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The West Slips Down Another Step

December 8, 2018

The West Slips Down Another Step

There is much on the Internet these days about documents allegedly hacked by Anonymous; these documents belong to the “Integrity Initiative” and describe a multi-country effort, funded by London and Washington, to counter “Russian propaganda” and “fake news”. Since the initial story broke, a good deal of confusion has been laid down: Wikileaks is doubtful, and Anonymous itself is being evasive. On the other hand, Integrity Initiative doesn’t entirely deny.

But even if entirely false, they would be in that curious category of “fake but true”: Integrity Initiative does actually exist and here is its website. It is certainly engaged in anti-Russia propaganda. It publishes articles locking the barn door after the horses have escaped: yes, “Novichok” is terribly deadly but that doesn’t mean it will kill you. But, if it isn’t strong enough to kill you today, it may be strong enough to kill someone four months later. Its most memorable statement is surely this:

The Kremlin has invested more operational thought, intent and resource in disinformation, in Europe and elsewhere in the democratic world, than any other single player.

A statement that would stun anyone who’s ever been in a hotel and gone channel cruising: RT’s in there somewhere along with CNN, MSNBC, Fox, BBC, DW, France Télévisions, Rai and so on. A tiny voice in a bellowing crowd. But, after all, these are the people who tell us that Russia affected the US election with one FB message per 400 million others.

The Integrity Initiative is one of many. We had, and still have, the Legatum Institute which worried about “Russian disinformation” back in 2013, a pair of British thinktankers two years later also worried about “Russia’s information warfare in the UK“. Then it was time for “hybrid war“, a supposed Russian invention.

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

Trump vs. The Fed: When Markets Crash, Who Is To Blame?

October 17, 2018

Trump vs. The Fed: When Markets Crash, Who Is To Blame?

After a certain length of time examining history in-depth, anyone who is honest and relatively objective comes to understand that most of what we are told about our past in the mainstream is completely fabricated. We learn that much of “history” is not about posterity or heritage and more about a continuous set of false narratives peppered with half-truths. That is to say, what we thought we knew is actually lies.

Unfortunately, these lies can be complex, to the point that even many alternative researchers get caught up in their own biases to the point that they lose track of reality. Of course, this is what propaganda and 4^th generation warfare is meant to accomplish; it creates a series of filters that thin out the crowd of truth seekers a little at a time. Those few who make it through to the other side might discover the bigger picture, but when they turn around to explain what they have seen there’s hardly anyone left to listen.

Intricate propaganda narratives are actually rooted in simple archetypal memes that resonate with the average person’s sense of story. Think of mainstream historical events as more of a screenplay with a well-practiced set of beats, and the people who draft this screenplay intend we the public to act as an audience with limited participation. Our jobs are merely to continue providing fuel for the machine with our labor until the machine no longer needs us, and to continue perpetuating the fantasies that the machine conjures up as news feed fodder.

There are many actors that read lines from the historic screenplay and act out elaborate scenes meant to emotionally manipulate the masses. These actors play the roles of politicians and leaders of state.

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

Google vs. Trump: “The Good Censor” On Collision Course With The Patriot President

October 13, 2018

Google vs. Trump: “The Good Censor” On Collision Course With The Patriot President

What are Trump’s options? He’s certainly thinking about the issue.

The Washington Post reported recently that the White House was backing off a proposed executive order that would have required federal agencies to “investigate and/or prosecute” tech giants for bias. Administration officials told WaPo: “Although the White House is concerned about the conduct of online platforms and their impact on society, this document is not the result of an official White House policymaking process.” [White House distances itself from reports that Trump could target Facebook, Google and Twitter with a new executive order, by Tony Romm and Josh Dawsey, September 22, 2018]

WaPo reported Trump has demanded an executive order on this matter for some time, but all of the drafts have been deemed “unworkable.” Sources tell the Watcher that the fallout from the leak deterred the President but he still considers the issue a top priority for his base and he wants it addressed.

And Trump is right–it’s urgent. Alarmingly, the Tech Totalitarians seem to be developing a blitzing technique, whereby they all suddenly jump a Politically Incorrect site and do everything possible to destroy its business–for example, Alex Jones and, most recently, the manosphere site Return Of Kings.

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

The Myths We Tell Ourselves

June 19, 2018

The Myths We Tell Ourselves

“We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.”

Your average mass media pundit regularly decries the fact Americans no longer have trust in the country’s institutions, yet simultaneously refuse to take any sort of responsibility for the situation. Government bureaucrats and other assorted supporters of our decrepit status quo tend to do the same thing. As is typically the case, I’ll take the other side.

