propaganda – Page 11

Biomass plant along the Columbia River. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Propaganda may very well have been invented by the Catholic Church in the year 1622. Yet it was transported into modernity by a man known as Poison Ivy and, more importantly, by Edward Bernays, who once said, The significant revolution of modern times is not industrial or economic or political but the revolution which is taking place in the art of creating consent among the governed.

Just as the Catholic Church tried to prevent stepping into modernity by fighting the Reformation, Poison Ivy fought modernity by combatting those who disliked capital. He fought an ideological public relations battle for Rockefeller but also advised Adolf Hitler.

Not only after the unsavoury beginnings of public relations, the true mastermind of PR, Bernays, had even bigger goals. With his help, propaganda became the art of creating consent among the governed. German philosopher Adorno called this the process of mass deception. Decades later, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky named virtually the same thing:manufacturing consent.

A piece of gigantic machinery had been set in motion to create mass consent in support of corporate capitalism. Today a large section of capitalism’s public relations machinery is fighting a new battle – the battle to preserve the profits of mineral extracting corporations and fossil fuel giants. This, of course, means fighting the awareness that global warming is killing our planet. Anti-global-warming PR seeks to fight knowledge like this:

There is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which humankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels… There are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh XIII

May 17, 2021

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh XIII

Electrifying everything has become a rallying cry for many people concerned with the ecological/environmental impact of humanity. But do such attempts to mitigate/solve such problems/dilemmas actually do what they claim to? I would argue no. They are simply substituting one set of problems for another set of problems and completely avoiding the underlying causes. They are primarily about creating the idea that they are a solution, not that they truly are. They are a marketing scheme to sell products and gloss over using language the problematic issues they prolong or create. It is fundamentally about propaganda, not addressing the plight that human expansion is.

In this vein, here is my comment on an article that looks at substituting electric long-haul trucks for internal combustion engine ones.

* * * * *

We really do need to stop using language that does not reflect reality. Electric vehicles are neither ‘green’ nor ‘clean’. A shift to them is not in any way, shape, or form helping us to address the various ecological/environmental dilemmas humanity has created in its endless expansion and exploitation of the planet’s limited resources (and that go far beyond carbon emissions).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Reporters Once Challenged the Spy State. Now, They’re Agents of It

May 14, 2021

Reporters Once Challenged the Spy State. Now, They’re Agents of It

News companies are pioneering a new brand of vigilante reporting, partnering with spy agencies they once oversaw

*Former CIA director John Brennan was a media villain, now he’s media himself.*

What a difference a decade makes.

Just over ten years ago, on July 25, 2010, Wikileaks released 75,000 secret U.S. military reports involving the war in Afghanistan. The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel helped release the documents, which were devastating to America’s intelligence community and military, revealing systemic abuses that included civilian massacres and an assassination squad, TF 373, whose existence the United States kept “protected” even from its allies.

The Afghan War logs came out at the beginning of a historic stretch of true oppositional journalism, when outlets like Le Monde, El Pais, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, The New York Times, and others partnered with sites like Wikileaks. Official secrets were exposed on a scale not seen since the Church Committee hearings of the seventies, as reporters pored through 250,000 American diplomatic cables, secret files about every detainee at Guantanamo Bay, and hundreds of thousands of additional documents about everything from the Iraq war to coverups of environmental catastrophes, among other things helping trigger the “Arab Spring.”

There was an attempt at a response — companies like Amazon, Master Card, Visa, and Paypal shut Wikileaks off, and the Pentagon flooded the site with a “denial of service” attack — but leaks continued. One person inspired by the revelations was former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who came forward to unveil an illegal domestic surveillance program, a story that won an Oscar and a Pulitzer Prize for documentarian Laura Poitras and reporters Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill. By 2014, members of Congress in both parties were calling for the resignations of CIA chief John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, both of whom had been caught lying to congress.

The culmination of this period came when billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar launched The Intercept in February 2014. The outlet was devoted to sifting through Snowden’s archive of leaked secrets, and its first story described how the NSA and CIA frequently made errors using geolocation to identify and assassinate drone targets. A few months later, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden admitted, “We kill people based on metadata.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

LBMA misleads Silver Market with False Claims about Record Silver Stocks

May 12, 2021

LBMA misleads Silver Market with False Claims about Record Silver Stocks

In a shocking retraction, the bullion bank dominated London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) has just announced that it has been overstating LBMA silver vault holdings by a massive 3,300 tonnes of silver.

