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When it comes to U.S. presidents, experience has taught me to always assume the worst. Irrespective of what the winning candidate said on the campaign trail, a few things things tend to happen once they’re sworn into office. To name a few, we almost always end up with a further expansion of the imperial presidency, more pointless wars, growth in the surveillance state and continued unaccountable pillaging by Wall Street. The worst trends and elements of society tend to grow no matter who sits in the oval office.

As such, I’m genuinely heartened by those rare occasions when a U.S. president tries to reduce geopolitical tensions and prioritize peace. This isn’t to say such attempts will work out perfectly, or work at all, but in a world in which a hammer-focused American foreign policy tends to see every situation as a nail, attempts at peace should at the very least be supported by those who claim to care about such things.

Nevertheless, here in America we’ve encouraged and rewarded a peculiar class of people who tend to cluster within specialized niches of the imperial economy, namely the mass media and think tanks often funded by military contractors and foreign dictatorships. While these types always cheer U.S. overseas belligerence, nothing gets them clutching their pearls more fiercely than Donald Trump doing something reasonable.

When it comes to U.S. presidents I’m nobody’s cheerleader, but if the executive tries to make the world more peaceful I’ll support it. If they do the opposite, I’ll oppose. As such, I’m on board with Trump trying to ease tensions on the Korean peninsula and I’m glad he’s doing it. Naturally, mass media pundits took the opposite approach and immediately resorted to their trademark creepy militarism and ignorance.

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

In The Western World Truth Is An Endangered Species: Come To Its Support

June 12, 2018

In The Western World Truth Is An Endangered Species: Come To Its Support

Nowhere in the Western world is truth respected. Even universities are imposing censorship and speech control. Governments are shutting down, and will eventually criminalize, all explanations that differ from official ones. The Western world no longer has a print and TV media. In its place there is a propaganda ministry for the ruling elite.

Whistleblowers are prosecuted and imprisoned despite their protection by federal statue. The US Department of Justice is a Department of Injustice. It has been a long time since any justice flowed from the DOJ.

The total corruption of the print and TV media led to the rise of Internet media such as Wikileaks, led by Julian Assange, a prisoner since 2012.
Assange is an Australian and Ecuadorian citizen. He is not an American citizen. Yet US politicians and media claim that he is guilty of treason because he published official documents leaked to Wikileaks that prove the duplicity and criminality of the US government.

It is strictly impossible for a non-citizen to be guilty of treason. It is strictly impossible under the US Constitution for the reporting of facts to be spying. The function of the media is to expose and to hold accountable the government. This function is no longer performed by the Western print and TV media.

Washington wants revenge and is determined to get it. If Assange were as corrupt at the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, National Public Radio, MSNBC, etc., he would have reported the leaker to Washington, not published the information, and retired as a multi-millionaire with Washington’s thanks. However, unfortunately for Assange, he had integrity.

Integrity today in the Western world has no value. You cannot find integrity in the government, in the global corporations, in the universities and schools, and most certainly not in the media.

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

Bilderberg Meetings – Just An “Occasional Supper Club”?

June 7, 2018

Bilderberg Meetings – Just An “Occasional Supper Club”?

The European online “news” service, Independent, published an article about this years annual Bilderberg meeting being held in Italy. Why is it wherever Bilderberg goes economic chaos follows? Remember Greece? Greece was tagged on both sides of their economic problems first in 2008 at the beginning of their problems and then again in 2017 after Prime Minister Tsirpas had sold his soul and betrayed the people to the Troika.

As the Independent described the annual meeting.

Annual meeting of American and European elite attracts huge amount of suspicion and paranoia but is it really just an ‘occasional supper club’? Source

Not really sure I would describe these meetings as a “supper club”. More like a club meeting of treasonous criminals coming together to decide issues like the EuroZone, the euro currency and the like. When you have global corporate heads and government officials from around the world meeting behind closed doors with a 100% complicit media blackout this is the very definition of treason. The media is happy to oblige the request for secrecy.

A collective of elite North American and European politicians, business leaders, financiers and academics, the group has attracted a good deal of suspicion over the last half-century, with conspiracy theorists confidently asserting that its members are plotting the New World Order and are hell-bent on global domination.

