rigorousintuition.ca

American Dream » Tue Jun 04, 2013 1:43 pm wrote:


Cross-posting from the Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS") thread:

David Icke: A Biographical Profile
http://thrivedebunked.wordpress.com/201 ... avid-icke/

DECONSTRUCTING MUERTOS DAILY PROJECT


Yes, we’re writing this from the 13th floor of the Deconstructing “MUERTOS” Building in beautiful downtown San Antonio. I bet you’re asking yourself why anyone would read this blog dedicated to the deconstruction of the words, sentences and paragraphs of ‘MUERTOS”? Because I said so, that’s why. Enjoy the mouth-watering dissection of the posts of “MUERTOS” here and take a look at the other links as well. There’s sumthin for everybody at the Deconstructing “MUERTOS” Blog.


Just another WordPress.com site
posted on MAY 23, 2011

MUERTOS LAYS A BIG STINKY
Is it true….?

It seems that “MUERTOS” has been following this thread and has posted a link of my demolition of his bullshit onto his blog. Thanks for the free pub. “MUERTOS” is attempting to turn this event into a male-on-male-ego-wrasslin-match by trying to “out-blog” me by rushing out more blogs about his expose on the Desteni Cult. What “MUERTOS” doesn’t realize is that the more he posts his garbage, the easier my job becomes to debunk it.

I set my own hours, “MUERTOS.” By taking my time through going over each witless word, sentence and paragraph, I set my own comfortable pace. “MUERTOS” (which may be Spanish for “anonymous coward”) can fire off 100 blogs a day for all the good it will do him, because he’s already been exposed as a conspiracy theorist who hunts down other conspiracy theories as some sort of undocumented ‘expert.’ He has no currency or authority of any kind. “MUERTOS” may have gotten a little bit out of hand when he decided to talk shit about Desteni, so I had to give him some handles.

“MUERTOS” has a much rougher road to travel than me, as “MUERTOS” must feverishly pad his word count by associating everything that he thinks he knows about conspiracies and then trying to paint Desteni with his brush, but all I have to do is expand on each and every paragraph to reveal the shallow, simplistic and trifling substance the anonymous “MUERTOS” fittingly has to resort to cut-and-paste hater hearsay and gossip. It won’t be long until “MUERTOS” begins repeating himself over and over again, revealing himself as a crank and saving me much time in the process. Thanks in advance.

And now, on to paragraph 3)

“Desteni seems to have something else in common with Zeitgeist. Poolman’s group advocates something called the “Equal Money System.” The exact nature of this is somewhat vague to me, but it appears to be a utopian idea aimed at guaranteeing everyone on earth a basic standard of living, and all sorts of benefits are supposed to result from the institution of this system―for example, war, poverty and greed will become a thing of the past. These are not unlike the promises supposed to come from Zeitgeist’s “Resource Based Economy.” In contrast with Zeitgeist, however, Poolman and Desteni advocate an entire elaborate system of New Age living. Poolman and his chief lieutenants cloak themselves in New Age rhetoric. For instance, there’s a lot of talk about “channeling,” a classic New Age concept. It gets a little scary when you realize who and what they’re channeling, but we’ll get to that in a moment.”
Due to his characteristically sloppy word placement, “MUERTOS” has given the impression that Zeitgeist and Desteni have similar goals in instituting a global universal economic income for everyone. Let’s clean it up a bit. Due to his equally sloppy research, “MUERTOS” admits that his understanding of the Equal Money system “is somewhat vague.” Well, that can only indicate that he didn’t do his fucking “investigation” properly, doesn’t it?

I wonder if “MUERTOS” has performed this badly in the other subjects he obsesses over, for it is the nature of a crank to obsessively relate to everything through the prism of a single-minded point, which in the case of “MUERTOS,” is the meta-conspiracy. The “exact nature” will always escape one if there is a dominant desire to prejudge what one’s interested in attacking instead of looking at the thing objectively. This is also referred to as “intellectual dishonesty.”

