For the last couple of months, I've enjoyed watching Homeland, The Blacklist, and American Odyssey. But I've watched them with a critical eye for what messages they are trying to convince me to accept as true.

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Homeland

Homeland is a show starring actors-par-excellence Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin, as loose-cannon, experienced CIA agent Carrie Matheson and her veteran CIA mentor, Saul Berenstane respectively. Danes is "bipolar", a fact she hides from the CIA. As a person with bpd, I can say Danes depiction of bipolar is quite extreme and includes a high degree psychosis. My point is, whatever it is, she's also a psychopath who has no respect for political, social or moral boundaries.

And just so you know I'm not the only one who thinks Homeland is propaganda:

• ‘Homeland is a joke’: Artists on TV show sabotaged it with critical graffiti, no one noticed
• Sorry Liberals, "Homeland" is Actually Security State Propaganda
• Homeland: Islamophobic Propaganda or Progressive Masterpiece?
• The new TV show Homeland Security USA is nothing more than propaganda. The department is rife with problems
• Homeland isn't just bad TV, it peddles the worst lies about US foreign policy
• "Homeland" Tells It Like It Ain't
• Homeland: A Show For Liberals Who Root for Islamic Terrorists, Blame America First; Obama Loves It

In the very beginning of the series, she's hired her private contractors to surreptitiously enter a decorated war hero's home and bugging it and hiding cameras all over the house. Having been given a dying man's intel that this person was a 'manchurian candidate', she illegally monitors him for months and yet never finds anything that can stick.

In her desperation to prove Brody is a terrorist, she seduces him, has sex with him in a cabin and tries to fool him into revelation and then shoot him. But he discovers the gun, and her plot. Awkward!

She spirals into some kind of bipolar mania and falls apart, crashes Brody's house and terrorizes his family and becomes "the unmedicated, unhinged CIA ex-mistress".

It turns out later, she was right all along, as war hero Brody was found to be a terrorist who was 'flipped' by psychological torture by some al queda mastermind trope * Abu Nazir* in afghani-wherever-stan, and was planning on blowing up many us leaders including cia folks when they were all in a room together. You see, he's not really such a bad guy though because we got to see him teaching Abu Nazirs son, and Brody was there when the US dropped a bomb on him, so it's justified or so they would have us think.

Brody and Carrie later get back together following a deal with the CIA (awww). Brody is later set up to be a double agent to catch Nazir, but he is caught and hanged as Carrie watches. Carrie is pregnant with this 'good man at heart''s baby.

Now this is interesting. First of all: the show says several things:

1) Psychopaths are allowed if they do a good job 2) The illegal ends justify the means 3) We ought care about the struggles between Israel and Arabs more, for some reason 4) Terror is a real threat in the US 5) Terror is a threat from our own people 6) Terror can impregnate you if you are a stupid fucking unmedicated moron

Sorry for the spoilers but it's been a few years. This was all Homeland season 1/2/3. In season 4, Carrie the psychopath becomes "the Drone Queen" and just murders people throughout the middle east constantly from a cowardly control room. She is absolutely the one for the job. She is 100% blameless. At this point, I'm actually really scared the the US is turning into nazi germany with this kind of 'programming'.

Carrie's Jewish mentor Saul, who perennially bails her out of her messes, her fake testimonies in congress, becomes the head of the CIA. Learnings:

1. If you lie hard enough, if you cover your tracks hard enough, you become the Dark Lord
2. The network protects its own, even if it fucks up, a lot lot lot

Season 5 takes place in Berlin, Germany, where Carrie has left CIA to 'make amends' by working with a private security firm. She's abandoned her child in her sister's care back in the US. She's lied to her lawyer boyfriend and her close associate Quinn, another CIA contractor ("Hit man") is running around shooting people to death. He gets an encoded letter with the vic's name, shoots them, gets money. He and Saul run this business out of a PO box. Saul targets Carrie because he believes she's the source of a substantial CIA leak that caused a severance of ties between US and Germany.

Quinn reveals the strategy of no strategy and islamaphobia, queuing the viewer that he should just 'stay calm and believe in the spectacle'.