Not only do I think it’s completely sane for Americans to have zero faith in their institutions, including but certainly not limited to the three-letter agencies, Congress and the Federal Reserve, I’ll take it a step further and argue we as citizens remain far too naive and trusting for our own good. If nothing else, the recent Justice Department Inspector General’s (IG) report on the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server should underscore the point.

First, there’s the now infamous text exchange between between Peter Strzok and his mistress Lisa Page. The following excerpt is from the Executive Summary of the IG report:

We were deeply troubled by text messages exchanged between Strzok and Page that potentially indicated or created the appearance that investigative decisions were impacted by bias or improper considerations. Most of the text messages raising such questions pertained to the Russia investigation, which was not a part of this review. Nonetheless, when one senior FBI official, Strzok, who was helping to lead the Russia investigation at the time, conveys in a text message to another senior FBI official, Page, “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it” in response to her question “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!”, it is not only indicative of a biased state of mind but, even more seriously, implies a willingness to take official action to impact the presidential candidate’s electoral prospects.

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

New Project Aims to “Fact-Check the Fact-Checkers” Accused of Liberal Bias

March 29, 2018

New Project Aims to “Fact-Check the Fact-Checkers” Accused of Liberal Bias

Reston, VA – With the rise of the term “fake news,” many individuals have turned to self-proclaimed fact-checking sites like Snopes and PolitiFact; the objectivity of these sites tends to be questioned by conservatives as having a covert liberal bias.

On Tuesday, the conservative Media Research Center unveiled a new project entitled “Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers,” which is designed to “ensure the fact-checkers themselves are reliable, or exposed as liberal partisans if they aren’t.”

The Media Research Center explained in its announcement:

Sometimes you have to check the fact-checkers.

More and more, major news outlets are relying on “fact checkers” to, allegedly, ensure that the news is factual, sources are reliable, and statements are accurate.

In theory, this is admirable. In practice, it has proven to be simply another opportunity for the media to push their leftist agenda.

Fact checking groups — such as PolitiFact — routinely cast judgments while failing to disclose their own left-wing bias. Their allies in the media try to cast these groups as neutral third parties when, in fact, they are card-carrying members of the liberal echo chamber.

It’s no wonder that the public has so little faith in the fact-checkers. A 2016 Rasmussen poll found that an astonishing 62% of American voters think the fact-check-ers are biased.

The Media Research Center is flipping the script on these faux-fact-checkers. It’s time to turn the tables and give the public the real facts.

While Americans attempt to separate truth from propaganda, especially in regards to politics, some of these reportedly neutral third-party fact checkers— accused by conservatives of having a progressive bias— has left some consumers unsure of their reliability.

“In an era of ‘fake news’ and inaccurate reporting, it is important now more than ever that the fact-checkers themselves are exposed for their biases,” MRC President Brent Bozell said in a statement.

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

truth in media, fact checking, fact checkers, fake news, media research center, snopes politifact, objectivity, bias, misinformation, news, media

Our Shoggoths, Ourselves

October 5, 2017

Our Shoggoths, Ourselves

There are many ways I could talk about the point I want to make in this week’s post, but when it comes to the really difficult issues—and yes, we’re going to be talking about one of those—the indirect routes are generally the most useful. For that reason, I want to start out with a seeming irrelevancy, and talk a bit about shoggoths.

Some of my readers already know about shoggoths. For the benefit of those who don’t, I’ll note that they’re one of the many species of imaginary critters that slithered out of the perfervid brain of iconic American fantasy-horror author H.P. Lovecraft. Shoggoths look a bit like huge hungry masses of iridescent black soap bubbles, fitted out with a random scattering of phosphorescent green eyes that ooze to the surface and then sink again. They’re big, they’re strong, they’re nightmarishly fast, and like most of the other critters in the Lovecraftian universe, their entire purpose in existence is to give investigators something to run away from as quickly as possible, screaming in terror all the while.

That sort of thing is a staple of bad horror fiction, but Lovecraft was doing something at once highly subtle and unpleasantly familiar with it. Central to his worldview was the belief that the eight-inch-long lump of meat called the human brain is completely out of its league when it tries to make sense of the cosmos in which we live, and can all too easily go stark staring crazy if it makes the attempt. His monstrous beings and tentacled devil-gods get most of their power over the reader from their sheer incomprehensibility. In his very best stories—“The Color Out Of Space” is perhaps the finest example—that theme takes center stage, and lives are destroyed and minds shattered by a force without malice and without meaning, irrupting from an impersonal cosmos serenely indifferent to the pretensions of our species.