After a brief and breezy interpretation of the Equal Money system that “MUERTOS” has already admitted to having a poor grasp of the subject, he then proceeds to list all the items that he thinks the Equal Money will bring to the world. “MUERTOS” then proceeds to compare the “promise” of the EMS with the Resource Based Economy without saying what exactly how the RBE was supposed to accomplish its mission.(Remember, “MUERTOS” is not presenting any solution to the global fuckness at all, his job is to merely obsess over conspiracy theories, particularly those of Zeitgeist which is now in internal turmoil and may not continue. “MUERTOS” needs copy and a raison d’être to find content. Hence his sudden, fuzzy attention towards Desteni. We must be seen as a Miracle to the lad!

And it’s a “New Age” miracle at that! Not surprisingly, “MUERTOS” makes another lazy (and mistaken) comparison. To anyone familiar to the forum will see the utter hilarity at draping Desteni in New Age garb. Desteni rejects completely everything that the New Age is about. “MUERTOS” could go over to my You Tube channel and find out what I personally think of the New Age. One only needs to invest an hour poking through the FAQ in the forum to discover what Desteni’s relationship to the New Age is, but apparently, “MUERTOS” was too busy conjuring up a strawman to notice. Because second only to the ill-informed haters that “MUERTOS” is begging to be part of his audience, the biggest enmity directed at Desteni comes from the New Age Lightweenies and Love-and-Light-Burgers themselves! And of course, here comes the “expert” testimony of “MUERTOS” when he claims that Desteni is involved in “channeling” and that we “channel” things that “MUERTOS” finds “scary.” I will give you all a moment to pick yourselves off of the floor after you’ve stopped laughing.

Next up as we delve further into the mess left behind by “MUERTOS,” he predictably drags in the predictable topics of David Icke, Reptilians and Anti-semitism. Could the dreaded figure of Adolph Hitler be far behind?

Why, yes! Stay tuned…

slimmouse » Tue Jun 04, 2013 1:45 pm wrote:
The crowdsource funding of a TV and radio station that will broadcast the news that the shepherds and their sheepdogs ( since you appear big on such analogies) dont want us to hear,

Good or bad idea?

As an asiide Ive learned an absolute ton about indiegogo funding and stuff from this. Personally, that was worth looking at the link in and of itself if you ask me.

Cathy O'Brien and David Icke

Cathy O’Brien has long been one of David Icke's great eyes and ears into the hidden world of the powerful. In this extract from Jon Ronson’s "Them Adventures with Extremists", we can see the advice that Icke gave Ronson before his famous mission into Bohemian Grove:

"David Icke warned me against it. He said the reptilian bloodlines transform themselves back into giant lizards at Bohemian Grove. Furthermore, he said, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, Walter Cronkite and the male members of the British Royal family routinely sexually abuse their harem of kidnapped sex slaves - brainwashed through the MKULTRA trauma-based mind control program - at the Grove. I asked David how he knew this, and he explained that one of the sex slaves, a woman called Cathy O'Brien, escaped and wrote a chilling memoir about her experiences called the TranceFormation of America. 'If you read Cathy O'Brien's book,' said David, 'you'd know not to go anywhere near the place. People disappear in those forests."

Jon Ronson and Alex Jones survived the encounter.

They also filmed the infamous "cremation of care" event and surprise, surprise, never saw anyone turn into giant lizards...

The problem is that Monarch is an extremely debatable program - not even Alex Jones touches her. Which is rather interesting, as Martin Cannon made the observation in the article "Project Monarch: The Tangled Web" that when she first came on the scene in 1996, she and her husband seemed to be testing the waters for a market to pitch her stories to:

"The couple describe World Vision as 'Jesuit' conspiratorial group intent on bringing about a socialistic, 'New World Order.' (World Vision is vile emphasized the 'New World Order' bugaboo and Mark takes pains to hide his atheism. Actually a conservative Protestant missionary group.) Ever since our intrepid anti-Monarch crusaders discovered that their primary audience leans far to the Right, they have and Mark takes pains to hide his atheism."