Protesters who believe the Bilderbergers represent a “shadow world government” regularly picket their yearly meet-ups, creating a need for high security at all times, but attendees insist the group is simply a debating society taking place outside the glare of the political spotlight. Source

Why would a bunch of “sign carriers” create enough of a threat to warrant high-powered, fully automatic, assault rifles for the protection of these treasonous meeting attendees?

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

Jerry Brown: 3 Billion Will Die from Global Warming

June 5, 2018

Jerry Brown: 3 Billion Will Die from Global Warming

On April 17, 2018, California Governor Jerry Brown delivered a speech at the National Press Club in Washington DC. A day later the headline that forms the title of this post appeared in Google News. I’ve been unable to find out exactly how many views Google News gets, but it’s probably in the billions/year range, and this headline is sufficiently eye-catching that even viewers who just skim through the articles can hardly miss it. Three billion global warming deaths is, however, a lot, and the question is where Gov. Brown got this number from. It turns out to be a recent World Health Organization report that cites 3 billion as the number of people potentially affected by “household air pollution from inefficient cooking practices“. How Gov. Brown translated this into 3 billion global warming deaths isn’t clear, but if you sincerely believe that climate change will destroy civilization the important thing is to get the message across. The facts are secondary.

In the interests of fairness we must first consider what Gov. Brown actually said in his speech. According to CNS News and other sources it was this: “The prospect is 3 billion people on this planet will be subject to fatal lethal heat events.” A heat event that is both fatal and lethal can be guaranteed to kill the people who are subjected to it, but this is not quite as catchy a headline as 3 billion will die. So Gov. Brown got some help from the media in delivering his message.

Second, the World Health Organization has consistently projected that climate change deaths will be far lower than Gov. Brown claims. WHO estimates (probably overestimates, but that’s a separates issue) only the health impacts of climate change, but these include the impacts of drought (malnutrition etc), and the impacts of floods are generally included in a separate category.

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

Turning Trees Into Enemies. The New War on Forests

June 3, 2018

Turning Trees Into Enemies. The New War on Forests

The San Marco Square in Florence in 2017. You can see the ancient trees of the square being cut as part of a plan that involved the removal of several hundred trees in the whole city. The action was accompanied by a propaganda campaign against trees that looked curiously similar to that used to justify the invasion of Iraq, in 2003. “Trees are a threat to citizens,”, “There is no alternative,” “Killer Trees,” and the like.

The war on trees seems to be starting. I don’t know about what’s happening where you live, but here, in Italy, we see it clearly, accompanied by all the propaganda tricks normally used to start wars. So, we have seen a string of accusations in the media against “killer trees,” supposed to be a danger for the citizens because they can fall on them or on their beloved shiny cars. The image on the right, here shows the first page of an Italian newspaper in 2014 informing us there are “50,000 killer trees” in Rome. Truly an invading army to be fought with the appropriate weaponry in the form of chainsaws.

One century ago, city administrations were proud of planting trees, today they are proud of cutting them. What happened that changed their attitude so much is hard to say. Maybe it is the general degradation of the ecosystem that has turned trees into monsters, but that doesn’t explain how administrations are starting also a war on forests – surely not threatening citizens or their cars. In a previous post, I commented on a recent piece of legislation in Italy that forces land owners to cut their woods even if they don’t want to. From the comments I received to that post and from what I can read on the Web, I think I can say that the war on trees is not just an Italian phenomenon, it is worldwide.

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

The American Empire and its Media

June 3, 2018

The American Empire and its Media

Largely unbeknownst to the general public, executives and top journalists of almost all major US news outlets have long been members of the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

Established in 1921 as a private, bipartisan organization to “awaken America to its worldwide responsibilities”, the CFR and its close to 5000 elite members have for decades shaped U.S. foreign policy and public discourse about it. As a well-known Council member once explained, the goal has indeed been to establish a global Empire, albeit a “benevolent” one.

Based on official membership rosters, the following illustration for the first time depicts the extensive media network of the CFR and its two main international affiliate organizations: the Bilderberg Group(covering mainly the U.S. and Europe) and the Trilateral Commission (covering North America, Europe and East Asia), both established by Council leaders to foster elite cooperation at the international level.

