Governments Lie, Media Deceives... What to Believe

we'd like to believe that our governments and institutions are run by good people, or at least normal people, people like us;

but they are not;

normal people, good people, people like us do not get the opportunity to be in their place

we are ruled by psychopaths

if that sounds too harsh, its just because we don't want to believe it;

if it helps, think of them as sociopaths instead; 

(sounds less bad; doesn't mean less bad; psychopaths are mass murderers that maybe kidnap and maybe use torture, perhaps even chainsaws, on their 1, or 4, or handful of victims; sociopaths use drones, or MOABs (the Mother of all Bombs), or Fat Man and Little Boy, or economic (starvation) sanctions, on their hundreds of thousands of victims)

the sociopaths that rule us are MUCH worse than the psychopaths we fear

in any case;

there is so much utter B.S. that it has become very hard to figure out what is true;

I grew up believing what Dan Rather told me on CBS News, or Tom Brokaw on NBC, or Peter Mansbridge on CBC, or just about anyone, with their cool accents, on BBC;

I watched the Gulf War on TV from my first year university dorm room;

so naïve at the time, believing what I was told, captivated by the light show on the TV screen

10 years later, I still hadn't taken the red pill

like most, I too was glued to the TV on that fateful morning, watching as the towers came down

it was only in retrospect that I thought:

how did that 3rd tower, WTC7, come down?

for that matter, how exactly did the Twin Towers come down in the fashion they did, at freefall speed, into their own footprints?

then later...

how exactly did they find the culprits' passports in the debris of the Towers' wreckage?

are you f'g kidding me?!

so many more questions (my questions)

so many B.S. pronouncements,

so few real questions (from the media, not digging into any of the questions that I was asking/thinking)

Red Pill taken

20 years later, I'm so tired of it;

so tired of the naïve complacency of the public believing the 4th Estate;

so tired of the lack of critical thinking;

of the lack of skepticism about the latest B.S. despite all the past BS;

so tired of those features of the public allowing the perversions of justice, the absolute evil, the perpetuation of grotesquely unsustainable practices that are destroying the biosphere that our civilization, nay, our species, depends on

so tired of the public arguing on Twitter about the trivialities... like which corrupt evil con-man should (pretend to) rule the world next, Trump or Biden (while the powers that be behind the scenes really direct the play)... that we keep missing the forest for the trees

its all a mess

and, honestly, we don't really want to know how bad a mess it is, do we?

its better to just believe the lies and try to do our best going on with living our lives

while rainforests get bulldozed,

while species after species goes extinct,

while we keep belching GhGs into our atmosphere,

while we keep acidifying our oceans,

while the coral reefs die,

while keystone species are imperilled, from bees and insects to oceanic plankton

..

while Yemenis starve,

and Venezuelans starve,

and Iranians, who can't be starved b/c of their own agriculture, are deprived of medication for their children,

and Libya has an actual slave trade with active slave markets

...

all because of the evil U.S. warlords (from Trump to Obama to Bush to Clinton to Bush to Reagan to …)

fxck

so...

first rule - don't believe either the government or the media just because they are the government or media -- they are to be distrusted -- instead of believing everything they say is true, we'd be better off believing everything they say is false, unless and until it can be substantiated and proved

how so?

b/c of all the preponderance of lies

what lies?

oh, oh so many

• Guantanamo, illegal rendition, torture
• Osama bin Laden's supposed capture and death
• Saddam's WMD
• the War on Terror
• the War on Drugs
  
• Assad's chemical weapons
• US drone strikes against civilians over and over again
  
• Russia shot down MH17
• Skripal affair
  
• attempted coups and character assassinations of any and all socialist-leaning Latin American leaders, from Venezuela's Chavez to Maduro; from Brazil's Lula to Bolivia's Morales
  
• color revolutions, including to install Nazis in Ukraine
• Russiagate
• DNC server "hack"
• Assange's rape case
• Snowden and Manning persecution
  
• Bezos in bed with the CIA
• Epstein's child sex blackmailing scheme on behalf of the CIA and whomever
• the NSA's surveillance state
  
• WTC7's collapse
• Twin Towers' collapse at freefall speed into their own footprints
• Project for New American Century
• etc etc etc
  

or, how about govt allowance of corporate malfeasance

• corporate capture of EPA
• safety of fracking
• Monsanto's toxic legacy
• tobacco, DDT, PFAS & PFOS
  
• FEMA - Katrina - disaster profiteering
• Halliburton - Blackwater - Afghanistan Inc. - contractors - war profiteering
• etc etc etc
  

how about we go further back?

• JFK, MLK and Robert Kennedy assassinations
• Operation Gladio
• Gulf of Tonkin
• Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile crisis and Operation Northwoods
  
• Nagasaki and Hiroshima
• Pearl Harbor
• the Spanish-American War and other Banana Wars
• the Civil War
• etc etc etc
  

so, I've become convinced that the official stories about all of those events are bullshit;

so, now I'm suspicious about so many other things as well, though perhaps not yet convinced one way or another

like what?

• Boston Marathon bombing
• Sandy Hook shooting
• Vegas shooting
• San Bernardino shooting
• Charlie Hebdo shooting
• Paris shooting
• any accusation made by US against Russia
• any accusation made by US against Iran
• any accusation made by US against China
• etc etc etc
  

and, most recently, George Floyd's death

at the end of the day, I am very much in favor of the social justice movement and very much in favor of reining in the unlawful and egregious actions by the police, (which, in my opinion, is a phenomenon that has certainly been exacerbated by racism, but is mostly about brutality and abuse of power by bullies and sociopaths);

so perhaps it shouldn't matter to me that the trigger for the BLM movement these past few months has been orchestrated on false premises

it sure looked on that video as if George Floyd was slowly asphyxiated by the knee of Derek Chauvin

BUT was that really what happened?

(and I wouldnt be surprised if Chauvin was nonetheless a nasty cop, a brutish cop, a dirty cop.... but, did Chauvin really kill Floyd?)

we saw video of planes crashing into the Twin Towers and the towers then later collapsing; but did the (2) planes really cause the THREE (3!) Towers' collapses?!

I don't always agree with Paul Craig Roberts (I think most particularly when he discusses race issues), but I have come to entirely trust his honest pursuit of truth, wherever that truth may take him/us. He, like me, thinks that if the facts don't fit the story, then there is something wrong with the story. That was true about JFK, 9/11, and his view on mask-wearing now to decrease transmission of COVID (yes, wear them... but not any and all masks are designed to prevent the transmission of virus); and it seems to be the case also with what happened to Floyd, which triggered the social uprising that we've seen in the U.S.

Here's PCR:

Should we be protesting about George Floyd or Julian Assange? Paul Craig Roberts. July 31, 2020.

(Don't let the first 3 paragraphs dissuade you from reading the rest)

if you truly want to know what is going on in the world, you can't choose the blue pill; 

if you want to take the Red Pill:

read less / none of the mainstream media

read more of 

Caitlin Johnstone

Ian Welsh

Chris Hedges

Also (perhaps more selectively than the 3 above):

Paul Craig Roberts

And:

Edward Curtin

Glenn Greenwald

Aaron Mate

Ben Norton

Yves Smith and her contributors at naked capitalism

And also:

Guy Crittenden

John Pilger

Noam Chomsky

Howard Zinn

John Perkins

David Ray Griffin

Oliver Stone

William Blum

Amy Goodman

Abby Martin

Jimmy Dore

Lee Camp

James Corbett

Jeremy Scahill

Sharon Lerner

Krystal Ball

Eva Bartlett

Vanessa Beeley

Finnian Cunningham

Cory Morningstar

Pepe Escobar

Matt Taibbi

Dylan Ratigan

Eric Margulis

Michel Chossudovsky

James Howard Kunstler

Mike Krieger

Dmitry Orlov

John Michael Greer ('s older stuff; i.e. archdruid report rather than ecosophia)

Cognitive Dissonance / Two Ice Floes

The Saker

Moon of Alabama

Chalmers Johnson

Michael Klare

Tom Engelhardt

Andrew Bacevich

My advice, fwiw:

Read the first 4 regularly

Johnstone and Welsh in particular are consistently fantastic

Roberts and Hedges may have some differing views but are candid, honest truth-seekers

Read the rest when you come across them or when you can

 

p.s. update

this from Caitlin Johnstone on Aug. 3:

Here is a link to an article full of tips on how to punch through the obfuscations of propaganda and make sense of things, and here is a link to a Twitter list of my favorite news-gatherers and dot-connecters which you can bookmark and scroll through daily.

War and Empire Links December 2019 #1

as per CaitOz, here's more undeniable evidence that you were lied to about the war in Afghanistan, for anyone who needed more undeniable evidence that you were lied to about the war in Afghanistan.

"Undeniable Evidence": Explosive Classified Docs Reveal Afghan War Mass Deception. zerohedge. Dec. 9, 2019.

and, as per Josh Landis, "Almost hard to get infuriated about the blatant spinning by government agencies anymore. The effort to cover up the failures of US foreign policy whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria or Yemen has worn us down. Hard to remember what honesty is."


Who Will Tell the Truth About the So-Called ‘Free Press’?­ Jeremy R. Hammond, Foreign Policy Journal. Dec 4, 2019.