Plenty of Book Sales With Icke's Promotion

With Icke's help, O’Brien and her husband are now through to the 14th printing of their book, and had another one called "Access Denied: For Reasons of National Security", which came out in 2004.

It was also the rather rabid followers of O’Briens, Icke and Makow (amongst other crazies) that led to one of the first genuinely critical researchers of the conspirahypocrite fraternity Martin Cannon to retire from the field as he stated in an email to Mark Pilkington in 2002.

"But perhaps the main reason I 'had to let it go' was the dawning realization that a lot of the folks I was talking to were simply nuts"

JackRiddler » Mon Jun 03, 2013 5:32 pm wrote:I decided a long time ago I couldn't spend all my time pissed off at liberals, not even the ones on this board. I'm looking at you compared2what? and drew.

slimmouse » Wed Jun 05, 2013 12:56 pm wrote: OK, his website posts links to dodgy sources and scoundrels, , but of course that happens here in this very thread. Meanwhile theres some good stuff there too.

American Dream » Wed Jun 05, 2013 1:04 pm wrote:

slimmouse » Wed Jun 05, 2013 12:56 pm wrote: OK, his website posts links to dodgy sources and scoundrels, , but of course that happens here in this very thread. Meanwhile theres some good stuff there too.

Winston Churchill completely omitted from the text of his Nobel Prize-winning, 6-volume treatise The Second World War any mention the 1942-1945 Bengali Holocaust in which he deliberately starved to death 6-7 million Indians.

Holocaust ignoring is far, far worse than repugnant holocaust denial because at least the latter admits the possibility of public discussion, History ignored yields history repeated. Genocide ignored yields genocide repeated.

Martin Cannon wrote:"But perhaps the main reason I 'had to let it go' was the dawning realization that a lot of the folks I was talking to were simply nuts"

Project Monarch: The Tangled Web
by Martin Cannon

Since 1991, Mark Phillips and Cathy O'Brien have alternately appalled and enthralled their growing audience with tales of mind control, programmed prostitution, ritual abuse, and worse. The handsome couple from Tennessee initially told their story to a select group of writers and journalists. Now, they spread the word via right-wing periodicals and outside-the-mainstream radio programs. They've also written a book: Trance-formation of America.

Cathy claims to be a victim of the Monarch Project, an insidious CIA/military/Satanist plan to use ritual abuse victims as mind-controlled guinea pigs. Victims of the plot, almost always female, grew up within multi-generational Satanic families. Sold by their parents to government brainwashers, Monarch kids are intentionally "split" into directed multiple personalities, useful for various criminal purposes - as spies, as drug mules, as prostitutes, and so forth. The well-developed primary personality never realizes what was done by, or to, the alter personalities. Powerful individuals with a taste for sexual excess choose their playmates from the ranks of Monarch graduates, the better to avoid after-the-fact blackmailers and tattle-talers, a la Vicki Morgan and (if you believe certain writers) Marilyn Monroe. For example, O'Brien describes in detail how one important aide to Ronald Reagan enjoyed raping her anally while using a stun device to prod her body with electric convulsions. This is the sort of fetish that might cause some concern among the voters, if ever they learned the truth. Hence, Monarch.

Little about the basic Monarch theory struck me as technically implausible - indeed, this putative project seems, in many ways, the logical extension of MKULTRA. I therefore initially found the O'Brien/Phillips story quite intriguing. But I also found Mark and Cathy exceptionally frustrating to deal with.

Mark Phillips has offered varying descriptions of how he first learned about Monarch programming. At one point, he said he had worked for an unnamed "DIA contractor," in which position he came across various materials detailing the government's mind control projects. But in a letter to me (June 1, 1991), he claimed to have discovered the operation during his "tenure in the '60s and '70s at NASA (Huntsville, Alabama) and Woodland Hills R&D (Woodland Hills, California)" I have lived near Woodland Hills most of my life, yet have never heard of any such corporation, which remains a mystery to everyone else I have consulted. (A call to Directory Assistance came up goose eggs.) Phillips seems rather too young to have worked in a sensitive position at NASA in the 1960s. He supposedly "retained" copies of classified documents detailing "harmonics, electroshock, hypnotic programming, mind/body conditioning (torture), (limited) drug applications for programming and deprogramming, and the names and backgrounds of the expendables (victims)." Peculiarly, he has never produced any of this confirming documentation. Nor has he produced any evidence that he ever worked for any government contractor. Independent background checks have revealed only that he has held far less impressive jobs, such as selling recreational vehicles.