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

Every Single Cognitive Bias In One Infographic

September 30, 2017

Every Single Cognitive Bias In One Infographic

The human brain is capable of incredible things, but it’s also extremely flawed at times.

Science has shown that we tend to make all sorts of mental mistakes, called “cognitive biases”, that can affect both our thinking and actions. These biases, as Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins points out, can lead to us extrapolating information from the wrong sources, seeking to confirm existing beliefs, or failing to remember events the way they actually happened!

To be sure, this is all part of being human – but such cognitive biases can also have a profound effect on our endeavors, investments, and life in general. For this reason, today’s infographic from DesignHacks.co is particularly handy. It shows and groups each of the 188 known confirmation biases in existence.

Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

WHAT IS A COGNITIVE BIAS?

Humans tend to think in certain ways that can lead to systematic deviations from making rational judgments.

These tendencies usually arise from:

Information processing shortcuts
The limited processing ability of the brain
Emotional and moral motivations
Distortions in storing and retrieving memories
Social influence

Cognitive biases have been studied for decades by academics in the fields of cognitive science, social psychology, and behavioral economics, but they are especially relevant in today’s information-packed world. They influence the way we think and act, and such irrational mental shortcuts can lead to all kinds of problems in entrepreneurship, investing, or management.

COGNITIVE BIAS EXAMPLES

Here are four examples of how these types of biases can affect people in the business world:

Familiarity Bias: An investor puts her money in “what she knows”, rather than seeking the obvious benefits from portfolio diversification. Just because a certain type of industry or security is familiar doesn’t make it the logical selection.

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

The MSM’s Anti-Russia Bias

September 27, 2017

The MSM’s Anti-Russia Bias

The U.S. mainstream media (MSM} presents itself as the arbiter of truth-telling and journalistic professionalism – the global gold standard – but its deep-seated biases, especially on Russia, belie that self-image, notes William Blum.

The anti-Russian/anti-Soviet bias in the American media appears to have no limit. You would think that they would have enough self-awareness and enough journalistic integrity -– just enough -– to be concerned about their image. But it keeps on coming, piled higher and deeper.

President Reagan meeting with Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev at the Soviet Mission during the Geneva Summit in Switzerland, Nov.20, 1985. (Photo from Reagan presidential library)

One of the latest cases in point is a review of a new biography of Mikhail Gorbachev in the New York Times Book Review (September 10). The review says that Gorbachev “was no hero to his own people” because he was “the destroyer of their empire.”

This is how the New York Times avoids having to say anything positive about life in the Soviet Union or about socialism. They would have readers believe that it was the loss of the likes of Czechoslovakia or Hungary et al. that upset the Russian people, not the loss, under Gorbachev’s perestroika, of a decent standard of living for all, a loss affecting people’s rent, employment, vacations, medical care, education, and many other aspects of the Soviet welfare state.

Accompanying this review is a quote from a 1996 Times review of Gorbachev’s own memoir, which said: “It mystifies Westerners that Mikhail Gorbachev is loathed and ridiculed in his own country. This is the man who pulled the world several steps back from the nuclear brink and lifted a crushing fear from his countrymen, who ended bloody foreign adventures [and] liberated Eastern Europe. … Yet his repudiation at home could hardly be more complete. His political comeback attempt in June attracted less than 1 percent of the vote.”

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

Centralized “Truth” – 13 Ways To Fight Fake News (And The Big Problem With All Of Them)

May 22, 2017

Centralized “Truth” – 13 Ways To Fight Fake News (And The Big Problem With All Of Them)

Will humans or computer algorithms be the future arbiters of “truth”?

The following infographic from Futurism sums up the ideas that academics, technologists, and other experts are proposing that we implement to stop the spread of fake news.

Below the infographic, Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins raises concerns about each of these methods.

Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

While fake news is certainly problematic, the solutions proposed to penalize articles deemed to be “untrue” are just as scary.

By centralizing fact checking, a system is created that is inherently fragile, biased, and prone for abuse. Furthermore, the idea of axing websites that are deemed to be “untrue” is an initiative that limits independent thought and discourse, while allowing legacy media to remain entrenched.

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

Opinion Infected by Bias

September 10, 2016

Opinion Infected by Bias

QUESTION: Marty; Why do you say your opinion is not worth much? You have been around for some time and you are the only analyst to have been behind the curtain. If anyone’s opinion carries any weight, it has to be yours.