The US corporate media dangerously accuse alternative sources of propagating “fake news” to maintain their own dominance as purveyors of misinformation. 

As Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky convincingly argue in their book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, the major media in the US fulfill a propaganda function by systematically misinforming the public in order to engineer consent for various government policies. Debate about important issues is limited to a narrow range of allowable opinion. Perspectives challenging fundamental assumptions of the mainstream discourse are marginalized. Alternative voices are relentlessly attacked and demonized rather than their legitimate criticisms substantively addressed. 

An enlightening example of how propaganda works is the media’s use of the term “fake news”. 

... Unfortunately, the New York Times with this very editorial is not pursuing truth but issuing propaganda for the purpose of advocating a dangerous political agenda. While lecturing others on how to behave, the Times editors are being the opposite of forthright and objective. 

... The Times wants to remain among an elite few who dictate to the rest of us what constitutes “misinformation”. The problem is that terms like “fake news” and “misinformation” are being used euphemistically to mean any information, no matter how factual, that challenges whatever political agendas are being pushed during any given news cycle. The Times, in other words, wishes for the corporate media to preserve their oligopoly in determining what information the public should and should not be made aware of.  

... In addition to pressuring internet companies to engage in censorship, the Times was serving to advance the shared political agenda of the Democratic Party establishment and the military/intelligence establishment, the latter of which some political analysts refer to as the “Deep State” for its shadowy actions and influence on government policies  

... For example, on November 4, 2016, I republished an article by David Swanson titled “The Purpose of Demonizing Putin”, which was excerpted from his book War Is A Lie and discusses how the perpetuation of the US war machine requires propaganda to convince the public of the existence of some external enemy, thereby manufacturing consent for US foreign policy and the increasing amount of taxpayer dollars diverted from productive uses toward the destructive purposes of the military/intelligence complex. 

In addition to Mr. Swanson’s insightful writings, I was publishing articles by Paul Craig Roberts, a former Wall Street Journal editor and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under the Ronald Reagan administration. Mr. Robert’s writings were continually critical of how the media was refusing to address real issues and instead manufacturing controversies serving the political agenda of the Washington establishment. Consequently, his own website, PaulCraigRoberts.org, was also included on PropOrNot’s list. 

As another illustrative example, on November 28, 2016, I republished Mr. Roberts’ article “The Western War On Truth”, in which he pointed out how the media had a long history of propagating lies intended to manufacture consent for war and violence and criticized how US government officials commit war crimes with impunity. 

The same day, I published another article by Mr. Swanson in which he mocked the Washington Post’s disgraceful reporting under the headline “How I Produce Fake News for Russia”. As he noted, his non-partisan writings—which are critical of US foreign policy across administrations and predominantly center around the goal of ending war—had been published in at least eighteen of the “Russian propaganda” outlets named by PropOrNot. (Mr. Swanson is a widely respected antiwar activist and is on the Board of Directors of the organization World BEYOND War.) 

I also published another of Mr. Roberts’ articles that day in which he similarly mocked the Post for its hypocrisy under the title “Dear President Putin, Now That the WaPo Has Blown My Cover…” 

I have since continued to publish articles at Foreign Policy Journal exposing how the major corporate media propagate misinformation, such as my own articles “New York Times Propagates Russia Hacking Conspiracy Theory” (September 6, 2017) and “New York Times Persists in Russia Election Hacking Conspiracy Theory” (August 9, 2019), both of which document how America’s “newspaper of record” has alleged that the Russian government hacked into state electoral systems not only without producing any credible evidence but despite the preponderance of evidence indicating that it’s just another lie originating from within the US government. 

... 

“The most important fact to realize about this new term”, Greenwald rightly observed, was that those “who most loudly denounce Fake News are typically those most aggressively disseminating it.”  

Propaganda, Anti-propaganda. Joel Whitney, The Baffler. December 6, 2019.

On The Report and the history of the CIA onscreen

The Great American Shakedown. Chris Hedges, TruthDig. Dec. 9, 2019.

The Democratic Party and its liberal supporters are perplexed. They presented hours of evidence of an impeachable offense, although they studiously avoided charging Donald Trump with impeachable offenses also carried out by Democratic presidents, including the continuation or expansion of presidential wars not declared by Congress, exercising line-item veto power, playing prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner to kill individuals, including U.S. citizens, anywhere on the planet, violating due process and misusing executive orders. Because civics is no longer taught in most American schools, they devoted a day to constitutional scholars who provided the Civics 101 case for impeachment. The liberal press, cheerleading the impeachment process, saturated the media landscape with live coverage, interminable analysis, constant character assassination of Trump and giddy speculation. And yet, it has made no difference. Public opinion remains largely unaffected. 

Perhaps, supporters of impeachment argue, they failed to adopt the right technique. Perhaps journalists, by giving voice to opponents of impeachment—who do indeed live in a world not based in fact—created a false equivalency between truth and lies. Maybe, as Bill Grueskin, a professor at the Columbia University Journalism School, writes, impeachment advocates should spend $1 million to produce a kind of movie trailer for all those who did not sit through the hours of hearings, to “boil down the essentials of the film” and provide “a quick but intense insight into the characters, setting the scene with vivid imagery—to entice people to come back to the theatre a month later for the full movie.” Or perhaps they need to keep pounding away at Trump until his walls of support crumble. 

The liberal class and the Democratic Party leadership have failed, even after their defeat in the 2016 presidential election, to understand that they, along with the traditional Republican elites, have squandered their credibility. No one believes them. And no one should.

They squandered their credibility by promising that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would, as claimed by President Bill Clinton, create 200,000 new, well-paying jobs per year; instead, several million jobs were lost. They squandered it by allowing corporations to move production overseas and hire foreign workers at daily wages that did not equal what a U.S. unionized worker made in an hour, a situation that obliterated the bargaining power of the American working class. They squandered it by allowing corporations to use the threat of “offshoring” production to destroy unions, suppress wages, extract draconian concessions and push millions of workers into the temp and gig economies, where there are no benefits or job security and pay is 60% or less of what a full-time employee in the regular economy receives. They squandered it by forcing working men and women to take two or three jobs to support a family, jacking up household debt to $13.95 trillion. They squandered it by redirecting wealth upward, so that during the Clinton administration alone 45 percent of all income growth went to the wealthiest 1%. They squandered it by wiping out small farmers in Mexico, driving some 3 million of them off their lands and forcing many to migrate in desperation to the United States, a human tide that saw the U.S. right wing and President Trump direct mounting rage toward immigrants. They squandered it by turning our great cities into urban wastelands. They squandered it by slashing welfare and social service programs. They squandered it by supporting endless, futile wars that have an overall price tag of between $5 trillion and $7 trillion. They squandered it by setting up a surveillance system to spy on every American and then lying about it. They squandered it by catering to the big banks and gutting financial regulations, precipitating the 2008 economic meltdown. They squandered it by looting the U.S. Treasury to bail out banks and financial firms guilty of massive financial crimes, ordering the Federal Reserve to hand over an estimated $29 trillion to the global financiers responsible for the crash. They squandered it by not using this staggering sum instead to provide free college tuition to every student or universal health care, repair our crumbling infrastructure, transition to clean energy, forgive student debt, raise wages, bail out underwater homeowners, form public banks to foster investments in our communities at low interest rates, provide a guaranteed minimum income and organize a massive jobs program for the unemployed and underemployed, whose ranks are at least double official statistics. They squandered it by cutting child assistance programs—most drastically during the Clinton administration—resulting in 16 million children going to bed hungry every night. They squandered it by leaving over half a million Americans homeless and on the streets on any given day. They squandered it by passing laws that keep students burdened by massive college loan debt that has climbed to $1.4 trillion, debt they cannot free themselves from even if they declare bankruptcy. They squandered it by militarizing police and building the world’s largest system of mass incarceration, one with 25% of the world’s prison population. They squandered it by revoking due process and habeas corpus. They squandered it by passing massive tax cuts for the rich and for corporations, many of which—such as Amazon—pay no federal income tax, ballooning the federal deficit, now at $779 billion and climbing. They squandered it by privatizing everything from intelligence gathering to public education to swell corporate bank accounts at taxpayer expense. They squandered it by permitting corporate money—an estimated $9.9 billion will be spent this presidential election cycle on political advertising—to buy politicians in a form of legalized bribery that sees corporate lobbyists write legislation and create laws. They squandered it by doing nothing to halt the looming ecocide.
The problem is not messaging. The problem is the messenger. The mortal wounds inflicted on our democratic institutions are bipartisan. The traditional Republican elites are as hated as the Democratic elites. Trump is vile, imbecilic, corrupt and incompetent. But for a largely white working class cast aside by austerity and neoliberalism, he at least taunts the elites who destroyed their communities and their lives.

The shakedown that Trump clumsily attempted to orchestrate against the president of Ukraine in the hope of discrediting Joe Biden, a potential rival in the 2020 presidential election, pales beside the shakedown orchestrated by the elites who rule over America’s working men and women. This shakedown took from those workers their hope and, more ominously, their hope for their children. It took from them security and a sense of place and dignity. It took from them a voice in how they were governed. It took from them their country and handed it to a cabal of global corporatists who intend to turn them into serfs. This shakedown plunged millions into despair. It led many to self-destructive opioid, alcohol, drug and gambling addictions. It led to increases in suicide, mass shootings and hate crimes. This shakedown led to bizarre conspiracy theories and fabrications peddled by a neofascist right wing, deceptions bolstered by the lies told by those tasked with keeping the society rooted in truth and verifiable fact. This shakedown led to the end of the rule of law and the destruction of democratic institutions that, if they had continued to function, could have prevented the rise to power of a demagogue such as Trump.