This overstatement relates to the total quantity of physical silver bars that the LBMA claimed were being held in LBMA vaults in London as of end of March 2021.

These LBMA vaults in London are operated by three banks, namely the infamous JP Morgan, the equally infamous HSBC, and the maybe not so infamous ICBC Standard Bank, and three security vaulters, Brinks, Malca Amit and Loomis.

On 9 April, to much fanfare, the LBMA published updated monthly vault data for London vaulted silver bars, claiming that as of end of March 2021, total silver held in LBMA London vaults had risen by a whopping 11.04% during March from 1.125 billion ozs (34,996 tonnes) to 1.249 billion ozs (38,859 tonnes), i.e. an increase of 124 million ozs or 3863 tonnes.

LBMA even claimed that this surge in silver holdings meant that there were record stocks of silver in London, titling it’s press release, ‘Record Stocks of Silver in London Vaults – End March 2021’:

“As at end March 2021, there was a record stock of silver held in London vaults. In total there was 38,859 tonnes of silver, representing an 11% increase on the previous month, valued at $30 billion which equates to approximately 1,259,310 silver bars.”

This, it turns out, was not true.

However, for an entire month the LBMA let this fiction persist, before deciding to change its claim on 10 May when it released a statement saying that:

“A data submission error led to the publication of an incorrect aggregate figure for the total silver held in London vaults in March. The corrected figure is 1,143,194 Troy ounces (‘000s).“

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How the World’s Energy Problem Has Been Hidden

May 5, 2021

How the World’s Energy Problem Has Been Hidden

We live in a world where words are very carefully chosen. Companies hire public relations firms to give just the right “spin” to what they are saying. Politicians make statements which suggest that everything is going well. Newspapers would like their advertisers to be happy; they certainly won’t suggest that the automobile you purchase today may be of no use to you in five years.

I believe that what has happened in recent years is that the “truth” has become very dark. We live in a finite world; we are rapidly approaching limits of many kinds. For example, there is not enough fresh water for everyone, including agriculture and businesses. This inadequate water supply is now tipping over into inadequate food supply in quite a few places because irrigation requires fresh water. This problem is, in a sense, an energy problem, because adding more irrigation requires more energy supplies used for digging deeper wells or making desalination plants. We are reaching energy scarcity issues not too different from those of World War I, World War II and the Depression Era between the wars.

We now live in a strange world filled with half-truths, not too different from the world of the 1930s. US newspapers leave out the many stories that could be written about rising food insecurity around the world, and even in the US. We see more reports of conflicts among countries and increasing gaps between the rich and the poor, but no one explains that such changes are to be expected when energy consumption per capita starts falling too low.

The majority of people seem to believe that all of these problems can be fixed simply by increasingly taxing the rich and using the proceeds to help the poor…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Corporate News Outlets Again “Confirm” the Same False Story, While Many Refuse to Correct it

May 5, 2021

Corporate News Outlets Again “Confirm” the Same False Story, While Many Refuse to Correct it

Journalists with major outlets know they spread a false, retracted story about the FBI and Giuliani but refuse to remove it, because their real job is spreading disinformation.

Rudy Giuliani appeared before the Michigan House Oversight Committee in Lansing, Michigan on December 2, 2020 (Photo by JEFF KOWALSKY / AFP) (Photo by JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP via Getty Images)

One of the primary plagues of corporate journalism, which I have documented more times than I can count, just reared its ugly head again to deceive millions of people with fake news. When one large news outlet publishes a false story based on whispers from anonymous security state agents with the CIA or FBI, other news outlets quickly purport that they have “independently confirmed” the false story, in order to bolster its credibility (oh, it must be true since other outlets have also confirmed it).

This is an obvious scam — they have not “independently confirmed” anything but rather merely acted as servants to the same lying security state agents who planted the original false story — but they do it over and over, creating the deceitful perception that a fake story has been “confirmed” by multiple outlets, thus bolstering its credibility in the public mind. It was the favored tactic for spreading debunked Russiagate frauds and is still used. One of the most vivid examples occurred in December, 2017, when CNN falsely reported what it hyped as “a major bombshell”: that Donald Trump, Jr. had advance access to the WikiLeaks archive. Within an hour, NBC News’ Ken Dilanian and CBS News both claimed they had “independently confirmed” this fairy tale…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

CNN’s New “Reporter,” Natasha Bertrand, is a Deranged Conspiracy Theorist and Scandal-Plagued CIA Propagandist

April 28, 2021

CNN’s New “Reporter,” Natasha Bertrand, is a Deranged Conspiracy Theorist and Scandal-Plagued CIA Propagandist

In the U.S. corporate media, the surest way to advance is to loyally spread lies and deceit from the U.S. security state. Bertrand is just the latest example.

