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On January 19, during one of its raids in the Occupied West Bank, the Israeli military arrested a Palestinian journalist, Abdul Muhsen Shalaldeh, near the town of Al-Khalil (Hebron). This is just the latest of a staggering number of violations against Palestinian journalists, and against freedom of expression.
A few days earlier, the head of the Palestinian Journalist Syndicate (PJS), Naser Abu Baker, shared some tragic numbers during a press conference in Ramallah. “Fifty-five reporters have been killed, either by Israeli fire or bombardment since 2000,” he said. Hundreds more were wounded, arrested or detained. Although shocking, much of this reality is censored in mainstream media.
The murder by Israeli occupation soldiers of veteran Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh on May 11, was an exception, partly due to the global influence of her employer, Al Jazeera Network. Still, Israel and its allies labored to hide the news, resorting to the usual tactic of smearing those who defy the Israeli narrative.
Palestinian journalists pay a heavy price for carrying out their mission of spreading the truth about the ongoing Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Their work is not only critical to good and balanced media coverage, but to the very cause of justice and freedom in Palestine.
In a recent report on January 17, PJS detailed some of the harrowing experiences of Palestinian journalists. “Dozens of journalists were targeted by the occupation forces and settlers during the last year, which (recorded) the highest number of serious attacks against Palestinian journalists.”
However, the harm inflicted on Palestinian journalists is not only physical and material. They are also constantly exposed to a very subtle, but equally dangerous, threat: the constant delegitimization of their work.
The Violence of Delegitimization
One of the writers of this piece, Romana Rubeo, attended a close meeting involving over 100 Italian journalists on January 18, which aimed at advising them on how to report accurately on Palestine. Rubeo did her best to convey some of the facts discussed in this article, which she practices daily as the Managing Editor of the Palestine Chronicle.
However, a veteran Israeli journalist, often touted for her courageous reporting on Palestine, dropped a bombshell when she suggested that Palestinians cannot always be trusted with the little details. She communicated something to this effect: Though the truth is on the Palestinian side, they cannot be totally trusted about the little details, while the Israelis are more reliable on the little things, but they lie about the big picture.
As outrageous – let alone Orientalist – such thinking may appear, it dwarfs in comparison to the state-operated hasbara machine of the Israeli government.
But is it true that Palestinians cannot be trusted with the little details?
When Abu Akleh was killed, she was not the only journalist targeted in Jenin. Her companion, another Palestinian journalist, Ali al-Samoudi, was present and was also shot and wounded by an Israeli bullet in the back.
Naturally, al-Samoudi was the main eyewitness to what had taken place on that day. He told journalists from his hospital bed that there was no fighting in that area; that he and Shireen were wearing clearly marked press vests; that they were intentionally targeted by Israeli soldiers and that Palestinian fighters were not anywhere close to the range from which they were shot.
All of this was dismissed by Israel, and, in turn, by western mainstream media, since supposedly ‘Palestinians could not be trusted with the little details.’
However, investigations by international human rights groups and, eventually a bashful Israeli admission of possible guilt, proved that al-Samoudi’s account was the most honest detailing of the truth. This episode has been repeated hundreds of times throughout the years where, from the outset, Palestinian views are dismissed as untrue or exaggerated, and the Israeli narrative is embraced as the only possible truth, only for the truth to be eventually revealed, authenticating the Palestinian side every time. Quite often, true facts are revealed too little too late.
The tragic murder of 12-year-old Palestinian boy Mohammed al-Durrah remains the most shameful episode of western media bias, to this day. The death of the boy, who was killed by Israeli occupation troops in Gaza in 2000 while sheltered by his father’s side, was essentially blamed on Palestinians, before the narrative of his murder was rewritten suggesting that he was killed in the ‘crossfire’. That version of the story eventually changed to the reluctant acceptance of the Palestinian reporting on the event. However, the story didn’t end here, as Zionist hasbara continued to push its narrative, smearing those who adopt the Palestinian version as being anti-Israel or even ‘antisemitic’.
(No) Permission to Narrate
Though Palestinian journalism has proved its effectiveness in recent years – with the Gaza wars being a prime example – thanks to the power of social media and its ability to disseminate information directly to news consumers, the challenges remain great.
Nearly four decades after the publishing of Edward Said’s essay “Permission to Narrate”, and over ten years after Rafeef Ziadah’s seminal poem “We Teach Life, Sir”, it seems that, in some media platforms and political environments, Palestinians still need to acquire permission to narrate, partly because of the anti-Palestinian racism that continues to prevail, but also because, per the judgment of a supposedly pro-Palestinian journalist, Palestinians cannot be entrusted with the little details.
However, there is much hope in this story. There is a new, empowered and courageous generation of Palestinian activists – authors, writers, journalists, bloggers, filmmakers and artists – that is more than qualified to represent Palestinians and to present a cohesive, non-factional, and universal political discourse on Palestine.
A New Generation’s Search for the Truth
Indeed, times have changed, and Palestinians are no longer requiring filters – as in those speaking on their behalf, since Palestinians are supposedly inherently incapable of doing so.
The authors of this article have recently interviewed two representatives of this new generation of Palestinian journalists, two strong voices that advocate authentic Palestinian presence in international media: journalists and editors Ahmed Alnaouq and Fahya Shalash.
Shalash is a West Bank-based reporter, who discussed media coverage based on Palestinian priorities, counting many examples of important stories that often go unreported. “As Palestinian women, we have a lot of obstacles in our life and they are (all) related to the Israeli Occupation because it’s very dangerous to work as a journalist. All the world saw what happened to Shireen Abu Akleh for reporting the truth on Palestine,” she said.
Shalash understands that being a Palestinian reporting on Palestine is not just a professional, but an emotional and personal experience, as well. “When I work and I am on the phone with the families of Palestinian prisoners or martyrs, sometimes I break into tears.”
Indeed, stories about the abuse and targeting of Palestinian women by Israeli soldiers are hardly a media topic. “Israel puts on the democracy mask; they pretend that they care for women’s rights, but this is not at all what happens here,” the Palestinian journalist said.
“They hit Palestinian female journalists because they are physically weaker; they curse them with very inappropriate language. I was personally detained for interrogation by Israeli forces. This affected my work. They threatened me, saying that if I continued to depict them as criminals in my work, they would have stopped me from being a journalist.”
“In Western media, they keep talking about women’s rights and gender equality, but we don’t have rights at all. We do not live like any other country,” she added.
For his part, Alnaouq, who is the head of the Palestine-based organization ‘We Are Not Numbers’, explained how mainstream media never allow Palestinian voices to be present in their coverage. Even pieces written by Palestinians are “heavily edited”.
“It is also the editors’ fault,” he said. “Sometimes they make big mistakes. When a Palestinian is killed in Gaza or in the West Bank, the editors should say who is the perpetrator, but these publications often omit this information. They do not mention Israel as the perpetrator. They have some kind of agenda that they want to impose.”
When asked how he would change the coverage of Palestine if he worked as an editor in a mainstream Western publication, Alnaouq said:
I would just tell the truth. And this is what we want as Palestinians. We want the truth. We don’t want Western media to be biased toward us and attack Israel, we just want them to tell the truth as it should be.
Prioritizing Palestine
Only Palestinian voices can convey the emotions of highly charged stories about Palestine, stories that never make it to mainstream media coverage; and when they do, these stories are often missing context, prioritize Israeli views – if not outright lies – and, at times, omit Palestinians altogether. But as the work of Abu Akleh, al-Samoudi, Alnaouq and Shalash, and hundreds more, continues to demonstrate, Palestinians are qualified to produce high-quality journalism, with integrity and professionalism.
Palestinians must be the core of the Palestinian narrative in all of its manifestations. It is time to break away from the old way of thinking that saw the Palestinian as incapable of narrating, or of being a liability on his/her own story, of being secondary characters that can be replaced or substituted by those who are deemed more credible and truthful. Anything less than this can be rightfully mistaken for Orientalist thinking of a bygone era; or worse.
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The post A Prescription first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Probably no corporation possesses a bigger share of control over America’s Government than does the one that sells more to the U.S. Government than does any other: Lockheed Martin. Actually, its top owners, or the group of stockholders who dominate the firm and cooperatively together control its policies and determine whom the corporation’s top executives are, are, together with one-another, the individual persons who cooperatively produce the decisions that constitute this “bigger share of control over America’s Government” than any other corporation does (and vastly more than the American public does). Some of these top owners are, themselves, in one way or another, employees or other official agents of Lockheed Martin, but others are not: one needn’t be officially a “part of” the firm in order for the firm to be one’s agent. This is instead the power of money and of ownership — not of any official status. Usually, stockholding is the main means by which it’s exercized. Corporations were planned and designed in this way, in the years 1600 and 1602, in England and in Holland, partly because the then-rising public opposition against the official, titled, nobility or aristocrats, was beginning to raise questions among the aristocracy, as to whether, some day, official titles might become more of a personal burden to be borne than of a personal asset to continue to flaunt publicly (such as by such titles as “Duke” “Lord” “Baron” or etc.). That was one of the main motives for the creation of the corporate form.
From its very outset, empire was to have its own army and armed forces, in order to be able to coerce the local aristocracy in a seized vassal-nation to cooperate with the imperial power, so as for those two national aristocracies jointly to exploit and extract wealth from the vassal nation and from its population. This was the start of capitalism. The armaments-makers and mercenaries have always been crucial to its foundation, and the result is popularly called “imperialism” or (in the United States, “neoconservatism,” though there is nothing really “neo” about it, except, as Mussolini called the two synonyms, “corporationism” and “fascism,” marking the historical transition away from agrarian-based feudalism, into its replacement by the international-corporate version of aristocracy — which is based on ownership of stock instead of land).
So: as the world’s largest armaments-maker, Lockheed Martin is quite naturally itself foundational to the U.S. empire. A few instances of how it functions that way will here be described:
On 26 January 2020, I headlined “Joe Biden Is as Corrupt as They Come,” and opened:
Bernard Schwartz, a former Vice Chairman and top investor in Lockheed Martin (which is by far the largest seller to the U.S. Government, and also the largest seller to most of America’s allied Governments), is one of Joe Biden’s top donors. CNN headlined, on October 24th, “Biden allies intensify push for super PAC after lackluster fundraising quarter”, and reported that, “Bernard Schwartz, a private investor and donor to the former vice president’s campaign, said he spoke with Biden within the last two weeks and encouraged him to do just that.
And Biden did then follow Schwartz’s advice, and has remained loyal to him. This was an example of Lockheed’s impact upon a Democratic Party public official who serves the military-industrial complex (MIC) instead of the public.
Here is what I wrote on 26 March 2019, under the heading “Mueller’s Record of Framing Innocent People to Protect the Guilty, an excerpt concerning a Republican Party official, James Comey, who likewise serves Lockheed and the rest of the MIC instead of the public:
***** The liberal Republican James Comey became the Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Lockheed Martin Corporation during 2005-2010, where his 2009 pay was $6,113,797. During that time, he also was a Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s National Chamber Litigation Center, which works to support business interests in the courts, especially the interests of U.S.-based international corporations, including Lockheed Martin. Furthermore, as-of 12 March 2010, Comey also had been granted 162,482 free shares of stock in Lockheed Martin, which number was higher than that of anyone except the Chairman, the CEO President, and an Executive Vice President; so, Comey was among the very top people at Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin’s largest foreign customer was the Saudi Government, which is 100% owned by the Saud family. Today, those Comey shares are worth $47,119,780 — after his five years with the company, plus nearly nine years of growth in that stock, from the war-producing policies that Comey had helped to initiate.Then, Comey bought a $3M mansion in Connecticut and became the General Counsel and a Member of the Executive Committee at the gigantic hedge Fund, Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates, in Connecticut, where Comey’s only publicly known pay was $6,632,616 in 2012. Dalio and Comey became very close — Dalio called Comey his “hero.” But Obama then hired the liberal Republican Comey as FBI Director in 2013, replacing the liberal Republican Mueller in that role, from which Obama’s successor President Trump fired Comey, and congressional Democrats then succeeded in getting Mueller assigned to become the Special Counsel who would supposedly investigate the legitimacy of that firing.
On 21 May 2013, Marketwatch bannered “Bridgewater Associates’ trades for Q2” and reported that
After a number of tech companies — including those we’ve mentioned [Microsoft, Oracle, and Intel] and EMC — the largest single-stock holding in the fund’s portfolio was its roughly 220,000 shares of Lockheed Martin LMT, +1.93%. The company recently reported an increase in earnings compared with the first quarter of 2012, but revenue was down slightly and there is a good deal of speculation that the business will be impacted by cuts in U.S. military spending. … Billionaire Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group reported a position of 1.2 million shares at the end of December.
Lockheed Martin is by far the largest U.S. ‘defense’ contractor, taking 8.3% of all U.S. Government purchases during 2015, as compared to #2 Boeing’s 3.8%, and #3 General Dynamics’s 3.1%.
Other than sales to the U.S. Government, the largest customer of Lockheed Martin is the Saud family, who own Saudi Arabia and own the world’s largest oil company, Aramco, and who hate Shia Muslims and especially hate Iran, which has the most Shia.
As Open Secrets has reported about Comey:
He left Bridgewater and became senior research scholar and Hertog Fellow on National Security at Columbia Law School in February 2013, and also joined the board of London-based HSBC Holdings. As the Center has reported, Comey maxed out his contributions to Mitt Romney in 2012 in an effort to unseat his new boss, and also gave to Obama’s 2008 opponent, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
This is a team that’s pro-Saud and pro U.S. billionaires, and pro Israeli billionaires, but rabidly anti Iran and Russia and China, and looking for a fight — war and increased ‘defense’-spending — against any nation (such as Syria) that’s favorable toward those ‘enemies of America’.
***** The MIC has far more key agencies than are generally known. One is In-Q-Tel, whose pernicious character is so obvious that practically nothing can be said about that corporation without revealing its inconsistency with any democratic republic.Even the CIA-affiliated Wikipedia, in its article “In-Q-Tel”, opens:
In-Q-Tel (IQT), formerly Peleus and In-Q-It, is an American not-for-profit venture capital firm based in Arlington, Virginia. It invests in high-tech companies to keep the Central Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies, equipped with the latest in information technology in support of United States intelligence capability.[4] The name “In-Q-Tel” is an intentional reference to Q, the fictional inventor who supplies technology to James Bond.[5]
In-Q-Tel has stated that the average dollar invested by In-Q-Tel in 2016 attracts fifteen dollars from other investors.[6]
History [edit]
Originally named Peleus and known as In-Q-It, In-Q-Tel was founded by Norm Augustine, a former CEO of Lockheed Martin, and by Gilman Louie, who was In-Q-Tel’s first CEO.[4][5][7] In-Q-Tel’s mission is to identify and invest in companies developing cutting-edge technologies that serve United States national security interests. According to the Washington post, In-Q-Tel started as the idea of then CIA director George Tenet [the man who told G.W. Bush that fooling the American people to believe that Saddam had WMD would be “a slam dunk”]. Congress approved funding for In-Q-Tel, which was increased in later years.[6] Origins of the corporation can also be traced to Ruth A. David, who headed the Central Intelligence Agency Directorate of Science & Technology in the 1990s and promoted the importance of rapidly advancing information technology for the CIA.[5] In-Q-Tel now engages with entrepreneurs, growth companies, researchers, and venture capitalists to deliver technologies that provide superior capabilities for the CIA, DIA, NGA, and the wider intelligence community.[8] In-Q-Tel concentrates on three broad commercial technology areas: software, infrastructure and materials sciences.
Former CIA director George Tenet says,
“We [the CIA] decided to use our limited dollars to leverage technology developed elsewhere. In 1999 we chartered … In-Q-Tel. … While we pay the bills, In-Q-Tel is independent of CIA. CIA identifies pressing problems, and In-Q-Tel provides the technology to address them. The In-Q-Tel alliance has put the Agency back at the leading edge of technology … This … collaboration … enabled CIA to take advantage of the technology that Las Vegas uses to identify corrupt card players and apply it to link analysis for terrorists [cf. the parallel data-mining effort by the SOCOM–DIA operation Able Danger], and to adapt the technology that online booksellers use and convert it to scour millions of pages of documents looking for unexpected results.[9]“
In-Q-Tel sold 5,636 shares of Google, worth over US$2.2 million, on November 15, 2005.[10] The shares were a result of Google’s acquisition of Keyhole, Inc, the CIA-funded satellite mapping software now known as Google Earth.[11]
“Nonprofit” — isn’t that nice?
On 22 January 2015, Nafeez Ahmed posted two articles, both researched and documented in depth, “How the CIA made Google”, and “Why Google made the NSA”.
The more that goes to the MIC, the less that goes to everything (and everyone) else; the public increasingly fend for themselves. For example: in a country where the Government doesn’t protect small businesses but only giant ones, this is how they protect themselves — no thanks to, and maybe against the laws of, that MIC-dominated Government. It’s what happens when and where 57.16% of the money that is legally donated to politicians comes from the wealthiest 0.1% — the richest one in ten thousand — of the nation’s population.
Such a nation censors-out the truth, instead of allows it to be reported. Only the lies against those truths are allowed: such as the lie that what happened in February 2014 in Ukraine was a democratic revolution instead of a U.S. coup; and such as the lie regarding Taiwan 5 miles away from mainland China’s coast (or 1.2 miles away, or 100 miles away) — that it belongs to America instead of to China, of which Taiwan has actually been a part since 1684 (except when Japan conquered Taiwan in 1895 and then America seized it in 1945 — as-if Japan’s surrender gave Japan’s conqueror the U.S. a right to control that island 3,236 miles away from America — as-if Taiwan were American instead of Chinese). (Of course: the U.S. says instead that Taiwan is an independent country, which is just as big a lie.) It’s another lie-based land-grab by the voracious U.S. empire, and can be sustained only by means of censorship against essential relevant truths that contradict those lies.
However, at the lower levels — the hirees of the mega-corporations that are doing this, instead of at the top levels that more-directly represent the controlling stockholders — there is far more confusion, and even outright stupidity, as those front-line workers who carry out the censorship are struggling to do their jobs in the face of the multiple self-contradictory hypocritical instructions they get from corporate management, gobblydegook such as this, which is a link from Matt Taibbi’s 2 December 2022 “1. Thread: THE TWITTER FILES”: his report about how the heavily Democratic-Party suckers who had been hired by the heavily Democratic-Party billionaires who control that corporation (Twitter) managed to hide from most Americans (until AFTER the 2022 mid-term elections) the reality of the scandal about what was contained in Hunter Biden’s laptop. Only at the topmost level — the board members and the top executives — is the actual motive (U.S. imperialism. a.k.a., “neoconservatism”) actually known and understood. Blaming the suckers down below can’t even possibly endanger, but instead protects, the real culprits (the beneficiaries — in BOTH Parties — of this imperialism). Censorship itself poisons and kills democracies: all of it is inconsistent with democracy and advances ONLY aristocracy, theocracy or any other form of dictatorship. Whereas the employees of firms such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, Guardian, NewsGuard, etc., might not know this, the top-level people there do, and they are the ones who have selected and hired those lower-level workers, to carry out their dirty-work, for the billionaires, and especially for their ‘defense’ contractors, who control the Government. It’s the controlling mega-corporate investors, basically, who are the beneficiaries of what this Government does, and this is the reality of neoconservatism (U.S. imperialism).
The post How America’s “Defense” Contractors Control America’s Government first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Click here to read “7 Facts Fauci Knew But Hid From the Public”
Click here to read more about this Tesla accident.
Click here to read more about California’s descent into digital slavery.
Here’s what Canada is trying to normalize:
The Truth Barrier
“In 2021, only 486 people died using California’s assisted suicide program, but that same year in Canada, 10,064 used MAID to die that year. MAID has now grown so popular that Canada has both anti-suicide hotlines to try and stop people killing themselves, as well as pro-suicide hotlines for people wanting to end their lives…
“Dr. Kathryn Edwards, a well-known vaccinologist who served on the data monitoring committee charged with ensuring the safety and efficacy of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, previously worked as a paid consultant and advisor to Pfizer.”
Read the full article here.
The post Fauci’s Lies, Self-driving Car Accidents, Assisted Suicide, and More first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
President Édouard Fritch of French Polynesia says he wants to boost funds to study journalism in French Polynesia in a bid to help strengthen the media industry quality, reports RNZ Pacific.
According to the local Ministry of Education, the amount given for study grants will vary from US$536 to US$1341 per month, depending on the level of study.
Fritch told La Première television about the “growing threat of false information” and the importance of reliable news outlets.
“Those social media pages escape the realm of news outlets, they shy away from all verification and create confusion and worse, they act as the public’s spokesperson,” he said.
“That is why I think it is a must that the journalism sector must be supported by the country.”
Meanwhile, public broadcaster France Télévision — La Première — reports that its audience in French overseas territories grew in 2022 and now reaches 42 percent of the 889,000 audience at least once.
La Première in Tahiti heads the audience share with 36.5 percent. Figures for other territories are: French Guyana 33.4 percent, Mayotte 31.4 percent, New Caledonia 30.2 percent, Gaudeloupe 27.1 percent, Martinique 18.1 percent, and Réunion 14.5 percent.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