There is zero chance Trump will be removed from office in a trial in the Senate. The Democratic Party elites have admitted as much. They carried out, they argue, their civic and constitutional duty. But here again they lie. They picked out what was convenient to impeach Trump and left untouched the rotten system they helped create. The divisions among Americans will only widen. The hatreds will only grow. And tyranny will wrap its deadly tentacles around our throats.

Orlov

The Truthers and the Fakers. Sep. 4, 2018.

Can truth be said to exist? Most of us certainly like to think that it does, and, furthermore, that we actually know something about it. We tend to prioritize knowledge over ignorance, and bridle at the idea that some of what we consider to be knowledge may be false rather than true. This seems justified: compared to false knowledge, it is certainly true that ignorance is bliss. But there are few avenues of escape that are open to us when we are confronted with the notion that most of what we know for sure “just ain’t so.” 

The most common avenue of escape, and also the least valid, is to indulge in a bit of ad hominem fallacy by claiming that the challenge to your treasured certainties is the wrong kind of challenge because it comes from the wrong sort of person. For example, these days, it doesn’t take much to run afoul of certain people, and to get them to label you as a “fascist racist misogynist homophobe.” Nor does it take much to cause certain other people to label you a “libtard.” And both of these groups would be only too happy to declare you to be “Putin’s troll” the moment you try to say anything vaguely positive about Russia. 

And the most valid avenue of escape is some sort of public trial. The least assailable of these are held in academic contexts, in the hard sciences, because natural laws are not amenable to political or social pressure. Courts of law, on the other hand, can be good or bad in battling false knowledge, depending on the political environment in which they operate, but all of them are at least forced to maintain appearances of adhering to the truth by following various rules that exclude hearsay, anecdotal evidence or evidence invalidated by a broken chain of custody. The recent trial in California, which concluded that Monsanto’s Roundup is indeed a carcinogen (no doubt causing Capt. Obvious to do a little happy dance) is a hopeful sign that some sort of justice can be served even in the face of relentless political pressure. 

And what’s worse than any court at all, with one exception, is the court of public opinion. How many reputations and careers have been ruined in the course of the recent sexual harassment hysteria, where self-declared victims lobbed accusations unsubstantiated by any evidence? Such “trials” are on par with those held by the Inquisition: if the witch drowns, she wasn’t a witch, sorry, too bad; if she floats, she is obviously a witch and is then burned at the stake.

... 

there is a larger context to consider, which is that of late in many instances the pursuit of truth has become rather beside the point. Numerous recent developments have made opinion all-important and actual knowledge of provable facts borderline irrelevant. These include: 

• Social and political alienation and polarization, driven by increasing wealth inequality and enforced diversity
• The automatic segregation and voluntary siloing of people in social media, which has made it fashionable for people to avoid being exposed to opinions that differ from theirs, to the point where some have started to take offense whenever this happens
• Plummeting educational standards where independent reasoning abilities are no longer even taught and where the rewards go to those who are able to regurgitate knowledge they have accepted unquestioningly.
• The slow agony of traditional print and broadcast media where rigorous fact-checking was once considered absolutely necessary but no longer is, and where now the overarching concern is to run stories that sell advertising
• The rise of blogging, where a few validated facts are easily drowned in a sea of opinion, where what is accepted as real is determined through a popularity contest, and where a typical response to public disagreement is “go get your own blog.” 

The endpoint of this process is now in sight: as a basis of reality, truth matters not at all. Reality still exists, but as an artificial construct, and is fractured, with different versions of reality tightly targeted to specific audiences that are receptive to one set of opinions and narratives while being easily outraged by all others. In such circumstances, appeals to truth-based knowledge start to seem quixotic—or even a matter of casting pearls before swine. 

... 

This may be disconcerting to some people, because inquiring minds want to know the truth, even if what drives them is idle curiosity. Besides, walking around after realizing that you’ve been lied to by people you were taught to trust, and that you are surrounded by trusting fools who believe such an obviously fake story to be true, is rather disheartening. 

Great, Britain! Sep. 6, 2018.

The Brits have just provided my previous article, The Truthers and The Fakers, with a tidy little case study: the very next day after I published it Theresa May’s government stepped into its role as one of the world’s premier Fakers and unleashed the next installment of fake news on the Skripal poisoning. We can use this as training material in learning how to spot and discard fakes. 

The fake story that May has been pushing is that it is “highly likely” that the Kremlin ordered a hit on the former British spy Sergei Skripal (and his daughter) using a “Russian-made” chemical weapon called “Novichok.” In turn, from what we already knew, it is highly likely that this story is a complete and utter fake. As I explained in the previous article, it is not our job to establish what really happened. We would be unable to do so with any degree of certainty without gaining access to state secrets. But we don’t need to; all we need to do is establish with a reasonable degree of certainty that the British government’s story is a foolishly, incompetently concocted fabrication. Doing so will then allow us to properly classify the British press, which repeats this nonsense as fact, and the British public, which accepts it unquestioningly at face value. Then we can drop the erroneous appellation “great”—because great nations don’t act so stupidly.

First, applying the usual investigative technique of identifying means, motive and opportunity, we find that the Russian government had none of them while Theresa May’s government had all of them. 

Means: Russia had given up its chemical weapons, submitted to international inspections and no longer has a chemical weapons program, while Britain, along with the US, has been ignoring its treaty obligations. It has not given up its chemical weapons, has not submitted to international inspections and maintains a chemical weapons program at Porton Down, a few miles from where the poisonings took place. Experts at Porton Down claim to have identified the chemical agent that was supposedly used, and this implies that they had some of it on hand. 

Motive: Russia had handed Skripal over to Britain in a spy swap a few years ago and had no reason to pursue him. Gratuitously causing an international scandal right before the World Cup was to be held in Russia would have been considered a career-ending move for any Russian official. On the other hand, Theresa May’s government badly needed a distraction from its disastrous Brexit negotiations, flagging support and other woes and would have been eager to please its masters in Washington by staging a provocation against Russia. 

Opportunity: The poisoning took place on British soil, down the street from a British chemical weapons facility, and the person poisoned was living under the watchful eye of British special services. Clearly, the British had ample opportunity; whether the Russians had any at all remains to be shown. 

Thus, applying the now traditional British legal standard of “highly likely,” it seems highly likely that that the Kremlin had nothing to do with it. But this still leaves open the question of what precisely it was that the Kremlin had nothing to do with because it is highly likely that what the British government claims to have happened didn’t happen.

....

Terrorism of the Absurd. Sep. 14, 2018.

In recent months the governments of Syria and Russia have stood accused by the US and the UK governments of carrying out attacks using chemical weapons and have found themselves in a rather challenging situation. The charges against them are nothing short of absurd. It is very difficult, often impossible, to formulate a rational response to an absurd accusation beyond pointing out its obvious absurdity. But that’s usually not at all helpful because the contemporary Western political actors who revel in absurdity eschew the neoclassical principle of verisimilitude and ignore rational, reasoned arguments as uninteresting. This is a calculated choice: most of their audience is too bored, ill-informed and impatient to form opinions based on facts and logic but responds well to various kinds of conditioning.

Topic: Russiagate B.S.

The Strangelovian Russia-gate Myth. Phil Rockstroh, Consortium News. Dec. 22, 2017.

The effects of humankind created climate chaos are proving to be more devastating than even the grimmest predictions. Today’s wealth inequity is worse than in the Gilded Age. Around the world, the U.S. empire wages perpetual war, hot and cold, overt and covert, including military brinksmanship with the nuclear power, the Russian Federation. 

Speaking of the latter, the U.S. media retails a storyline that would be considered risible if it was not so dangerously inflammatory i.e., L’affaire du Russia-gate, wherein, according to the lurid tale, the sinister Vladimir Putin, applying techniques from the Russian handbook for international intrigue, Rasputin Mind Control For Dummies, has wrested control of the U.S. Executive Branch of government and bends its policies to his diabolical will. 

Ridiculous, huh? Yet the mainstream press promulgates and a large section of the general public believes what is clearly a reality-bereft tale, as all the while, ignoring circumstances crucial for their own economic well-being; their safety, insofar as a catastrophic nuclear exchange; and the steps required to maintain the ecological criteria crucial for allowing the continued viability of human beings on planet earth. 

A socio-cultural-political structure is in place wherein the individual is bombarded, to the point of psychical saturation, with self-serving, elitist manufactured media content.

... 

Hyperbolic? Take at perusal at the cover story of the Washington Establishment mouthpiece Newsweek, headlined: “PUTIN IS PREPARING FOR WORLD WAR III — IS TRUMP?” 

A sphincter-clinching tale of woe and warning promulgated by the same governmental entities and their corporate media stenographers who waxed apocalyptic about Iraq possessing weapon’s of mass destruction; that an immediate NATO bombing campaign must be launched against the government of Muammar Gaddafi or else a mass slaughter of the innocent would be imminent; and regime change in Syria must proceed because Assad is gassing his own people. 