He also briefly joined forces with a Tennessee businessman named Alex Houston. Houston, in a telephone interview with researcher Mike Knight, claims that he was married to Cathy O'Brien in 1988. Oddly, she never mentioned this marriage in her voluminous autobiographical writings, although she has frequently labeled Houston an operator within Project Monarch - an accusation he strongly denies. Houston reports that he and Phillips once traveled to China to sell capacitors, and were briefly detained on suspicion of espionage by the Chinese government. After returning to the United States, Houston found that Cathy had gone off with Mark.

Mark Phillips claims that his "inside knowledge" allowed him immediately to spot Cathy's status as a Monarch victim. He therefore whisked her away and embarked on a deprogramming operation - although his description of "how to deprogram" seems unnervingly similar to descriptions I have read of how to instill programming. The couple traveled to Alaska, where, Cathy claims, they gave the FBI testimony concerning various entertainment figures involved in the Monarch drug conspiracy. In 1991, the couple began distributing "documented proof" of the scheme to their network of journalists, researchers, and interested parties - including myself.

Unfortunately, the only "documentation" I ever saw consisted of unsworn testimony written by Cathy O'Brien, in which she accused various political and entertainment figures of participation in the plot. Her two-to-ten page short-stories-from-hell detailed the horrific deeds (mostly involving sex and drugs) perpetrated by the likes of Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and Cathy's bête noir, Senator Robert Byrd. The entire program, she averred, was commanded by the occultist I have already labeled "Mr. A." Cathy also identified other putative Monarch victims, such as Country singer Loretta Lynn and Dodger pitcher Fernando Valenzuala, who, we are told, owed his baseball prowess to hypnosis. (Apparently the trance wore off.) Even comedian Jack Benny fell afoul of the Monarch conspiracy.

On one occasion (or so Cathy claims), she was taken to a rural retreat, where she serviced the eldritch sexual needs of then-vice president George Bush and one of his chief aides. This story's high point depicts Bush "kissing the sky" while strung out on heroin, as he repeatedly gurgles to his comrade: "You look just like Elmer Fudd!" (A wicked part of me almost wishes it were true)

I once told Mark that found impressive Cathy's willingness to name names, thereby placing the couple at some legal risk. Mark became nervous, and, rather less-than-gallantly, observed that his name didn't appear as author on any of the accusatory writings, leaving him in a position protected from libel action.

A number of journalists, such as freelance writer Civia Tomarkin (who has followed the ritual abuse controversy), quietly studied the O'Brien/Phillips "paperwork." But, as Tomarkin observes, "there's a difference between testimony and proof," and Mark and Cathy refuse to provide the proof they have promised. Cathy has frequently asserted that her body bears many marks, wounds, and "cancerous moles" corroborating her tales of torture - yet she never makes available probative photographs or other medical evidence. Nor will she provide documentation that she has had cancer. Everyone who meets her notices that her fashion-model good looks remain unflawed by any visible scars. Cathy often describes the genitalia of the famous politicos she has serviced - but no journalist could hope to validate these descriptions, unless he possesses a talent for furtive glances in the Senate restroom.

The couple use familiar tactics to counter their critics: After Tomarkin's interest turned to skepticism, Mark Phillips asserted that the journalist was herself part of the Great Monarch Conspiracy.