A study published Monday by researchers at New York University eviscerated liberal Democrats’ assertion that the Russian government’s disinformation campaign on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election had any meaningful impact on the contest’s outcome.
The study, which was led by NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics and published in the scientific journal Nature Communications, is based on a survey of nearly 1,500 U.S. respondents’ Twitter activity. The researchers—who also include scholars from the University of Copenhagen, Trinity College Dublin, and Technical University of Munich—concluded that while “the online push by Russian foreign influence accounts didn’t change attitudes or voting behavior in the 2016 U.S. election,” the disinformation campaign “may still have had consequences.”
\u201cYesterday @NatureComms published our paper about Russia\u2019s foreign influence efforts *on Twitter* in the 2016 election. We’ve seen many claims about the implications of the findings, so we want to be clear about what the paper says and what it doesn\u2019t. 1/\n \nhttps://t.co/coMxO2JR3j\u201d— NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics (@NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics) 1673376947
According to the paper:
Exposure to Russian disinformation accounts was heavily concentrated: Only 1% of users accounted for 70% of exposures. Second, exposure was concentrated among users who strongly identified as Republicans. Third, exposure to the Russian influence campaign was eclipsed by content from domestic news media and politicians. Finally, we find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.
“Despite this massive effort to influence the presidential race on social media and a widespread belief that this interference had an impact on the 2016 U.S. elections, potential exposure to tweets from Russian trolls that cycle was, in fact, heavily concentrated among a small portion of the American electorate—and this portion was more likely to be highly partisan Republicans,” said Joshua A. Tucker, co-director of the Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP) and one of the study’s authors.
“The specter of ‘Russian bots’ wreaking havoc across the web has become a byword of liberal anxiety and a go-to explanation for Democrats flummoxed by Trump’s unlikely victory.”
Gregory Eady of the University of Copenhagen, and one of the study’s co-lead authors, cautioned that “it would be a mistake to conclude that simply because the Russian foreign influence campaign on Twitter was not meaningfully related to individual-level attitudes that other aspects of the campaign did not have any impact on the election, or on faith in American electoral integrity.”
The new study may boost arguments of observers who contend that Democrats bear much of the blame for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat by former GOP President Donald Trump. Clinton’s loss, many say, is largely attributable to a deeply flawed Democratic ticket consisting of two corporate candidates including a presidential nominee who, according to former Green presidential contender Ralph Nader, “never met a war she did not like,” and an anti-abortion vice presidential pick in Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia.
“That Russian intelligence attempted to influence the 2016 election, broadly speaking, is by now well documented,” The Intercept’s Sam Biddle wrote in an analysis of the study. “While their impact remains debated among scholars, the specter of ‘Russian bots’ wreaking havoc across the web has become a byword of liberal anxiety and a go-to explanation for Democrats flummoxed by Trump’s unlikely victory.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
By Arieta Vakasukawaqa in Suva
Fiji’s opposition leader Voreqe Bainimarama has been warned to provide evidence of allegations he has made against the coalition government or face the full brunt of the law.
Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka issued the warning in a national address yesterday in response to Bainimarama’s claims that the situation in Fiji had deteriorated since Rabuka came into office.
Rabuka said he offered a hand of co-operation and wished to develop a positive relationship with the FijiFirst party, but Bainimarama has made it clear that he rejects the idea of both sides of Parliament working together.
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“In recent days, Mr Bainimarama has been bombarding the country with lies and misinformation,” Rabuka said.
“He alleges that Fiji is in some sort of crisis, that our new coalition government is engaged in repressive, oppressive conduct.”
He said Bainimarama went on to claim that Fiji was reliving the “dark ages” and that families were living in fear of job losses.
He said the former prime minister had also attempted to terrify the public by trying to create racial disharmony along with former attorney-general Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum.
‘Message for Bainimarama’
“Members of our coalition have a message for Bainimarama,” Rabuka said.
“On behalf of the people, we demand specific details of reports that you have received that we have acted unconstitutionally, contrary to the rule of law and in violation of good governance, and committed other transgressions.
“If he fails to provide the details of what he has published in his attempt to smear the image of our coalition, then he and those who are working with him are going to face consequences within the law.”
In a statement this week, Bainimarama claimed they had received “further reports of certain matters” that were taking place in government and that were detrimental to the Constitution, rule of law and governance.
Meanwhile, police public relations officer Ana Naisoro yesterday confirmed receiving complaints against the former prime minister, alleging his statements were inciteful.
Arieta Vakasukawaqa is a Fiji Times reporter. Republished with permission.
The true résumé is rarely honest. The entire document is based on a stream of twisting embellishments, fanciful achievements, and, in some cases, pure fiction. Read it, as you would, an autobiography, which could only interest audiences by what it omits, what it underlines, and what it pretends to celebrate. The wrinkles vanish, the wounding sores patched; the skin moisturised, the face lifted by delicate textual surgery. Its writing, and its acceptance by any relevant audience, is a mutual conceit, a pact against veracity.
The number of individuals who make use of this mechanism is embarrassing. Academics speak of projects they never undertook nor finished, and degrees doctored rather than earned. In a good number of cases, diplomas and awards mentioned are not all they seem – the global market for purchasable PhDs is healthy and thriving. Some claim to have legal qualifications they lack, and others fantasise about unattained military honours and tours of duty they never completed.
Any résumé that also purports to be true is bound to be irrelevant. Many job appointments are already filled before the paperwork is sent in. The favoured candidate, however inferior, must be boosted by the quality of the alternatives. That the alternatives are better is not a chance they will succeed, but cast glorious sunlight on the nepotistic pick, the favoured winner. The mediocre are long in such affairs.
The true résumé, in short, is short on truth. All it needs do is mention a name, preferably correctly (the right spelling is a bonus), a few bottom drawer achievements, and the rest can be put down to research by the employer or, in the case of politics, the voters in question.
This raises, then, the fundamental point about the role of such a document in certain fields. Why even bother trusting the biographical portraits of politicians, notably those of salad day persuasion? The art and the craft of the position demands deception, truthful lies and lying truths. A good turn of phrase, a deodorising spray of charm, helps.
It follows that such a document is redundant before going to press, to brochure, and to postings on a social media channel. You cannot trust it, and you are a fool to. Even worse is to get excited about it after the fact.
This leads us to the New York Republican and Representative-elect George Santos, who has been put into the stockade, if only by the press, for his schoolboy fibbing and childish howlers. “My sins here,” he mumbles, “are embellishing my résumé.”
It transpires that the 34-year-old representative-elect did not graduate from college (it probably would have spoiled his education), nor worked for Mammon’s cutthroat representatives, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup (a fact impressively moral, surely?). His portfolio of 13 properties was also make-believe – he lives with his sister in Long Island. His mother did not die “in her office in the south tower” of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, but in 2016. Then came that slightly tricky addition of identity politics – good if you can get away with it, dangerous if you end up on the gallows. That matter was the question of his Jewishness.
The New York Times could barely hide its astonishment at such a smorgasbord selection by Santos. “While others have also embellished their backgrounds and military honors that they did not receive or distortions about their business acumen and wealth, few have done so in such a wide-ranging manner.” The paper was indignant at the fact that voters “didn’t know about his lies before casting their ballots.”
The list of political figures sporting sketchy biographies, if not outright lies, is lengthy and not confined to any one party or ideology. Massachusetts Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren had a hack at claims of Native American ancestry and was found wanting. In August 2019, she put the whole matter down to a case of oversight. “Like anyone who’s being honest with themselves, I know that I have made mistakes.”
The current US President, one Joseph R. Biden Jr, was also susceptible to improving his academic record for public consumption. In 1987, he inflated his double major in history and political science from the University of Delaware into three degrees rather than a single B.A. in history and political science. His claim that he had gone to law school on a full academic scholarship was corrected by Newsweek’s finding that Biden had gone to Syracuse “on half scholarship based on financial need.”
For those who treat the truth with molesting disdain, Santos is impressively and pathologically consistent. But he hopes that his audience will be receptive and forgiving. “I’m very much gay,” he remarks, hoping to shrug off the demon of unfashionable heterosexuality. His marriage of five years to a woman was one of those things that made him ponder. “People change. I’m one of those people who change.” Steady on, Representative-elect; you have changed quite enough already.
Santos has also promised to “be effective” and “good.” There is no reason to assume that he will be either, but that’s merely in line with his résumé. Any politician claiming achievement ahead of attainment is a clown to be celebrated before the guillotine of real expectations.
The post George Santos: The Perfect Résumé first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
If events since March 2020 have shown us anything, it is that fear is a powerful weapon for securing hegemony. Any government can manipulate fear about certain things while conveniently ignoring real dangers that a population faces.
Author and researcher Robert J Burrowes says: “… if we were seriously concerned about our world, the gravest and longest-standing health crisis on the planet is the one that starves to death 100,000 people each day. No panic about that, of course.”
No panic because the controlling interests of the global food system have long profited from a ‘stuffed and starved’ strategy that ensures people unnecessarily go hungry when corporate profit rather than need dictates policies.
US social commentator Walter Lippmann once said that ‘responsible men’ make decisions and must be protected from the ‘bewildered herd’ – the public. He added that the public should be subdued, obedient and distracted from what is really happening. Screaming patriotic slogans and fearing for their lives, they should be admiring with awe leaders who save them from destruction.
During COVID, Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern urged citizens to trust the government and its agencies for all information and stated: “Otherwise, dismiss anything else. We will continue to be your single source of truth.”
In the US, Fauci presented himself as ‘the science’. In New Zealand, Ardern was ‘the truth’. It was similar in countries across the world – different figures but the same approach.
Like other political leaders, Ardern clamped down on civil liberties with the full force of state violence on hand to ensure compliance with ‘the truth’. Those who questioned the COVID narrative – including world-renowned scientists – were smeared, shut down and censored.
It was an internationally orchestrated campaign involving governments, the big tech companies, media and the WHO, among others.
The EU Times reported on 17 December 2022 that the US Centers for Disease Control worked with social media to censor facts and information about COVID that ran afoul of official narratives.
The organisation America First Legal noted in a press release that the fourth set of documents it released – obtained from litigation against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – revealed: “… further concrete evidence of collusion between the CDC and social media companies to censor free speech and silence the public square under the government’s label of ‘misinformation’.”
Twitter ran a ‘Partner Support Portal’ for government employees and other ‘stakeholders’ to submit posts that it would remove or flag as ‘misinformation’ on its platform.
The US government was actively working to ‘socially inoculate’ the public against anything that threatened its narrative. Big tech corporations monitored and manipulated users for the purposes of censoring unapproved information and pushing government propaganda. Facebook sent written materials to the CDC in which it talked of censoring more than sixteen million ‘pieces of content’ containing opinions or information the government wanted suppressed.
AFL noted that the CDC was “collaborating with UNICEF, the WHO and IFCN member and leading civil society organisation Mafindo” to mitigate ‘disinformation’. Mafindo is a Facebook third-party fact-checking partner based in Indonesia and funded by Google.
AFL states: “What is clear is that the United States government, big tech platforms, and international organizations were fully entangled in an intricate campaign to violate the First Amendment, to silence the American people, and to censor dissenting views.”
The CDC’s mask guidance policies for school children were also shown to be driven by politics rather than science.
Across all the major Western nations, there was a clamp down on dissent and a massive censorship campaign to justify a policy framework of social and economic lockdowns, masking, distancing and state intrusion into almost every aspect of private life.
The findings of AFL indicate how centres of power can and do act in unison when they need to. The fact that it involved a worldwide campaign shows something huge was at stake.
The official narrative was about protecting populations from a deadly virus. And any dissent that did seep into the edges of mainstream discourse (like Tucker Carlson on Fox News or a few presenters on Talk Radio in the UK, for instance) tended to focus on politicians going too far on lockdowns and restrictions and being caught up in their egotistical lust for power and control.
Such a superficial explanation avoided a deep, critical analysis of the situation. Indeed, any focus on big finance’s – Wall Street and the City of London – role in this was conspicuous by its absence.
In March 2022, BlackRock’s Rob Kapito warned that a ‘very entitled’ generation of people would soon have to face shortages for the first time in their lives as some goods grow scarce because of rising inflation. BlackRock is the world’s most powerful investment fund.
Kapito talked about the situation in Ukraine and COVID being responsible for the current economic crisis, conveniently ignoring the inflationary impact of the trillions pumped into imploding financial markets in 2019 and 2020 (dwarfing the crisis of 2008).
The war in Ukraine as well as COVID are being used to explain the roots of the current economic crisis. But COVID policies were a symptom not a cause of the crisis – they were used to manage what by late 2019 was regarded as an impending economic meltdown. Draconian COVID policies had little to do with a public health emergency.
That much is made clear in the article “A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Systemic Collapse and Pandemic Simulation” by Professor Fabio Vighi.
On 15 August 2019, BlackRock issued a white paper instructing the US Federal Reserve to inject liquidity directly into the financial system to prevent “a dramatic downturn”. The message was unequivocal: “An unprecedented response is needed when monetary policy is exhausted and fiscal policy alone is not enough. That response will likely involve ‘going direct’.” It also stated the need to find ways to get central bank money directly in the hands of public and private sector spenders while avoiding hyperinflation.
Six days earlier, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) had in a working paper called for “unconventional monetary policy measures” to “insulate the real economy from further deterioration in financial conditions”.
Vighi’s shows why the hegemonic class reacted so severely to a public health issue that impacted a minority of the population. This response only makes sense when viewed within the context of economics.
Come late 2019 and especially 2020, pumping trillions into the financial system followed by lockdowns (to prevent hyperinflation) were used as the “unconventional monetary policies” that the BIS had called for on 9 August 2019.
Did you really think the authorities cared so much about something that mainly affected the over-80s and those with severe co-morbidities that they would lock down the entire global economy?
Did they really care so much about ordinary people, especially unproductive labour – the working class old and working class infirm – when through the years of imposed austerity, we saw the working classes being treated with utter contempt?
And did those who imposed restrictions and lockdowns really believe there was a ‘deadly’ virus on the loose?
Think of booze parties at Downing Street, Neil Ferguson’s breaking of lockdown rules to carry on an extra-marital affair, Matt Hancock breaking his own COVID rules with his lover, maskless world leaders gathering in London while their servants wore masks, various US political leaders ignoring their own rules and the public theatre of Fauci et al masking up for TV cameras then maskless as soon as they were off camera.
While such people tyrannised populations with fear and lockdowns, it is clear they themselves were unworried about ‘the virus’.
After embarking on a massive anti-Russia media propaganda campaign earlier this year to garner public support for Ukraine, the centres of power in the West are now sending billions of dollars of the public’s money into the coffers of the likes of weapons manufacturers Raytheon and Boeing.
Such corporations are more than happy to profit from sacrificing the lives of ordinary Ukrainians in the geopolitical quest to weaken and balkanise Russia so that US interests can gain a dominant, strategic foothold on the Eurasian landmass.
And while billions of dollars are being spent to achieve this, a wholly unnecessary ‘cost of living’ crisis (resulting from reckless economic neoliberalism which has finally imploded) is being imposed on working people in the Western countries – regarded as mere collateral damage when it comes to economic policies, war and corporate profit. The result is misery and poverty and the demonisation of some of the (now striking) workers who were lauded as ‘heroes’ during COVID.
But – of course – the powers that have so much demonstrable contempt for the lives of ordinary people at home and abroad will close down the entire global economy to protect their health!
Those who believe this are testament to the power of propaganda.
COVID-related policies were wholly disproportionate to any risk posed to public health, especially when considering the way ‘COVID death’ definitions and data were often massaged and how PCR tests were misused to scare populations into submission.
And the big winner has been Big Pharma, an industry with a track record of dirty tricks, false advertising and death and injury resulting from its products. If, say, Pfizer were an individual, given its corporate crimes, it would be serving a lengthy prison sentence with the proverbial key being thrown away.
But corporations with lengthy corporate rap sheets across many sectors are promoted to the public as being trustworthy and dependable. When governments partner (conspire) with such enterprises, they are conspiring with criminal recidivist companies. And when people purchase stock in them, the same applies.
Given the reference to the global food system at the beginning of this article, of particular interest are the crimes of Dupont and Bayer (see the Powerbase website), and Monsanto and Cargill (see the Corporate Research Project (CRP) website).
And, of course, Pfizer and its disturbing corporate rap sheet also appears on the CRP site.
These immensely wealthy corporations spend millions each year funding various groups and lobbying governments and international bodies. Little wonder that they wield tremendous influence and, in one way or another, become ‘trusted partners’ of governments, the WHO, the WTO and the like.
In Pfizer’s case, trusted so much as being granted ‘emergency use authorisation’ to have its ‘vaccines’ brought to market and then forced on the public via the coercive policies of governments.
Returning to Lippmann, since early 2020 so many people have feared for their lives and have admired with awe leaders who supposedly saved them from destruction. Even now as reports on vaccine injuries, vaccine inefficacy and increased mortality rates since the jab rollouts are largely taboo within the mainstream media, the public are being kept on message as the WHO and Big Pharma work towards a global treaty that will strip all their rights come the next economic meltdown or ‘pandemic’.
This article was written over the Yuletide period, an increasingly secular celebration stripped of religious connotation. These days, ‘in Big Pharma we trust’ might be more apt along with blind faith in a Zuckerberg-esque fantasy metaverse where Facebook is fact, government is truth and Big Pharma is God.
Because (heaven help us) that we should be left to think for ourselves!
The post Of Economic Crises and Pandemics first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
When U.S. President George W. Bush, on 7 September 2002, said that the IAEA had just come out with a “new report” concluding that Saddam Hussein was only six months away from having a nuclear weapon, and the IAEA three times denied it, the President’s allegation grew into, and became the basis for, America’s ‘justification’ to invade Iraq on 20 March 2003, while the IAEA’s denial was hidden by the ‘news’-media — censored-out by them all (except for only one tiny and unclear news-story that only one small news-medium published three weeks later and few people even noticed — and which news-report didn’t even so much as just mention that it had related to the U.S. President’s allegation, much less that it disproved that allegation: that America’s President had lied his country into — deceived his own public into supporting — that invasion).
This is an example of censorship to require lies, and to prohibit truths. And that is what censorship is generally intended to do. An author can write or say truths, but if no one will publish it, what good is it? What good is such ‘freedom of the press’? What good was it? (The IAEA knew.) None, at all (except for the international corporations that profited from America’s takeover of Iraq, and that served them by publishing those clients’ propaganda as ‘news’, such as in “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”).
I specialize in documenting such censorship to enforce lies and prohibit truths, but I find that the public isn’t much concerned about this problem; most people simply assume it doesn’t even exist, and that if any censorship does exist, it is to prohibit lies instead of truths (the exact opposite of what it really is). They are thus doubly deceived. On December 27th, Russia’s RT headlined “Every social media firm censors for US government”, documenting that claim with links to the sources, and noting that it pertains to at least Twitter, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Reddit, and Pinterest, and that it’s controlled by collusion between those corporations and the Government in order to hide truths — including partisan political truths — so as to pump up the public’s support for current Governmental policies, to continue those policies by continuing those leaders in office. It’s essential to retaining the regime.