CNN’s new national security reporter Natasha Bertrand, then of *Politico and NBC News*, with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Sept. 19, 2019

The most important axiom for understanding how the U.S. corporate media functions is that there is never accountability for those who serve as propagandists for the U.S. security state. The opposite is true: the more aggressively and recklessly you spread CIA narratives or pro-war manipulation, the more rewarded you will be in that world.

The classic case is Jeffrey Goldberg, who wrote one of the most deceitful and destructive articles of his generation: a lengthy New Yorker article in May, 2002 — right as the propagandistic groundwork for the invasion of Iraq was being laid — that claimed Saddam Hussein had formed an alliance with Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. In February, 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, NPR host Robert Siegel devoted a long segment to this claim. When he asked Goldberg about “a man named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” Goldberg replied: “He is one of several men who might personify a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda.”

Needless to say, nothing could generate hatred for someone among the American population — just nine months away from the 9/11 attack — more than associating them with bin Laden. Five months after Goldberg’s New Yorker article, the U.S. Congress authorized the use of military force to impose regime change on Iraq; ten months later, the U.S. invaded Iraq; and by September, 2003, close to 70% of Americans believed the lie that Saddam had personally participated in the 9/11 attack.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Mass Media Will Never Regain The Public’s Trust

April 27, 2021

The Mass Media Will Never Regain The Public’s Trust

Listen to this article:

This year has marked the first time ever that trust in news media dropped below fifty percent in the United States, continuing a trend of decline that’s been ongoing for years.

Mass media punditry is divided on where to assign the blame for the plummet in public opinion of their work, with some blaming it on Russia and others blaming it on Donald Trump. Others, like a recent Forbes article titled “Restoring Public Trust In Technology And Media Is Infrastructure Investment” blame it on the internet. Still others, like a Washington Post article earlier this month titled “Bad news for journalists: The public doesn’t share our values” blame it on the people themselves.

The one thing they all seem to agree on is that it’s definitely not because the billionaire-controlled media are propaganda outlets which manipulate us constantly in conjunction with sociopathic government agencies to protect the oligarchic, imperialist status quo upon which the members of the billionaire class have built their respective kingdoms. It cannot possibly be because people sense that they are being lied to and are fed up with it.

And actually it doesn’t ultimately matter what mainstream pundits and reporters believe is the cause of the public’s growing disgust with them, because there’s nothing they can do to fix it anyway. The mass media will never regain the public’s trust.

They’ll never regain the public’s trust for a couple of reasons, the first of which is because they’ll never be able to become trustworthy. At no point will the mass media ever begin wowing the public with its journalistic integrity and causing people to re-evaluate their opinion of mainstream news reporters…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Journalists, Learning They Spread a CIA Fraud About Russia, Instantly Embrace a New One

April 16, 2021

Journalists, Learning They Spread a CIA Fraud About Russia, Instantly Embrace a New One

The most significant Trump-era alliance is between corporate outlets and security state agencies, whose evidence-free claims they unquestioningly disseminate.

A US soldier in Afghanistan CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES

That Russia placed “bounties” on the heads of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan was one of the most-discussed and consequential news stories of 2020. It was also, as it turns out, one of the most baseless — as the intelligence agencies who spread it through their media spokespeople now admit, largely because the tale has fulfilled and outlived its purpose.

The saga began on July 29, 2020, when The New York Times announced that unnamed “American intelligence officials” have concluded that “a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops.” The paper called it “a significant and provocative escalation” by Russia. Though no evidence was ever presented to support the CIA’s claims — neither in that original story nor in any reporting since — most U.S. media outlets blindly believed it and spent weeks if not longer treating it as proven, highly significant truth. Leading politicians from both parties similarly used this emotional storyline to advance multiple agendas.

The story appeared — coincidentally or otherwise — just weeks after President Trump announced his plan to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2020. Pro-war members of Congress from both parties and liberal hawks in corporate media spent weeks weaponizing this story to accuse Trump of appeasing Putin by leaving Afghanistan and being too scared to punish the Kremlin. Cable outlets and the op-ed pages of The New York Times and Washington Post endlessly discussed the grave implications of this Russian treachery and debated which severe retaliation was needed…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

CNN’s Blatant Disinformation About Russia-Ukraine Activity

April 15, 2021

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough’s belittling comments against fair and balanced Russia related journalism relate to an April 12-13 CNN airing on recent matters concerning Russia and Ukraine. The segment at issue begins with CNN reporter Matthew Chance joining Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the frontline of the demarcation area between the forces of the Ukrainian government and Donbass rebels. Thereafter, CNN news anchor John Vause follows up with longtime US academic/mass media journalist Jill Dougherty.

