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If You Get Your News
From the Corporate Media:
Just Shut Up and Listen!!!
![]() Advice to the Uninformed
From TvNewsLIES
It’s very important in life to know when to shut up: Alex Trebek
THE ADMONITION
Enough! Just stop. You’ve had your say over and over and over. You’ve repeated yourself ad nauseam for years without making an iota of sense. You’ve accomplished nothing constructive, absolutely nothing. You’ve repeated the same nonsense over and over without knowing a single fact. So just cut it out. Now it’s time to close your mouth and open your ears.
Just shut up and listen!
All this time you’ve ignored people who know things you can’t even imagine. You’ve shut your eyes and your mind to people who have spent years gathering information and checking out their sources. You’ve dismissed people with skills and credentials you can’t even pronounce. And you’ve demeaned people with knowledge and experience you can’t even come close to.
All this time you’ve refused to hear a single thing they’ve said. You’ve strutted around like an arrogant peacock, believing you knew more than they. You had no basis for what you claimed to know. You just decided it was true. What unadulterated stupidity. It’s time to stop being a total idiot.
It’s time to just shut up and listen.
THE VACUUM
You probably don’t even know it, but there’s a huge, blank space in your information data base. So much has happened in this country about which you know absolutely nothing. So many lies have been told and so much has been kept secret that you are simply wandering in the dark. So much of what you should know and what you have a right to know has been denied you. And yet you foolishly claim to know what is going on.
Not so. You know almost nothing that is real about your own country or the world. Almost nothing.
Absent a specialized background, you would never dream of challenging your doctor’s diagnosis or outguessing your auto mechanic. You wouldn’t even claim to know more than someone who spent years developing a hobby you never had. If you wanted to learn to fish, you’d most probably listen to the instructions of an experienced angler.
So what in hell makes you such an expert on the crimes of the Bush administration?
You haven’t done the research. You haven’t even asked the questions. But most important, you haven’t taken a minute to listen to the people who have. You haven’t checked out the evidence that has been unearthed and you refused to listen to those who unearthed it. You have no basis for your own conclusions, and yet you ridicule anyone who seeks the truth. But for some unexplainable reason you believe everything your President and his cohorts tell you, even if everything they tell you is a lie.
You believe them even though you know that have lied to you over and over and over.
So just shut up and listen for a minute. For starters, take a look at what you DON’T know, even though you pretend you do. Take a good close look and cringe at your lack of facts and real news and vital information.
Here is our SHORT LIST of things you DO NOT KNOW:
YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT IS HAPPENING IN LEBANON OR GAZA. You don’t know that Israel censors all news so that their own population is not even aware of how their military conducts itself. There is NO balanced reporting on the events that has led to the present conflagration in the region. Other than explanations by official Israeli representatives, there is never an open or accurate discussion from ALL sides of the conflict. There is never a voice given to the thousands of organized activists working around the globe for a just and lasting peace in the region. Any criticism of the Israeli government is perceived as a form of Anti-Semitism and Jew baiting. Any defense of those who have lived under occupation for nearly forty years is perceived as aiding the war on terror. There is NO public discussion of the Christian zealots in the US who support Israel for their own fanatical religious concerns about a Second Coming. You do NOT know that the Karl Rove mantra of an imminent WWII is being used by the media to revive the fear factor among Americans. And, you have NOT been told how the call to stop Iran and Syria from aiding ‘terrorists’ is part of the PNAC plan for domination of the region. You just don’t know. YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT IS HAPPENING IN IRAQ! You don’t know that the war in Iraq is getting less media coverage than any other conflict in American history. You only know that the invasion of Iraq is supposedly part of a greater War on Terror. The connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda was a lie, but you still believe the claim. The insurgency is made up largely of Iraqis who oppose an invasion of their country, but they are constantly referred to as terrorists. No one tells you where the billions upon billions of your war dollars have gone; the Bush administration certainly has not rebuilt the country they bombed to smithereens. You don’t know what is happening because US reporters are not free to leave the safety of the Green Zone and they rely on official military reports for their information. You hear what the Pentagon chooses to tell you. You hear that progress is being made, despite the ongoing, daily, non-stop death and mayhem and carnage. You just don’t know. YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW MANY SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS HAVE BEEN KILLED IN IRAQ! You don’t know the numbers because the totals are ignored until a major milestone is reached. Even then, there is no corroboration of the numbers you hear. None at all. Coalition deaths are never, ever reported by the media. Even though counting