This censorship is so normal in America so that on 24 November 2016, the Washington Post headlined “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say”, and it reported that a
group, called PropOrNot, a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds, planned to release its own findings Friday showing the startling reach and effectiveness of Russian propaganda campaigns. (Update: The report came out on Saturday).
The researchers used Internet analytics tools to trace the origins of particular tweets and mapped the connections among social-media accounts that consistently delivered synchronized messages. Identifying website codes sometimes revealed common ownership. In other cases, exact phrases or sentences were echoed by sites and social-media accounts in rapid succession, signaling membership in connected networks controlled by a single entity.
PropOrNot’s monitoring report, which was provided to The Washington Post in advance of its public release, identifies more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans. On Facebook, PropOrNot estimates that stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times.
It wasn’t “nonpartisan,” and it was, instead, censorship to enforce lies — not to prohibit them — and that ‘news’paper was praising it by spreading its lies about itself (i.e., that the WP wasn’t itself one of the top spreaders of “fake ‘news’” — which, like all mainstream (and many non-mainstream) ‘news’-peddlers, it was and is). In fact: many of the “more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda” were publishing more truths and less lies than such mainstream ‘news’-media as the WP itself was and does. But that’s an unpublishable truth, because it’s a truth that exposes themselves to be precisely what they condemn.
If you want to be censored-out from America’s mainstream — and from most of America’s non-mainstream — ‘news’ media, just prove that they are fraudulent; that’ll do it, every time.
There was no accountability for either Bush’s, or his ‘news’-media’s, lying America into invading and occupying Iraq — providing knowingly false ‘justifications’ for that (in order to do it ‘democratically’ — with support by the majority of voters). However, to expose, such lying, gets a journalist censored-out 100% (in this anything-but-democratic country).
On 5 February 2003, U.S. SecState Colin Powell addressed the U.N. Security Council urging its authorization to invade (which didn’t come). He said that Saddam’s Government was hiding crucial information, and “Some of the material is classified and related to Iraq’s nuclear program. Tell me, answer me, are the inspectors to search the house of every government official, every Baath Party member and every scientist in the country to find the truth, to get the information they need, to satisfy the demands of our council?” The next day, all major U.S. newspapers editorialized that, as the Washington Post headlined “Irrefutable”, saying that, “Whether Iraq is disarmed through the authority of the United Nations or whether the United States effectively assumes responsibility depends on how the Security Council responds.” In other words: this issue was to stand as a test not of the U.S., but of the U.N. And definitely not of the ‘news’-media, at all. On 22 March 2019, the WP’s “Fact Checker” columnist issued a 2,000+word retrospective, “The Iraq War and WMDs: An intelligence failure or White House spin?” which concluded “It’s too fuzzy for the Pinocchio Test [“True” vs. “False”], as it also falls in the realm of opinion [supposedly meaning statements that are neither true nor false but ONLY about what the person wants others to believe — and that statement about “opinion” is itself FALSE]”; and, so, he was alleging, both the “Bush administration” and its intelligence agencies had failed (even though both actually succeeded because they — with the assistance of the Washington Post and others — had deceived the public). His lengthy column 100% avoided any reference to the IAEA — whose Bush-alleged but non-existent “new report” had gotten the regime’s PR campaign to invade Iraq started. Nobody (certainly no U.S. ‘news’-medium) even noticed that the IAEA as the alleged source of the nuclear allegation had somehow mysteriously disappeared (much less wondered why it disappeared in the press, and from the Government). Colin Powell’s speech made no mention of the IAEA. There was constant hiding of the fact that America’s President had lied in order to start the allegation as having originated from the IAEA (the U.N.-authorized investigation-agency on nuclear matters — and Powell was addressing the U.N.). The media hid his lies, and their own lies, to back up the U.S. president’s lies. And (unlike on issues that are politically partisan in the U.S.) this was unanimous lying, by the U.S.-and-allied press.
I shall here cite my own personal experience to explain why I think that the public (which is so deceived as to be largely supportive of censorship) should be very much concerned about this (censorship), if they care at all about democracy. The incident in which the invasion of Iraq resulted from censorship is what had caused me, in 2002, to focus upon this problem, because it made clear to me that I was living under a dictatorship. I hadn’t previously been certain of this subsequently proven fact about America. So: that incident was a turning-point for me. A second such turning-point for me was the start in 2014 of the war in Ukraine:
Back in or around 2014, 43 international-news media were publishing my articles, and some of them were mainstream liberal media, some were mainstream conservative, and others were libertarian, but the vast majority were non-mainstream. When Barack Obama in February 2014 perpetrated a coup in Ukraine that installed a rabidly anti-Russian government there on Russia’s border and that was instead ‘reported’ as-if it had been a ‘democratic revolution’, which coup-imposed regime perpetrated a massacre against its pro-Russian protestors inside the Trade Unions Building in Odessa on 2 May 2014 (see especially the charred bodies of its victims at 1:50:00- in that video), I started writing about Ukraine; and, then, those 43 international-news sites gradually whittled themselves down to only 7; and, yet, none of them ever alleged that anything in any of my articles was false and asked me to prove it true, but they were instead getting pressure from Google, and from the FBI, and from other Establishment U.S. entities, and were afraid of being forced out of business (which many of them ultimately were) by them. The personal narrative that will now be provided here is about the latest of these cases, which threatens the site Modern Diplomacy, which had been an excellent international-affairs news site and included writers from all across the international-affairs news spectrum, for and against every Government’s policies, and from practically every angle. I had long been expecting MD (because of its impartiality) to receive a warning from the U.S. regime, and this finally happened late in December 2022, when the site’s founder, D., sent me this notice:
Dear Eric, do you know who are these guys? https://www.newsguardtech.com/
They sent me an email with allegations mentioning your articles as false claims and MD as a pro-kremlin propaganda website due to these.
Do they have any influence on Search engines and social media? Will we have any problems at all?
Thanks
D.
I replied with an email
Subject: Since you are a co-founder,
Date: Dec 24, 2022 at 9:20 AM
To: moc.hcetdraugswennull@llirb.nevets
Cc: [D.]
I ask you please to explain to me, and to the webmaster at moderndiplomacy.eu, why your organization — well, here is what he sent me about what your organization did:
[I pasted in D.’s message to me.]
As you can see there, he is afraid (that’s a weak version of terrorized) that your organization will downgrade his site because of his site’s posting some of my articles.
It seems to me that there are two reasonable types of responses that you can give him and me:
Either you will cite falsehoods in one or more of my articles at his site
https://moderndiplomacy.eu/
(but, of course, you could also do that regarding any edition of the New York Times or Washington Post; so, why would that be a reason?), or else:
You could search to find such falsehoods, find none, ask your employee why he or she is terrorizing that webmaster and (essentially) indirectly threatening me; and, if that employee fails to provide a reasonable and entirely true answer, which justifies what he or she has done, fire that person and inform the rest of your staff that you have done so and explain to all of them WHY you fired the employee, so that they all can then know to STOP DOING THIS!!!
Sincerely,
Eric Zuesse
Brill didn’t respond. So, I sent to D.:
I take my not having received a reply from either Steven Brill or you to be an ominous sign, because, suddenly, none of my recent articles has been posted by your site. Would you please explain? (If you are cancelling me as an author, I shall remove your site from my submissions-list.) After all, you said “They sent me an email with allegations mentioning your articles as false claims and MD as a pro-kremlin propaganda website due to these.” Did they state what those “false claims” were? Did you ask them? I very much doubt that they were able to find anything in any of my articles that is false. No one has ever before, to my knowledge, alleged any assertion in any of my articles to be false. I don’t ever make a claim that is false. I am EXCEEDINGLY careful. And any assertion in any of my articles that I think some readers MIGHT find questionable I provide a link to its documentation. So, I would distrust that allegation from Brill’s organization and consider it to be likely a lie from them in order to censor out from the news-media information that the U.S. regime wishes the public not to know. Would you not want to know whether that allegation from them was merely an excuse to censor out from your site information that they don’t want the public to know?
D. responded:
Dear Eric,
Sorry for the late reply. Thank you for your efforts in contacting newsguard, although I was surprised to see that you used my message I sent you in your contact email without my consent. Now they know I took it seriously. Anyway, I decided to stop publishing your articles — at least for a while and see how it goes. Part of my decision was of course the threats (not only from them) but also the fact that you are spreading them to a lot of websites and that google considers it as “scraped content”. I will try to stay in exclusive content although I appreciate your work and your courage.
I worked really hard these 10 years for MD and still can’t monetize it to support the expenses and me of course. Also I am tired and I am thinking about the possibility to find a buyer and stand back. Just keep it in mind, in case you find someone interested in it.
Of course we can stay in touch and keep sending me your articles — at least to have the opportunity to read them.
Below, you will find newsguard allegations concerning your articles. Please don’t use it to reply to them — we both know that there is no use. Instead, maybe you can write a new piece debunking them.
Kind Regards
D.
Here is what he had received from News Guard, and which I shall here debunk [between brackets]:
We found that Modern Diplomacy articles often link to sites rated as unreliable by NewsGuard for promoting false information, such as OrientalReview.org, pro-Kremlin site TheDuran.com, and en.interaffairs.ru <http://en.interaffairs.ru> , owned by the Russian Foreign Ministry. The site has also republished articles from sites such as The Gray Zone, rated unfavorably by NewsGuard for repeatedly publishing false claims about the Russia-Ukraine war and Syrian chemical attacks. Could you comment on why Modern Diplomacy republishes or links to sites which consistently promote false claims?
[Rating allegations as “true” or as “false” ON THE BASIS OF the identity of the SITE instead of on the basis of the specific allegation in the specific article (or video) is a standard method of deception of the public, which censors employ to distract and manipulate individuals (readers, etc.) by appealing to their existing prejudices such as (for an American conservative or Republican) “Don’t trust the N.Y. Times” or (for an American liberal or Democrat) “Don’t trust the N.Y. Post” (or, for both, “Russia is bad and wrong, and America is good and right”). It is appealing to prejudices and emotions, instead of to facts and evidence — it is NOT appealing to actual truth and falsity. It is a method of deception.]
We also found that ModernDiplomacy.eu has repeatedly published false and misleading claims about the Russia-Ukraine war.
For example, a June 2022 article titled “Have Europeans been profoundly deceived?,” claims to provide evidence that “A coup occurred in Ukraine during February 2014 under the cover of pro-EU demonstrations that the U.S. Government had been organizing ever since at least June 2011.”
[The word “coup” in that article was linked to this video, every detail of which I have carefully checked and verified to include ONLY evidence that is authentic — and no one has contested any of the evidence in it. The first item of evidence that is referred-to in this video is at 0:35, which item is the audio of a private phone-conversation between two top EU officials in which one, who was in Kiev while the coup was occurring, reported to his boss, who wanted to know whether it was a revolution or instead a coup, and he reported to her that it was a coup, and described to her the evidence, which convinced her. My article later says “Here is that phone-conversation, and here is its transcript along with explanations (to enable understanding of what he was telling her, and of what her response to it indicated — that though it was a disappointment to her, she wouldn’t let the fact that it had been a coup affect EU policies).” This news-reporting is of real evidence, not distractions, not any appeal to the reader’s (and listener’s) prejudices, either. But Mr. Brill’s employee apparently didn’t check my article’s sources (gave no indication of having clicked onto any of my links), because he or she was judging on the basis purely of that person’s own prejudices — NOT upon the basis of any evidence. Then, at 3:35 in that video, is audio of another private phone-conversation, which was of Obama’s planner of the coup, Victoria Nuland, telling his Ambassador in Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, whom to get appointed to run the stooge-regime after the coup will be over, “Yats” Yatsenyuk, which then was done. My article also says “Here is that phone-conversation, and here is its transcript along with explanations (to enable understanding of whom she was referring to in it, and why).” The reference to “June 2011” had appeared in this passage from a prior article of mine, where that two-word phrase linked to Julian Assange’s personal account of the matter — the Obama Administration’s early planning-stage for the coup in Ukraine — that explains how those “pro-EU demonstrations” had been engineered by Obama’s agents. So: everything in that paragraph by Brill’s employee was fully documented in my links — which that person didn’t care to check.]
However, there is no evidence that the 2014 Maidan revolution in Ukraine that led to the ouster of then-president Viktor Yanukovych was a coup orchestrated by the United States. … Angry protesters demanded Yanukovych’s immediate resignation, and hundreds of police officers guarding government buildings abandoned their posts. Yanukovych fled the same day the agreement was signed, and protesters took control of several government buildings the next day. The Ukrainian parliament then voted 328-0 to remove Yanukovych from office and scheduled early presidential elections the following May, the BBC reported. These events, often collectively referred to as the “Maidan revolution,” were extensively covered by international media organizations with correspondents in Ukraine, including the BBC, the Associated Press, and The New York Times.
Could you please comment on why Modern Diplomacy repeated this false claim, despite evidence to the contrary?
A March 2022 article titled “Who actually CAUSED this war in Ukraine?” states that “Russia had done everything it could to avoid needing to invade Ukraine in order to disempower the nazis who have been running the country ever since Obama’s 2014 coup placed it into the hands of rabidly anti-Russian racist-fascists there.”
In fact, Nazis are not running Ukraine. … Svoboda won 2.2 percent of the vote. Svoboda currently holds one parliamentary seat.
In February 2022, U.S. news site the Jewish Journal published a statement signed by 300 scholars of the Holocaust, Nazism and World War II, which said that “the equation of the Ukrainian state with the Nazi regime” is “factually wrong, morally repugnant and deeply offensive to the memory of millions of victims of Nazism and those who courageously fought against it.” Additionally, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, addressed the Russian public in a Feb. 24, 2022, speech, saying that these claims do not reflect the “real” Ukraine. “You are told we are Nazis. But could people who lost more than 8 million lives in the battle against Nazism support Nazism?”
Could you please comment on why Modern Diplomacy repeated this false claim [that “the nazis who have been running the country ever since Obama’s 2014 coup placed it into the hands of rabidly anti-Russian racist-fascists there”], despite evidence to the contrary?
[Yet again, Mr. Brill’s employee simply ignores my evidence — fails even to click onto my links whenever he disagrees with an allegation that has a link. Here was my published assertion, as it was published: “Russia had done everything it could to avoid needing to invade Ukraine in order to disempower the nazis who have been running the country ever since Obama’s 2014 coup placed it into the hands of rabidly anti-Russian racist-fascists there.” The evidence is right there, just a click away, but Mr. Brill’s employee again wasn’t interested in seeing the evidence. (Nor is Brill himself.)]
An April 2022 article titled “Authentic War-Reporting From Ukraine,” promotes a video report by pro-Kremlin journalist, Patrick Lancaster, filmed in the Eastern Donbas region of Ukraine. The article asserts that Ukraine was “constantly shelling into that region in order to kill and/or compell to flee anybody who lived in that region […] It was an ethnic cleansing in order to get rid of enough of those residents so that, if ever that area would again become integrated into Ukraine and its remaining residents would therefore be voting again in Ukrainian national elections, the U.S.-installed nazi Ukrainian regime will ‘democratically’ be able to continue to rule in Ukraine.” (The article also repeats the claim that the 2014 revolution was a US-backed coup, and makes the unverified claim that “The CIA has instructed all of Ukraine’s nazis (or racist-fascists) to suppress their anti-Semitism and White Supremacy until after Ukraine has become admitted into NATO.”)
The claim that Ukraine conducted an “ethnic cleansing” in the Donbas echoes a falsehood propagated by the Russian government for years. There is no evidence supporting the claim that genocide occurred in Ukraine’s eastern region of Donbas. The International Criminal Court, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe have all said they have found no evidence of genocide in Donbas. The U.S. mission to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe called the genocide claim a “reprehensible falsehood” in a Feb. 16, 2022 post on its official Twitter account. It said that the mission “has complete access to the government-controlled areas of Ukraine and HAS NEVER reported anything remotely resembling Russia’s claims.”
Could you please comment on why Modern Diplomacy repeated this false claim, despite evidence to the contrary?
[Yet again, Mr. Brill’s employee relies upon people’s opinions — but ONLY ones who agree with his — instead of any evidence at all. Here, on behalf of myself, and of Modern Diplomacy, and of Patrick Lancaster (INSTEAD OF on behalf of Lockheed Martin and the other U.S.-and-allied international-corporate entities that are profiting from this war), are nine news-reports linking to actual evidence which disproves those opinions:
“Mortar shelling in Kramatorsk. Nazis attacking city district.” 18 May 2014
“Ukraine crisis: ‘Those fascists killed this girl and they will be in hell’” 5 May 2014
“Ukraine Crisis: Kiev’s Slovyansk ‘Anti-Terrorist Operation’ Kills 300 Pro-Russian Separatists” 4 June 2014
“Luhansk. After Air Strike. Part 4 (of 6)” 2 June 2014
“AP’s Matt Lee challenges White House’s lies on Ukraine” 7 July 2014
“Obama Definitely Caused the Malaysian Airliner to Be Downed” 18 July 2014
“How Our People Do Their Extermination-Jobs In Ukraine” 23 October 2014
“What Obama’s Ukrainian Stooges Did” 10 October 2014
“Brookings Wants More Villages Firebombed in Ukraine’s ‘Anti Terrorist Operation’” 3 February 2015]
My final reply to D.’s final rejection of my position was:
As regards myself, I am with Chris Hedges (who quit the N.Y. Times over this) and with Consortium News (which is standing up against the same pressure that you are caving to), in order to have any hope that the future might possibly be better than the present.
At the same time when News Guard was threatening Modern Diplomacy and perhaps forcing that site to reject all future submissions from me, the news-site, Consortium News, was likewise being threatened by Brill’s shills. On December 29th, Consortium News headlined “On the Influence of Neo-Nazism in Ukraine: A short history of neo-Nazism in Ukraine in response to NewsGuard’s charge that Consortium News published false content about its extent”. That, too, is an excellent example of censors killing truths and leaving only lies. However, mega-corporate America has a number of such ‘fact-checking’ truth-destroying organizations: New Guard is only one of them.
These self-styled truth-policemen of the Web represent the regime, and came into being after the Web itself did. The Web enabled — for the first time in history — articles to be published and read that link to their sources, and this opened up a new possibility and reality, in which the online readers could actually evaluate ON THEIR OWN (by clicking onto such links) the evidence. That upset the billionaires’ applecarts of ‘authoritative opinion’ (which they have hired) so that authoritarianism (which they control) could become replaced by facts (which they can’t).
The least reliable means of forming or even of changing one’s opinions are means such as ink-on-paper allegations (newspapers, magazines, etc.) that cannot even POSSIBLY provide immediate direct online links to the items of evidence; and the MOST reliable means are online articles and books (such as my new one, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL, whose ebook versions do document allegations by means of such online links — it’s the first-ever book to do so) which constantly bring directly to one’s computer or other Web-online device the items of evidence whenever the reader has any doubt about a given allegation’s veracity or not. That way the individual can form one’s opinion on the basis only of the evidence.
Anyone whose opinions are based upon the opinions of other people who believe as that person does, instead of on the basis of purely the facts of the matter and of ONE’S OWN investigations seeking out evidence both for and evidence against any alleged fact, will simply believe the myths that one already believes, and will only become more and more convinced of those falsehoods, as one grows older.
The function of censorship is to prohibit spreading truths. It poisons democracy, to death. Censors kill democracies. That’s what they are being paid to do. And they do it.
The post Censorship Prohibits Spreading Truths and Demands Spreading Lies first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Julian Assange once observed that, ‘Nearly every war has been the result of media lies.’ For daring to publish evidence of US war crimes, Assange now sits in the high-security Belmarsh prison in London, at risk of being extradited to the US within the next few weeks. The prospects for a fair trial range from miniscule to zero.
In a recent interview, WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson told US journalist Glenn Greenwald that legal avenues in London to challenge Assange’s unlawful extradition were being exhausted. What is needed now is, not recourse to a legal system that is subservient to power, but a political fight, as Hrafnsson explained:
In my perception, and I’ve been sitting in on all the proceedings in London, all the extradition proceedings in London have exposed only one thing, and that’s the fact that this is just not going to be won in a court. There’s no justice to be had in court rooms in London. That’s obvious and I don’t have to mention the United States, that’s one of the essences of the defence in fighting the extradition, that he will never be able to get a fair trial there. So, we’re running out of time. We need to push this on a different level and so I decided that we needed to go on a tour to shore up political support, because the only way to fight a political persecution is through political means.