Click to enlarge 🔎

In a column entitled “Ruling Class Journalists”, former Washington Post senior editor and ombudsman Richard Harwood once described the Council and its members approvingly as “the nearest thing we have to a ruling establishment in the United States”.

Harwood continued: “The membership of these journalists in the Council, however they may think of themselves, is an acknowledgment of their active and important role in public affairs and of their ascension into the American ruling class. They do not merely analyze and interpret foreign policy for the United States; they help make it. () They are part of that establishment whether they like it or not, sharing most of its values and world views.”

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

1984: The UK is Illegally Detaining Two Journalists, Seemingly Making Them Vanish

May 31, 2018

1984: The UK is Illegally Detaining Two Journalists, Seemingly Making Them Vanish

The UK government is responsible for the illegal arrest, sentencing, and detainment without trial of two journalists: Julian Assange, who recently had his Internet and communications cut off; and Tommy Robinson, all without any type of legal concession. Argue as you may about Robinson and his colorful past, including shortly being a member of BNP when he was in his twenties, but it’s what got him arrested this time that is the more shocking part of the story.

Robinson was arrested, charged and sentenced to prison for covering the existence of a Leeds Crown Court case of Islamic pedophile-grooming rape gangs. Further, the UK media has been issued D-notice takedown requests for articles on the grooming rape court case, as well as coverage of Robinson’s own arrest and sentencing, Infowars reported.

View image on Twitter

The judge in Tommy Robinson’s case, Denise Marson, pulled a neat trick today.

She threw him in jail for 13 months, and banned anyone in the UK from talking about it.
A thread on how she did it. (h/t @nickmon1112)#FreeTommy #FreeTommyRobinson

4:31 PM – May 25, 2018

Robinson, real name Stephen Lennon, streamed an hour-long Facebook Live outside the court on Friday. It had been watched more than 250,000 times before he was abruptly arrested.

Lennon had filmed himself as he read out the defendants’ names and the charges they faced and confronted them as they arrived at court before sentencing by the jury.

According to the judge, Lennon (Robinson) could have caused the trial to be retried and cost taxpayers “hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pounds,” despite the fact that the court case was highly publicized in the media and Robinson was just reporting publicly available facts, according to journalist Lauren Southern.

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

May You Live in Stupid, Corrupt and yet Fascinating Times

May 31, 2018

May You Live in Stupid, Corrupt and yet Fascinating Times

In the old days, America’s top spies would complete their tenures at the CIA or one of the other Washington puzzle palaces and segue to more ordinary pursuits. Some wrote their memoirs. One ran for president. Another died a few months after surrendering his post. But today’s national-security establishment retiree has a different game plan. After so many years of brawling in the shadows, he yearns for a second, lucrative career in the public eye. He takes a crash course in speaking in soundbites, refreshes his wardrobe and signs a TV news contract. Then, several times a week, waits for a network limousine to shuttle him to the broadcast news studios where, after a light dusting of foundation and a spritz of hairspray, he takes a supporting role in the anchors’ nighttime shows.

– Politico: The Spies Who Came in to the TV Studio

May you live in stupid, corrupt and yet fascinating times.

– Me, paraphrasing a Chinese curse

I’ve been away the past couple of weeks taking a break with my family. I paid attention to the news, but from a distance. As usual, there’s plenty to talk about.

In the last 24 hours alone, we’ve seen political chaos erupt in Italy and hordes of pundits simultaneously lose their minds over the murder of a prominent Russian journalist that never happened. Such is the world we live in. Stupid, corrupt, yet fascinating.

Of all the things I could’ve written about, you may be surprised by today’s selection. It’s a clip many of you probably saw where Richard Stengel (who was Time Magazine’s managing editor from 2006-2013) admits he approves of government propagandizing its own citizens during a Council on Foreign Relations forum. Here’s the clip.

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

TIME Editor Literally Admits He’s For Gov. Propaganda!

May 30, 2018

TIME Editor Literally Admits He’s For Gov. Propaganda!

Great Britain has become an Orwellian, globalist police state. Once the land of the Magna Carta, it’s now the land of tyranny.

May 30, 2018

Great Britain has become an Orwellian, globalist police state. Once the land of the Magna Carta, it’s now the land of tyranny.