civilian casualties in Iraq was forbidden by the US government early on, George Bush guessed that roughly 30,000 Iraqis had died. Actually, the latest estimate by concerned agencies has placed civilian deaths at 175,000. Deaths of contractors or other private workers are never tallied or reported. The numbers and the nature of devastating injuries cause by this war are simply ignored by the Bush administrations and the media. Flag draped coffins may not be photographed. Military funerals are not attended by government officials. You just don’t know. YOU DO NOT KNOW THAT THE US CANNOT BE CHARGED WITH WAR CRIMES! You don’t know that in May of 2002, the US pulled out of the only treaty that could result in charges being brought against the US government for war crimes: the International Criminal Court of the United Nations This move made it impossible for any American to face charges for crimes such as waging a preventive war, using outlawed weapons such as depleted uranium or torturing detainees. Months before pulling out of the treaty, the Bush administration had established with the ICC that US soldiers serving overseas would be immune from prosecution in the court, while politicians and US officials, including CIA operatives, could claim diplomatic immunity. As a result, the US has put itself above the law and can commit war crimes with impunity. You just don’t know. YOU DO NOT KNOW WHO AUTHORIZED THE USE OF TORTURE BY OUR MILITARY! You don’t know that the use of illegal torture methods was authorized at the highest levels of our government, including the President himself. You were told that such acts at Abu Ghraib and other prisons were the work of a few ‘bad apples’ in the military and you believed it. The story served to cover up the wide use of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo that has been recorded in photos and video tapes that the Pentagon still refuses to turn over to the US Circuit Court. The world learned of secret CIA flights that flew detainees to countries that permitted torture during interrogation. Still, George Bush and Condoleezza Rice publicly stated that the US does not tolerate torture. You just don’t know. YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT HAPPENED ON 9/11. No one does. There has been NO investigation into the events leading to the attacks of that day. The Kean Commission looked only into the Intelligence failures. No independent agency has ever been appointed to look into the hundreds of unbelievable discrepancies, anomalies and inconsistencies of the official story created by the Bush administration. There has been absolutely no evidence to support the official version of events; the public is simply expected to accept it without question. Since 9/11, many highly credible people have come forward to challenge the government’s explanation with mounds of impressive evidence to support their claims. They all have been ignored by the media and dismissed by you as conspiracy theorists. You just don’t know. YOU DO NOT KNOW THAT THE IRAQ WAR WAS PLANNED LONG BEFORE 9/11! You probably never even heard of the Project for a New American Century and how many of its members, including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld hold high positions in the Bush administration. You DON’T know about PNAC because the media never exposed the plans they laid out in the late 1990’s for invading Iraq. You DON’T know that they openly expressed the need for a ‘new Pearl Harbor’ in order to facilitate a war against Iraq. How convenient for them that 9/11 provided them with just the ‘catastrophic and catalyzing event’ they needed. How convenient as well that they were able to lie to the people and the Congress to launch an illegal and immoral war. You just don’t know. YOU DO NOT KNOW THAT YOUR GOVERNMENT SOLD YOU A WAR! You don’t know that Condoleezza Rice, Karl Rove and seven other people were part of the White House Iraq Group that was designed to you a war. Their job was to develop talking points and mantras such as ‘mushroom cloud’ that would hype the administration’s planned war against Iraq. You have no clue that the WHIG group set a carefully constructed terror trap to convince you and other Americans that invading a sovereign nation that had never threatened them would keep them safe. You also don’t know that the Downing Street Minutes revealed beyond any doubt that George Bush and Tony Blair planned the war in Iraq and ‘fixed’ the intelligence information to gain your support. They knew all along that the WMD’s and nuclear programs never existed. You just don’t know. YOU DO NOT KNOW THAT THE 2004 ELECTION WAS AS GREAT A FRAUD AS THE ELECTION OF 2000. You never heard about Congressman John Conyers’ official report about What Went Wrong in Ohio. You don’t know about Mark Crispin Millers explosive book about the 2004 election called Fooled Again. You don’t know about the brilliant Rolling Stone article by Robert F Kennedy Jr. entitled, Was the 2004 Election Stolen? You don’t know that hackers can manipulate all of the new touch screen electronic voting machines with little difficulty. You have no clue that 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S, both of which have strong ties to the GOP. You don’t know that the new electronic machines have no paper trail to verify the tabulations, even though both companies make ATM machines, checkout scanners and ticket machines that easily generate receipts. You don’t know how many people were intentionally and fraudulently disenfranchised in every election since 2000. You just don’t know. YOU DO NOT KNOW WHO LEAKED THE SECRET IDENTITY OF VALERIE PLAME! You still don’t know because the cover up has been successful. You don’t know who did what because there is no one to demand that Bush