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The American Press Is Destroying Itself
The American Press Is Destroying Itself
A flurry of newsroom revolts has transformed the American press
Sometimes it seems life can’t get any worse in this country. Already in terror of a pandemic, Americans have lately been bombarded with images of grotesque state-sponsored violence, from the murder of George Floyd to countless scenes of police clubbing and brutalizing protesters.
Our president, Donald Trump, is a clown who makes a great reality-show villain but is uniquely toolless as the leader of a superpower nation. Watching him try to think through two society-imperiling crises is like waiting for a gerbil to solve Fermat’s theorem. Calls to “dominate” marchers and ad-libbed speculations about Floyd’s “great day” looking down from heaven at Trump’s crisis management and new unemployment numbers (“only” 21 million out of work!) were pure gasoline at a tinderbox moment. The man seems determined to talk us into civil war.
But police violence, and Trump’s daily assaults on the presidential competence standard, are only part of the disaster. On the other side of the political aisle, among self-described liberals, we’re watching an intellectual revolution. It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.
The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation. They are counting on the guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature of traditional American progressives, who will not stand up for themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
You are What you Read: How to Manage your Personal Echo Chamber
You are What you Read: How to Manage your Personal Echo Chamber
Mr. Trump has often being accused of “lying” in his many speeches and tweets. For sure, much of what he says can be said to be “contrary to fact.” But is the president really lying or is he simply stating what he thinks truth is? One man’s lies are another man’s truth. And the problem is that people tend to see the world according to the different echo chamber in which they live. Everyone seeks for facts that support their opinions. We badly need to take control of the information flow that we receive and I think we can do that. Let me show you how I try to do it by disclosing my personal information bubble.
Not long ago, I stumbled in a comment on “Quora” for the question, “Why do some people deny climate change? Here is a shortened version:
CO2 levels of 400 ppm being dangerously high are not accepted by scientists I find credible. There is no significant sea rise. The temperature has not changed by even 1 degree C. over the past century. Climate Change has not increased hurricanes or their intensity. I may rethink this if there is an undoubtedly measurable change in the level of the seas, or a decade long temperature rise.
Now, if you are an average reader of “Cassandra’s Legacy” you’ll agree with me every statement in this paragraph is wrong in the sense of being “contrary to fact.” But I am sure that the writer of this paragraph is a good person. He signed with his full name and I could see his profile. I think that if he were a neighbor of mine we could be good friends (as long as we would avoid discussing climate science!). He truly believes in what he says and he thinks his vision of the world is the right one.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Why Does The Mainstream Media Seem So Desperate To Keep The Coronavirus Lockdowns Going?
Why Does The Mainstream Media Seem So Desperate To Keep The Coronavirus Lockdowns Going?
Something doesn’t smell right. The number of newly confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. each day has been declining, as has the number of deaths. This is great news, and we should be hoping that the falling numbers are a sign that the pandemic is beginning to subside. But the mainstream media has been relentlessly pumping out stories that warn of “disaster” if the lockdowns are lifted “too soon”. According to the mainstream media, by “ignoring science” we are inviting a “second wave” which will be even deadlier than the first one. And it is certainly true that as we end the lockdowns more people will get exposed to COVID-19, but right now I do not know of a single hospital in the entire country that is currently being overwhelmed by this pandemic. As long as our hospitals can handle it, there is no reason to continue the lockdowns.
But the mainstream media seems desperate to keep the lockdowns going, and so they keep telling us that we are “inviting disaster” by ending them. For example, the following comes from a New York Times article that was just published entitled “As States Rush to Reopen, Scientists Fear a Coronavirus Comeback”…
Millions of working people and small-business owners who cannot earn money while sheltering at home are facing economic ruin. So dozens of states, seeking to ease the pain, are coming out of lockdown.
Most have not met even minimal criteria for doing so safely, and some are reopening even as coronavirus cases rise, inviting disaster. The much-feared “second wave” of infection may not wait until fall, many scientists say, and instead may become a storm of wavelets breaking unpredictably across the country.
And this is how that article ended…
Having 50 states and more territories do competing and uncoordinated experiments in reopening is “daring Mother Nature to kill you or someone you love,” Dr. Frieden said. “Mother Nature bats last, and she bats a thousand.”
That sounds quite ominous.
Without a doubt, most Americans certainly do not want to see a loved one die after catching COVID-19.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Peter Schiff: This Is a Financial Crisis
Peter Schiff: This Is a Financial Crisis
A lot of people in the mainstream still insist this isn’t a financial crisis like we saw in 2008. They say this is just a self-inflicted shutdown of the economy. Since we decided to shut it down, we can decide to start it back up again. Peter Schiff begs to differ. In his podcast, he explains that this is absolutely a financial crisis and it’s going to be worse than 2008.