Just what sort of an embittered cynic would call into question the credibility of and mistrust the motives of such paragons of probity? Yet, somehow, in regard to Russia-gate, liberals display scant-to-zip skepticism towards the stories peddled by this unelected, unaccountable clutch of hyper-authoritarian prevaricators.

Did the FBI Conspire to Stop Trump? Patrick Buchanan. Dec. 26, 2016.

Clinton's Defeat and the Fake News Conspiracy. Jonathan Cook, Counterpunch. Dec. 19, 2016.

There is an astounding double standard being applied to the US presidential election result. 

A few weeks ago the corporate media were appalled that Donald Trump demurred on whether he would accept the vote if it went against him. It was proof of his anti-democratic, authoritarian instincts. 

But now he has won, the same media outlets are cheerleading the establishment’s full-frontal assault on the legitimacy of a Trump presidency. That campaign is being headed by the failed candidate, Hillary Clinton, after a lengthy softening-up operation by US intelligence agencies, led by the CIA. 

According to the prevailing claim, Russian president Vladimir Putin stole the election on behalf of Trump (apparently by resorting to the US playbook on psy-ops). Trump is not truly a US president, it seems. He’s Russia’s placeman in the White House – a Moscovian candidate. 

...

The Washington Post quoted CIA director John Brennan saying: “Earlier this week, I met separately with [the FBI’s] James Comey and [director of national intelligence] Jim Clapper, and there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election.” 

Craig Murray, a former British ambassador turned whistleblower on British government collusion in torture, has said he personally received the leaked emails on behalf of Wikileaks. The data came, he said, not from Russian security agencies, or even from freelance Russian hackers, but from a disillusioned Democratic party insider. Russia experts in the US have similarly discounted the anti-Putin claims, as have former US intelligence agents. 

But either way, what is being overlooked in the furore is that none of the information that has come to light about the Democratic party was false. (Though the US intelligence services did indeed try to make that claim initially). The emails are real and provide an accurate account of the Democratic party’s anti-democratic machinations, including efforts to undermine the campaign of Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s challenger. 

If Russia did indeed seek to influence the election by releasing truthful information that made Clinton and her allies look bad that would be far more legitimate interference than the US has engaged in against countless countries around the globe. For decades the US has been actively involved in using its military might to overthrow regimes in Latin America and the Middle East. It has also compromised the sovereignty of innumerable states, by sending killer-drones into their airspace, manipulating their media and funding colour revolutions. 

The NSA is not archiving every bit of digital information it can lay its hands on for no reason. The US seeks global dominance, whether the rest of the globe wants it or not.

The corporate media have been lapping up the CIA’s evidence-free allegations as hungrily as an underfed kitten. Not only have they been credulously regurgitating the dubious claims of the same US intelligence agencies that knowingly spread lies about Iraq’s WMD, but they have added their own dangerous spin to them. 

The media have suddenly woken up to the supposed threat to western democracies posed by “fake news”. The implication is that it was “fake news” that swept Trump to power. A properly informed electorate, on this view, would never have made such a patently ridiculous choice as Trump. Instead, Clinton would have been rightfully crowned president. 

“Fake news”, of course, does not concern the systematic deceptions promoted by the corporate media. It does not include the demonstrable lies – like those Iraqi WMDs – spread by western governments and intelligence agencies through the corporate media. It does not even refer to the press corps’ habitual reports – demonstrating a seemingly gargantuan gullibility – that take at face value the endless state propaganda against Official Enemies, whether Cuba, Venezuela, Libya or Syria. Or Russia and now Trump. 

No, “fake news” is produced only by bloggers and independent websites, and is promoted on social media. Those peddling “fake news” are writers, journalists and activists whose pay packets do not depend on continuing employment by western state-run media like the BBC, billionaire proprietors like Rupert Murdoch, or global corporations like Times-Warner. 

It is worth noting that the leaked Democratic emails, whether the leaking was done by Russia or not, were certainly not “fake news”. They were documented truth. But the leaks are being actively conflated with “fake news”.

The US Aristocracy’s Smear-Russia Campaign: Big Brother at Work. Eric Zeusse, Strategic Culture Foundation. Nov. 28, 2017.

Billionaires, both liberal and conservative ones, own, and their corporations advertise in and their ‘charities’ donate to, America’s mainstream (and also many ‘alternative news’) media. They do this not so as to profit directly from the national ‘news’media (a money-losing business, in itself), but so as to control the ’news’ that the voting public (right and left) are exposed to and thus will accept as being “mainstream” and will reject all else as being “fringe” or even ‘fake news’, even if what’s actually fake is, in fact, the billionaires' own mainstream ’news’, such as their ’news'media had most famously ‘reported’ about ’Saddam’s WMD’ (but the’news’media never changed after that scandal — even after having pumped uncritically that blatant lie to the public).

Have America’s numerous foreign coups and outright military invasions (including Iraq 2003) been the result of fake-news that was published by the mainstream ’news'media, or only by some of the ‘alternative news’ sites that mirror what the mainstream ones have been ‘reporting’ (passing along the Government’s lies just like the mainstream ones do)? 

Obviously, the catastrophic fake news — the fake news that ‘justified’ America’s invading and destroying Iraq, Libya, and many other countries — was all published in the mainstream ’news’media. That’s where to go for the really dangerous lies: it’s the mainstream ’news’media. If those media, and their Government (whose lies they stenographically report to the public) will now censor the Internet, such as is increasingly happening not only in the US but in its allies including the European Union, then the only ‘information’ that the public will have access to, at all, will be the billionaires’ lies. Have we already almost reached 1984, finally, in 2017? 

Two typical examples of this coordinated mass-deception-operation happened to be showing at the top of the magazine-pile at an office recently and struck my attention there, because of the ordinariness of the propaganda that was being pumped. One of them was the cover of TIME magazine, dated “July 24, 2017” and with the cover headlined “RED HANDED: The Russia Scandal Hits Home”, overprinting onto the face of Donald Trump Jr., as their menacing-looking cover-image. That cover-story, as published inside, was titled “How Donald Trump Jr.'s Emails Have Cranked Up the Heat on His Family”, and it used such phrases as “potentially treasonous” and “Russia is the one country that could physically destroy America” (as if it weren’t also the case that US is the one country that could physically destroy Russia, and very much the case also that possession of the weaponry isn’t any indication of being evil, such as this particular propagandist was implicitly assuming). Hillary Clinton’s V.P. running-mate was reported to be “saying that these fresh revelations move the Russia investigation into the realms of 'perjury, false statements and even, potentially, treason.'”

These mere speculations, with slimy inferences of evil, with no real facts that back them up, were the front-cover ‘news’, in TIME. The facts were thin, but the speculations were thick, and the only thing really clear from it was that almost all of America’s billionaires and centi-millionaires want Trump ousted, and want Vice President Mike Pence to become America’s President as soon as possible — before Trump’s term is up. 

Democratic ones certainly do, and many of the Republican ones apparently do as well. Perhaps Trump isn’t hostile enough toward Russia to suit their fancy. At least Pence would be predictable — predictably horrible, in precisely the way that the controllers of the ‘news’media overwhelmingly desire. 

The other example was the cover of The New Republic magazine, dated “December 2017” and it simply headlined in its center, “HOW TO ATTACK A DEMOCRACY”, and the opening page of the article inside was bannered “WEAKEN FROM WITHIN” and below that in the printed edition (the December physical issue of the magazine) was: 

“Russian manipulation of American social media in the 2016 presidential election took the United States by surprise. But Moscow has been honing an information-age art of war — through fake news, disinformation, leaks, and trolling — for more than a decade. How can these societies protect themselves?” 

The online version of that article (which was dated 2 November 2017) opened almost the same: “Moscow has been honing an information age art of war — through fake news, disinformation, leaks, and trolling — for more than a decade. How can free societies protect themselves?” 

The unspoken assumption in this article is that the US CIA hasn’t been doing the same thing — and doing it even worse than the old (and thankfully expired) KGB ever did. (And the CIA, even after the end of communism as its supposed enemy until 1991, still does far worse to other countries than Russia’s FSB does or ever did.) 

Underlying both the TIME article and the TNR article are unstated speculations about the American situation, which are based upon thin facts such as that "at least $100,000 in ads purchased through 470 phony Facebook pages and accounts” were "using Facebook to incite anti-black hatred and anti-Muslim prejudice and fear while provoking extremism”, and that supposedly somehow (they never say how) such puny expenses threw the multi-billion-dollar 2017 US Presidential election to Trump. How is a case such as that, to be viewed by an intelligent reader as constituting anything but propaganda for the weapons-making firms such as Lockheed Martin, who benefit from such international anti-Russia hate-spewing to NATO countries, which are those firms’ major markets (other than Saudi Arabia, and the other fundamentalist-Sunni kingdoms that together constitute the Gulf Cooperation Council or “GCC” nations, which hate Shiite Iran as much as the US regime hates Russia)? 