and Cheney come clean about what happened in their White House on their watch. Understand that the recent stories of Richard Armitage as a prime source for outing Valerie Plame never got to the mainstream media, and never will. Remember that for three full months after Plame was outed George Bush refused to investigate this crime. It was only when the CIA demanded an inquiry into the leak of its operative that the President finally turned to case over to John Ashcroft, an insider and friend of the WH and ultimately the case went to Pat Fitzgerald. You only know that Scooter Libby, National Security Assistant to Dick Cheney, was charged with lying to the FBI and obstructing justice. And you know for damn sure he’ll be pardoned before there is any trial. As for the Plame leak itself, you don’t know that the civil suit brought by the Wilsons against Cheney, Rove and Libby will be delayed until after the 2008 election. You just don’t know. YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW MANY AMERICANS HAVE BEEN SPIED ON WITHOUT WARRANTS! You don’t know because the warrantless surveillance was carried on in secret for years. The NY Times broke the story after keeping it under wraps for a full year – and not reporting it before the 2004 election. You don’t know that the FISA court was specifically created after the Nixon era to facilitate spying that was deemed necessary by the government, and allows for warrants to be issued 72 hours after surveillance, should there be a need to carry it out quickly. You simply don’t know who was spied upon or what was accomplished as a result of the spying. What you should know is that Americans are protected from such spying by the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution. And yet, the President insists he has the authority to spy on Americans without a warrant from any court. And you surely don’t know that this same President insists he has greater power than any American president in history, and that as a result your Constitutional rights are in terrible jeopardy. You just don’t know.
There is so much more you don’t know. This is the tip of the iceberg, the very tip. We didn’t list the still secret Cheney energy meetings, the destruction of the environment, the manipulated reports about global warming, the horrendous national debt, or the rampant cronyism and corruption in the WH, among so much else. The above is an extremely short list, but for the sake of readability, it will have to do.
Tragically, what you DO know has come from the very people who see to it that you know ONLY what they want you to know. What you DO know has come from the corporate media sources that get their talking points from the very same people who want to keep you uninformed. What you DO NOT KNOW helps them to manipulate your opinions and to influence your political views. What a disaster that is.
If you find your ignorance of the issues acceptable, go for it. If you find it abhorrent and totally opposed to the democratic concept of an informed electorate, forgive the discourteous nature of our reprimand and please, just shut up and listen.
THE SOLUTION
First, understand that there is hope for you. But also understand that it’s too late for courtesy or good manners. This nation is rapidly approaching a dangerous brink which may take us all into an abyss from which we will not recover. So, please take us very seriously. The solution lies in your willingness to just shut up and listen.
Shut up about things you know nothing about and get informed. Shut up about the ranting blather of right wing radio hosts who are just as uninformed as you, but whose agenda makes it unnecessary for them to know what they are talking about. They get their talking points from Karl Rove and his manipulation machinery and dish their nonsense out to you. And most of all learn to say “I don’t know,” instead of repeating the distortions and lies and garbage you’ve been conned into believing. If you can’t do that, just shut up. Please, just shut up.
Once you’ve been able to stop spreading misinformation and to stop supporting policies about which you know nothing, go on to the next step. For your own sake, LISTEN. Listen to people who know because they’ve taken the time to research and validate the facts. Listen to people you refused to even acknowledge because they dared to question what you blindly accepted as truth. Listen with a discerning ear so you can filter out unsubstantiated and uncorroborated propaganda. Listen through the catch phrases such as ‘war on terror’ and ‘for national security.’ Try; really try to listen with an open and questioning mind.
The information is out there. You are reading this on the Internet, the most incredible information source in history. The facts are at your fingertips. Find them.
Deal with the painful reality that you DO NOT KNOW what is happening around you, and understand that your stubborn resistance to new information will be your own downfall in the long haul. Until you make some attempt at rehabilitation, just stop. We’ve had enough. You’ve done your damage, so just stop.
There is no other way to say it. If you can’t back up what you parrot so stupidly, just stop. If you can’t explain why you believe what you do without some substantive and meaningful backing, just stop. Just stop.
That’s all there is to say. All that remains is a last echo of the advice we offer, and the hope that it reaches even one of the many uninformed Americans among us:
Just shut up and listen. It’s time.
POSTSCRIPT
He who knows and knows that he knows, he is a teacher, follow him.
He who knows not and knows he knows not, he is a student, teach him.
But he who knows not, and knows not he knows not…
He is a FOOL, pity him.
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