Stocks fell yesterday (April 15) on dour economic news and the financials led the plunge. In fact, even during the stock market rally on Monday, the financials lagged. Peter called them the Achilles Heel in that Monday surge.
This is significant because the financial sector is the key to the US economy.
They shouldn’t be, but they are, because we have a bubble economy. We have an economy based on credit, based on debt. So, not people spending the money they earned, but spending the money they didn’t earn but they borrowed.”
This becomes clear when you look at the consumer debt numbers. Americans were already leveraged up to their eyeballs before coronavirus spurred a government lockdown of the economy.
What is at the heart of the bubble, other than the Federal Reserve which is pumping all the blood through the body of the economy, but it’s pumping it through the heart of the banking sector. So, when you’re seeing this cardiac arrest in the banking sector, this is a sign that there’s trouble brewing here when the banks are having so much trouble.”
Why are banks in trouble? Because people are defaulting on their loans. In fact, there was already trouble in the subprime markets before COVID-19. Both subprime credit card and auto loan defaults were rising. That will only increase with millions of people suddenly unemployed.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The World Has Changed More Than We Know
The World Has Changed More Than We Know
Put another way: eras end.
While the mainstream media understandably focuses on the here and now of the pandemic, some commentators are looking at the long-term consequences. Here is a small sampling:
Coronavirus, synchronous failure and the global phase-shiftCoronavirus Will Require Us to Completely Reshape the EconomyFlorence Hit by the Coronavirus: The Curse of Hyperspecialization
We’re not going back to normal: Social distancing is here to stay for much more than a few weeks. It will upend our way of life, in some ways forever (MIT Technology Review)While each of these essays offers a different perspective, let’s focus on the last two: Ugo Bardi’s essay on Hyperspecialization and the technological responses described in the MIT Technology Review essay.
As readers of the blog know, I’ve been differentiating between first-order and second-order effects: First order effects: every action has a consequence. Second order effects: every consequence has its own consequences.
We can think of these as direct (first order) and indirect (second order) effects.
The MIT Technology Review article focuses on direct effects, i.e. how to deploy technology to identify people with the virus, track their recent movements and who they might have exposed to the disease, tech-driven regulations that would limit the movements of infected (such as we see in China now), etc.
Bardi’s first-hand account from Northern Italy touches on an indirect effect: the profoundly negative impact of a hyperspecialized economy that is suddenly disrupted. In this case, the specialization is tourism, but there are other examples, many driven by hyper-globalization.
Specialization has long been central to capitalism’s relentless drive to increase efficiencies and thus profits, and globalization has pushed specialization to extremes globally dominant corporations can arbitrage currencies, wages, political corruption and lax environmental standards in ways that localized competitors cannot.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Corporate Debt Bubble Is A Train Wreck In Slow Motion
The Corporate Debt Bubble Is A Train Wreck In Slow Motion
There are two subjects that the mainstream media seems specifically determined to avoid discussing these days when it comes to the economy – the first is the problem of falling global demand for goods and services; they absolutely refuse to acknowledge the fact that demand is going stagnant and will conjure all kinds of rationalizations to distract from the issue. The other subject is the debt bubble, the corporate debt bubble in particular.
These two factors alone guarantee a massive shock to the global economy and the US economy are built into the system, but I believe corporate debt is the key pillar of the false economy. It has been utilized time and time again to keep the Everything Bubble from completely deflating, however, the fundamentals are starting to catch up to the fantasy.
For example, in terms of stock markets, which are now meaningless as an indicator of the health of the real economy, corporate stock buybacks have been the single most vital mechanism for inflation. Corporations buy their own stocks, often using cash borrowed from each other and from the Federal Reserve, in order to reduce the number of shares on the market and artificially boost the value of the remaining shares. This process is essentially legal manipulation of equities, and to be sure, it has been effective so far at keeping markets elevated.
The problem is that these same corporations are taking on more and more debt through interest payments in order to maintain the facade. Over the period of a decade, corporate debt has skyrocketed back to levels not seen since 2007, just before the credit crisis. The official corporate debt load now stands at over $10 trillion, and that’s not even counting derivatives exposure.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Surf’s Up!
Surf’s Up!
The wave of change is finally here. Are you prepared to ride it?
Nothing seems right anymore.
In whichever direction we choose to look, things are unraveling at a quickening pace.
Welcome to the Fourth Turning; and with it, a profound loss of trust in institutions and government.
Such lack of social cohesion is a hallmark of a Fourth Turning. Sadly, it’s happening at a time when society desperately needs to pull together, set aside our differences, and make some really big decisions.
Dirty Hands Everywhere
For my own part, my loss of trust in what is termed the ‘mainstream media’ (MSM) is nearly complete. Its sins of omission and commission have piled up too high to forgive – the bank of trust I once had in it has lost every penny and is now in deep overdraft.
