’ they were ‘unsubstantiated,’ I was ‘ill-informed,’ I ‘shouldn’t be forwarding articles about the topic when I wasn’t at the event…’ ok, so you may think I was saying something quite scandalous, quite radical. But no… here is all I was saying: I had concerns for the rioting and looting, and the toll it is taking on the residents of neighborhoods where it is continuing. I’ve noticed that ‘rioting and looting’ has become a very charged phrase, and it would seem if you are a proper Democrat, it is no longer politically correct to say you object to rioting and looting. Inversely, it is also politically incorrect to say that any ongoing protest has been anything other than ‘mostly peaceful.’ But if the viewpoint is that rioting and looting is understandable, then why also is mainstream left media keep hammering home the message that it is not happening, when anyone with eyes, and the ability to read obituaries can see it is indeed happening. I am so confused and troubled… I think I am expected to stay in line with the false narrative, but when I start seeing reports of people getting killed during various protests, at the hands of rioters and looters, it is getting more difficult to deny this truth. My main mission is to speak out against brutality, and two months ago, I showed up to protest police brutality, now I am protesting the brutality of rioting and looting, especially when I am seeing multiple reports confirming devastating property damage to small businesses, and worse, deaths at the hands of rioters and looters…this does not seem to help the cause of peaceful protests if people are not safe. It is really shaking me up that this has become a ‘conservative viewpoint.’ Shouldn’t all Americans be objecting to brutality, however it is appearing?