Wednesday, February 8, 2017

THE BURNZO PAPERS now available on AMAZON!

THE BURNZO PAPERS book is now available on Amazon! Watch a teaser trailer and read the book's introduction below. Purchase the full eBook for only 99 cents HERE.




INTRODUCTION

It was more than ten years ago, back in the 2005 area, when I discovered this wonderful new “social media” website called Myspace. This was a website that helped friends connect with friends in the virtual world. What appealed to me the most about Myspace was its “blog” feature where you could journal your thoughts. At the time, I did not have a website to call my own and I had no idea how to build one. I realized Myspace could act as a kind of website for me, a means of expressing my thoughts and ideas via blogs and sharing said blogs with Myspace friends. Unbeknownst to me, these initial Myspace blogs would become the first of “The Burnzo Papers”, though I did not refer to them by that name at the time. They were just blogs.

I wrote Myspace blogs for a few years but then Myspace went obsolete and I was forced to make the transition to Facebook. Aside from its “notes” feature, Facebook didn’t have blogging, though it enabled you to easily post and proliferate links to an outside blog and these links would appear on the “news feed” of your Facebook friends’ pages. I figured it was probably about time I should start a more official blog anyway. I could write my articles and essays on a blogging website like Blogger, and then post the links on Facebook.

So, as an homage to one of my favorite writers Hunter S. Thompson, I named my new official blog “The Natty Ice Diaries” (a play on Thompson’s The Rum Diaries). I wrote dozens of articles on this blog for a number of years and then I thought the blog needed a better (and perhaps more mature) name so it later became “The Burnzo Papers”, which, of course, was another homage to a Thompson work The Gonzo Papers.

“The Burnzo Papers” is still an active blog as I write this in 2017 (click HERE to visit the blog) but I decided to compile my articles into a book like Thompson did with Gonzo Papers and this book is what you’re reading right now.

Indeed, “The Burnzo Papers” book is a collection of current-events-related articles and essays that I’ve written over the past ten years, basically ever since I graduated from college in 2004 and started blogging away on that wonderful extinct dinosaur that we remember being called Myspace.

My articles range in topics but most of them can be linked to each other through one underlying concern and that concern is with—what-I-would-refer-to-as—the “Media Industrial Complex”. This term is basically an offspring of its parent term Military Industrial Complex, which President Eisenhower famously warned us about in his 1961 farewell address.

The latter phrase—military industrial complex—is basically a term reminding us that war is big business for the corporate defense industry as well as the banks who fund the wars and make big money off the loan interests. No matter which way you look at it, the corporate and banker elite profit from a perpetual state of war, which is concerning, because this means peace is undesirable to these money-making entities. When there isn’t war, the military industrial complex will encourage, if not instigate, war and it accomplishes this through influencing politicians via campaign contributions, lobbying etc.

The military industrial complex also spreads its warmongering via the powerful mind-control instrument that is the media. The corporate-owned media industrial complex manipulates public opinion into the supporting of perpetual war through its proliferation of military-loving propaganda, fear of enemies (real or imagined) and loathing of enemies etc.

The media industrial complex, however, is an industrial entity in and of itself—not just a means of manipulating public opinion—and it reaps massive profits from the BIG NEWS stories that come out of a warring world. In fact, the current “war on terror” is a godsend for both the military and media complexes because this is a war that pretty much never ends and has therefore been a perpetual profit-making machine since 9/11. There’s literally no end to the war in sight. It could potentially be a constant source of profits for the industrial complexes.

Now, when I say the media industrial complex profits from ‘war’, I would broaden the term to include anything that isn’t peace. ‘Chaos’ is probably the best word to use and, for that reason, the media industry is a Luciferian-like entity that thrives off negativity. Pretty much any negative news is profitable for the media industry and “The Burnzo Papers” discusses several of these negative news events that the media exploits or even creates—events like Donald Trump dossiers, Orlando nightclub shootings, race riots, Measles outbreaks, Bill Cosby rape allegations, Sony cyber-hacks, AirAsia plane disappearances, Boston marathon bombings, Charlie Sheen meltdowns, Michael Jackson deaths, you-name-it.

Working as a kind of team, the media reports on negative news, makes money off this news, and then creates a need for the military industrial complex to make us more “safe” from all the negativity in the world.

Incidentally, the negative news also makes us so depressed that there is suddenly a huge demand for anti-depressant drugs and yet another offspring of the military industrial complex—the pharmaceutical industry—ends up profiting as well (it’s no coincidence that you’re bombarded by drug ads when you watch the news). Defense, surveillance, pharmaceutical—all kinds of corporate entities feed off the media-induced negativity. It is truly one, giant corporate beast with an insatiable appetite for chaos. A demonic-like 666.

So, yes, where Eisenhower warned us about the corporate-run military industrial complex that profits from world chaos, the articles in “The Burnzo Papers” collectively warn us of its monstrous offspring, the corporate-run media industrial complex. Even if some articles don’t address the media explicitly, they usually at least deal with the corporate world that owns the media and how this corporate world tries to control our life and mind in a way that serves their profit-making agendas. As you’ll see in my most recent article, I compare this corporate world to a scientologist-like cult of which we are all unknowing members.

Reading through the Papers, you will notice that my politics seemingly shifted from left to right over the years, from 2005-2017. This is all superficial, though, because at the core I’ve always been a true liberal, not to be mistaken with ‘leftist’, which has successfully hijacked the former term. In other words, I’ve never called myself either a right-winger or left-winger, Republican or Democrat. The human spirit should transcend those labels and I have always tried to be a nonpartisan pragmatist throughout both the Bush and Obama eras. In fact, you will see that I was equally critical of both administrations.

As for the new Trump administration? Right now, I’m neither anti-Trump nor am I pro-Trump. I’m more like a let’s-see-what-he-does guy and also a this-could-go-very-well-or-very-wrong guy. I’m also a he’s-not-as-bad-as-the-media-makes-him-look guy. Trump’s been president for about a week now (as I write this introduction) and one thing that did really impress me was his killing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (aka TPP) trade deal, which he did almost immediately. I discuss the TPP in greater detail a few articles into this book (click HERE), but, to make a long story short, Trump’s killing of the trade deal was a big blow to the aforementioned corporate/banker elite. Well, not a big blow. A HUGE blow. The fact that he killed the TPP deal right away may have showed us where he was coming from and who he was working for (i.e. the people and not the elite). I talk more about Trump in the very first article of this book, but, for now, I’ll wrap up this introduction with just a few more things I’d like to mention:

Some of my earlier writing was written in a more informal blog form so don’t be surprised if you see a little humor and even some cuss words sprinkled into the mix. I also included a small handful of excerpts from letters or emails I’ve written to friends, mainly because there are interesting ideas being voiced regarding current events and they almost act like essays and/or articles in and of themselves.

I arranged the Papers in an order starting with the most current, which I thought made sense since this is a book dealing with “current” events. Before each article, I provide a brief summary in bold so you can get a quick idea of what the article will be about and determine whether it’s something you’ll be interested in. Feel free to read out of order and also feel free to peruse the table of contents so you can find articles that sound the most intriguing to you.

Oh, and not to sound crass, but the Papers are great bathroom-reading material. In fact, most of the articles are probably short enough to be read in one (toilet) sitting. I’m serious here. These make for good, quick reads.

Enjoy!


Matt Burns
Boston, MA.
January 31, 2017

Purchase THE BURNZO PAPERS for only 99 cents on AMAZON.