The false spin is given that Russia increased tension by amassing troops along its border with Ukraine. In actuality, the Kiev regime’s dramatic military buildup near the Donbass rebels occurred beforehand. This oversight is in line with the aforementioned CNN segment misidentifying Ukrainian forces as being Russian.

The CNN bit gives an inaccurate psychoanalysis of what’s motivating the recent Russian military activity. Omitted, is some otherwise valid insight of what could very well be influencing Zelensky and the Russian response to him. Zelensky’s low poll numbers are in part due to the miserable socioeconomic conditions in Ukraine and some faulty decision-making on the part of his government. Unable to get a prompt delivery of Western Covid-19 vaccinations, the Ukrainian government shot down the possibility of acquiring the Russian Sputnik vaccine. That stance can be reasonably seen as a shortsighted nationalist stance. It’s not as if Russia and Ukraine don’t commercially interact. Despite the differences between their governments, Russia remains a key trading partner of Ukraine.

Zelensky won the last Ukrainian presidential election on a platform that wasn’t as confrontational towards Russia as his opponent Petro Poroshenko. The former has since done an about face with brazen comments towards Russia and the Donbass rebels…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Wrong Direction: Bright Green Lies

April 14, 2021

The Wrong Direction: Bright Green Lies

THE RECENTLY RELEASED book Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It is designed to disabuse a well-meaning public of the notion that Teslas and wind farms will save the planet. They won’t, say the three coauthors, Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert; at best, they’ll slow our inevitable self-destruction. The only thing that can save us is serious lifestyle change. What would that look like? From Thacker Pass in Humboldt County, Nevada, where he’s camped out with other activists protesting a pending lithium mine, Wilbert explains.

What’s the premise of Bright Green Lies?
“Bright green” environmentalists believe that technological changes can make our culture sustainable, and there’s not actually very good evidence to support this. In fact, the opposite is true. So, our book critiques technological solutions from an environmental perspective. We’re not just saying that solar panels and wind turbines are destructive. We’re saying that they’re actively misleading our movements and pulling us in the wrong direction.

So, I drive an electric car based on the belief I’m helping the planet. In your view, what should I be doing instead?
Cars themselves are the problem and some environmentalists have been pointing this out for decades. Car culture, urban sprawl, parking lots — these things don’t depend on the fuel that powers the car; they’re consequences of the car itself. People need to recognize that we’re not going to buy our way out of the ecological problems we face. In fact, the opposite is true. As long as we continue to invest in the mindset that produces this culture, that comes out of the idea that factories will save the planet, then we’re going to be led deeper into this mass extinction event.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Book review of “Bright Green Lies”

April 5, 2021

Book review of “Bright Green Lies”

This is a book review of “Bright Green Lies. How the Environmental Movement Lost its Way and What We can Do About It” by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert.

This is a timely book. The Biden administration is alarmed by how China controls up to 90% of rare earth and other essential minerals we’ll need for bright green power and anything else electronic. Analysts are predicting that the Biden infrastructure plan will include mines for lithium (such as the open-pit lithium mine at Thacker Pass, Nevada), a new copper mine in Arizona on land the San Carlos Apache Tribe considers sacred and more destruction of U.S. land, rivers, and aquifers.

This book covers the amazing amount of damage bright green power will do to the climate, biodiversity, and ecology, but above all by mining. If you are trying to lose weight, read this book, you will lose your appetite, I guarantee you!

And why destroy our country to mine metals to compete with China? In my book “Life After Fossil Fuels”, I write “Let China monopolize the second most polluting industry on earth. Mining spews out acid rain, wastewater, and heavy metals onto land, water, and air. One fifth of China’s arable land is polluted from mining and industry. Mining the materials needed for renewable energy potentially affects 50 million square kilometers, 37% of Earth’s land (minus Antarctica), with a third of this land overlapping key biodiversity areas, wilderness, or protected areas. If mined, that would drive biodiversity loss, harm (rain) forests, and poison ecosystems. Renewable energy is anything but clean and green. And quite a Pyrrhic victory for China!”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

alice friedemann, bright green lies, renewable energy, clean energy, misinformation, lies, propaganda, ecology,

US Democracy is a Façade: There Are No Effective Constraints on Elites’ Behavior

March 26, 2021

US Democracy is a Façade: There Are No Effective Constraints on Elites’ Behavior

“Do you remember ’36, we went our separate ways
You fought for Stalin, I fought for freedom

You believe in authority, I believe in myself
I’m a molotov cocktail, you’re Dom Perignon”

-Against Me

How did the cat get so fat?