The Guardian recently joined with the New York Times, Le Monde, El País and Der Spiegel in publishing an open letter calling on US President Joe Biden to end Assange’s prosecution. It has been ten years since Assange sought refuge in London’s Ecuadorian embassy. After being dragged from the embassy by police in April 2019, Assange has been locked up in the harsh regime of Belmarsh prison, suffering from failing physical and mental health. Indeed, according to then UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, Assange is literally a victim of torture. In 2020, the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, published a letter from Doctors for Assange, with 216 signatories from 33 countries, drawing urgent attention to ‘the ongoing torture and medical neglect of Julian Assange.’
US political writer Thomas Scripps noted that the open letter from the five newspapers:
makes clear that Assange has been the victim of a monstrous campaign of state persecution, costing him years of his life and good health, for revealing state criminality, designed to set a chilling example for others.
But what took them so long to speak out? Scripps observed:
The conduct of these newspapers over the past decade has been thoroughly reprehensible. Their efforts to poison public opinion against Assange, to give credence to the false claims and accusations made against him, facilitated the American state’s persecution of this principled and courageous journalist.
Australian journalist John Pilger, who has done so much to raise public awareness of Assange’s plight, was scathing:
The editors of the Guardian, NY Times etc. finally speak up for Julian #Assange — weasel words and 10 years late. Ten years after the Guardian made public WikiLeaks’ secret password and launched a campaign of vilification against a truthteller.
He added:
The Guardian, which has played a major role in the persecution of Julian #Assange, is now scurrying for cover with a call for him to be freed. But even its weasel statement repeats malign fiction about his failure to redact files.
Pilger was referring to the oft-repeated smear that the WikiLeaks co-founder recklessly endangered the lives of informants when publishing information that exposed US war crimes. In fact, Assange was extremely careful in redacting names, and he was effectively thrown to the wolves by both the Guardian and the New York Times.
How do we know this? Award-winning Australian journalist Mark Davis was an eyewitness to the preparation of the Afghan War Logs in 2010 for newspaper publication, documented in Davis’s film, Inside Wikileaks. Davis spoke at a public meeting in Sydney in 2019 and said that he was present alongside Assange in the Guardian’s ‘bunker’ where a team from the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel worked on the publication of articles based on, as the NYT put it:
‘A six-year archive of classified military documents [that] offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.’
Davis attested that, far from being ‘cavalier’ about releasing documents that might endanger lives, it was:
Guardian journalists [who] neglected and appeared to care little about redacting the documents.’
Moreover, they had a ‘graveyard humour’ about people being harmed. No one, he stated emphatically, expressed concern about civilian casualties except Assange.
As Oscar Grenfell explained in a piece for the World Socialist Web Site: ‘David Leigh and Nick Davies, senior Guardian journalists, who worked closely with Assange in the publication of the logs, have repeatedly claimed that Assange was indifferent to the consequences of the publication.’
These Guardian claims were pivotal in corporate media smears against Assange. They were also crucial in US government claims that publication ‘aided the enemy’.
However, noted Grenfell:
In reality, the US and Australian militaries have been compelled to admit that release of the Afghan war logs did not result in a single individual coming to physical harm. [our emphasis]
As Scripps pointed out, the open letter is evidence that the five newspapers, including the Guardian and NYT, were well aware from the start that Assange ‘was functioning as a journalist, innocent of any crime.’
Why speak out now in defence of Assange, ten years too late? The likely concern is that a US show trial would expose the newspapers’ own nefarious role in providing cover for US war crimes, as well as in enabling the persecution of Assange.
There is also another vital element in the timing. As Scripps wrote: ‘This exposure of US war crimes would come at a time when the United States is expanding its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, sold to the public on the grounds that US intervention is necessary to prevent Russian atrocities.’
‘The Public Despises the Corporate Media’
It is vital for state and corporate power that public trust in the news media – a key conduit for carrying and amplifying Western propaganda – does not collapse entirely. In the US, trust in the news has fallen to an historic low. The percentage of Americans who say they have ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ of confidence in newspapers has fallen to 16%. For television news, it is even lower at 11%.
In response to these findings, Glenn Greenwald was blunt:
The public despises the corporate media. There is almost nobody held in lower esteem or who is more distrusted and abhorred than the liberal employees of large media corporations. Nobody wants to hear from them, so in-group arrogance is all they have left.
Here in the UK, in the past year alone, the public has seen reshuffling and defenestration of Tory Prime Ministers, governments and ministers in a kind of bizarre soap opera. This has been reported as serious political drama by mass media outlets, most especially BBC News, that permit no serious scrutiny of state-corporate power; no substantive challenge to the special interests that rule the country for themselves, while the population suffers and the climate emergency worsens.
As we noted in a media alert earlier this year, the rise of oligarchical politics has seen a great merger of politics and the media that dominates how the UK is run. Yet another example of this phenomenon was highlighted recently by Aaron Bastani of Novara Media:
Richard Sharp, BBC chairman, was Rishi Sunak’s boss at Goldman Sachs, donated £400k to the Conservatives, & was once an adviser to Boris Johnson.
My generation & those younger need to be realistic. Big parts of British public life aren’t democratic. And it’s getting worse.
In a recent interview with Mark Curtis of Declassified UK, John Pilger exposed the insidious, power-serving nature of the British media. He took particular aim at the BBC: ‘I’ve always found it amusing, bemusing, that so many people in the BBC see themselves as having entered into a Nirvana of objectivity, as if their objectivity and impartiality have been given to them intravenously.’
He continued:
Andrew Marr was very good at waxing on lyrically about this. Andrew Marr, the political editor of the BBC, who made a victory speech virtually on behalf of Tony Blair outside Number 10 Downing Street in 2003. […] Tony Blair, he said, tonight as the troops have gone into Iraq, he has been “proved conclusively right”. Conclusively right! And Andrew Marr was absolutely eloquent in talking about the BBC as a national treasure of objectivity. Of course, Orwell called it “doubletalk”.
Long-time readers will be aware that we have highlighted Marr’s valedictory words from Downing Street, a shameful performance that ought to have ended his career:
I don’t think anybody after this is going to be able to say of Tony Blair that he’s somebody who is driven by the drift of public opinion, or focus groups, or opinion polls. He took all of those on. He said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right. And it would be entirely ungracious, even for his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result. (BBC News at Ten, 9 April, 2003)
Pilger also pointed to the ongoing ‘tsunami of propaganda’ about Ukraine which is ‘something I’ve never seen before’, including even the lies told about Iraq in the run-up to the 2003 invasion. When it comes to ‘opposing views or informed views’ on Ukraine, ‘none of them have been allowed in’ by the media, he said.
As for the Guardian and its coverage of foreign affairs: ‘We have some people now who are an absolute disgrace, especially on the reporting of Ukraine [and] Russia.’
The Independent carried a rare dose of sanity last week when it permitted a piece by Mary Dejevsky, formerly the newspaper’s foreign correspondent in Moscow. Dejevksy observed that the informed view that ‘Western provocations’ had played a major role in precipitating the Ukraine war is virtually absent from news coverage. Specific factors that are routinely ignored by the BBC and the other major news media include:
post-Cold War triumphalism, the green light for former East bloc states to join Nato despite what Russia understood to have been promises to the contrary, the 2014 ousting of Ukraine’s democratically elected president – which Russia saw as a US-inspired coup – and the ways the West subsequently drew Ukraine into the Western bloc, with the EU association agreement and Nato military assistance, even as it abrogated Cold War arms control treaties one after one, or allowed them to lapse.
Consideration of such facts matter, she noted, ‘because without understanding why Russia invaded, there can be no understanding of what will be needed for a lasting peace.’
Robin Andersen, who teaches media studies at Fordham University in the US, also pointed to the dangers of not permitting a proper understanding of how we got here; not least because it involves heavily nuclear-armed states:
Without context and accuracy, reasoned discourse and the ability to find solutions or engage in diplomacy are beyond our reach as we approach nuclear Armageddon. Corporate newsframes regularly exclude alternative voices of peace and those who call for an end to war, leaving out an entire discourse that has animated global discussions about conflict resolution for decades.
Jeffrey Sachs, an economist and foreign policy analyst, recently told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!:
I think both sides see that there is no military way out. I’m speaking of NATO and Ukraine on one side and Russia on the other side. This war, like von Clausewitz told us two centuries ago, is politics by other means, or with other means, meaning that there are political issues at stake here, and those are what need to be negotiated.
Sachs continued:
Much of this war has been about NATO enlargement, from the beginning. And, in fact, since NATO enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia were put on the table by President George W. Bush Jr. and then carried forward by the U.S. neocons basically for the next 14 years, this issue has been central, and it’s been raised as central. But President Biden, at the end of 2021, refused to negotiate over the NATO issue.
He pointed out that the urgent need for the war not to escalate, perhaps towards nuclear Armageddon, demands that the issue of NATO expansion be negotiated immediately, adding:
There are other issues, as well, but the point is, this war needs to end because it’s a disaster for everybody, a threat to the whole world. According to European Union President Ursula von der Leyen last week, 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died, 20,000 civilians. And the war continues. And so, this is an utter disaster, and we have not searched for the political solution.
To return to Julian Assange, the need for independent media that serve the public and scrutinise power has thus never been greater. The pattern of the media calling for one war after another, as media analyst Alan MacLeod highlighted in a recent tweet, is persistent and abhorrent:
‘Bombing Iraq Isn’t Enough’
‘Bomb North Korea, Before It’s too Late’
‘Bomb Syria, Even If It Is Illegal’
‘To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran’
On and on it goes. This media-promoted war fever, whose primary beneficiary is the Western military-intelligence-
Assange put it succinctly:
The post “Nearly Every War Has Been the Result of Media Lies” first appeared on Dissident Voice.If we have a good media environment, then we will also have a peaceful environment.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
New Twitter chief and exploding-car entrepreneur Elon Musk has given a team access to the website’s data archives in order to examine its content moderation actions. The investigators include former New York Times editor Bari Weiss and podcaster-journalist Matt Taibbi, amongst others.
Their findings are being released under the hashtag #TwitterFiles, and they’re being hyped to reveal some conspiracy to suppress right-wing and fringe voices. But as always, the truth appears to be that the right is once again crying about the fact that hate speech and conspiracy theories will get you banned from social media – who’d have thought it?
Hunter Biden’s laptop, again
Taibbi’s first thread revolved around the removal of Donald Trump from the platform, and the controversy around Hunter Biden’s laptop. This story originally came from the New York Post and concerned now-US president Joe Biden’s son Hunter using his connection to his dad to get in with a Ukrainian natural gas company. Sordid, for sure, but hardly uncommon, or even condemned, in the world of politics. Taibbi claimed that:
Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be “unsafe.” They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.
Back in the real world, the #TwitterFiles appear to have exposed… Twitter employees scrambling to react appropriately to what seemed to be a Russian hacking operation, during an incredibly volatile political moment in the US.
In turn, many Twitter users chose to focus on the outrage that right-wingers couldn’t freely post illegally obtained photographs of politicians’ family members’ genitalia:
tHe TwItTeR fILeS:
Day 1: Twitter just deleted pics of Hunter Biden's junk when asked. Zero pushback. Unbelievable.
Pre-Day 2: Via a journalistic technique known as 'asking', we shockingly discovered that a Twitter lawyer was reviewing The Twitter Files before we got them!!
— Noah Dahl (@cen271) December 10, 2022
THE TWITTER FILES is funny, the tone they're described in is like watergate or wikileaks but instead of war crimes it's about pics of Hunter Biden's penis and why Libs of TikTok couldn't post for 2 days.
— The Path of the Alpha–BenghaziExpert 5'4.5" (@BenghaziExpert) December 9, 2022
Republicans tried to destroy Hillary using her emails but it was a nothing burger
They then tried to destroy Biden using Hunter’s laptop but it was a nothing burger
Now they’re trying to destroy Dems using the Twitter files but it’s STILL a nothing burger
Nice try though, GOP
— Lindy Li (@lindyli) December 11, 2022
Shadowbanned
In turn, Weiss chose to dig into nefarious blacklisting and tweet suppression:
1. A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users.
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
The problem with this masterstroke of investigative journalism is, however, that Twitter was open about the fact that it suppressed tweets. In fact, it released a blog post detailing the subject in 2018. It stated, quite clearly:
We do rank tweets and search results. We do this because Twitter is most useful when it’s immediately relevant. These ranking models take many signals into consideration to best organize tweets for timely relevance. We must also address bad-faith actors who intend to manipulate or detract from healthy conversation.
Nevertheless, the #TwitterFiles breathlessly reported the scandal of the suppression of… coronavirus [Covid-19] misinformation, conspiracy theorist Dan Bongino, and noted racist Charlie Kirk. If this suppression happens to sound like ‘responsible content moderation’ to you, don’t worry – you’re not alone:
So today's Twitter Files scoop from the author of "San Fransicko" is that someone responsible for content moderation was moderating content associated with baseless conspiracy theories, and we're supposed to be very upset about it! pic.twitter.com/xvykMQRlqD
— steven ''italian elon musk'' monacelli (@stevanzetti) December 11, 2022
Shellenberger once again pulls out the galaxy-brained claim that Twitter's moderation practices violated "free speech"…somehow.
Yes, Trump alone, distinct from other political leaders, used Twitter to repeatedly deny the election results and then fomented a seditious riot. pic.twitter.com/d1FyjBpnDe
— Michael Paulauski (@mike10010100) December 11, 2022
I don’t have it in me to comment much on this Twitter Files farce – but it’s really striking how all these supposedly scandalous “revelations” have either been public knowledge – or make the old Twitter regime look eminently reasonable: People trying, in difficult circumstances. https://t.co/wqvTExiPL0
— Thomas Zimmer (@tzimmer_history) December 10, 2022
Waiting for transparency
Finally, of course, we should remember that Musk’s newfound love of ‘transparency’ is deeply hypocritical:
Two days ago, Elon Musk said "Exactly" in response to a tweet praising the Twitter Files because "transparency is good for everyone long-term."
Today, Musk sent an email to all Twitter employees saying he would sue them if they released confidential information. pic.twitter.com/0dswC56kcJ
— James Surowiecki (@JamesSurowiecki) December 10, 2022
The next instalment of the #TwitterFiles will apparently focus on coronavirus and US chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci. Surely, it will be just as measured and responsible as the previous reporting under the hashtag. Maybe eventually we’ll get around to investigating why a set of hack journalists have been given access to unknown quantities of Twitter data? Don’t hold your breath, though.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Ministério Das Comunicações, resized to 770×403 under licence CC BY 2.0
This post was originally published on Canary.
Marc Limon, Executive Director of the Universal Rights Group – on 29 November 2022 – published a blog post, “Twitter’s descent reminds us of the dangers of free speech absolutism” which is worth reading in full:
..A decade ago normative interpretations of freedom of expression under international human rights law and under relevant resolutions of the Human Rights Council were fairly finely balanced between the ‘anything goes’ ideology espoused by the United States (US) as well as by American human rights lawyers and experts (including several Special Rapporteurs) on the one hand, and those States and experts (especially from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation – OIC) advocating a far more interventionist approach, on the other. However, over recent years the needle has shifted discernibly towards the latter view.
There are several reasons for this, but perhaps the most important are, first, a growing recognition, initially on the part of European countries but also increasingly in the US, of the growing threat posed by incitement to religious or racial hatred (i.e., ‘hate speech’) to human rights in the digital age, and second, a growing acknowledgement that disinformation (or ‘fake news’) spread online can no longer be held in check by societal checks and balances (i.e., the long-held American view that ‘best antidote to bad speech is more speech’) and thus poses a direct threat to democracy. In a stark example of the latter point, the administration of President Joe Biden has repeatedly acknowledged, and promised to respond to, the key role that disinformation about US elections (i.e., ‘stop the steal’) played in inciting the mob that attacked Congress in January 2021.
Today, the international community, including members of the Human Rights Council, while certainly not united on the thorny question of the threshold between speech that is ok and speech that is not, at least share something of a (albeit wide) common ground.
What is more, that growing intergovernmental consensus has been reflected in the operations of another former absolutist bastion of free speech: the social media giants. Meta (formerly Facebook) and Twitter have been at the forefront of this shift, bringing in increasingly sophisticated content moderation protocols heavily influenced by international human rights law and by guidance provided by Treaty Bodies, Special Procedures, and UN frameworks like the Rabat Plan of Action.
Is Larry soaring or hurtling towards the ground?
Which makes recent developments at Twitter (Larry is the name of the blue Twitter bird), following the company’s takeover by Elon Musk, all the more dispiriting – but also all the more instructive (i.e., demonstrating that the Human Rights Council and the wider UN have been moving in the right direction over the past ten years).
Elon Musk is a freedom of expression absolutist who, moreover, subscribes to the widely held view among such extremists that free speech is being threatened by a censoring ‘woke’ orthodoxy.
Musk arrived at Twitter with a hard-line approach based on a belief that the platform’s efforts over recent years to check hate speech and malicious disinformation is part of some left-wing plot to destroy free speech and thus, in his mind, to threaten democracy. That is why he is now on a crusade to allow suspended users back on to the platform. The accounts of Donald Trump, Kanye West, and Jordan Peterson have been reinstated, along with nearly all those that were suspended for falling foul of old Twitter’s content rules on abuse, disinformation, and hate speech.
This means that Twitter is about to turn into a very unpleasant and potentially dangerous experiment in the reality of free expression without limit.
See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2020/06/03/more-on-facebook-and-twitter-and-content-moderation/
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
It has been said that the first casualty of war is truth, and it is not hyperbolic to suggest that in the Russian government, the truth has never faced a greater foe. History can offer us few comparable examples of such an impressive and consistent state-led defiance of truth. The collective audacity to lie to…
The post Until Assange is free, the war for truth is unwinnable appeared first on InnovationAus.com.
This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.
This is a rite of passage that needs to go the way of the Dodo.
Mercenaries, and now, we have a blue blood son, grandson to Robert Kennedy, heading out to Ukraine with some sad sack ideas about what he in the name of Hell is going to do in that country?
Yep, RFK Jr., let out the news recently, on Megyn Kelly. The newspapers picked it up:
“He felt that he shouldn’t be arguing about it unless he was willing to have skin in the game and take his own risk,” Kennedy said on “The Megyn Kelly Show” of his son’s decision to go to the war-torn country.
Kennedy said his son signed up for the Foreign Legion at the Ukrainian Embassy and was a drone pilot before he was promoted to a “machine gunner.”
“He didn’t have any military experience and kind of talked his way into the unit,” he added. “He’s been in firefights, mainly nighttime, and a lot of artillery fights with the Russians.”
“He had a job for a law firm, a really good law firm in Los Angeles, and I was looking forward to him living with me for the summer,” he said of his son’s initial plans.
When probing him further about Conor Kennedy’s plans, his son said, “I’m not going. I want to talk to you. I don’t want you to ask me what I’m doing.”
“I was like, ‘Um…,’” he explained. “And he said, ‘I will explain it to you at some point, but I do not want you to ask me now, and if you could just respect that it would mean a lot to me.’ So I did.”
We can discuss what the role of parenting has to do with bringing up children who might find it necessary to shoot at people to get skin in the game. Now, Conor is 28, that is, 28 years old, not months, yet as a teacher of many souls over four decades, I can say he is most certainly arrested developed (so many American men are), and this whole idea of having skin in the game is beyond insane. Kind reader, what were you doing at age 28? Wanting skin in the game? Which game? Hmm, I went to Central America before age 28, and I was working with refugees in Arizona in my 19 to 21 years of age time frame. I was involved in journalism, too, young, at 17, and then reporting on some things like El Salvadorans perishing in the desert near where I was headquartered, and some on the drug tunnels down also near Bisbee. Also, reporting on the military putting up aerostat balloons along the border to try and capture undocumented workers. I even did a story on some of those Posse Comitatus folk, the border patriots (sic) who went out there armed and lock ‘n’ loaded.
Nope, no blue blood in my line. Yep, plenty of military around me with an old man in cryptology in the Air Force and then Army. Germany, France, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, etc.
Yes, and I am named after a grandfather who was a WWI pilot in the Germany navy-air force, flying triple-wing planes. He was in post-WWI Germany, seeing the wheelbarrows of Deutsche Marks for a loaf of bread. He also — before the German loss — in the Battle of Jutland, on a ship, the Rostock, that was hit and distressed with hundreds dead. He floated on the flotsam of war and watched the battle ensue and then the two sides with white flags came into the war theater to pick up the wounded and dead.