Free speech is gone–the imprisonment of Tommy Robinson proves that. There was no legitimate charge, no trial, no due process. Instead, he was disappeared into jail where death threatens him. Remember, an anti-Muslim Englander was imprisoned for a year for leaving a bacon sandwich near a mosque. He was murdered while locked up. The same threat looms for Robinson. The media are not allowed to talk about it. It’s the ‘law.’

Robinson is a whistleblower who cast light on a huge problem in his country: Muslim pedophile rape gangs. Apparently Muslims are a protected caste and so Robinson was arrested and locked up. He was on parole and the British authorities were determined to lock him up again on any pretense. They said he was a ‘threat to the peace,’ which is ridiculous.

What’s next, England—people getting ‘disappeared’ into gulags or the being shot in the back of the head, Stalin-style? It’s good to see many patriotic citizens in England protesting Robinson’s arrest. Unfortunately, they’ve all been disarmed. Let that reinforce a lesson for us Americans: Never, ever give up your guns. If our government ignores our Constitutional rights and tries to ‘disappear’ us into prison camps, we’ll know what to do. Remember the words of Solzhenitsyn:

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?

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

The Great Oz

May 19, 2018

The Great Oz

For eight years (2008-2016), the US liberal media touted the brilliant accomplishments of the liberal president, whilst the conservative media groused that nothing he did was of value.

Today, the conservative US media are touting the brilliant accomplishments of the conservative president, whilst the liberal media grouse that nothing he does is of value.

So, which is it? Who is correct here? Well, actually, neither is correct.

Neither president is the great Oz. Neither one is in fact, “running the country.” Behind the scenes, the great machine of government churns along, often in complete disregard to the president or his stated policies.

However, the media credits or lambastes the president of the day as though he and he alone is in charge of the country. Whatever happens is treated as his accomplishment or failure.

And, typically, presidents play into this – taking personal credit for perceived accomplishments within the country and disavowing blame for perceived failures.

At present, the conservative media are emphasising low unemployment as an achievement, just as the liberal media did during the Obama Administration,

And yet, since the Clinton Administration, the unemployment figures have been consistently fudged. Those who work only part time are defined as “employed.” Those who have given up pursuing employment are removed from the unemployment equation. If those numbers were plugged back in, US unemployment would be in the double-digits during both the Obama and Trump presidencies.

The conservative media also tout Mister Trump for the increase in the stock market. Of course, the liberal media did the same in Mister Obama’s time. Stocks have been on the rise in both administrations.

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

The ‘fake news’ story is fake news

May 19, 2018

The ‘fake news’ story is fake news

Judy Woodruff of PBS News Hour

Almost every day on public radio or public television, I hear reports about how fake news is undermining our democracy. These high-minded reporters and anchors seem truly to believe that a feverish menace is overwhelming the minds of once-sensible people.

This story is itself fake news for several obvious reasons. We’ve never had more good information than we have now; people are as well-informed as they want to be. There will always be outlets purveying lies; that is the nature of communication. And the insistence on the “fake news” issue is an effort to assign Trump’s victory not to those who brought it to us (the electorate, and the incompetence of the Clinton campaign) but on some nefarious agents.

The fact that we have more and better information today than ever almost goes without saying. When I started in the news business more than 40 years ago, few reporters carried tape recorders, largely because they worked for a guild and were never subject to correction. Today there are countless outlets, thanks to the internet, and important events are almost always recorded. The amount of data we have on public figures is vast compared to even ten years ago.

We can all argue about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing; but we are today awash in information. That information is more reliable than it has ever been before. My own work on Palestine and the Israel lobby has shown me that global consumers can get more accurate information about that conflict than they’ve ever had. Yes, as we assert here all the time, the mainstream US media is in the tank for Israel; but it’s not as if better information is not available at your fingertips, much of it from Europe and Palestine, often citizen video.

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

Before You Tell Me What You “Know,” Tell Me Your Sources

May 9, 2018

Before You Tell Me What You “Know,” Tell Me Your Sources

We can no longer trust data and conclusions being published as impartial by institutions that were once trustworthy.

When someone says they “know” what’s happening on the ground in Syria, how can we assess the validity of their claim to knowledge, i.e. their claim to “know” “facts” or (gasp) “truth”?

When someone says they “know” the U.S. economy is growing and unemployment is at record lows, what is the basis of their claim to knowledge?