Also among the underlying and unstated speculations in the background here is the older mass-media allegation about Russia’s allegedly having spied and swayed the US election by ‘hacking’ it, which is likewise being pumped by Democrats and other opponents of Mr. Trump, alleging that ‘Russia hacked the election’. And, so, for an example of the flimsiness of those allegations, one of the two main ‘authorities’ who are the source of that, the Bush and Obama Administration’s James Clapper, was headlined at Politico on 7 July 2017, "Clapper: No evidence others besides Russia hacked US election”. Mr. Clapper happens to be a military-industrial-complex revolving-door ‘intelligence’ ‘professional’ whom, on 10 February 2011, even Politico was reporting to be “backing away from comments he made Thursday calling Egypt's branch of the Muslim Brotherhood movement 'largely secular’,” and who had also covered-up George W. Bush’s lies about ‘WMD in Iraq’ so as to protect the liars. On 29 October 2003, the New York Times stenographically passed along his deception about the non-existent WMD by headlining, "WEAPONS SEARCH; Iraqis Removed Arms Material, US Aide Says” and reported, "The official, James R. Clapper Jr., a retired lieutenant general, said satellite imagery showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria, just before the American invasion in March, led him to believe that illicit weapons material 'unquestionably' had been moved out of Iraq.” No evidence ever existed that Saddam Hussein still had any WMD after the U.N. monitors (UNSCOM) destroyed the last of them in 1998; but Clapper ‘unquestionably’ ‘knew’ to the contrary — though no evidence was ever made available to the contrary of UNSCOM’s reports, and lots of evidence existed that Bush simply lied about the entire matter. 

The other main source for the allegation that ‘Russia hacked the election’ is the Obama Administration’s John Brennan, whom Glenn Greenwald exposed as a fraud back on 7 January 2013, headlining “John Brennan's extremism and dishonesty rewarded with CIA Director nomination”.

Both of the official ‘experts’ who are promoting the Russiagate charges, are longtime, and repeatedly, exposed liars — but that’s the best they can do, always assuming that the public don’t know that these people are propagandists for the military-industrial complex, not real ‘public servants’ at all. 

This isn’t to say that Trump isn’t also a liar — just that the ‘news’ in America is full of conflicting lies — and that they constantly are coming from the fake ‘news’media that are the mainstream ones who are now trying to censor out, and ultimately to obliterate, the few small news-operations (some of which, unlike any of the mainstream ones, actually are good, and authentic journalistic operations, no mere PR hackery) that are constantly exposing the fraudulence of the mainstream ones, which want to impose their dictatorship — the mainstream lies — even more rigorously than they already do. After all, the mainstream Western media still haven’t yet reported US President Obama’s bloody racist-fascist coup that in February 2014 replaced the democratically elected President of Ukraine (and his supporters in the legislature) by a racist-fascist or ideologically nazi regime that’s rabidly hostile toward its neighboring nation of Russia. Even now — nearly four years after the event. It’s already solidly documented history, but the mainstream US-and-allied press still hasn’t reported it. 

The fake-news masters are certainly the mainstream ‘news’media themselves — and they, and the billionaires and centi-millionaires who own and control them, are the real megaphones by which the US dictatorship constantly fools the American people (and the publics in its allied nations), to keep in line, for the aristocracy.

What Now? James Howard Kunstler, Clusterfuck Nation. Dec. 4, 2017.

“Contact with Russians.” Grown men and women, doubling and re-doubling down on a political fantasy, repeat this prayer hour after hour on the cable channels and Web waves as if trying to exorcise a nation possessed by the unholy hosts of Hell. But such vicars of the news as Wolf Blitzer, Rachel Maddow, Chuck Todd, and Dean Baquet (of The New York Times) only shove the country closer to a cliff of constitutional crisis. 

To a certain class of people — a class that includes a lot of Intellectuals-Yet-Idiots, as Nassim Taleb has dubbed them — President Donald Trump is a figure of supernatural malignity who must be ousted at all costs. I did not vote for Donald Trump and I do not admire him; but I rather resent the dishonesty that is being marshaled against him, especially the mis-use of judicial procedure and the mendacious propagandizing of the nation in service to that end. 

This is what it comes down to: General Mike Flynn, designated National Security Advisor, conferred with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak after the 2016 election about two pressing matters: a vote in the UN orchestrated against Israel, and sanctions imposed against Russia by outgoing President Obama on December 28, two weeks before the inauguration. Both these matters could be viewed as bits of mischief designed deliberately to create foreign policy problems for the incoming administration. 

Flynn’s discussions with Ambassador Kislyak amounted to what are called “back channel talks.” These informal, probing communications occur all the time and everywhere in American foreign policy, especially the transitional months every four or eight years when a new president comes in. They are necessarily secret because they concern issues of high sensitivity. Every incoming presidential staff in my lifetime (going back to Dwight Eisenhower) has conducted back-channel talks with foreign diplomats in order to directly assess where things stand, minus public posturing and bloviating. 

And so that is what Mike Flynn did, as incoming National Security Advisor, after an eight-year run of worsening relations with Russia under Obama that Trump publicly pledged to improve. And now he’s been charged with lying to the FBI about it. Which raises some enormous and troubling questions well beyond the simple charge, questions that suggest a US government at war against itself. 

For instance, why exactly might Mike Flynn lie about his discussions with Kislyak? That ought to be self-evident as per what I said above: back channel talks are necessarily secret. But why not let Vice-president Pence or the FBI in on it? As for Pence, not all government officials are in-the-loop for back channel talks for the excellent reason that the fewer people involved the less chance of the talks becoming un-secret. 

And the FBI? Why, in December of 2016, might Trump and his aides consider the FBI to be an unreliable agency? Because they knew that officials in the FBI under Director James Comey had politicized the agency in favor of his opponent in the election; that the agency had misbehaved in the Clinton e-mail investigation, the meeting at the Phoenix airport between Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and the Christopher Steele Russian intel file affair. We don’t know whether, at that point, Trump and his staff knew about the FBI’s conduct in the Uranium One deal. But there was plenty of evidence that the permanent bureaucracy of Washington wanted to use a politicized FBI against Trump in any way that it could to get rid of him. 

And over the weekend, news comes out that Peter Strzok, the top FBI official assigned to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of collusion between Russia and Trump officials, had been removed from the probe after exchanging anti-Trump and pro-Hillary Clinton text messages with his mistress, who was an FBI lawyer working for Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. This information was concealed from the congressional oversight committee that had formally subpoenaed emails from the FBI all year long, only to be stonewalled by the agency. So, now the committee is threatening contempt citations against the current FBI Director, Christopher Fry and Rod Rosenstein, his deputy. 

Why should President Trump not fire Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller now? Mueller was James Comey’s mentor at the FBI when Mueller was director. Is there not a train of association and dishonesty that implicates criminal activity by the FBI itself. And if and when Trump does this, and pardons Mike Flynn for the non-crime of back channel negotiation, should a new special prosecutor be appointed by the Attorney General to investigate the activities of the FBI through 2016 and 2017?

The Scalp-Taking of Gen. Flynn. Robert Parry, Consortium News. Dec. 1, 2017.

What is arguably most disturbing about this case is that then-National Security Adviser Flynn was pushed into a perjury trap by Obama administration holdovers at the Justice Department who concocted an unorthodox legal rationale for subjecting Flynn to an FBI interrogation four days after he took office, testing Flynn’s recollection of the conversations while the FBI agents had transcripts of the calls intercepted by the National Security Agency. 

In other words, the Justice Department wasn’t seeking information about what Flynn said to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak – the intelligence agencies already had that information. Instead, Flynn was being quizzed on his precise recollection of the conversations and nailed for lying when his recollections deviated from the transcripts.

Accusing Someone You Disagree With Of Being A Russian Troll Is Admitting You Have No Argument. Caitlin Johnstone, Medium. Nov. 27, 2017.

let me explain how normal online discourse operates:

Party A presents a position on an issue.

Party B presents a rebuttal to the position, often supplemented with links substantiating their claim.

Party A returns with their own counter-argument and their own substantiations.

Repeat this back-and-forth for as long as both parties remain interested. 

The civility with which this discourse takes place varies wildly, and it can leave both parties feeling like they wasted an hour or two of their lives talking to a brick wall. But it can also be very informative to people watching, it can often lead to one party realizing that their argument isn’t nearly as strong as their partisan echo chamber had led them to believe it was, and it can cause both parties to do more research and rigorous thinking as they strive to come up with a compelling case. It can even lead to someone realizing that they don’t know nearly as much about a given issue as they thought they did and privately questioning their previous assumptions. 

Conversations like this are socially enriching and lead to a more intelligent and better-informed humanity. 

Compare that to:

Party A presents a position on an issue.

Party B accuses party A of conducting psyops for a foreign government.

Discussion ends. 

These accusations always kill dialogue. And they are meant to. It is a safe way of slamming the door on ideas which make the person who uses this tactic uncomfortable.

...

Bottom line: when a stranger on the internet accuses you of being a Kremlin agent, of being a “useful idiot”, of “regurgitating Kremlin talking points”, this is simply their way of informing you that they have no argument for the actual thing that you are saying. If you’re using hard facts to point out the gaping plot holes in the Russiagate narrative, for example, and all they can do is call your argument Russian propaganda, this means that they have no counter-argument for the hard facts that you are presenting. They are deliberately shutting down the possibility of any dialogue with you because the cognitive dissonance you are causing them is making them uncomfortable.