And, of course, I had Irish and Scottish and English and Canadian family in that war, but also in WWII. Uncle Ian was on a submarine for the British, and German family members on the Russian front, and alas, relatives who survived the bombing of Dresden.

Yeah, I heard stories about Paul Haeder’s exploits on a tall sail ship learning how to be a soldier, and listened intently his war experiences, and learned about his post-WWI life, and his life in Iowa and South Dakota (my grandfather ended up in Iowa and South Dakota as the last of seven brothers who hit Ellis Island before WWI). Paul found work as a former lieutenant impossible — coal mining and “working” the food trains with orders to shoot fellow Germans, per the Pinkerton outfit, if they rushed the trains for food, bread, foodstuffs. That wasn’t Paul Haeder’s ethos, so he never did the dirty deeds of shooting Germans hungrier than rabid dogs.

Now, of course, forgotten history of that putrid, Patton and MacArthur, and their dirty deeds killing their own veterans:
In 1932, 17,000 former soldiers marched on Washington, D.C. to demand wartime pay owed to them. The Great Depression ravaged the country, and a president took desperate measures to disperse the angry veterans.
Tanks rolled down the streets. Soldiers held people at bayonet-point. Veterans and their families took lungs full of tear gas. People died.
Gen. Douglas MacArthur — then the U.S. Army’s Chief of Staff — led the 12th Infantry Regiment and the 3rd Cavalry Regiment into the fray.
The cavalry regiment contained six Renault FT tanks commanded by Maj. George Patton. The Army troops, with bayonets affixed to their rifles, charged into the shanty town and launched tear gas into the crowds. (source)
Skin in the game? Hmm. So, growing up on air force bases, army posts and outside Paris, on SHAPE and NATO compounds, I was truly interested in the stories of men and women, and the accounts of dudes who were in Vietnam, or hanging onto my old man’s Korea stories and his recalling about what happened in Vietnam, though he was pretty much a zipped up mouth on those wars. He worked in NATO caves in France and Germany, as a signal corps warrant officer, and we all in the family had to have FBI-level background checks.
I wonder what a 13-year-old is doing learning about Black Panthers, Cesar Chavez, Che Guevara, and much much more? That was me. I learned about Ho Chi Minh from some of my older sister’s friends who had come back from Vietnam, mentally wounded, hooked on smack, some wounded physically, and most anti-American, anti-War.
No blue blood in my family.
Look, yes, I am trauma informed, and this image, or these two, are full of context and whatever this Conor believes in, in terms of killing humans, Russians, and some of them, if he was a drone operator, civilians, that would be an interesting discussion and debate.


So, listening to RFK, Junior, Conor’s dad, I stuck with him throughout the wide-ranging two-hour Megyn Kelly interview, which in my mind is less of a journalistic interview and more of the same old celebrity cultish thing a multimillionaire Kelly was doing (interviewing) with another multimillionaire, RFK, Jr.
I wrote this to a fellow writer I respect, and who publishes many amazing pieces. He’s a bit older than I am, I believe. Here:
Yeah, ECC, we have this fascination with blue blood, the Kennedys, Bush, those coming out of Ivy League schools, who are millionaires who hang with billionaires.
His son, well, has to be judged on what he was doing, and alas, Ukraine is the most corrupt nation in the world, in some sense. So, there are many issues tied to what the quality of his character is.
He’s a mercenary, and this is war porn. He wasn’t even in any military. He talked his way into the Mercenary Legions. Lied. Oh, he is an athlete, which is a big Kennedy thing.
The entire thing will give this kid a cleared pipeline to multi-millions, and his book will be coming out soon, Oprah-approved, soon.
The kid (man, age 28) wouldn’t even tell his parents where he was going, what he was up to. That is something deeply troubling to me because I have friends and a spouse who have been estranged by their children. There are Facebook groups with the title “Mothers of Estranged Children.” Many of these women were just hard working single mothers, and something snapped in the children. There are 70 year old women who have never met children’s children, and even great grandkids. This is pretty deeply ingrained in my own background in trauma informed case management with homeless civilians and veterans and those hooked on drugs and those just released from prison.
I’m 65, been to Central America as a journalist, covered the US-Mexico border, been with US military as a college instructor at the Sergeant Major Academy at Fort Bliss. My old man was in 32 years. Air Force and then Army. Clandestine stuff, crypto stuff. We ended up in the Azores and then Germany and France and UK. I got to see and hear a lot of stuff. I am, was early, anti-military on so many levels
Very young (13) I was already seeing the destruction of the world through the military state, through corporate malfeasance, through the professional managerial class, and the lawyer class. This kid (man) at this age, 28, is really going to be part of the problem for socialists and social-environmental-cultural warriors like myself, and anyone who might come up as decent, smart and thoughtful adults in our current generation. We have a lot of work to do, and putting one’s effort into machismo, into this trip into a corrupt place, thinking Putin is a Gangster, well, what sort of upbringing did he have?
FYI: In the Megyn interview RFK admits he got the mRNA, and so did his children, 7.
Whew. Amazing, no, ECC.
Trauma, man. So much trauma in the Kennedy family. Epigenetic, and who the hell knows what kind of trauma is in Conor’s immediate family. I am trauma informed, so I can’t judge too much on that level.
Then, Aaron and Gabor Mate, an older interview, on the trauma, the mental illnesses and pain that propelled people to believe in Russia Gate.
Thanks, ECC. A real interview with you one of these days?
Here’s the show’s low down blurb:
Megyn Kelly is joined by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., author of “A Letter to Liberals,” to discuss COVID pandemic orthodoxy, the need for discussion and debate, the elimination of freedoms due to the COVID pandemic, Dr. Fauci demanding blind faith in authority, the important issue of whether the COVID vaccines prevent transmission, myocarditis risk from COVID and from vaccines, rise in “unexplained” deaths in a post-COVID vaccine world, the truth about how many lives COVID vaccines saved and lost, the lack of important data needed to understand the rise in deaths post-COVID, what Fauci said about vaccines that could have an adverse effect before the COVID vaccines were available, the absurdity of the new booster which was only tested on eight mice and no humans, Pfizer’s involvement in the Trump administration, Alex Berenson and tech censorship, RFK’s disbanded “vaccine safety” commission, Scott Gottlieb and our supposed medical elite, American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendations, problems with the VAERS system, personal backlash from family and friends, his views of Donald Trump then and now, Herschel Walker and our politics today, the war in Ukraine, American imperialism, RFK’s personal connection to the war as his son Conor was fighting in the country, and more.
Look, these issues need to be discussed. In the interview, there is discussion about Trump, about politicians’ public lives versus private lives, and how we weigh the bad people perpetrate in their families, in their own house and jobs, their personal personas, against the good their policy and governance might come off as part of their public life. My writer friend was upset that RFK, Jr. calls Putin a thug and gangster, while at the same time, RFK JR does speak out against the cancel left, against the war drumming and against the endless pit of money and arms for nothing to ZioLensky. Kennedy laments that there is $7 a gallon of gasoline in California, equating that to the war/Putin (?), but really, the USA is (has been for decades) in a major free-fall, and, people are struggling with double-triple-quadruple cost of living; i.e., food, coffee, drugs, and now Pfizer, who got the jab approved by CDC for children’s yearly vaccination, well, they also announced the company will be upping the price of the dirty jab, to $110 a shot, which is four times the current price.
I wonder what these lawyers working for these outfits have in terms of skin in the game? Will they head to Yemen to see what it’s like to have USA-UK supplied bombs to Saudi Arabia. Skin in the game in Haiti stealing that country’s resources and stealing the coffers? Which skin in the game will the American put forth who wants to know what it is to take on a stand on any issue psychologically and intellectually without having to put one’s ass in the game?
It is a blue in the face routine now attempting to talk about Nuland and Maidan, about the Donbass and the ethnic cleansing? All of the history of Putin wanting diplomacy, wanting to be part of the Eurozone, to be on good terms with Germany, and to advance nuclear weapon decommissioning.
The thuggery and gansterism RFK Jr. and Conor Kennedy espouse about Putin, that’s way off, sort of brainwashed opinion. Putin is a million times more informed and sensible than Biden or Blinken. They have skin in the game, a la Raytheon et al.
Here, trauma, and what exactly is-was-continues to go on in the minds of Russia Gate freaks:
GABOR MATÉ: What does it say about American society that so many people are actually enrolled in believing that this man could be any kind of a savior? What does that say about the divisions and the conflicts and the contradictions and the genuine problems in this culture? And how do we address those issues?
You can look at that. Or you can say there must be a devil somewhere behind all this, and that devil is a foreign power, and his name is Putin, and his country is Russia. Now you’ve got a simple explanation that doesn’t invite you or necessitate that you explore your own pain and your own fear and your own trauma.
So I really believe that really this Russia gate narrative was, on the part of a lot of people, a sign of genuine upset at something genuinely upsetting. But rather than dealing with the upset, it was an easier way to in a sense draw off the energy of it in to some kind of a believable and comforting narrative. It’s much more comforting to believe that some enemy is doing this to us than to look at what does it say about us as a society.
I mean there was a massive denial of the actual dynamics in American society that led to the election of this traumatized and traumatizing individual as President, number one.
AARON MATÉ: Because you think Donald Trump himself is traumatized?
GABOR MATÉ: Oh, Donald Trump is a clearest example of a traumatized politician one could ever see. He’s in denial of reality all the time. He is self aggrandizing. His fundamental self concept is that of a nobody. So he has to make himself huge and big all the time and keep proving to the world how powerful and smart, what kind of degrees he’s got and how smart he is. It’s a compensation for terrible self image. He can’t pay attention to anything, which means that his brain is too scattered because it was too painful for him to pay attention.
What does this all come down to? The childhood that we know that he had in the home of a dictatorial child disparaging father, and a very weak
AARON MATÉ: Fred Trump, his father.
GABOR MATÉ: Who demeaned his children mercilessly. One of Trump’s brothers drank himself to death. And Trump compensates for all that by trying to make himself as big and powerful and successful as possible. And, of course, he makes up for his anger towards his mother for not protecting him by attacking women and exploiting women and boasting about it publicly. I mean, it’s a clear trauma example. I’m not saying this to invite sympathy for Trump’s politics. I’m just describing that that’s who the man is. And the fact that such a traumatized individual can be elected to the position of what they call the most powerful person in the world speaks to a traumatized society.
And like individuals can be in denial, a society can be in denial. So this society is deeply in denial about its own trauma, and particularly in this case about the trauma of that election. So one way to deal with trauma is denial of it. The other way is to project onto other people things that you don’t like about yourself.
Now, it’s only a matter of historical fact. And no serious person, no serious student of history can possibly deny how the United States has interfered in the internal politics of just about every nation on earth.
There is lots of skin in the game for all of us surviving in various stages and steps trauma. How many countries has the USA bombed, sanctioned, proxied, and stolen from? That is another fun thing, right, visiting those countries and donating some mutual aid support — skin in the game — by planting trees, feeding children, digging water systems. But putting on combat gear and playing tin soldier with live rounds and drones, hmm, that is an interesting skin in the game.
Here, Jim Chambers, from the rich and famous Cox news-cable family, he too went to Ukraine, Donbass, as a reporter:
When I asked him about his perspectives on the conflict now, versus when he made the decision to come over, his repeated emphasis was that he had been “extremely uninformed” when he was still in Alabama and relying on the narrative being spun by Western media. “I can tell you that I was very surprised to see most women and children still at home and living normally in all the major Ukrainian cities I went to. And when I was detained here in Donetsk, it was the first time I had been able to speak to any Russians or Russian-speakers from Donbass. There’s a side of the story that we’re not getting in America.” He noted that even from his cell in Donetsk, he had been hearing constant explosions, every day, coming from Ukrainian shelling of the city, something he had never anticipated. “Nothing in the Western media shows you that this is a civil war, and one that’s been going on a long time.” He didn’t go as far as disavowing the Ukrainian state, or endorsing the Russian “special military operation,” but he repeatedly said to me, “If I had known the truth about what was going on over here, I would never have made the decision to come. I regret it.”
Feelings of sympathy for a man in a life-and-death predicament, who at face value seems to have been duped into his decision, above all else, are completely understandable. But some on the Donetsk side of the conflict aren’t shedding many tears for him, or for similar detainees. Russell “Texas” Bentley is a U.S.-born veteran of the DPR armed forces, having served from 2014 to 2017, and he is a resident of Donetsk. Bentley shared with me his thoughts on Drueke and those like him.
“Yeah, a lot of these punks were just too big for their britches, and that’s almost forgivable. But what they wanted to do was come here to kill, and if the shoe had been on the other foot, they wouldn’t have hesitated. I was behind Ukrop [Ukrainian] lines twice, and didn’t fire a shot either time. Every single battle I was ever in was defensive. We held a position, and the Ukrops came to attack us, and they’d have killed us all if they could have. So, it will be an educational experience for them, hopefully give them a bit of a head start in their next life.” (source — ‘I Regret’ Being a Mercenary in Ukraine: Conversation with U.S. POW Detained in Donbass)
“Here is Texas Russell Bentley: From Texas to Donbass: Meet the American fighting Ukrainian fascists”
I used to show lots of movie clips to my students in Texas, New Mexico, Washington and Oregon. Lots of controversial (sic) books, and tons of articles and professional journal studies. Controversial, in their face, and much of it was during Reagan’s illegal wars, Panama, Bush One and Kuwait and Iraq, Bush Two, Iraq, Clinton, even Obama. Many many complaints about exposing youth and older students to things that went boom in their heads. Everything was on-limits, no holds barred. We talked, debated and then I got students to research and think critically and with the right tools of rhetoric, a la centuries of clear thinking, proposing, comparing and contrasting, looking at causes and effects, all of the ways we classify, argue, persuade, define and connotate and how we engage in those techniques of propaganda, and how to get through with objectivity and then what powerful tools narrative writing can give us. Pat Tillman — Conor, ever see him?
Here, the full movie, free, on You Tube. The Pat Tillman Story.
Look, RFK Jr. did say that we are imperfect, that is, the human race. He was stating how Hershel Walker can be candidate X, antiabortion vis-à-vis policy, but in his own life, having been a part of abortions with his spouses and partners, that is just the contradictory way of politics. It all makes sense as a Catholic who believes in redemption. I am not going to knock that. Conor, becoming a high priced lawyer one day, well, maybe he will do great things for humankind.
Maybe doing the mercenary thing in Ukraine will give Conor better perspectives. Now, Russell Bentley, I have had email exchanges with him. Yes, he has hit some of the same places I have hit — El Paso, Tucson, etc. He went to Donbass, and he married a Ukrainian-Russian, and he lives in the Donbass and reports from the Donbass. Yes, he sent me his memoir:

Robert Kennedy said he is not doctrinaire or hard-headed, and that he learns and changes over time. He repeats how he was working as an environmental lawyer, and that he was part of Riverkeeper, for which there are over 350 rivers around the world with a keeper testing water, supporting the river life and acting as a pied piper for a healthy river. He was suing over poisons in the rivers, mercury. He stated that he was dogged by some women at one of his talks. One woman gave him a stack of briefs and reports on mercury preservatives in Vaccines and other issues tied to vaccine injuries. The vaccine fight he was not a part of for years, until persistent citizens and a medical doctor brought it to his attention. I understand that old saw, “No one is perfect . . . Homo Sapiens is a messy, troubled species.”
That’s a given And we all have skin in the game when it comes to peace, life, truth, and reconciling our own trauma with healing and loving thy neighbor. The whole Putin is a Gangster thing is interesting, for sure, and alas, Capitalists Are Gangsters, sure, I get to deploy that one all the time. Murder Incorporated, the Value of Nothing, the Sociopathic Rich, and so much more I can also utilize as descriptors of the USA, then and now. Did Conor take in that book, War is a Racket? Did he weigh Butler’s words with the reality of Russia wanting Minsk II to be abided by before signing up for weaponizing his idea of skin in the game? What was Nuland doing in Kiev? Biden and Hunter? Are we all going to default on redemption for any sin? That we are all imperfect souls? Did Conor have real deep talks with people outside the frame of Putin is a Gangster?