When I was a public schoolboy, bright-eyed, we sang the anthem every day.

I believed there was some entity, some unseen guardian angel, that made the literal and figurative trains run on time. I really believed there was some incorruptible backstop to prevent the bottom from falling out.

It’s taken years of watching upper-crust decadence and depravity – in the vein of Caligula — to realize the truth: there is no bottom to the barrel. The elites just do what they want and if they decide they want to hurt you, either through malice or indifference or graft, they will.

This is when “defenders of democracy” – increasingly, from the ostensible, self-positioned “left” — will jump in with the well-trodden refrain: “We choose our leaders to represent us – we have a choice!”

You have no meaningful choice. As George Carlin, patron saint of calling out neoliberal bullshit, RIP, put it:

“Americans are led to feel free through the exercise of meaningless choices. There are only two political parties. There is a reduction of the number of media companies. Banking has been reduced to only a handful of banks. Oil companies. These are important, and you’re given very little choice…. You know what your freedom of choice in America is? Paper or plastic.”

High society is “a big club – and you ain’t in it.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ben Bartee, the daily bell, democracy, ruling class, propaganda, lies, con, government, government policy,

Book and Film Expose the Illusion of “Green” Technology: “Bright Green Lies”

March 26, 2021

Book and Film Expose the Illusion of “Green” Technology: “Bright Green Lies”

Technology can be and has been beneficial in many ways. Unfortunately, it’s been disastrous in others. For example, utility “Smart” Meters have been nothing but trouble for people and the environment in numerous ways including fires and explosions (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Ditto on 5G (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

Book and film, Bright Green Lies expose more examples of unsafe technology that are still audaciously but inaccurately being lauded as “green.”

From Bright Green Lies:

The book Bright Green Lies dismantles the illusion of ‘green’ technology in breathtaking, comprehensive detail, revealing a fantasy that must perish if there is to be any hope of preserving what remains of life on Earth. From solar panels to wind turbines, from LED light bulbs to electric cars, no green fantasy escapes Jensen, Keith, and Wilbert’s revealing peak behind the green curtain. Bright Green Lies is a must-read for all who cherish life on Earth.” —Jeff Gibbs, writer, director, and producer of the film Planet of the Humans.

The film Bright Green Lies investigates the change in focus of the mainstream environmental movement, from its original concern with protecting nature, to its current obsession with powering an unsustainable way of life. The film exposes the lies and fantastical thinking behind the notion that solar, wind, hydro, biomass, or green consumerism will save us from climate change. Tackling the most pressing issues of our time will require us to look beyond the mainstream technological solutions and ask deeper questions about what needs to change.

Bright Green Lies – Trailer from Julia Barnes on Vimeo.

The US Ministry of Woke Propaganda Wants to Cancel You, Me, Fox, and Anyone Else Who Disagrees

February 14, 2021

The US Ministry of Woke Propaganda Wants to Cancel You, Me, Fox, and Anyone Else Who Disagrees

There’s a saying that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

But I think that there are people who learned from history and want to repeat it.

Don’t get me wrong. If you walked up and asked someone like the little short guy from Facebook who sat on some books at his congressional hearing so he could see over the table or that dude with the dirty looking beard from Twitter or all those so-called journalists frothing at the mouth on CNN whether they wanted to turn our nation into a carbon copy of Hitler’s Germany, they’d be positively aghast at the very notion.

Yet every day on social media, people like me try to share innocuous things, like an article about taco seasoning, I kid you not, and we’re told we aren’t following “community standards.”

For the record, I had waited 15 minutes between posting that article on my personal timeline and was then trying to share it on my frugal living Facebook page. If I’m in trouble for taco seasoning, it probably won’t be long until they kick me off entirely, so if you found this post on social media and want to make sure you see all of our articles, please go here and subscribe – you’ll get a free, full-length copy of The Prepper’s Workbook when you do. You can also find me on Gab, MeWe, and Twitter (for the moment).

If you think this is only happening to conservatives, you’re wrong. I’m an anti-politician, anti-war, lower-case L libertarian who believes that gay married couples should be able protect their legally grown weed with guns.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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