Saul is cock gobbling with some Israeli Mossad person, and the viewer just has to sit there and take all this bullshit about ISIS, Syrian refugees and it's more of the same, unreal warped nonsense that MSM is giving us daily. But this time, it goes something like this: Zion guy: "But Saul, we've been good friends in the past" Saul: "We are still your friends, bubby". Zion guy: "Yes but not like in the past (WINK)". (Implying Saul was a mossad double agent in the past)

Learnings:

1. CIA goes where it wants and kills people in cold blood
2. CIA will kill its own rather than seek clarification of actions
3. Corrollary to #2, if you become no more use of CIA you are a liability and so they have motivation to kill you ("you never really leave")
4. Carrie is a terrible parent who abandoned her child. She makes a video when she thinks she'll die from being hunted, saying "I didn't abandon you I love you" and bawls
5. In trying to determine who is out to kill her, she goes unmedicated ("super powers activated"), holes herself up in the room and does her strange analysis, only to come to the conclusion that it's 'Bad Karma'--it's all of them...they're all out to get me because I've done such bad in the world.

Now #5 would look like a confession from the establishment, what it actually is is a misdirection, trying to send the viewer--who by this point if you are still watching, identifies with Carrie--the message that it's our fault for creating this middle east mess. That it's failures of policy, or failures of geopolitics, etc. It misses the fact that politicians made a choice and we have to live with it. It's psychological abuse to manufacture a type of catholic like worldview where we are supposed to take the blame, not the 911 perpetrators, politicians and sympathizers actually responsible.

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The Blacklist

The role of notorious Raymond Reddington--ex-spook on the lam for decades as an independent contractor / hit man at the top of the CIA's most wanted list--is probably the best role James Spader has played. In a strange turn of events, Reddington turns himself into the CIA on the condition he can only speak with a newly hatched CIA agent Elizabeth Keen, a person with whom he has a poorly-understood relationship going back to her partially confabulated 'amnesiatic' childhood.

The show consists of a story arc of 'catching the cabal' (essentially the illuminati), through episodic whimsy of Reddington scratching off names from his Blacklist. This television series is incredibly subversive and manages to sneak a lot of interesting anti-state, anti-establishment ideas to the viewer, which is great.

Halfway through the first season, there's this "attractive?" (canot tell if...) Mossad lady that--through her inattention, not impressed, tough no nonsense girl attitude--seduces the doting, silly, affable, somewhat socially awkward (of course) Turkish CIA IT genius of the group. She becomes a tacit installation among their ranks. Puzzling. Eventually it sinks in that a Mossad agent is embedded (pun intended) with the CIA.

There is an element of a cautionary tale to be had here: it could be a trojan horse--not just the mossad agent but the show generally. Again, as with homeland, this is a show that depicts people breaking rules and pushing boundaries. The trojan horse is Reddington himself. By setting him up as a 'criminal working with the CIA', what they have effectively done is provide a mechanism (CONTRACTORS) for intelligence agencies to break the law in order to get their totally necessary work accomplished.

It also denigrates the rule of law, and the protections that the law affords, by showing how "stifling to our processes of catching terrorists and criminals the US bureaucratic system can be". In other words, it sets up those "nefarious citizens' rights and liberty protecting laws" as something negative, something that "enables crime and terror". In this type of narrative, it psychologically sends the message to the viewer that it's "ok to break the rules in the name of fighting terror".

To which I say, "bullshit".

But dammit it's a really really good show. Recommended nonetheless. I find Reddington, wholly delightful.

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American Odyssey

Sergeant Odelle Ballard was the only surviving soldier of a missle / drone strike following stumbling upon encrypted files on a USB drive that prove an american coropration called SOC is secretly funding terrorists. She is hunted by private contractors.

This show was too subversive and was not surprisingly canceled after one season.

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We dont' know what happened to Odelle, but we assume she used securedrop and wikileaks, blew the whole thing open on Alex Jones, and then was the subject of a week of FOX news controversy, following an incident in which she called the ladies of the View a bunch of idiotic, stupid twats. Also, her revelations lead to reinvestigation of 9/11, the Bush's are hanged without trial, congress is burned and Sanders, Charlie Sheen and Dwayne the Rock Johnson for some reason are set up as tricameral presidents of Neomerica.

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EDIT:

UPDATE:

Saul: "Simple answer's usually the correct one." "Nothing simple about Israel sabotaging one of our operations"

More of the same....