I recommend reading, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). The book, and now, a 2022 German movie of the book:
“But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony — Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
Yes, banned.
Remarque’s novel saw censorship outside of Germany as well. In the United States, the English translation was banned in Boston on grounds of obscenity; and in Chicago, U.S. customs had seized any volumes which had not been expurgated. Austrian soldiers were forbidden to read the novel, Czech military libraries removed copies from their shelves, while Italy banned the novel entirely due to its anti-war, pacifist agenda. Despite its success, or perhaps because of it, Remarque had his German citizenship revoked and was forced into exile. Just before the onset of World War II in Europe, Remarque and his wife left Switzerland for the United States. They became official U.S. citizens in 1947. (source)
Now? The sides, that is, the many sides, to Ukraine and Nazis and Bandera and Zelensky and Coups and USA and CIA, and then, Putin and Russian demands for stopping the existential threat of NATO moving east with all their bombs bursting in air. John Pilger stated it correctly recently:
Much of this propaganda originates in the US, and is transmitted through proxies and ‘think-tanks’, such as the notorious Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the voice of the arms industry, and by zealous journalists such as Peter Hartcher of the Sydney Morning Herald, who labeled those spreading Chinese influence as ‘rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows’ and called for these ‘pests’ to be ‘eradicated’.
News about China in the West is almost entirely about the threat from Beijing. Airbrushed are the 400 American military bases that surround most of China, an armed necklace that reaches from Australia to the Pacific and south east Asia, Japan and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean island of Jeju are loaded guns aimed point blank at the industrial heart of China. A Pentagon official described this as a ‘noose’.
Palestine has been misreported for as long as I can remember. To the BBC, there is the ‘conflict’ of ‘two narratives’. The longest, most brutal, lawless military occupation in modern times is unmentionable.
The stricken people of Yemen barely exist. They are media unpeople. While the Saudis rain down their American cluster bombs with British advisors working alongside the Saudi targeting officers, more than half a million children face starvation.
This brainwashing by omission has a long history. The slaughter of the First World War was suppressed by reporters who were knighted for their compliance and confessed in their memoirs. In 1917, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, C.P. Scott, confided to prime minister Lloyd George: ‘If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow, but they don’t know and can’t know.’ (‘Silencing the Lambs — How Propaganda Works‘)
Then, on a sad and inspiring (for some) note tied to other types of humans who might be coming to Donbass to fight what they believe is the good fight.
That’s Alex Castillo, who was a fighter in Donbass since 2014. From Spain, but born in Columbia. It’s a tough comparison, right, Kennedy and Castillo. This man had skin in the game, family in the game, was there to defend the people of Donbass being murdered by Ukraine, vis-a-vis USA material and training and NATO beefing up.
He was a communist, too, which is contrary to the bleeding heart liberals who are wrapped in blue and yellow and demand more more more for Zelensky, who has rounded up communists. Russia, by the way, isn’t communist, since so many Americans I will send this article to might need some reminding.
Russell Bentley is in Donbass and was in the fighting groups with Castillo. Bentley is a communist, colorful, sometimes bombastic, but not afraid to call a spade a spade, and he has that robust energy still in his older age days (63) of someone critical of USA, of Ukraine and of Russia’s decision makers who Russell believes have really messed up the fight against the AFU and Azov folk in Donbass region.
But he has tributes for Castillo, just recently killed in fighting:
Alexis was a true Communist, and a real Internationalist. He often spoke of going to Syria or Venezuela or Cuba after our victory here in Donbass, to defend the people and the socialism there. He did not love war, not by any means, he hated it, as we all do here, as all decent people do, but he was good at the job, and the job needed to be done. As all combat veterans know, we are all born with only so much luck, and the more time you spend in the places where the bullets fly, the closer you get to the day your luck runs out. Alexis spent 8 years as a front line soldier, a sniper in a Spetsnaz unit, and he never, ever hesitated when it was his turn to go. And when his time came to meet death, two weeks after our good friend Elia was killed, Alexis met it like a hero, advancing on the enemy with a weapon in his hand. Alexis was truly a Che Guevara of the 21st century, and Alexis had said, as did Che, “I do not care if I fall, as long as another ear hears my battle cry, and another hand picks up my gun.” (“Adios, Alex Castillo: A Donbas hero falls on Oct. 28″).
Any sort of tribute to a fighter like Castillo in the circles I intersect with is verboten, literally. Cancelled, called a traitor, called a Putin lover, called a Trumpster, called any number of names that are completely antithetical to who and what I am. Or, you might end up in a Michigan Democratic rally, with Obama stumping, and god forbid you confront Obama about his administration’s work in Ukraine in 2014, and not only will you get the swarmy and bs Obama folksy retort — “We are all friends here . . . you’ll have time to speak” — but you will get those blue democrats, men, women, children, old and young, hating on Russia and just not ready for any pushback against their multimillionaire-soon-to-be-a-pro-basketball-team-owner Obama. Yelling, “Down with Russia . . . Putin is our enemy.” You know, no antiwar chants, or chants of peace talks, or chants against escalation, of nuclear saber rattling by Biden. Obama is truly a stump. These are his rallies in Michigan, and he was in Oregon, stumping for the democratic candidate for governor. What’s that got to do with ex-President’s multimillionaire package?
I know it’s “only” Jimmy Dore below covering that Michigan event, but heck, no pushback from mainstream media, so here, watch Democratic Party rally with Obama pushed through the Dore seive: “Peace Activists Heckle Obama Over Nuclear War”
All those dead Ukrainians, and Russians, and fighters like Castillo, and this is the end result for so many of them — what they leave behind:
We are in some very sick and strange times —
Deep Critical Analysis Needed EVERY Veterans’ Day, USA’s National Holiday, November 11!

The post War Porn, Blue Bloods, and Fathers (and sons) first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Back in April of this year, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, stated, “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”
A question: can you declare that you are for freedom of speech/expression and ban, or maintain a ban, on a person from expressing himself in a purportedly public forum and preserve your integrity? Whether the new owner of Twitter, Musk, steadfastly stands on the principle of freedom of expression looks like it is about to be revealed.
One question is whether the former president Donald Trump will be allowed back onto the Twitter platform.
Musk was critical of Twitter’s ban of Trump. He called it a “morally bad decision” and “foolish in the extreme.”
A section of the corporate sector (obviously, the corporate sector is not a monolith, as Trump and Musk both belong to this sector) is threatening a boycott of its advertising dollar if Musk allows Trump back on Twitter. This has set the stage for what could turn out to be a showcase of corporate infighting.
Does one section of the corpocracy predominate? Politically, the answer would seem to be no. In the United States, the Democrats and Republicans represent two wings of the corpocracy that alternate between them in forming the government, with, what many would contend, is minimal separation politically.
USA Today, the newspaper with the largest circulation in the US, pointed the finger at Trump as the instigator behind the riot on Capitol Hill that led to him being banned from Twitter. This is an allegation — borne out by the panoply of media takes on the Capitol Hill riot and who is to blame. Allegations, however, do not carry the imprimatur of certitude.
While supporting the principle of freedom of speech/expression is fine in the abstract, it should not be an absolute. For instance, the 2004 Halifax Symposium on Media and Disinformation participants unanimously held disinformation to be a crime against humanity and a crime against peace. In a moral world, lies that cause death and suffering must not be condoned or given a deceitful, argumentative free pass.
So the billionaire Musk seemingly finds himself on the horns of a dilemma: losing money or losing face. Musk has a choice. He can give in to corporate blackmail and uphold the ban on Trump and preserve advertising revenue for Twitter or he can reinstate Trump and, at least on this measure, maintain his integrity.
The post A Choice for Musk: Principles or Profit? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube are failing to curb the spread of right-wing extremism and disinformation on their platforms and must immediately implement safeguards with the pivotal U.S. midterm elections less than two weeks away, a watchdog warned Thursday.
In Empty Promises: Inside Big Tech’s Weak Effort to Fight Hate and Lies in 2022, Free Press analyzed the policies of the four social media giants to measure how prepared each one is to combat Trump-backed efforts to sow doubt about upcoming electoral outcomes.
According to Free Press, “The problem is just as dire in advance of the 2022 U.S. midterms as it was during the nation’s 2020 elections.”
In particular, the report found that the major social media networks have:
- Failed to clearly update their election integrity systems in time for the elections;
- Created a labyrinth of company commitments, announcements, and policies that make it difficult to assess what they’re really doing, if anything, to protect users; and
- Failed to close what they call “newsworthiness” or “public interest” exceptions that give prominent users and politicians a “get out of jail free” card and allow them to post lies without consequences from the platforms.
Free Press warned that these failures are likely to be felt not only at polling stations on November 8, “but also on the streets.”
“The unchecked spread of online lies about the 2020 election fueled real-world violence on January 6,” said Nora Benavidez, report author and senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights at Free Press. “And although most people in the United States now believe that Big Tech should do more to curb the online spread of disinformation and incitements to violence, social media companies keep failing to protect users.”
As the report notes:
Change the Terms, a coalition of more than 60 civil and consumer rights organizations, developed a set of 15 priority reforms for social media companies to implement ahead of the midterm elections that would fight algorithmic amplification of hate and lies, protect users across all languages, and increase company transparency. Our coalition, of which Free Press is a founding member, then met with Meta, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube throughout the summer of 2022, calling on each company to implement these 15 priority reforms as soon as possible and to share more data about their enforcement practices around election integrity.
[…]
Although tech companies had promised to fight disinformation and hate on their platforms this fall, there is a notable gap between what the companies say they want to do and what they actually do in practice. In sum, platforms do not have sufficient policies, practices, AI, or human capital in place to materially mitigate harm ahead of and during the November midterms.
“Even in writing, platforms like Meta, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube can’t commit to the most basic online protections to limit the spread of disinformation and hate,” said Benavidez. “And in practice, our research shows ongoing gaps in companies’ enforcement of their own meager safety policies.”
“These are systemic failures across all of the major social media companies that show how little the companies care about safeguarding elections and fighting extremism and lies on their platforms,” she added.
After Twitter’s new mega-billionaire owner, Elon Musk, fired several of the platform’s key leaders immediately upon taking over on Thursday night, Benavidez warned that content moderation on the site is poised to become even worse.
Our new @freepress report out today found Twitter ranks in the bottom half of platform preparedness for midterms. Musk firing key leaders won’t limit toxic content & it won’t protect “free speech”. It’ll just engender fear & distrust in staff and make moderation harder. https://t.co/ItHXnYJo9q
— Nora Benavidez (@AttorneyNora) October 28, 2022
Free Press urged Facebook parent company Meta, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube to take the following steps to stem the spread of bigotry and lies on their platforms:
- Stop amplifying hate and disinformation content and implement algorithms without discrimination;
- Protect people equally around the world and across languages through increased resourcing for civic integrity teams year-round; and
- Boost transparency about company business models and moderation and enforcement practices, ensuring access to data for external researchers and journalists.
“We are less than two weeks from the U.S. midterms,” Benavidez tweeted. “Over 30 other national elections have occurred around the world this year, featuring conspiracy theories and lies fanned by online rhetoric that social media companies allow to flourish.”
“What will it take for the culture of Big Tech to change?” she asked. “What will it take for civil and human rights to become a real priority with evidence to show for it?”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Listen to a reading of this article:
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Those who hate Russia the most are the ones who embody everything they claim to hate about it: they’re all pro-war, pro-censorship, pro-propaganda, pro-trolling operations, and support Ukraine in banning political parties and opposition media. They are what they claim to hate.
Meanwhile those of us who oppose those things are told to “move to Russia”, even though we’re the ones advocating the supposed “western values” they claim to support while they’re doing everything they can to undermine them. They should move to Russia.
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— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 23, 2022
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Western propaganda means people always oppose the last war but not the current war. The US provoking and sustaining its Ukraine proxy war is no more ethical than its invading of Iraq; it just looks that way due to propaganda. Ukraine isn’t the good war, it’s just the current war.
It is only by the copious amounts of propaganda our civilization is being hammered with that this is not immediately obvious to everyone. In the future (assuming we don’t annihilate ourselves first), the propaganda will have cleared from the air enough for people to see clearly and realize that they were lied to. Again.
The US indisputably deliberately provoked this war. The US is indisputably keeping this war going. The US indisputably benefits from this war while Ukrainians, Russians and Europeans get nothing but suffering from it. Empire apologists will admit to the latter in rare moments of honesty, as Matthew Yglesias recently did when he wrote the following:
The United States is using up a lot of military equipment in the war, but it’s being used for the purpose of destroying Russian military equipment. Since we were already fully committed to an anti-Russian military alliance, this is actually a really good deal for us. Basically, NATO equipment + Ukrainian lives are being traded for Russian equipment + Russian lives, which leaves NATO coming out ahead. That’s doubly true because NATO is much richer than Russia, so we win a long-term game of “everyone explode their weapons as fast as they can make them.”
Again, though, what makes that really true is that NATO material is killing Russian soldiers, while Russian material is killing Ukrainian soldiers. That’s a deal in our favor.
It’s easy to oppose the last war. It’s hard to oppose current wars as the propaganda machine is shoving them down our throats. Everyone’s anti-war until the war propaganda starts.
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Phoniest, most PR-intensive proxy war of all time. https://t.co/UsN5YclShF
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 22, 2022
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The fact that the White House is weighing a national security review of Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase because he’s perceived as having an “increasingly Russia-friendly stance” is an admission that the US government views large social media platforms as its own propaganda services.
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There is no one who can be trusted with the authority to determine what constitutes “disinformation” or “misinformation” on behalf of large numbers of people. This is because we are not impartial omniscient deities but highly fallible, biased humans with our own vested interests.
This fatal logical flaw in the burgeoning business of “fact checking” and “counter-disinformation” is self-evident at a glance, and it becomes even more glaring once you notice that all the major players involved in instituting and normalizing these practices have ties to status quo power.
The idea that someone needs to be in charge of deciding what’s true and false on behalf of the rank-and-file citizenry is becoming more and more widely accepted, and it’s plainly irrational. In practice it’s nothing other than a call to propagandize the public more aggressively. You might agree with their propaganda. The propagandists might believe they are being totally impartial and objective. But as long as they have any oligarchic or state backing, directly or indirectly, they are necessarily administering propaganda on behalf of the powerful.
Question the assumption that people saying wrong things to each other on the internet is a problem that needs to be fixed. People have always said wrong things to each other. Untruth has always existed. We’ve managed. It’s not a problem we should want the powerful to fix for us.
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A regime that points guns at people for wielding cameras is a regime that sees truth as a threat. https://t.co/SzHaDURKQR
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 21, 2022
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Science should be the most collaborative endeavor in the world. Every scientist on earth should be collaborating and communicating. Instead, because of our competition-based models, it’s the exact opposite: scientific exploration is divided up into innovators competing against other innovators, corporations competing against other corporations, nations competing against other nations.
If we could see how much we are losing to these competition-based models, how much innovation is going unrealized, how much human thriving is being sacrificed, how we’re losing almost all of our brainpower potential to these models, we’d fall to our knees and scream with rage. If science had been a fully collaborative worldwide hive mind endeavor instead of divided and turned against itself for profit and military power, our civilization would be unimaginably more advanced than it is. This is doubtless. We gave up paradise to make a few bastards rich.
It’s not too late to have this, of course. We could still abandon our competition-based models for collaboration-based ones and create paradise on earth together; we’ve just got to want it badly enough as a species.
A collaboration-based society where everyone gets what they need wouldn’t just eliminate the inefficiencies and obstacles created by competition: it would free up the brainpower of our entire species to devote itself to innovation and discovery. As Stephen J Gould said, “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
Poverty, inequality, the patent system, the need to earn money to survive, corporate competition, corporate secrecy, competition between states, state secrecy, war, militarism; all these drainages leave us with a tiny fraction of our available scientific potential. Overcoming the existential roadblocks we’ve set up for ourselves in our near future is going to require a tremendous amount of brilliance, and we won’t have access to that brilliance until we become a conscious species and move from competition-based models to collaborative ones.
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This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
For students of official propaganda, mind control, emotional coercion, and other insidious manipulation techniques, the rollout of the New Normal has been a bonanza. Never before have we been able to observe the application and effects of these powerful technologies in real-time on such a massive scale.
In a little over two and a half years, our collective “reality” has been radically revised. Our societies have been radically restructured. Millions (probably billions) of people have been systematically conditioned to believe a variety of patently ridiculous assertions, assertions based on absolutely nothing, repeatedly disproved by widely available evidence, but which have nevertheless attained the status of facts. An entire fictitious history has been written based on those baseless and ridiculous assertions. It will not be unwritten easily or quickly.
I am not going to waste your time debunking those assertions. They have been repeatedly, exhaustively debunked. You know what they are and you either believe them or you don’t. Either way, reviewing and debunking them again isn’t going to change a thing.
Instead, I want to focus on one particularly effective mind-control technology, one that has done a lot of heavy lifting throughout the implementation of the New Normal and is doing a lot of heavy-lifting currently. I want to do that because many people mistakenly believe that mind-control is either (a) a “conspiracy theory” or (b) something that can only be achieved with drugs, microwaves, surgery, torture, or some other invasive physical means. Of course, there is a vast and well-documented history of the use of such invasive physical technologies (see, e.g., the history of the CIA’s infamous MKULTRA program), but in many instances mind-control can be achieved through much less elaborate techniques.
One of the most basic and effective techniques that cults, totalitarian systems, and individuals with fascistic personalities use to disorient and control people’s minds is “gaslighting.” You’re probably familiar with the term. If not, here are a few definitions:
“the manipulation of another person into doubting their perceptions, experiences, or understanding of events.” American Psychological Association
“an insidious form of manipulation and psychological control. Victims of gaslighting are deliberately and systematically fed false information that leads them to question what they know to be true, often about themselves. They may end up doubting their memory, their perception, and even their sanity.” Psychology Today
“a form of psychological manipulation in which the abuser attempts to sow self-doubt and confusion in their victim’s mind. Typically, gaslighters are seeking to gain power and control over the other person, by distorting reality and forcing them to question their own judgment and intuition.” Newport Institute
The main goal of gaslighting is to confuse, coerce, and emotionally manipulate your victim into abandoning their own perception of reality and accepting whatever new “reality” you impose on them. Ultimately, you want to completely destroy their ability to trust their own perception, emotions, reasoning, and memory of historical events, and render them utterly dependent on you to tell them what is real and what “really” happened, and so on, and how they should be feeling about it.
Anyone who has ever experienced gaslighting in the context of an abusive relationship, or a cult, or a totalitarian system, or who has worked in a battered women’s shelter, can tell you how powerful and destructive it is. In the most extreme cases, the victims of gaslighting are entirely stripped of their sense of self and surrender their individual autonomy completely. Among the best-known and most dramatic examples are the Patty Hearst case, Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, the Manson family, and various other cults, but, the truth is, gaslighting happens every day, out of the spotlight of the media, in countless personal and professional relationships.
Since the Spring of 2020, we have been subjected to official gaslighting on an unprecedented scale. In a sense, the “Apocalyptic Pandemic” PSYOP has been one big extended gaslighting campaign (comprising countless individual instances of gaslighting) inflicted on the masses throughout the world. The events of this past week were just another example.
Basically, what happened was, a Pfizer executive confirmed to the European Parliament last Monday that Pfizer did not know whether its Covid “vaccine” prevented transmission of the virus before it was promoted as doing exactly that and forced on the masses in December of 2020. People saw the video of the executive admitting this, or heard about it, and got upset. They tweeted and Facebooked and posted videos of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, Bill Gates, the Director of the CDC, official propagandists like Rachel Maddow, and various other “experts” and “authorities” blatantly lying to the public, promising people that getting “vaccinated” would “prevent transmission,” “protect other people from infection,” “stop the virus in its tracks,” and so on, which totally baseless assertions (i.e., lies) were the justification for the systematic segregation and persecution of “the Unvaccinated,” and the fomenting of mass fanatical hatred of anyone challenging the official “vaccine” narrative, and the official New Normal ideology, which hatred persists to this very day.
The New Normal propaganda apparatus (i.e., the corporate media, health “experts,” et al.) responded to the story predictably. They ignored it, hoping it would just go away. When it didn’t, they rolled out the “fact-checkers” (i.e., gaslighters).
The Associated Press, Reuters, PolitiFact, and other official gaslighting outfits immediately published lengthy official “fact-checks” that would make a sophist blush. Read them and you will see what I mean. They are perfect examples of official gaslighting, crafted to distract you from the point and suck you into an argument over meaningless details and definitions. They sound exactly like Holocaust deniers pathetically asserting that there is no written proof that Hitler ordered the Final Solution … which, there isn’t, but it doesn’t fucking matter. Of course, Hitler ordered the Final Solution, and, of course, they lied about the “vaccines.”
The Internet is swimming with evidence of their lies … tweets, videos, articles, and so on.
Which is what makes gaslighting so frustrating for people who believe they are engaged in an actual good-faith argument over facts and the truth. But that’s not how totalitarianism works. The New Normals, when they repeat whatever the authorities have instructed them to repeat today (e.g., “trust the Science,” “safe and effective,” “no one ever claimed they would prevent transmission”), could not care less whether it is actually true, or even if it makes the slightest sense.
These gaslighting “fact-checks” are not meant to convince them that anything is true or false. And they are certainly not meant to convince us. They are official scripts, talking points, and thought-terminating clichés for the New Normals to repeat, like cultists chanting mantras at you to shut off their minds and block out anything that contradicts or threatens the “reality” of the cult.
You can present them with the actual facts, and they will smile knowingly, and deny them to your face, and condescendingly mock you for not “seeing the truth.”
But here’s the tricky thing about gaslighting.
In order to effectively gaslight someone, you have be in a position of authority or wield some other form of power over them. They have to need something vital from you (i.e., sustenance, safety, financial security, community, career advancement, or just love). You can’t walk up to some random stranger on the street and start gaslighting them. They will laugh in your face.
The reason the New Normal authorities have been able to gaslight the masses so effectively is that most of the masses do need something from them … a job, food, shelter, money, security, status, their friends, a relationship, or whatever it is they’re not willing to risk by challenging those in power and their lies. Gaslighters, cultists, and power freaks, generally, know this. It is what they depend on, your unwillingness to live without whatever it is. They zero in on it and threaten you with the loss of it (sometimes consciously, sometimes just intuitively).
Gaslighting won’t work if you are willing to give up whatever the gaslighter is threatening to take from you (or stop giving you, as the case may be), but you have to be willing to actually lose it, because you will be punished for defending yourself, for not surrendering your autonomy and integrity, and conforming to the “reality” of the cult, or the abusive relationship, or the totalitarian system.
I have described the New Normal (i.e., our new “reality”) as pathologized-totalitarianism, and as a “a cult writ large, on a societal scale.” I used the “Covidian Cult” analogy because every totalitarian system essentially operates like a cult, the main difference being that, in totalitarian systems, the balance of power between the cult and the normal (i.e., dominant) society is completely inverted. The cult becomes the dominant (i.e., “normal”) society, and non-cult-members become its “deviants.”
We do not want to see ourselves as “deviants” (because we haven’t changed, the society has), and our instinct is to reject the label, but that is exactly what we are … deviants. People who deviate from the norm, a new norm, which we reject, and oppose, but which, despite that, is nonetheless the norm, and thus we are going to be regarded and dealt with like deviants.
I am such a deviant. I have a feeling you are too. Under the circumstances, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary, we need to accept it, and embrace it. Above all, we need to get clear about it, about where we stand in this new “reality.”
We are heading toward New Normal Winter No. 3. They are already cranking up the official propaganda, jacking up the fabricated “cases,” talking about reintroducing mask-mandates, fomenting mass hatred of “the Unvaccinated,” and so on. People’s gas bills are doubling and tripling. The global-capitalist ruling classes are openly embracing neo-Nazis. There is talk of “limited” nuclear war. Fanaticism, fear, and hatred abound. The gaslighting of the masses is not abating. It is increasing. The suppression of dissent is intensifying. The demonization of non-conformity is intensifying. Lines are being drawn in the sand. You see it and feel it just like I do.
Get clear on what’s essential to you. Get clear about what you’re willing to lose. Stay deviant. Stay frosty. This isn’t over.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
New Zealand journalist and academic David Robie has covered the Asia-Pacific region for international media for more than four decades.
An advocate for media freedom in the Pacific region, he is the author of several books on South Pacific media and politics, including an account of the French bombing of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour in 1985 — which took place while he was on the last voyage.
In 1994 he founded the journal Pacific Journalism Review examining media issues and communication in the South Pacific, Asia-Pacific, Australia and New Zealand.
- READ MORE: Other presentations at the Mediasia conference in Kyoto, Japan
- The Bearing Witness project