It is a very powerful conspiracy, indeed. We are told that Hollywood animators deliberately place hypnotic cue images into children's television shows, such as Disney's Duck Tales. Rock-and-roll Monarchists deliberately include hypnotic cue words in the lyrics of many popular songs. When asked why they don't bring civil charges against the Monarchians, Mark and Cathy explain that the Satanic plot controls the entire court system - just as it also controls the presidency, much of Congress, the entertainment industry, and large sectors of both the Mormon and Catholic churches. The Vatican looms large in the Phillips/O'Brien demonology. In their 1996 book "Trance-formation of America," the couple describe World Vision as a "Jesuit" conspiratorial group intent on bringing about a socialistic "New World Order." (World Vision is actually a conservative Protestant missionary group. ) Ever since our intrepid anti-Monarch crusaders discovered that their primary audience leans far to the Right, they have heavily emphasized the "New World Order" bugaboo and Mark takes pains to hide his atheism.

I backed away from this story in September of 1991, when Cathy sent a letter begging me to "rally the troops" in support of Mark Phillips after a Federal Grand Jury in Tennessee had called him in for testimony. "We nervously anticipate a set-up," Cathy wrote, apparently hoping her network would start a "Free Mark" movement. I didn't bite. Soon thereafter, Mark Phillips explained to me that the Grand Jury had falsely accused him of threatening President George Bush. This assertion made no sense: Anyone accused (even falsely) of posing a presidential threat would first confront the Secret Service, not a Grand Jury. Later still, I discovered that the Grand Jury had merely called in Mark Phillips as a potential witness in a matter unrelated to either Bush or Monarch. Why, then, the call-to-arms?

Throughout 1991, O'Brien and Phillips inundated their network with "paperwork" outlining the crimes of numerous American political figures, especially those hailing from the south. Yet they never mentioned Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, either in writing or in telephone interviews. That situation changed after the 1992 Democratic convention, which chose Bill Clinton as the party's presidential candidate: Cathy then distributed a two-page report titled "Clinton Coke Lines" - allegedly "compiled 3/89." (Why, then, didn't we see it earlier?)

In this paper, Cathy claims to have met then-governor Clinton in 1984, at a contributor's mountain retreat. All parties did mounds of cocaine while they discussed using a fleet of trucks, jestingly labeled "Clinton's Coke Lines," to run CIA drugs through Arkansas. Thus spake Bill, as per O'Brien: "Bottom line is, we've got control of the drug industry, therefore we've got control of them (suppliers). You control the guy underneath ya, and Uncle has ya covered - what have ya got to lose?" Soon after making this observation, Clinton insisted that Cathy (apparently brought in to supply "entertainment") had to leave the room, even though she was a "presidential model" capable of keeping state secrets.

Cathy O’Brien claims that Arkansas entertainment director H.B. Gibson was present at this meeting. In 1993, investigator Mike Knight telephoned Gibson. Knight, no fan of the president he will always call "Slick Willie," undoubtedly wanted to prove this story true. But Gibson seemed genuinely bewildered when he heard the names Alex Houston and Cathy O'Brien. After lengthy, carefully-phrased questioning, Knight reluctantly decided that Cathy had witnessed no such meeting involving Bill Clinton.

And that's the bottom line: Mark-and-Cathy stories never come backed by hard evidence. When Cathy claimed on the radio that a Vermont Senator had sexually abused her in an L.L. Bean store located in that state, a caller pointed out that the L.L. Bean company maintains no stores in Vermont. Cathy rationalized the problem away. There's always a rationalization.

Just to make matters pluperfectly surreal: Mark Phillips has privately admitted to at least one researcher that he (Phillips) concocted the name "Project Monarch," just to see who would pick it up.

At this point, an honest investigator can only feel aggravated and dispirited - which may be the entire point of this charade. In fact, ritual abuse claimants throughout the country had spoken darkly of a "Project Monarch" well before Mark and Cathy came on the scene. Now, skeptics can posit that Mark Phillips contaminated the testimony of others, even though the chronology argues against this scenario.

As mentioned previously, the essential idea behind the Monarch theory seems "do-able." And to be fair, Mark and Cathy never seemed to be "in it for the money" - in fact, they spent a tremendous amount on their mailings, while the potential for libel suits placed them at some financial risk. I doubt that sales of their book (published by a small firm, and undistributed, so far, in the larger stores) will fetch them much monetary benefit.