How Russia-gate Rationalizes Censorship. Joe Lauria, Consortium News. December 4, 2017.

The U.S. Media Yesterday Suffered its Most Humiliating Debacle in Ages: Now Refuses All Transparency Over What Happened Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept. Dec. 9, 2017.

Third, this type of recklessness and falsity is now a clear and highly disturbing trend – one could say a constant – when it comes to reporting on Trump, Russia and WikiLeaks. I have spent a good part of the last year documenting the extraordinarily numerous, consequential and reckless stories that have been published – and then corrected, rescinded and retracted – by major media outlets when it comes to this story. 

All media outlets, of course, will make mistakes. The Intercept certainly has made our share, as have all outlets. And it’s particularly natural, inevitable, for mistakes to be made on a highly complicated, opaque story like the question of the relationship between Trump and the Russians, and questions relating to how WikiLeaks obtained DNC and Podesta emails. That is all to be expected. 

But what one should expect with journalistic “mistakes” is that they sometimes go in one direction, and other times go in the other direction. That’s exactly what has not happened here. Virtually every false story published goes only in one direction: to be as inflammatory and damaging as possible on the Trump/Russia story and about Russia particularly. At some point, once “mistakes” all start going in the same direction, toward advancing the same agenda, they cease looking like mistakes. 

No matter your views on those political controversies, no matter how much you hate Trump or regard Russia as a grave villain and threat to our cherished democracy and freedoms, it has to be acknowledged that when the U.S. media is spewing constant false news about all of this, that, too, is a grave threat to our democracy and cherished freedom. 

So numerous are the false stories about Russia and Trump over the last year that I literally cannot list them all. Just consider the ones from the last week alone...

Topic: Fake News and Propaganda

The "Intelligence" Fraud (1). Arthur Silber, Power of Narrative. Dec. 2, 2017.

In a post earlier this week, I remarked that I'm working on a new article about the monumental fraud represented by "intelligence," a fraud that includes "intelligence" itself -- that is, the supposedly vital need for "secret information" about everything under the sun, to hear the so-called "intelligence" experts tell this fable -- to every aspect of the State's insatiable appetite for "intelligence," including all the operations of the "intelligence community." I've decided to start a series of posts documenting the endless "intelligence" failures of the State. Stories about these failures appear with stunning regularity, even in our gutless, monochrome, propagandistic news media. 

I included links to earlier essays that explore this issue in detail. The second half of this article offers a good summary of the argument I've developed over a number of years. Two other articles I mentioned were this one and this one. (There are many, many more posts about this issue in the archives.) I can state my theme very briefly. Insofar as "intelligence" is concerned, such "secret information" is almost always wrong; on the rare occasions when it is correct, it is likely to be disregarded, especially if it goes against a policy that has already been decided. "Intelligence" is most commonly used as propaganda, to justify policy decisions that have already been made to an alarmingly gullible public.

When Fake News Kill. Mata Hari, the Spy Who Never Was. Cassandra's Legacy. July 24, 2017.

Why Ridiculous Official Propaganda Still Works. CJ Hopkins, Counterpunch. Jan. 13, 2017.

Chief among the common misconceptions about the way official propaganda works is the notion that its goal is to deceive the public into believing things that are not “the truth” (that Trump is a Russian agent, for example, or that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, or that the terrorists hate us for our freedom, et cetera). However, while official propagandists are definitely pleased if anyone actually believes whatever lies they are selling, deception is not their primary aim. 

The primary aim of official propaganda is to generate an “official narrative” that can be mindlessly repeated by the ruling classes and those who support and identify with them. This official narrative does not have to make sense, or to stand up to any sort of serious scrutiny. Its factualness is not the point. The point is to draw a Maginot line, a defensive ideological boundary, between “the truth” as defined by the ruling classes and any other “truth” that contradicts their narrative.

...  

The ruling classes are not exactly making it easy for their followers this time. Their new official narrative (let’s go ahead and call it “The Putinist Putsch to Destroy Democracy”) is so completely fatuous that it’s beyond embarrassing. The plot is more or less what you’d expect from a mediocre young adult novel or a Game of Thrones-type fantasy series. And if that wasn’t already humiliating enough for the liberals being asked to pretend to believe it, the PR folks in charge couldn’t even be bothered to assemble a new collection of liars to market their childish fairy tale for them. Not only are they insisting that liberals take the word of the “Intelligence Community” and the mainstream media that sold the world the “Saddam Has Secret WMDs” hoax, they actually dispatched James R. Clapper to sit there, in more or less the same spot he sat in the last time he lied to Congress, and do his dog and pony show again. 

Meanwhile, the ruling classes’ papers of record, which cosmopolitan liberals rely on to provide a simulation of “serious journalism,” highbrow “arts and culture,” and so on, have descended to the level of the National Enquirer.

...  

The point of all this propaganda is to delegitimize Donald Trump, and to prophylactically reassert the neoliberal ruling classes’ monopoly on power, “reality,” and “truth.” In case this wasn’t already abundantly clear, the neoliberal ruling classes have no intention of giving up control of the global capitalist pseudo-empire they’ve been working to establish these last sixty years. They’re going to delegitimize and stigmatize Trump (and any other symbol of nationalist backlash or resistance to transnational Capitalism), bide their time for the next four years, and then install another of their loyal servants … after which life will go back to “normal,” and liberals will do their best to forget this unfortunate period where they pretended to believe this insipid neo-McCarthyite nonsense.

Russia-gate bullshit: perfect example of media lying (suppressing truth, distorting facts, misrepresenting evidence, reporting claims without evidence) to support a political agenda

Tell the HuffPost to Restore My Censored Article. Joe Lauria. Change.org.

On the Origins of Russia-gate. Joe Lauria. Nov. 4, 2017. PDF of Lauria's article before it was taken down at PuffHo, via raymcgovern.

How We Can Be Certain That Mueller Won’t Prove Trump-Russia Collusion. Caitlin Johnstone, medium. Nov. 12, 2017.

Dear America. Stop trying to make Russiagate happen. It’s not going to happen. Deus ex Mueller isn’t coming. You’re going to have to solve your country’s problems yourselves, America. He may dig up evidence of corruption, but Robert Mueller’s investigation will never – ever – find proof that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election using hackers and propaganda.

... 

The most significant and most underappreciated facet of our existence is how much of our interface with the world consists not of our direct experience of it, but of our mental stories about it. Combine that fact with the century of research and development that has gone into refining propaganda tactics and the US plutocracy’s stranglehold on mainstream media, and you get a nation lost in establishment narratives. People forming their worldviews based on phantasms of the mind instead of concrete facts.

... 

when I converse with Russiagaters, that’s generally what this boils down to. “Impeach Trump” is a punishment in search of a crime. They’ve been whipped into a frenzied state of fear by establishment psyops, and they want Mueller to pull a deus ex machina and save them from the evil orange monster. They believe Mueller will get Trump impeached for Russian collusion because they badly want to. 

It’s not going to happen, though. Deus ex Mueller isn’t coming. You’re going to have to solve your country’s problems yourselves, America. 

And this is actually a good thing, because Trump is not the source of your country’s problems. Believing that a Trump impeachment will fix any of America’s major ills is like believing cough suppressants cure pneumonia.

... 

The problem is not Trump.

The problem is that America is ruled by an unelected power establishment which maintains its rule by sabotaging democracy, exacerbating economic injustice and expanding the US war machine. 

Stop listening to the lies that they pipe into your echo chambers and turn to face your real demons.

Who gets to push the nuclear button? Paul Craig Roberts. Nov. 17, 2017.

William Binney is the former National Security Agency (NSA) official who created NSA’s mass surveillance program for digital information. He says that if the Russian government had conspired with Trump, hacked the Democratic National Committee’s computer, or in any way influenced the outcome of the last US presidential election, the National Security Agency would have the digital evidence. The fact that we have been listening to the unsubstantiated charges that comprise “Russiagate” for more than one year without being presented with a scrap of evidence is complete proof that Russiagate is entirely fake news.

The fake news originated with CIA director John Brennan and FBI director Comey conspiring with the DNC in an effort to discredit and unseat President Trump and at a minimum prevent him from damaging the vast power and profit of the military/security complex by normalizing relations with Russia.

Consider what this means. The directors of the CIA and FBI made up a totally false story about a newly elected President and fed the lies to the presstitutes and Congress. The presstitutes never asked for a drop of evidence and enlarged the Brennan/Comey lie with a claim that all 17 US intelligence agencies had concluded that Russia had interfered. In actual fact, a handful of carefully selected people in three of the agencies had prepared, perhaps under duress, a conditional report that had no evidence behind it.

That it was fake news created to control President Trump was completely obvious, but corrupt security officials, corrupt senators and representatives, a corrupt DNC, and corrupt media used constant repetition to turn a lie into truth.

Long Night Ahead. John Robb, Global Guerillas. Sep 22, 2017.

Facebook just declared war against "disruptive" information. In addition to hundreds of new human censors, they are training AI censors capable of identifying and deleting 'unacceptable' information found in the discussions of all two billion members in real time. This development highlights what the real danger posed by a socially networked world actually is. 