He was also convenor of the Pacific Media Watch media freedom collective, which collaborates with Reporters Without Borders in Paris, France.
Until he retired at Auckland University of Technology in 2020 as that university’s first professor in journalism and founder of the Pacific Media Centre, Dr Robie organised many student projects in the South Pacific such as the Bearing Witness climate action programme.
He currently edits Asia Pacific Report and is one of the founders of the new Aotearoa New Zealand-based NGO Asia Pacific Media Network.
In this interview conducted by Mediasia organising committee member Dr Nasya Bahfen of La Trobe University for this week’s 13th International Asian Conference on Media, Communication and Film that ended today in Kyoto, Japan, Professor Robie discusses a surge of disinformation and the challenges it posed for journalists in the region as they covered the covid-19 pandemic alongside a parallel “infodemic” of fake news and hoaxes.
He also explores the global climate emergency and the disproportionate impact it is having on the Asia-Pacific.
Paying a tribute to Pacific to the dedication and courage of Pacific journalists, he says with a chuckle: “All Pacific journalists are climate journalists — they live with it every day.”

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
By David Robie
A human rights advocate appealed tonight for people in Aotearoa New Zealand to take personal responsibility in the fight against disinformation and to upskill their critical thinking skills.
Anjum Rahman, project lead of the Inclusive Aotearoa Collective Tāhono, said this meant taking responsibility for verifying the accuracy and source of information before passing it on and not fuelling hate and misunderstanding.
“Our democracy is very fragile,” she warned while delivering the annual David Wakim Memorial Lecture 2022 with the theme “Protecting Democracy in an Online World” at Parnell’s Jubilee Building.
She said communities were facing challenging and rapidly changing times with climate change, conflicts, inflation and the ongoing pandemic.
“If our democracy fails, all those other things fail as well,” she said.
“And for those of us who are more vulnerable it is a matter of life and death.
“Who most stand to lose their freedom if democracy fails? Who will be on the frontline to be exterminated?”
Rahman is co-chair of the Christchurch Call Advisory Network and a member of the Independent Advisory Committee of the Global Internet Forum for Countering Terrorism.
Argued strongly for diversity
As an advocate, she has argued strongly for many years in support of diversity and inclusion and in 2019 was made a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit.
On the third anniversary of the 15 March 2019 mosque massacre, she wrote in a column for The SpinOff that “we don’t need any more empty platitudes of sorrow . . . we need firm action and strong resolve. Across the board.”
The David Wakim Memorial Lecture 2022. Video: Billy Hania
The recommendations of the Royal Commission of Inquiry were more critical now than ever, and absolutely urgent, she wrote.
“In a world that feels chaotic, with war, rising prices, anger and hate expressed in protests across the world, our hearts seek a certainty that isn’t there.
“We need more urgency, and in many areas. I’m still disappointed with the Counter-Terrorism legislation passed last year, granting greater powers without evidence of any benefit. Hate speech legislation has been delayed, and we await a full review and overhaul of the national security system.”
A founding member of the Islamic Women’s Council of New Zealand, Rahman gave a wide-ranging address tonight on the online challenges for democracy, and answered a host of questions from the audience of about 100.
“I’m really worried about trolls,” said one. “They affect government, they influence voters, they have an impact on all sorts of decision making – what can be done about it?”
Rahman replied that it was very difficult question – “I wish there was a simple answer.”

Removing troll incentives
She said there needed to be more education and greater awareness of the activities of trolls and the sort of social media platforms they operated on.
One problem was that the more attention paid trolls got, it often meant the more money they were getting.
A challenge was to remove the incentive being given to them.
Award-winning cartoonist Malcolm Evans asked Rahman what her response was to the global situation “right now” with the invasion of Ukraine where people were “under intense pressure to vilify the Russians . . . treating them as ‘evil’.”
He added that “we live in a time that is probably the most dangerous that I have experienced in my lifetime … we are facing an Armageddon and I blame the media for that.
“It’s a disgrace.”
This led to a discussion by Pax Christi Aotearoa’s Janfrie Wakim about how Evans lost his job as a cartoonist on The New Zealand Herald in 2003 for “naming Israeli apartheid” over the repression of Palestinians to the loud applause of the audience.
‘Quality journalism’ paywalls
In a discussion about media, Rahman said she was disturbed by the failures of the media business model that meant increasingly “quality journalism” was being placed behind paywalls while the public that could not afford paywalls were being served “poor quality” information.
Introducing Anjum Rahman, Pax Christi’s Susan Healy said how “especially delighted the Wakim whanau were” that she had agreed to give the lecture.
David Wakim was the inaugural president of Pax Christi Aotearoa, an independent section of Pax Christi International, a Catholic organisation founded in France at the end of World War Two committed to working “to transform a world shaken by violence, terrorism, deepening inequalities, and global insecurity”.
Growing up in a Sydney Catholic family, Wakim was an advocate of interfaith dialogue. His travels in Muslim countries strengthened his links with the three faiths of Abraham – Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
He helped establish the Council of Christians and Muslims in Auckland, but was especially committed to Palestinian rights.
Wakim died in 2005 and the annual lecture honours his and Pax Christi’s mahi for Tiriti o Waitangi, interfaith dialogue, peace education, human rights and restorative justice.

Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s prime minister, grabbed the global limelight a few years ago, making headlines by stating she wanted to put “kindness” into politics. In 2019, Foreign Policy, a publication closely associated with the Atlantic Council and the US State Department, published the article ‘The Kindness Quotient’, a glowing promotion of Ardern.
The strategic marketing of Ardern in various publications has focused on her likeability, pro-environment stance, compassionate values and collaborative nature. To further appeal to liberal sentiments, she was said to represent everything Trump is not.
Ardern belongs to a set of global leaders who were groomed for their positions through the World Economic Forum (WEF) Young Global Leaders programme. Yes, that WEF – the elitist organisation where hard-nose billionaires and their handmaidens gather to set out policies aligned with powerful business interests.
The charm offensive that Ardern’s promoters undertook was an investment. She delivered on COVID and is now expected to sell more questionable policies to the public.
Arden recently stated at the UN:
As leaders, we are rightly concerned that even the most light-touch approaches to disinformation could be misinterpreted as hostile to values of free speech that we value so highly.
She went on to state:
How do you tackle climate change if people believe it does not exist? How do you ensure the human rights of others are upheld as they are subjected to hateful and dangerous ideology.
She continued by saying speech (that the authorities disagree with) can be a weapon of war.
During COVID, Ardern urged citizens to trust the government and its agencies for all information and stated:
Otherwise, dismiss anything else. We will continue to be your single source of truth.
Throughout that period, in the US, Fauci presented himself as ‘the science’. In New Zealand, Ardern’s government was ‘the truth’. It was similar in countries across the world – different figures but the same approach.
When anyone in power or any institution lays claim to ‘the truth’, history shows we are on a slippery slope to silencing thought and dissent that we disagree with.
Like other political leaders, during COVID, Ardern clamped down on civil liberties with the full force of state violence on hand to ensure compliance with ‘the truth’.
Clearly, Ardern is not alone here. Trudeau, Biden and others display Orwellian undertones as they talk of the need to challenge ‘misinformation’ and those who question ‘the truth’. The thin end of a very wide authoritarian wedge.
It seems critical analysis and open debate are fine as long as those involved keep within the framework of what is deemed supportive of the narrative. Chomsky was correct on that.
We are often urged to ‘trust the science’ and accept that the ‘science is decided’ on various issues. We heard this on the COVID issue, when we were told governments are ‘following the science’, while they and the big tech companies censored world-renowned scientists and opposing views and opinions. In ‘following the science’, conflicts of interest were rife and notions of objectivity, open disclosure and organised scepticism – core values of scientific endeavour – were trampled on.
Those who questioned the COVID narrative were smeared, shut down and censored – the playbook of Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Ag and authoritarian governments down the years.
Is anyone who questions and wants a more open debate on climate change or whether such change is occurring as stated or will lead to ‘extinction’ to be charged with disseminating misinformation?
Is questioning the orthodoxy of the zero-carbon policy agenda to be shut down and those who challenge it to be labelled ‘extremists’.
Ardern asks: How do you tackle climate change if people believe it does not exist?
But it is also pertinent to ask: How do you tackle it if you accept it exists?
Even if we accept humanity is in trouble and facing a genuine climate emergency, people should at least be able to question the current ‘green’ agenda based on a ‘stakeholder capitalism’ strategy (governments and others facilitating the needs of private capital) that has co-opted genuine concerns about the environment to pursue new multi-billion-dollar global investment opportunities – described in the 2020 report Nature for Sale by Friends of the Earth.
If you read that report, you might conclude that we are witnessing a type of green imperialism that is using genuine concerns about the environment to pursue a familiar agenda of extractivism, colonisation and commodification – the same old mindset, greenwashed and rolled out for public consumption.
For some, things seem set to remain the same – business as usual.
Economic crisis
But in March 2022, BlackRock’s Rob Kapito warned that a “very entitled” generation of people would soon have to face shortages for the first time in their lives as some goods grow scarce because of rising inflation.
We have a very entitled generation that has never had to sacrifice.
He, of course, was referring to ordinary people, not the high-flying class of the mega-carbon-footprint multi-millionaires and billionaires who will continue to live life to the max and cash in on their various investments and ventures.
Kapito talked about the situation in Ukraine and COVID being responsible for the current crisis, conveniently ignoring the inflationary impact of the trillions pumped into imploding financial markets in 2019 and 2020 (dwarfing the crisis of 2008) and a moribund economic system his ilk have milked dry to the point of collapse.
Kapito is a co-founder of Blackrock, the world’s largest asset manager which exerts enormous influence on monetary policy in the US and Europe. According to Salary.com, Kapito, as the president of BlackRock, made $26,750,780 in total compensation in 2021. Of this, $1,250,000 was received as a salary, $9,700,000 was received as a bonus, $15,125,180 was awarded as stock and $675,600 came from other types of compensation.
Neither Kapito nor any of the hegemonic, unimaginably entitled and unelected billionaire class will have to experience any hardships in the coming years. No, they will be responsible for inflicting it on you. The same class of people who designed and profited from a strident neoliberalism based on deregulation and privatisation – a system now in collapse and responsible for the current crisis and the immiseration of hundreds of millions.
In the 1980s, to legitimise the neoliberal agenda, governments rolled out an ideological onslaught, pressing home the notion of individual rights and the primacy of the market. Now, there is a new ideological shift towards a great reset – again being driven by neoliberalism; this time, its collapse.
Arden’s utterances on the dangers of free speech, the singularity of ‘truth’ and the implicit shift towards authoritarianism must be viewed within the context of managing the economic crisis. What she says reveals how the financial and political elites based on Wall Street, in Washington and in the City of London are thinking.
The authorities fear blowback in terms of mass dissent and uprisings. Liz Truss, the UK prime minister, wants to place ‘legal curbs’ on striking trade unions as many of them take action to counter the ‘cost of living’ crisis. There is also the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Act which came into force in June and threatens citizens’ rights, not least the right to protest.
It therefore comes as no surprise that, today, individual rights and free speech are under threat. The ultimate control mechanism would be linking central bank digital currencies to personal carbon footprints, spending and dissent in an age of economic turmoil. Trudeau gave the game away on that when he hit protesting truckers where it hurt most – denying access to their bank accounts.
How long before ‘misinformation’ and challenging ‘the truth’ becomes thought crime and – as Jacinda Ardern might put it – ‘cruel to be kind’ actions are taken against those who challenge dominant state-corporate narratives?
Well, not long because we have already witnessed it during the last few years.
Tyranny is the type of ‘kindness’ we don’t need.
The post Free Speech, Jacinda Ardern and the Tyranny of “Kindness” first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
A few years after WW I, the poet T.S. Eliot opened his famous poem “The Wasteland” with these words: “April is the cruelest month … “ I think he may be wrong, for this October may be the cruelest month of all, followed by November. Unprecedented. You can hear the clicking and grating of spades if your antennae are attuned.
We are on the brink of ominous events created by the U.S. war against Russia. Yet so many people prefer to turn away and swallow the lies that the U.S. wants peace and not war and is the aggrieved party in the crisis.
A friend of mine, who is constantly charging me with having turned right-wing because of my writing that accuses many traditional liberal/leftists of buying the national security state’s propaganda on the JFK assassination, “9/11,” Syria, Ukraine, Covid-19, censorship, the “New” Cold War, etc., and whose go-to news sources are The Guardian, CNN, The New York Times, NPR, ABC, seems oblivious to the fact that right and left have become useless terms and that these media are all mouthpieces for the CIA and their intelligence allies in the new Cold War; that the so-called right and left are joined at the hip with their obsession with Pax Americana.
There are no right and left anymore; there are only free and independent voices or those of the caged parrots repeating what they have been taught to say:
“Polly wants a war!” “Polly wants a war.”
I am afraid that I will never convince this dear friend otherwise and I find that depressing. Yet I know such views are shared by millions of others and that even if nuclear war breaks out their minds will not change. Propaganda runs very, very deep into their psyches, and they desperately want to believe. Hitler said it clearly in Mein Kampf:
The masses … are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.
Hitler learned so much about “manufacturing consent” from his American teachers Edward Bernays, Walter Lippmann, et al., who accomplished so much brainwashing of the American people. They were all masters of the lie and millions continue to believe their followers.
If nuclear weapons are again used (and everyone knows the only country to have used them), these believers will blame their use on Russia, even though Russia has made it very clear that it would only resort to such weapons if the country’s existence were threatened, while the U.S. continues affirming its right to preemptively use nuclear weapons when it so chooses.
And even if nuclear weapons are not used, the recent sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines and the bombing of the Crimean Bridge, both clearly the work of U.S./NATO/Ukrainian forces, have raised the ante considerably. The door to hell has just been opened wider, and I suspect not by accident, as the U.S. elections approach.
In his recent television talk, Vladimir Putin made Russia’s nuclear position very clear, mentioning nuclear weapons only in the context of Western threats of using them, as Moon of Alabama reported. Putin said:
They [the U.S./NATO/Ukraine] have even resorted to the nuclear blackmail. I am referring not only to the Western-encouraged shelling of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, which poses a threat of a nuclear disaster, but also to the statements made by some high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO countries on the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction – nuclear weapons – against Russia.
I would like to remind those who make such statements regarding Russia that our country has different types of weapons as well, and some of them are more modern than the weapons NATO countries have. In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. This is not a bluff.
The citizens of Russia can rest assured that the territorial integrity of our Motherland, our independence and freedom will be defended – I repeat – by all the systems available to us. Those who are using nuclear blackmail against us should know that the wind rose can turn around.
When the long-planned U.S. war against Russia, so obvious to anyone who sees past the propagandist headlines and studies the matter, soon explodes into full-scale open war for all to see in horror, as it will, these true believers will dig in their heels even more. They will find new reasons to justify their faith, and it is akin to religious faith. The infamous Rand Corporation’s 2019 report cited above, “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia,” cites the following as part of the war process, as summarized in the Strategic Culture article, but it will have no impact on the faithful believers:
- Providing lethal military aid to Ukraine
- Mobilizing European NATO members
- Imposing deeper trade and economic sanctions
- Increasing U.S. energy production for export to Europe
- Expanding Europe’s import infrastructure to receive U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) supplies
I keep thinking of the U.S. false flag Gulf of Tonkin “incident” in 1964 and how effective that was in convincing the gullible population and the complicit U.S. Congress – by a vote of 88 to 2 in the Senate and 414 to 0 in the House of Representatives (try to imagine such criminals) – that U.S. destroyers were innocently attacked by the North Vietnamese and that Lyndon Johnson should be given the authority to respond to repel “communist aggression,” which, of course, he did by bombing North Vietnam and sending 500,000 troops to savagely destroy Vietnam and Vietnamese nearly 9,000 miles from the United States. Johnson simply lied to wage war and Biden is doing the same today. But far too many people love their leaders’ lies because it allows them to secretly feel justified in the lies they themselves tell in personal matters. And what may be true of the distant past, can’t be true today.
In 1965, the folk singer Tom Paxton put Johnson’s lies to music with “Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation“. In those days, art was used as a weapon against U.S. propaganda.
Today we can ask: Where have all the artists gone?
We know that the U.S. has, for the time being, abandoned sending hundreds of thousands of troops into another country; now it is drones, air warfare, special forces, the CIA, mercenaries, terrorists, and intermediaries such as the Ukrainian conscripts, Azov Nazis, and NATO surrogates. Such was the lesson of Vietnam when the draft led to massive protests and resistance. Now war is waged less obviously and the propaganda is more extensive and constant as a result of digital media.
There are many such examples of U.S. treachery, most notably the attacks of September 11, 2001, but such history is only open to those who take it upon themselves to investigate.
Now there is the corrupt Ukrainian U.S. puppet government, which is nearly 6,000 miles from the United States, and must be defended from Russian “aggression,” just like the corrupt South Vietnamese U.S. puppet government was.
To those who buy the mass media propaganda, I ask: Why is the U.S.A. always fighting to kill people so far from its shores? Doesn’t it sound a bit odd that our wonderful leaders destroyed Libya, Vietnam, Serbia, the Philippines, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, etc., countries so far away, and now that Russia defends itself from U.S./NATO encroachment a few miles from its borders, it is accused of being the evil aggressors and Vladimir Putin called another Hitler like all the leaders of the countries we attacked? Have you completely lost your ability to think? Or do you, like little children, actually believe the disembodied newsreaders who deliver your prepackaged television propaganda?
If I ask such an obvious question, does that make me a “right-winger”?
If I state two facts: that Donald Trump – whom I consider despicable and part of the divide and conquer game as Biden’s flip side, and have said so – did not start a war against Russia and that Russia-gate was a Democratic propaganda stunt and is false, does that make me a right-winger? My friend would say so. Do telling facts define your political allegiances, whether they be facts about Republicans or Democrats?
No. I will tell you what it makes me: A disgusted human being sickened by all the lies and people’s gullibility after decades of evidence that should have awakened them to the truth about all these politicians and the war against Russia underway. I have lost patience with it. For decades I have been writing about such propaganda to no avail. Yes, those who tended to agree with me might have moved a little closer to my arguments, but the vast majority have not budged an iota.
I wish it were different. It is my desire. Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan sage of the Americas, who knew what was up and what was down when he wrote Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World in 1998, said this about Desire:
A man found Aladdin’s lamp lying around. Since he was a big reader, the man recognized it and rubbed it right away. The genie appeared, bowed deeply, and said, ‘At your service master. Your wish is my command. But there will be only one wish.
Since he was a good boy, the man said, ‘I wish for my dead mother to be brought back.’
The genie made a face. ‘I’m sorry, master, but that wish is impossible. Make another.’
Since he was a nice guy, the man said, ‘I wish the world would stop spending money to kill people.’
The genie swallowed. ‘Uhh … What did you say your mother’s name was?’
The desire for peace and security is a universal dream. Sometimes it is hidden in people’s hearts because they have swallowed the lies of the evil ones who wish to wage war against those who insist on security for their country, as Russians are demanding today.
It is very frustrating to try to wake people out of their manufactured consent and the insouciance that follows as we are being led into the abyss.
But I will not stop trying. Galeano did not. He left us these words of universal resistance:
We shall be compatriots and contemporaries of all who have a yearning for justice and beauty, no matter where they were born or when they lived, because the borders of geography and time shall cease to exist.
We must save the world before it is too late.
The post The U.S. Is Leading the World Into the Abyss first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Speech by KJ Noh at the Friends of Socialist China webinar “China encirclement and the imperialist build-up in the Pacific,” held on 24 September 2022.
The event addressed the rising aggression of the US and its allies in the Pacific region, including the Biden administration’s increased support for Taiwanese separatism; Western power projection in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Straits; the hysteria surrounding China’s security agreement with the Solomon Islands; the AUKUS nuclear pact; developments in Korea and Japan; and more.
The post The US is Already Engaged in a Multi-faceted Hybrid War on China first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Amazing, really, all the money, all the human lifetimes wasted on the Morty ZioLensky’s most corrupt regime, all the oligarchs making money there, and, of course, the endless gravy train for the most despicable of souls, those offensive murdering weapons manufacturers and the tens of thousands of other companies with big and little inside tracks to the culling and killing machine that is the USA.
Authorities have traced the cause of a sewage spill that closed RAT Beach in Torrance Wednesday to a residential street in the Palos Verdes Estates, health officials announced. (source)