Before you tell me what you “know,” tell me your sources. We all know how this works nowadays: the sources are rigged or gamed to support the pre-selected narrative.

In “fake news,” the sources are designed to appear legitimate via official-sounding institutional titles for the source organizations and human “experts” / researchers, and the data that’s presented to support the “fake news” is also designed to be indistinguishable from legitimate data.

The cursory consumer of such content will be inclined to grant the institution, source and data as equal in legitimacy to other accepted sources. For example, if we read that the United Nations Labor Information Council has collected data showing the U.S. unemployment rate is actually 7.2% rather than the official 3.9%, the invocation of the UN and the precision of the data point suggests a legitimate source and data base.

But it’s “fake news;” there is no United Nations Labor Information Council (at least not to my knowledge).

Official sources have learned that the most effective way to propagate the sanctioned narratives is to rig or game the data and/or its interpretation. Thus the bailouts of the U.S. “too big to fail” financial institutions in 2008-09 were purposefully obscured; it took independent researchers to assemble all the bailout guarantees and publish the staggering total of over $16 trillion.

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

How To Silence RT Forever

May 8, 2018

How To Silence RT Forever

Loyalists of the western empire have been growing increasingly honest about their desire to use censorship and propaganda in order to win an “information war” against Russia.

The other day we saw a Guardian article arguing for the necessity of a coordinated campaign by western governments to “combat Russian disinformation” due to Russia’s disinterest in “cooperating to reach a common understanding of the truth”, i.e. agree with unproven western accusations and capitulate to the longstanding western agendas those accusations are meant to advance.

Before that, we saw a Defense One article authored by an Atlantic Council official arguing in favor of the creation of a “NATO for Infowar” to propagandize westerners against Russian interests for their own good. The author of this article went so far as to suggest that the Kremlin-backed television channel RT ought to be forbidden to air in western nations.

It always comes back to RT. Because of the network’s relatively high profile in comparison to other Russian media, it has been made into an ideal Emmanuel Goldstein for the empire’s daily Two Minutes Hate. RT is now so completely reviled by establishment loyalists that citing it in an online debate will be taken as an instant debunk of not just the point you were trying to make but of your entire position (and often your humanity itself by getting you labeled a “Russian bot”), even if your citation is comprised entirely of independently verifiable facts.

Luckily for the screaming hysterical Big Brother devotees, there is a very easy and 100 percent guaranteed way to get RT removed from western airwaves forever. Are you ready? Here it is:

Allow leftist and antiwar perspectives to be voiced on western mainstream media.

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

2018: When Orwell’s 1984 stopped being fiction

May 7, 2018

2018: When Orwell’s 1984 stopped being fiction

This is the moment when a newspaper claiming to uphold that most essential function in a liberal democracy – acting as a watchdog on power – formally abandons the task. This is the moment when it positively embraces the role of serving as a mouthpiece for the government. The tell is in one small word in a headline on today’s Guardian’s front page: “Revealed”.

When I trained as a journalist, we reserved a “Revealed” or an “Exposed” for those special occasions when we were able to bring to the reader information those in power did not want known. These were the rare moments when as journalists we could hold our heads high and claim to be monitoring the centres of power, to be fulfilling our sacred duty as the fourth estate.

But today’s Guardian’s “exclusive” story “Revealed: UK’s push to strengthen anti-Russia alliance” is doing none of this. Nothing the powerful would want hidden from us is being “revealed”. No one had to seek out classified documents or speak to a whistleblower to bring us this “revelation”. Everyone in this story – the journalist Patrick Wintour, an anonymous “Whitehall official”, and the named politicians and think-tank wonks – is safely in the same self-congratulatory club, promoting a barely veiled government policy: to renew the Cold War against Russia.

It is no accident that the government chose the Guardian as the place to publish this “exclusive” press release. That single word “Revealed” in the headline serves two functions that reverse the very rationale for liberal, watchdog-style journalism.

First, it is designed to disorientate the reader in Orwellian – or maybe Lewis Caroll – fashion, inverting the world of reality. The reader is primed for a disclosure, a secret, and then is spoonfed familiar government propaganda: that the tentacles of a Russian octopus are everywhere, that the Reds are again under our beds – or at least, poisoning our door handles.

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

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