The REAL danger facing a world interconnected by social networking isn't disruption. As we have seen on numerous occasions, the danger posed by disruptive information and events is fleeting. Disruption, although potentially painful in the short term, doesn't last, nor is it truly damaging over the long term. In fact, the true danger posed by an internetworked world is just the opposite of disruption.

This danger is an all encompassing online orthodoxy. A sameness of thought and approach enforced by hundreds of millions of socially internetworked adherents. A global orthodoxy that ruthlessly narrows public thought down to a single, barren, ideological framework. A ruling network that prevents dissent and locks us into stagnation and inevitable failure as it runs afoul of reality and human nature.

This ruling network already exists. It already has millions of online members and it is growing and deepening with each passing day -- extending its tendrils into the media, the civil service, tech companies, and academia. There's little doubt that over time it will eventually exert decisive influence over the entire government as well.

However, in order to exert authoritarian control over our decision making, it needs control over the flow of information in our society. Merely controlling the online debate is insufficient. For real power, the ruling network needs to control the information flows on our information infrastructure -- Facebook, Google, and Amazon -- and that's exactly the power it is now getting.

Fortunately, as large and powerful as this network already is, I still believe this dark future is avoidable. We still have a short time before a long night descends across the world.

The Silencing of Dissent. Chris Hedges, TruthDig. Sep 17, 2017.

The ruling elites, who grasp that the reigning ideology of global corporate capitalism and imperial expansion no longer has moral or intellectual credibility, have mounted a campaign to shut down the platforms given to their critics. The attacks within this campaign include blacklisting, censorship and slandering dissidents as foreign agents for Russia and purveyors of “fake news.” 

No dominant class can long retain control when the credibility of the ideas that justify its existence evaporates. It is forced, at that point, to resort to crude forms of coercion, intimidation and censorship. This ideological collapse in the United States has transformed those of us who attack the corporate state into a potent threat, not because we reach large numbers of people, and certainly not because we spread Russian propaganda, but because the elites no longer have a plausible counterargument. 

The elites face an unpleasant choice. They could impose harsh controls to protect the status quo or veer leftward toward socialism to ameliorate the mounting economic and political injustices endured by most of the population. But a move leftward, essentially reinstating and expanding the New Deal programs they have destroyed, would impede corporate power and corporate profits. So instead the elites, including the Democratic Party leadership, have decided to quash public debate.

People Ignore Facts That Contradict Their False Beliefs. Eric Zeusse, Strategic Culture Foundation. Sep. 23, 2017.

What social scientists call “confirmation bias” and have repeatedly found to be rampant, is causing the public to be easily manipulated, and has thus destroyed democracy by replacing news-reporting by[/with] propaganda - ‘news' that’s false - in a culture where lies which pump the agendas of the powerful (including lies pumped by the billionaire owners of top ‘news’media and of the media they own) are almost never punished (and are often not even denied to be true). Thus, lies by those powerful liars almost always succeed at enslaving the minds of the millions, to believe what the top economic-and-power class want those millions of people to believe — no matter how false it might happen actually to be.

... 

A well-established central finding of psychological research, concerning “confirmation bias” or “motivated reasoning” (which are two phrases referring to people’s tendency to believe whatever they want to believe, regardless of any contrary facts), is that individuals evaluate whatever they read or hear according to their pre-existing ideas about the given subject. Specifically, psychologists have found that people tend to pay attention to whatever confirms their existing ideas, and tend to ignore whatever contradicts those pre-established beliefs.

The CIA's 60-Year History of Fake News: How the Deep State Corrupted Many American Writers. Robert Scheer, TruthDig. Mar. 17, 2017.

How did the news go ‘fake’? When the media went social. Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan, The Guardian. Nov. 10, 2017.

The Collins Dictionary word of the year for 2017 is, disappointingly, “fake news”. We say disappointingly, because the ubiquity of that phrase among journalists, academics and policymakers is partly why the debate around this issue is so simplistic. The phrase is grossly inadequate to explain the nature and scale of the problem. .. But what’s more troubling, and the reason that we simply cannot use the phrase any more, is that it is being used by politicians around the world as a weapon against the fourth estate and an excuse to censor free speech. 

Definitions matter. Take, for example, the question of why this type of content is created in the first place. There are four distinct motivations for why people do this: political, financial, psychological (for personal satisfaction) and social (to reinforce our belonging to communities or “tribes”). If we’re serious about tackling mis- and disinformation, we need to address these motivations separately. And we think it’s time to give much more serious consideration to the social element. 

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When we try to understand why people are sharing misleading, manipulated and fabricated information, we need to appreciate that those shares and retweets are playing an incredibly important function, which is less about their veracity or truth. The act of sharing is often about signalling to others that we agree with the sentiment of the message, or that even if we don’t agree, we recognise it as important and worth paying attention to. We want to feel connected to others, and these mini-performances allow us to do that. 

Understanding this is easier if we read the work of media scholar James Carey. He argued that the dominant lens through which we understand communication is a “transmission model”, with a focus simply on the mechanics through which a message is transmitted from Sender A to Receiver B. However, he said, we should actually view communication through the lens of ritual if we want to understand why people seek out, consume and make sense of information. From this vantage point, Carey argued: “News is not information, it is drama.” A ritual view of communication views “reading a newspaper less as sending or gaining information and more as attending a mass”, where “a particular view of the world is portrayed and confirmed”. 

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we’ve historically evolved from being informed to having information, and then to appearing informed.

How Facebook and Google threaten public health – and democracy. Roger McNamee, The Guardian. Nov. 11, 2017.

The sad truth is that Facebook and Alphabet have behaved irresponsibly in the pursuit of massive profits. They have consciously combined persuasive techniques developed by propagandists and the gambling industry with technology in ways that threaten public health and democracy. The issue, however, is not social networking or search. It is advertising business models. Let me explain. 

From the earliest days of tabloid newspapers, publishers realized the power of exploiting human emotions. To win a battle for attention, publishers must give users “what they want,” content that appeals to emotions, rather than intellect. Substance cannot compete with sensation, which must be amplified constantly, lest consumers get distracted and move on. 

“If it bleeds, it leads” has guided editorial choices for more than 150 years, but has only become a threat to society in the past decade, since the introduction of smartphones.

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By making every experience free and easy, Facebook and Alphabet became gatekeepers on the internet, giving them levels of control and profitability previously unknown in media. They exploit data to customize each user’s experience and siphon profits from content creators. ... 

Facebook and Alphabet monetize content through advertising that is targeted more precisely than has ever been possible before. The platforms create “filter bubbles” around each user, confirming pre-existing beliefs and often creating the illusion that everyone shares the same views. Platforms do this because it is profitable. The downside of filter bubbles is that beliefs become more rigid and extreme. Users are less open to new ideas and even to facts.

Sean Parker unloads on Facebook "exploiting" human psychology. Mike Allen, Axios. Nov. 9, 2017.

... "God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” [Sean Parker, founding president of Facebook]

“The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, … was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?'” “And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you … more likes and comments.” 

“It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” “The inventors, creators — it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”

Early Facebook investor compares the social network to Nazi propaganda, likens its workers to Goebbels and claims it is creating a climate of 'fear and anger'. Katie French, Daily Mail. Nov. 11 2017.

Facebook officials have been compared to the Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels by a former investor. Roger McNamee also likened the company’s methods to those of Edward Bernays, the ‘father of public’ relations who promoted smoking for women. Mr McNamee, who made a fortune backing the social network in its infancy, has spoken out about his concern about the techniques the tech giants use to engage users and advertisers. [..] the former investor said everyone was now ‘in one degree or another addicted’ to the site while he feared the platform was causing people to swap real relationships for phoney ones.

And he likened the techniques of the company to Mr Bernays and Hitler’s public relations minister. ‘In order to maintain your attention they have taken all the techniques of Edward Bernays and Joseph Goebbels, and all of the other people from the world of persuasion, and all the big ad agencies, and they’ve mapped it onto an all day product with highly personalised information in order to addict you,’ Mr McNamee told The Telegraph.

RT America Torched in Witch Hunt ’17. Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Nov. 12, 2017. 

In one of the most horrendous blows to press freedom since the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s, the U.S. Department of Justice has forced the news broadcaster RT America to file under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). 

The assault on RT America, on which I host the show “On Contact,” has nothing to do with the dissemination of Russian propaganda. It is driven by RT America’s decision to provide a platform to critics of American capitalism and imperialism, critics who lambast a system of government that can no longer be called democratic. And it is accompanied by the installation of algorithms by Google, Facebook and Twitter that divert readers away from left-wing, progressive and anti-war websites, including Truthdig. The World Socialist Web Site has seen its search traffic from Google fall by 74 percent since April. 

Google, in a further blow, this month removed RT from its list of “preferred” channels on YouTube. Twitter has blocked all advertising by the channel. 

Put the censorship campaigns together and the message is clear: Left-wing critics, already marginalized by the state, must be silenced. 

It would seem, given how we are locked out of the corporate media and public broadcasting, that the assault is overkill. But the ideology that sustains the corporate state, the “free market” and neoliberalism has lost all credibility. The corporate state has no counterargument to its critics. The nakedness of corporate greed, exploitation and repression is transparent across the political spectrum. The ideological fortress erected by corporate power and sustained by its courtiers in the press and academia has collapsed. 