Of course, it gets bigger, here in LaLa Land, where Morty ZioLensky rings the bell for the New York Criminal Stock Mafia Exchange. Much bigger, and alas, this is coming to a township or city near you. Forget about decades of environmental warriors talking about non-point pollution in our thousands of rivers and waterways.
About 17 million gallons of sewage were dumped into Santa Monica Bay following the failure at the Playa del Rey plant. The resulting odors were later blamed by residents who said they developed rashes, nausea, burning eyes and other symptoms in the aftermath.
The L.A. city attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment. (source)

Wonderful beachfront view (above) of the shit about to hit the fan. The hydrogen sulfide is just one issue from the fumes. Raw sewage is the thing of great potentials — heavy metals and SSRIs in the ecosystem, washed up viruses, e coli, and thousands of ever-expanding brain and flesh eating microbes.
Yet, the news is about Ukraine and EuroTrashLandia and the U$A and Klanada — how it is all Ukraine, cold winters, energy bills 8 times last year’s, food shortages, and, well, no more protests, or else. Full-fledged support of war, proxies, economic bombardment, and fake inflation. Here, Richard Wolff does the 101 Econ explanation of what inflation really is: the owners of the businesses and factories deciding it’s time to raise prices to, well, off-set the half-greed to proportionately throw down the full-throttle greed that is capitalism.
It’s only an hour long, and it is definitely basics of capitalism, and, yes, it is NOT the Putin Inflation . . . never was, never will be:
More cognitive dissonance in Chile, where they can’t pass an amazing constitution, but they can start squirting more untested crap into pregnant women, et al:
On Friday, Chile’s Ministry of Health (Minsal) announced that the country would start the vaccination of priority groups amid limitations of monkeypox vaccines in the international context.
RELATED: US: Concerns Are Mounting Due to Escalating Monkeypox Outbreak
Through his official Twitter account, Undersecretary for Public Health Cristóbal Cuadrado said, “We expect to begin the first stage of the inoculation process during October.”
The vaccine to be used for the immunization process in the country will be the Jynneos vaccine from the Bavarian Nordic laboratory. It was obtained through the Pan American Health Organization’s Revolving Fund.
The first stage will include those “close contacts of confirmed cases of monkeypox who are at risk of severe disease, i.e., immunosuppressed people, HIV patients, and pregnant women,” Cuadrado said. (source)

Here, not my favorite source, but two Chileans discussing it, the lost chance for this amazing constitution to get passed by the people:
Ariel Dorfman: This was an extraordinary Magna Carta, both because of its origins, in a popular protest, because it was drafted by people who looked like Chile itself, not sort of elite experts who behind closed walls were constantly deciding what others would be ruled by. And it was, as you mentioned, you know, incredibly ecological, the most advanced in the world. It extended democracy in participatory forms in all levels. It legalized — not only legalized abortion but — you know, when I read the constitution, and I’ve read it several times, the one that has just been rejected, what calls attention to myself is the extraordinary tenderness with which it’s been composed and written. It speaks about the glaciers. It speaks about the air. It speaks about the children, over and over again the children. It speaks about the caretakers at home. It speaks about the animals. It speaks about the dogs. It speaks about everything vulnerable that needs to be taken care of. And, of course, it includes there, for the first time, those who have been invisible and exspoliated constantly by the major powers in Chile: the Indigenous populations. It is also an extraordinarily feminist constitution. And I just could go on and on and on. It had 388 articles, perhaps too many.
Well, well, so the beat goes on, in the endless prattling of media, 24/7, beamed up directly into our brains. Here, another story, tied to my local view, at the OSU Hatfield Marine Sciences Center: “HMSC Science on Tap: Ocean Iron Fertilization: Knowns and unknowns.”
Several decades ago, oceanographers first recognized that the addition of iron to surface waters stimulates algal growth in over a third of the ocean. This realization sparked international efforts to understand the role that iron plays in regulating ocean ecosystems and global carbon cycling. How do feedbacks between climate, iron-rich dust deposition, and ocean productivity work? Can humans leverage iron fertilization to offset greenhouse gas emissions or boost fisheries? (source)
In the “old days,” well, there was a precautionary principle at the top of the agenda; there was a big skiepticism in the sciences and in anything around geo-engineering and climate and oceans. There were even activists against Genetically Engineered mosquitoes in the tens of millions being released into our ecosystems. There used to be folks concerned about nanoparticles in our foods, and there used to be concern about neurotoxins in pesticides and hormone distrupters in baby’s milk bottle.
David Emerson, a geomicrobiologist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine, told Mongabay in an email that when it comes to iron fertilization there are still “critical questions worthy of research,” such as whether alternative forms of iron would interact differently with phytoplankton and ocean currents. However, he also emphasized the “unknown cost” of ecosystem impacts from large-scale fertilization.
“We shouldn’t do it, unless there are concomitant major reductions in emissions,” he said. “We shouldn’t do it until we know significantly more about how effective it will be. We should only do it if the alternative is major ecosystem/human civilization collapse.” (source)

[Satellite image shows a phytoplankton bloom off Newfoundland, Canada, on September 19, 2019. The bloom occurred unusually late for the region, possibly because of higher temperatures and more sunlight than is typical for that time of year. Image courtesy of NASA.]
But there are still warriors going up against Monsanto, Bill Gates, the 10 controlling corporations of food systems, seeds and GMOs.
New from GRAIN | 08 September 2022
An agribusiness greenwashing glossary
As effective action on the climate crisis could threaten corporate profits, Big Food and agribusiness conglomerates are counting on greenwashing to save them: the marketing strategy where they use misleading information to make it appear as if they and the products they sell are providing solutions to climate change. This confusing and unrealistic set of greenwashing tactics has even made its way inside international fora, especially at UN climate summits.
Building on the claims made by organisations and social movements around the world, GRAIN has prepared a short glossary to demystify these corporate proposals and expose them as false solutions. In a concise way, we aim to reveal who is behind these greenwashing concepts and why they actually deepen the climate crisis and social inequality.
This glossary focuses on corporations’ 10 favourite terms, ranging from “climate smart agriculture”, to “nature-based solutions” and “bioeconomy”. We have accompanied some of those concepts by infographics to help illustrate with irony the main problems generated by this corporate greenwashing. (source)

Here are the offending terms, the propaganda, the amazing work of millions of human lifetimes to lie, deceive, steal, and cobble the world.
Green finance; Bioeconomy; Carbon Farming; Regenerative agriculture; Agriculture 4.0; Climate smart agriculture; Climate smart agriculture; Nature-Based Solutions; Carbon offsets; ‘Net Zero’
Infinitesimal, grand, pervasive, from cradle to grave, the bombardment of propaganda and forced and concerted unlearning-unknowing (agnotology), each nanosecond, the world wide web and the dirty perversions of MSM and Holly-Dirt, and those millions and millions of Eichammans working for governments, the average kid or adult, well, he or she just isn’t getting the big or small of it. Logic and ethics are thrown out the window. Precautionary thinking, actions, commitments, well, those things are outside the common person’s way of going about his or her daily living.
Again, up is down, fat is thin, small is big, lies are truth, money is for nothing. Imagine, Switzerland, now a land of young women with masks and pro-pro war signs . . . That is the new propaganda frame — getting young people so messed up on their own roots, screwing with their own cultural DNA, their own history, that they would fall for this insanity:

Ahh, diplomacy is dead, and while Switzerland is a weapons producer, and a haven for criminal activity (hidden treasuries of dictators, drug kingpins, government leaders of the “free-for-all” world, for banks, for, well, you know what Switzerland is), here, the take on how to bring Switzerland back to the table as a neutral actor in maybe helping end the proxy war in Ukraine:
It is imperative that president Cassis take note and change his direction. Here is my prescription for Swiss change:
1. Abandon the NATO-leaning partisanship immediately.
2. Withdraw support of war inspired sanctions. Cassis has chosen to support the EU issued sanctions, but not those of Russia. Neutrality demands honoring the sanctions of neither side.
3. Recoil from any Swiss role that might involve facilitating the provision of weapons for use in the war.
4. Recognize that the ultimate decision makers in the conflict are Russia and the United States. It is readily apparent that NATO, the EU, and Ukraine are largely marching to the beat of an American drummer. Switzerland should seek to open negotiations with the principals, Russia and the United States, preferably hosted on Swiss territory.
5. Host the renegotiation of the basic precepts of the Minsk Accords, but this time with Russia and the United States as principals. That would mean achieving a cease fire and finding a mutually acceptable way of somehow incorporating the Donbass republics into Ukraine.
6. Work toward addressing Russia’s publically proclaimed security concerns vis-à-vis Ukraine, including the exclusion from Ukrainian leadership individuals who identify themselves, either by words or actions, with neo-Nazi ideology.
7. Seek agreement from Russia for the conduct of a Swiss-monitored referendum to affirm the current status of Crimea. (source)
And, then, the queen is dead (not really):

Anyone in the UK who imagined they lived in a representative democracy – one in which leaders are elected and accountable to the people – will be in for a rude awakening over the next days and weeks.
TV schedules have been swept aside. Presenters must wear black and talk in hushed tones. Front pages are uniformly somber. Britain’s media speak with a single, respectful voice about the Queen and her unimpeachable legacy.
Westminster, meanwhile, has been stripped of left and right. The Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour parties have set aside politics to grieve as one. Even the Scottish nationalists – supposedly trying to rid themselves of the yoke of centuries of English rule presided over by the monarch – appear to be in effusive mourning.
The world’s urgent problems – from the war in Europe to a looming climate catastrophe – are no longer of interest or relevance. They can wait till Britons emerge from a more pressing national trauma. (Jonathan Cook)
And alas, the Democratic Party is sooo different than the Republican Party (har-har). Imagine this, a hit squad list coming out of Brussels run by Ukraine (probably not Ukraine per se, more like CIA and Mossad and MI6, et al):
The co-founder of “Pink Floyd” is known for his support of imprisoned Wikileaks’ creator Julian Assange, and for his opposition to imperialism and war, as well as for his awesome music, loved by millions around the world.
Waters recently referred to Joe Biden as a “war criminal” on CNN, and said that Biden is “fueling the fire in Ukraine.”
“This war,” the musician stated, “is basically about the action and reaction of NATO pushing right up to the Russian border, which they promised they wouldn’t do when [Mikhail] Gorbachev negotiated the withdrawal of the USSR from the whole of Eastern Europe.”
Waters also said that Crimea belongs to Russia, because the majority of people living on the peninsula are Russian.
The rock star’s views have outraged the pro-NATO crowd and their Nazi friends, as well as the social justice warriors who froth at the mouth in support of whatever the mainstream media declares to be “the current thing.” Waters, who has always been something of a dissident and anti-war, the way all rock stars used to be when rock and roll was still real, is attacked mercilessly by the “woke” crowd, who are intolerant of all who are not in lockstep with their views. (source)
All is fine on the Western Front, and that shit has already hit the proverbial fan. ‘When the shit hits the fan’ alludes to the messy and hectic consequences brought about by a previously secret situation becoming public.

The true origins of the expression “shit hits the fan” are largely undetermined, though some sources suggest that Canada is to blame—it might have come from particularly picturesque Canadian military language of the early twentieth century. Another suggestion is that the idiom is descended from “an old joke”:
A man in a crowded bar needed to defecate but couldn’t find a bathroom, so he went upstairs and used a hole in the floor. Returning, he found everyone had gone except the bartender, who was cowering behind the bar. When the man asked what had happened, the bartender replied, “Where were you when the shit hit the fan?” (source)
Great piece by Eva Bartlet, on the hit list Ukraine supports, and who funds this Mafiosa thing?
“Western Media Continues to Ignore Ukraine’s Public ‘Kill List’ Aimed at Those Who Question the Kiev Regime”!
Bartlet: “Christelle Néant, a French war correspondent reporting from Donbass for the past six and a half years, mentioned to me before the panel began that some of the information on the site is not disclosed to the general public, and is password-locked.”
Néant, who said she’s been receiving death threats for years, spoke of how it impacts her:“Every time I use my car, I check underneath it for any unpleasant surprise,” referring to a potential car bomb. “
I don’t publish any photos with people I live with or love. I have to be vigilant at all times.”
“I’m not a terrorist, not a criminal, I’m just a correspondent. This list must be closed and all of those involved must be held accountable.”
And so it goes, as the people in Jackson, Mississippi still can’t drink the water. The optics here of this white governor, man, the reason for this environmental racism, just can’t be the only bitter taste in my “shit hit the fan” infused mouth:

Ahh, money in shitty water. Privatize, man. Every single time there is a disaster of the making of anti-government, anti-social safety net monsters, they come up with Privatize:
Jackson’s persistent water problems make daily life hard for residents and business owners alike. That includes boil water notices that can last weeks or more. Before the most recent failure, John Tierre, who owns Johnny T’s Bistro & Blues in downtown Jackson, said his business was already losing thousands of dollars due to spending weeks under a boil water notice.
“First, you’re gonna have to start a couple hours early. That’s already labor in itself, whatever you’re paying per hour,” he told the Mississippi Free Press in late August. “You gotta get in and start boiling water for everything that you’re gonna be using in service. Not only do we have to boil water just to wash dishes, for the bar, for glasses, but there’s the $200 or $300 a day in ice purchases, canned sodas, bottled water, things of that nature.”
State officials are discussing a number of possible solutions for a permanent fix, including privatising Jackson’s water system. “Privatisation is on the table,” Governor Reeves said earlier this week. The city’s Democratic mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, has also discussed hiring private contractors to operate and maintain the water system. (source)
Yeah, baby, billions more for Ukraine to run their corrupt system, from USA taxpayers.
Zelensky?
In a significant assault on worker rights in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky last week signed into law legislation that deprives around 73 percent of workers of their right to union protection and collective bargaining.
“For more than 15 months, the Federation of Trade Unions of Ukraine, in solidarity with other trade unions, with support of the international community, actively opposed promotion of the anti-labor draft law,” the Federation (FPU) said in a statement.
The Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine (KVPU) stated, “KVPU will not tolerate a blatant violation of the rights of workers, their constitutional guarantees and international norms and standards. We will continue the fight for workers’ rights.” (source)
There will be photo shoots, and there will be cannon fodder, and there will be blood, and there will be Zelensky rents to be paid:

That’s $51,000 a month Morty ZioLensky gets for this villa he owns in Italy:

Here we go, quoted just below, from the WSWS, world socialist web site, and these references already got me labeled a commie under a Bush or Trump, and alas, today? All Democrats hate social safety programs, err, nets, err, socialism programs. Commie, go home to Russia, China, Venzuela: (Source)
Małgorzata Kulbaczewska-Figat notes that even under the existing labor code, the conditions of workers in Ukraine were atrocious.
“Before the Russian invasion, millions of Ukrainian workers migrated to EU countries (and not only), knowing well that even the poorest of them—Bulgaria and Romania—offered significantly better earnings to an average worker than their homeland.
“Low wages are virtually strangling our economy,” she continued. “In addition, some 20-30 percent of Ukrainian workers are employed ‘unofficially.’
“Even working in a state-owned enterprise, in a critical economy sector, does not guarantee a stable salary, allowing for a decent living.”
Miners, for example, faced delays in payment of wages. “The miners were regularly organizing spontaneous protest actions, including the most desperate move—an underground protest. Another huge underground protest action took place in 2020 in Kryvy Rih, the center of iron mining of transnational importance. A group of workers of KZRK, a formerly state-owned plant consisting of four iron mines and more associated factories, spent more than a month inside mines, demanding a pay rise.”
She cited an expert on labor law who warned that big companies may “artificially split into smaller 250-people entities so that maximum flexibility can be used even by the biggest and strongest employers.”
The fact that the war in Ukraine is being used to impose a brutal increase in exploitation on the already impoverished working class in the country is a further indication of the reactionary character of the conflict. Workers in Ukraine, as well as their brother workers in Russia and the NATO countries, have nothing to gain from this war, which contains the seeds of a world conflagration. Workers in all lands must unite in opposition to the war in Ukraine, which was instigated by US imperialism and its allies as part their drive for world hegemony. (source)
Selfies for Morty (ZioLensky): (source: “Ukraine Counterattacks!”)
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.