How, then, do we assess their claims? Some believe that Cathy's testimony is essentially true, while others damn it as a pack of lies. Still others suspect that Mark and Cathy have played out a clever disinformation gambit, mixing fact and fiction in order to discredit any genuine victims who "break program." Worth noting: "Mr. A" has never attempted to sue the couple, even though they have accused him publicly of numerous crimes, and even though he is notorious for having his lawyers write intimidating letters to anyone he perceives as injuring his reputation.

At the end of the day, we can only contemplate Shakespeare's famous phrase: "Oh, what a tangled web we weave" The sentiment has never seemed more appropriate.

slimmouse » Wed Jun 05, 2013 2:36 pm wrote:Having read your last article AD, Im left with the impression that Martin Cannon, a man with years of experience in the field, is still unsure to this day whether or not the accounts of O' brien and Phillips are true.

NeonLX » Tue Jun 04, 2013 9:22 am wrote:Edit: But it ain't about me.

American Dream wrote:I think you're misinterpreting Martin Cannon. True that he once did "believe" in people of the ilk of Wilder, O'Brien/Phillips, Wheeler et al.

Martin Cannon wrote:At this point, an honest investigator can only feel aggravated and dispirited - which may be the entire point of this charade. In fact, ritual abuse claimants throughout the country had spoken darkly of a "Project Monarch" well before Mark and Cathy came on the scene. Now, skeptics can posit that Mark Phillips contaminated the testimony of others, even though the chronology argues against this scenario
As mentioned previously, the essential idea behind the Monarch theory seems "do-able." And to be fair, Mark and Cathy never seemed to be "in it for the money" - in fact, they spent a tremendous amount on their mailings, while the potential for libel suits placed them at some financial risk. I doubt that sales of their book (published by a small firm, and undistributed, so far, in the larger stores) will fetch them much monetary benefit.

How, then, do we assess their claims? Some believe that Cathy's testimony is essentially true, while others damn it as a pack of lies. Still others suspect that Mark and Cathy have played out a clever disinformation gambit, mixing fact and fiction in order to discredit any genuine victims who "break program." Worth noting: "Mr. A" has never attempted to sue the couple, even though they have accused him publicly of numerous crimes, and even though he is notorious for having his lawyers write intimidating letters to anyone he perceives as injuring his reputation..

slimmouse » Wed Jun 05, 2013 3:58 pm wrote:AD, for the second time, do the people who are being subjected to ongoing crimes by the elite deserve a global voice?

Do we deserve to hear the news the mainstream media isnt telling us, regarding warfare, pedophilia, the entire banking system con, the Big Pharma cartels with their criminal practices, the "War on drugs lie" , to name but a few?

I strongly suspect thats what we'll be hearing about. Im sure the stations lawyers will be all to familiar with the libel situation.

Is that a bad thing?

Reader-funded journalism
This model is vital in sustaining real journalism: it fosters independence, invests readers in the work that is done, and keeps journalists accountable to individuals

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 4 June 2013 08.18 EDT
Many news outlets around the world, in the age of the internet, have struggled to find an economically sustainable model for supporting real journalism. The results, including for some of the largest, have been mass lay-offs, bureau closures, an increasing reliance on daily spurts of short and trivial traffic-generating items, and worst of all, a severe reduction in their willingness and ability to support sustained investigative journalism. All sorts of smaller journalistic venues - from local newspapers to independent political blogs - now devote a substantial portion of their energies to staying afloat rather than producing journalism, and in many cases, have simply ceased to exist.

Virtually all aspects of real journalism have been negatively affected by these difficulties. Economic suffering, of course, plagues an endless number of realms beyond journalism. But there are special dangers when true journalism cannot find a means to fund itself.