ANSWER:Yes. Experience is everything. You cannot forecast something you have never seen, but opinion is fallible because we are all infected with that human trait of being fallible. I have learned so much from the computer. This is the importance of real cognitive adaptive computer systems. They have no emotion or bias so they are objective. In a way, they are like the character Spock from “Star Trek.” If someone believes that paper money is the great evil, then they will be blind to all other influence and look no further. Concluding that the evil is paper money, means they consider nothing else when in fact it is the fiscal mismanagement of the monetary system irrespective of what society uses for money. This is why a gold standard would not work and has failed historically every time just like Bretton Woods. It has nothing to do with the medium of exchange. It is always about those in charge. Milton Friedman said if you put the government in charge of the Sahara Desert, there would be a shortage of sand in no time. Investigating the truth requires abandoning all bias.

The computer has never been wrong because it sees trends without interjecting some theory or bias which infects all opinion. The only times the computer has been wrong seems directly linked to serious manipulation. It projected the Al Gore would win by a tiny, narrow margin. The Supreme Court gave it to Bush and would not allow a recount. When the recount was completed, it proved that the computer was correct after all. But that is reality.

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

The American Media: Pandering to Bias and Ignorance

December 21, 2015

The American Media: Pandering to Bias and Ignorance

anderson-cooper-attack-video1

The Texas board of education didn’t find anything wrong with a world geography textbook that said slaves from Africa were workers, but that immigrants from northern Europe were indentured servants.

This is the same school board that five years ago demanded that textbooks emphasize that slavery was only a side issue to the cause of the civil war, and that Republican achievements be emphasized in political science and civics textbooks.

For good measure, the officials also wanted a “fair and balanced” look at evolution versus intelligent design or creationism, and that global warming is only a theory, overlooking substantial and significant scientific evidence.

Because Texas adopts textbooks for the entire state, and there is minimal local choice, publishers tend to publish what Texas wants. The geography book had a 100,000 sale in Texas alone. However, McGraw-Hill, under a firestorm of protest from educators and parents, is modifying the text—African slaves will no longer be “workers” but slaves in the next printing.

Publishers in America, trying to reap the widest possible financial benefit by not offending anyone, especially school boards, often force authors to overlook significant historical and social trends. For more than a century, books which targeted buyers in the North consistently overlooked or minimized Southern views about the Civil War; other books, which targeted a Southern readership, discussed the War of Northern Aggression or the War Between the States.

Almost all media overlooked significant issues about slavery, the genocide against Native Americans, the real reasons for the Mexican-American War, the seizure of personal property and subsequent incarceration of Japanese-American citizens during World War II, the reasons why the United States went to war in Vietnam, the first Gulf War and, more recent, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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

PBS Joins the MSM’s Syria-Russia Bias

December 7, 2015

PBS Joins the MSM’s Syria-Russia Bias

Mainstream U.S. media systematically excludes points of view on world affairs that deviate from Official Washington’s “group think.” With no lessons learned from the Iraq-WMD debacle, the MSM only lets on establishment or right-wing pundits with conformist points of view on crises with Syria and Russia, notes Rick Sterling.

PBS Newshour is considered high-quality journalism by many North Americans. But is it? A test case is their report on Nov. 24 when a Russian jet was shot down and one pilot killed as he descended by parachute. This was a significant international event and the situation is still dangerous. The conflict in Syria could get even worse. PBS Newshour presented a discussion/analysis of the event with two guests: Nicholas Burns and Angela Stent. The PBS Newshour host was Judy Woodruff.

This critique applies to that one PBS Newshour broadcast but the essential points are true for much of what you see on the program (and across the mainstream U.S. news media). Assumptions and bias regarding the Syrian conflict are pervasive and persistent. So, how can U.S. foreign policy change (or even show some nuance) if the public is continually fed biased and false information from one point of view? Here are specific points:

—PBS Newshour selected two analysts with essentially the same viewpoint, representing the U.S. government and military/security establishment:

Nicholas Burns is a former U.S. Ambassador to NATO. In early 2003 he urged the “unity” of NATO as some NATO allies expressed doubts about the U.S. the invasion of Iraq. In 2006, he urged punishing sanctions on Iran. In 2011, Burn wrote, “President Obama was surely right to commit the United States, however reluctantly, to the NATO campaign [to overthrow Libyan President Gaddafi].” Burns has a track record supporting Western aggression against other countries. He evidently has learned nothing from the resulting chaos, devastation and death.