All it has left is a crude censorship. 

Complicit in this censorship is a bankrupt liberal class. The institutions tasked with defending press freedom—including the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, the Committee to Protect Journalists and PEN—along with major news outlets such as The New York Times, have served as the corporate state’s useful idiots. Only a handful of journalists, including Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer, grasp and decry the very real danger before us.

The charge that RT and these left-wing sites disseminate “foreign propaganda” is the beginning, not the end, of a broad campaign against press freedom. Once this precedent of state censorship is normalized, far more tepid and compliant media outlets will be targeted. Max Blumenthal wrote two good pieces on AlterNet about the puppet masters behind the censorship campaign. [Click here and here.] 

The venom of the state toward its critics was displayed in a report by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections,” issued Jan. 6. In the report, seven pages were specifically directed at RT America, much of the language focused on the journalist Abby Martin. Martin became one of the best-known critics of the corporate state during the Occupy movement. Her show on RT, “Breaking the Set,” which had been off the air for nearly two years when the report was published—a glaring error for an intelligence community awash in budgets of tens of billions of dollars—was denounced as a disseminator of “radical discontent.” The report complained that RT gave airtime to third-party candidate debates.  

The document attacked RT hosts for asserting that the two-party system does not represent the views of at least one-third of the population and is a sham. It excoriated the network for covering Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street and fracking. 

The report charged: 

RT’s reports often characterize the United States as a “surveillance state” and allege widespread infringements of civil liberties, police brutality, and drone use. 

RT has also focused on criticism of the US economic system, US currency policy, alleged Wall Street greed, and the US national debt. Some of RT’s hosts have compared the United States to Imperial Rome and have predicted that government corruption and “corporate greed” will lead to US financial collapse.

The “Alice in Wonderland” quality of the report would be laughable if it was not so ominous. The United States, in fact, is a surveillance state. Civil liberties have been eviscerated. Police brutality is endemic. Our drone wars have made us state terrorists. The economic structure serves the wealthiest corporations and oligarchs. Wall Street is run by a criminal class. Our debt is unsustainable, especially once the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, and like all decaying empires we are headed for collapse. The DNI report clarifies what the ruling elites fear—not fake news but the truth. And the truth is that the elites have destroyed the country and are traitors to democracy. 

The DNI report was followed by a congressional hearing on “Extremist Content and Russian Disinformation Online,” held Oct. 31. Executives of Facebook, Twitter and Google were grilled about their roles in distributing fake news and extremist content that in the words of Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley included “spread[ing] stories about abuse of black Americans by law enforcement.” The executives promised to double down on their censorship, and they did so. 

The ruling elites are desperately trying to shift the focus away from the cause of the political insurgencies on the left and the right: extreme social inequality. It is for this reason that critics who highlight and explore the roots and causes of social inequality must be discredited or silenced. If social inequality is accepted as the driving force behind the decay of the American state and the mounting rage of much of the population, then the structures that profit from this inequality will come under assault. All the elites have left is to paint their critics as “agents of a foreign power.” 

The United States increasingly resembles a totalitarian state. Our anemic democracy is on life support. A reasoned debate about social inequality or the crimes and misjudgments of empire is becoming impossible. This presages a frightening future. There will be many “good” Americans who, when the history of this moment is recorded, will be responsible. And one day, to their surprise, they too will be victims.

Propaganda

Issues, Problems, (Social) Media, and the Manipulation Thereof. Cognitive Dissonance. Nov. 27, 2017.

So (hypothetically speaking because this would NEVER happen in America, land of the free lunch and home of the benevolent government) how does a government beholden to a special interest billionaire corpocracy and a military industrial banking pharmaceutical complex convince its consumers…err…sorry, citizens there is a (never ending) clear and present danger which must be confronted with military force abroad and consumer…err…citizen surveillance at home? 

Well, they lie of course. And we aren’t speaking about an innocent little white lie, but a huge shameless multi institutional deeply involved and ever changing whopper of a lie. The core kernel of this lie is the skillful application of artificially induced fear which converts intellectual and aloof understanding into something closer to physical and personal feeling. 

Manufactured FEAR as in False Evidence Appearing Real. As opposed to real fear, the kind that runs up your spine as the tractor trailer in the oncoming lane begins to jackknife towards you. 

Propaganda is the most commonly used tool in their arsenal, though by no means the only tool. But understand that propaganda is most effective when skillfully blended with existing social memes, common knowledge and accepted/promoted (as opposed to true) history and national identity. 

For example, we are endlessly informed be media that America is a democracy when in fact it was originally a representative republic and now is at best an oligarchy…and at worst a totalitarian state.

Don’t believe me? Look up “Civil Forfeiture” or “Civil Asset Forfeiture” and then explain to me how, in the land of the free and home of the brave, law enforcement officers can seize your cash, your car, even your home or business simply because they SUSPECT those assets were purchased with, came from or were involved in an illegal activity.

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My original point is simple. We are fed propaganda that reinforces social memes and we are fed social memes that reinforce the propaganda. And the vast majority of this feeding is accomplished via (social) media. Seen from the outside, this feedback loop is obvious but normally not too alarming since there is (theoretically) an independent media hungry to expose the official hypocrisy, corruption and self dealing. 

That’s the myth anyway. In truth the Fourth Estate, aka the mainstream media (MSM), has always protected and enabled the rich and powerful to some extent or another. A careful and critical examination of major historical events shows that what the MSM says happened and what actually happened often diverge dramatically. 

It no longer is (and never really was) the Fourth Estate, but rather the fourth branch of government. We have the Executive, the Judicial, the Legislative and the Communication (Propaganda) branches. 

It is very important to distinguish between the main stream media (including the corporate owners of social media) and your local newspaper or television station where your real trust lay. You know…the place where you get your mostly reliable local news, traffic and weather reports. 

While local ‘reporting’ is at times somewhat misinformed and there is a striking similarity between stations on major news events (simply because they are fed the info from central MSM sources) I sense no real malice or hidden motive from local media, just pure greed to profit off your eyeballs and actions. 

Before the major newspapers and radio/television networks were gobbled up by corporate entities, to the point now where the national ‘media’ is entirely owned by 6 or 7 major corporations, on occasion you would find a major media outlet marching to a different drum and actually speaking truth to power. 

Such is not the case today despite what you or I (want to) believe. The MSM is serving the interest of the obscenely wealthy and powerful elite as well as the ‘national security state’. You may believe otherwise because you sometimes hear divergent ‘views’ among the MSM on unimportant-to-the-powerful subjects. 

But when the corpocracy and the ‘intelligence’ service(s) want you and me to ‘believe’ something (meaning swallow with little to no questioning) it is amazing how quickly they all fall into line on the critical points of the messaging. Without applying critical thinking or a healthy dose of skepticism, we tend to accept what we are told simply because everyone (in authority) is saying it. 

Speaking of intelligence services, it has been (and continues to be) thoroughly documented that the CIA employs (and has employed in the past) a surprisingly large number of mainstream media reporters to conduct their propaganda dissemination. Conduct your own research…I think you will be amazed by the number of significant and publicly admired reporters who were (and are) captured by the CIA. 

Even when there appears to be disagreement among those with the media bullhorn, notice how the (faux) disagreement is nearly always divided into two distinct camps who both agree on the fundamentals (i.e. Osama bin Laden did it) but quibble over the details (he directed it all from a cave...no, he was in a Taliban stronghold). 

This is done to project a false sense of media discernment and investigation, of true ‘reporting’. The vast majority of MSM reporters are little more than repeaters, handed corporate press releases and news ‘copy’ they read on air or modify with their own words before publishing like a 6th grade test cheater. 

Either you believe this or that. But to consider any other point of view is unacceptable, therefore you must either be a ‘fake’ news perpetrator or a conspiracy theorist. It really doesn’t matter which of the two points of view you adopt, just as long as you are marching to the manipulated drum beat. 

Manufactured consent and total capitulation to the prevailing meme is all they ask of you. Accept your programming and you are welcomed with open arms into the mainstream mind to reap the benefits of conformity. Object, push back, question, discern or think for yourself and you are spat out and spit upon, an outcast from the herd. 

No gruel for you. 

The intent is to corral, not to control, for it is impossible for 0.1% of the population to physically control the other 99.9%. But the 0.1% can erect thought barriers and social memes designed to encourage the 99.9% to self regulate and gather into easily manipulated self identifying herds that can quickly be corralled, then moved. 

Ouch…my ego doesn’t like that idea. 

In war, the best way to defeat your enemy is to convince them to lay down their arms and not even fight. To accomplish this, ‘psychological operations’ (psyops) are employed by both sides upon both sides. The US has a huge advantage creating any conflict because the myth of superior firepower is so universally ingrained into the global mindset. You can’t fight city hall or the Empire. 

But this implanted global/domestic mindset is slowly dissipating as more and more people/corporations/institutions/nations recognize the advanced signs of a declining empire and begin to challenge the prevailing dogma. 

Unfortunately for us, you and I are laying down our weapons. Though for now, at least, the weapons we fail to use are critical thinking and a skeptical approach to MSM ‘news’. As long as we swallow whole or in part the MSM swill without seriously challenging it, we will continue to get more (or worse) of the same.

Frank Capra - Why We Fight. Wikipedia