As governments and private financial power centers become larger, more secretive, and less accountable, one of the few remaining mechanisms for checking, investigating and undermining them - adversarial journalism - has continued to weaken. Many of these large struggling media outlets don't actually do worthwhile adversarial journalism and aren't interested in doing it, but some of them do. For an entity as vast as the US government and the oligarchical factions that control it - with their potent propaganda platforms and limitless financial power - only robust, healthy and well-funded journalism can provide meaningful opposition.

For several years, I've been absolutely convinced that there is one uniquely potent solution to all of this: reader-supported journalism. That model produces numerous significant benefits. To begin with, it liberates good journalists from the constraints imposed by exclusive reliance on corporate advertisers and media corporations. It enables journalism that is truly in the public interest - and that actually engages, informs, and inspires its readers - to be primarily accountable to those readers.

Reader-supported journalism also democratizes political discourse and injects otherwise excluded perspectives; it does so by enabling the funding of a platform for those who want to cover issues and advocate perspectives unwelcome in most large corporate conglomerates. It provides a crucial alternative to the easiest careerist path for journalists to make a living: working for and serving the most powerful and wealthiest corporate factions. Under this model, it is only the journalists who people perceive are providing a real public value who are supported.

And, probably most importantly, this model elevates the act of journalism into a collective venture, where readers are invested in the adversarial pushback against powerful institutions that good journalism provides. Readers become a part of it and the causes it advances, rather than just passive recipients of a one-way monologue. In sum, it's vital that journalism be funded not only by large corporate interests with homogenous agendas but by citizens banding together as well.

This model is not entirely new. The great independent journalist IF Stone was able to produce his path-breaking newsletter of the 1950s and 1960s only as a result of reader support. The emergence of political blogs at the beginning of the last decade, which really did produce several unique voices and had some genuine impact on the political discourse, was driven in part by some advertising but in many cases primarily by annual reader donations; in many cases, they still are. Various forms of public radio and television have long relied on voluntary donations, and political magazines from Mother Jones to National Review still do.

The New York Times has had great success in relying on voluntary reader donations. Its subscription "paywall" is, by design, very easily circumventable by anyone who expends minimal effort, because that model is really a means of asking its readers to voluntarily support its journalism with donations. Andrew Sullivan's efforts this year to rely exclusively on reader support produced such intense media attention precisely because everyone knows that reader-supported journalism is the one promising model for enabling different kinds of journalism to exist.

Ever since I began political writing, I've relied on annual reader donations to enable me to do the journalism I want to do: first when I wrote at my own Blogspot page and then at Salon. Far and away, that has been the primary factor enabling me to remain independent - to be unconstrained in what I can say and do - because it means I'm ultimately accountable to my readers, who don't have an agenda other than demanding that I write what I actually think, that the work I produce be unconstrained by institutional orthodoxies and without fear of negative reaction from anyone. It is also reader support that has directly funded much of the work I do, from being able to have research assistants and other needed resources to avoiding having to do the kind of inconsequential work that distracts from that which I think is most necessary and valuable.

For that reason, when I moved my blog from Salon to the Guardian, the Guardian and I agreed that I would continue to rely in part on reader support. Having this be part of the arrangement, rather than exclusively relying on the Guardian paying to publish the column, was vital to me. It's the model I really I believe in.

It is an indispensable factor in my independence. It enables me to work far more effectively by having the resources I need and to spend my time only on the work which I actually believe can have an impact. It keeps my readers invested in the work I do and keeps me accountable to them. And it's what enables me to know that I'll be able to continue focusing on the issues and advancing the perspectives which I think are vital regardless of who that might alienate. I've spent all of this week extensively traveling and working continuously on what will be a huge story: something made possible by being at the Guardian but also by my ability to devote all of my time and efforts to projects like this one.

Currently, this is not the conventional way journalism is funded in establishment circles, but I'm convinced it's the better way. For a deeply struggling field, and whether they want it or not, this is the way of the future: the short-term future at that, and I think that's a very positive development. I'm truly appreciative of all readers who spend their time coming here, and grateful for those who in the past have supported the work I do. Those who wish to do so this year can do that here.