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

The FED v Bias & Prejudice

December 2, 2015

The FED v Bias & Prejudice

COMMENT: If the Fed is so smart and understands the problem with low/negative interest rates, then why didn’t it hike rates in September? Better yet, why didn’t they raise rates YEARS ago? The Fed has kept rates near zero for seven years but now suddenly realizes that this is a problem?

I am surprised that you think so highly of them. The Fed consists of a bunch of academics with no real-world experience, no different than the ECB.

REPLY: Your bias and prejudice blind you. The ECB is run by Mario Draghi who is ex-Goldman Sachs. Mario Draghi faces a currency that is collapsing and a power structure that is fundamentally flawed. This is entirely different from the problems facing the Fed. Europe is in deep recession that is intensely deflationary. That is not the case yet in the USA.

Yellen has inherited a nightmare. It was Ben Bernankewho made the mess we are in today. He lowered rates, bought in long-term bonds the Fed cannot now sell and must wait for them to simply mature. Yellen is trapped for she cannot reverse QE and sell the bonds Bernanke bought and she is facing a meltdown in pension funds because rates are too low for too long. Yellen has no escape. You are also blind to how politics functions and all you are doing is listening to the bullshit that is spun by pretend analysts who know nothing about what really goes on behind the curtain.

The mere fact that the IMF came out publicly to ask the Fed not to raise rates in June was a political maneuver to counteract Yellen. Things of this nature are discussed behind the curtain – never in front. The IMF turned to the press to STOP Yellen because she would have raised rates back in June. It was Ben Bernanke who listened to the bankers and created insanity.

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

Distortion, Revisionism & the Liberal Media

November 30, 2015

Distortion, Revisionism & the Liberal Media

jcorbyn

American readers will be familiar with the enduring notion that the media has a liberal bias. Sensible ones will know that this notion is absurd, or at least requires a rather loose working definition of the word “liberal”. There isn’t quite the same feeling about the media in Britain, at least not taken as a whole, and this is all the more effective in sustaining the myth that freedom of press and speech are more or less protected and culturally ingrained. British people can buy a “liberal” newspaper or a “conservative” one and be happy in the knowledge that they are consuming more or less independent news, spun in their favoured direction. Conservative citizens may howl at the supposedly extreme-left views churned out by the various Marxist propaganda mills, such as The Guardian, or the Daily Mirror, and the liberal centre-left can find refuge in these texts from the right-wing forces of darkness in The Times, The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail.

The supposed ideological biases of these publications are known and accepted. The only media outlet truly accused of bias as though it were crime is the BBC, which has long been accused of having a liberal agenda. This idea has received some support from those who ought to be in the position to know, for example the former business editor, Jeff Randall, who now works for Murdoch’s Sky News. Randall claims a “very senior BBC person” told him that “the BBC is not neutral in multiculturalism: it believes in it and promotes diversity”.[i] Andrew Marr, a former editor of The Independent, a newspaper which defines itself by its apparent freedom from party-political bias, moved in the opposite direction and now works for the BBC.

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

Good Little Maoists

November 2, 2015

Good Little Maoists

Sometimes societies just go batshit crazy. For ten years, 1966 to 1976, China slid into the chaotic maw of Mao Zedong’s “cultural revolution.” A youth army called the Red Guard was given license to terrorize authorities all over the nation — teachers, scientists, government officials, really just about anyone in charge of anything. They destroyed lives and families and killed quite a few of their victims. They paralyzed the country with their persecutions against “bourgeois elements” and “capitalist roaders,” reaching as deep into the top leadership as Deng Xiaoping, who was paraded in public wearing a dunce-cap, but eventually was able to put an end to all the insanity after Mao’s death.

America’s own cultural revolution has worked differently. It was mostly limited to the hermetically-sealed hot-house world of the universities, where new species of hierophants and mystagogues were busy constructing a crypto-political dogma aimed at redefining status arrangements among the various diverse ethnic and sexual “multi-cultures” of the land.

There is no American Mao, but there are millions of good little Maoists all over America bent on persecuting anyone who departs from a party line that now dominates the bubble of campus life. It’s a weird home-grown mixture of Puritan witch-hunting, racial paranoia, and sexual hysteria, and it comes loaded with a lexicon of jargon — “micro-aggression,” “trigger warnings,” “speech codes,” etc — designed to enforce uniformity in thinking, and to punish departures from it.

At a moment in history when the US is beset by epochal problems of economy, energy, ecology, and foreign relations, campus life is preoccupied with handwringing over the hurt feelings of every imaginable ethnic and sexual group and just as earnestly with the suppression of ideological trespassers who don’t go along with the program of exorcisms.

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

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