In my opinion its gravest sin is the willful and deliberate fracturing of society into many disparate warring camps. The MSM has a lot to answer for in that regard.
Similarly guilty is our political system. The core power players are unable to hold each other accountable, revealing that we don’t have two parties after all, but rather a uniparty organized around power and money.
The rules are increasingly re-written to benefit a smaller and smaller group of elites at the expense of everyone else — and that’s now becoming increasingly crystal clear to the 99.9% who are getting screwed. The corrosive effects of that are going to take decades to resolve.
As a result, the social fabric is rending apart. Stress is epidemic with more people than ever reporting being unhappy, unfulfilled, isolated and alone. Suicide is the second leading cause of death. It’s worse than just depression, it’s something far more insidious — it’s demoralization. There’s no hope left any more for too many of us.
A Dying Ecosphere
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
32 Misinformation Schemes & Other Tactics Used by Wall Street, Corporate America & the Media, as Pointed Out Hilariously by WOLF STREET Commenters
32 Misinformation Schemes & Other Tactics Used by Wall Street, Corporate America & the Media, as Pointed Out Hilariously by WOLF STREET Commenters
Selected from so many Nits to Pick.
This is a collection of 32 tactics, instances, misnomers, immortal fake propaganda, and even wrong-doing cropping up ceaselessly on Wall Street, in the media, in press releases, in earnings reports, and in the broader nexus between Wall Street and the media. All of them were pointed out by WOLF STREET commenters. I put them together and grouped some of them, and added some explanations in a few cases even when not needed. In no particular order:
#1: “The moronic statements regarding ‘money on the sidelines.’”
“That ‘money on the sidelines’ thing drives me nuts. I sit around wondering how captured financial commentators must be to even entertain such concepts on such a regular basis.”
“Money on the sidelines is immortal. It has been cited all my investing life, and it will still be cited long after I’m gone, to be passed proudly from generation to generation, no matter how often it gets debunked.”
“I found a coin on the sidewalk once. It must be the infamous sidelines money. Just a million coins more, and I will have enough to go on vacation.”
#2: “The claptrap surrounding earnings beats – after earnings targets have been quietly but drastically reduced.”
#3: “Forward earnings projections” to rationalize high stock prices. Everyone is doing it, even the Fed. Forward earnings projections are part of the great body of American fiction and get slashed as earnings-report dates get nearer so that the much-lowered projections can then be “beat” (see #2 above). This produces the absurd situation where forward P/E ratios are always far lower (currently 18.4 according to FactSet) than the actual P/E ratios (currently 24.6, highest since the Financial Crisis).
#4: “The revolving door between government and Wall Street – ‘the swamp.’” Drain it already.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Is Fake News Hard-Wired? Study Finds People Misremember Facts To Fit Their Beliefs
Is Fake News Hard-Wired? Study Finds People Misremember Facts To Fit Their Beliefs
I recently criticized NBC Meet The Press host Chuck Todd for suggesting that Trump supporters are fantasy-prone dimwits who just want to be lied to…
NBC News anchor Chuck Todd is under fire for an openly derisive comment about Trump supporters as effectively delusional drones who want to be lied to. He even added a dig at belief in biblical accounts like Noah’s Ark. It is the latest example of how open bias has become the norm on mainstream media. Imagine if Todd said Obama supporters are ignorant voters who just want to be lied to. This is precisely why the media is now driving some voters to Trump and reinforcing echo-journalism on both sides.
On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” Todd criticized “misinformation” in the media and referenced a “fascinating” letter to the editor of the Lexington Herald Leader from last January. The letter read, “[W]hy do people support Trump? It’s because people have been trained from childhood to believe in fairy tales… This set their minds up to accept things that make them feel good… The more fairy tales and lies he tells the better they feel . . . Show me a person who believes in Noah’s ark and I will show you a Trump voter.”
Todd used the letter to say to New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet “This gets at something, Dean, that my executive producer likes to say, ‘Hey, voters want to be lied to sometimes.’ They don’t always love being told hard truths.”
Baquet was not sold on the theory and responded “I’m not quite sure I buy that. I’m not convinced that people want to be lied to. I think people want to be comforted, and I think bad politicians sometimes say comforting things to them.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The News Churn Memory Hole: How The MSM Lies Even When Telling The Truth
The News Churn Memory Hole: How The MSM Lies Even When Telling The Truth
“This goofy ass Trump letter is gonna get more outraged coverage than the bombshell report on the entire Afghanistan war being a lie and frankly I don’t know if I can handle that right now,” popular Youtube commentator Kyle Kulinski tweeted today.
The post was just one of the many observations that Kulinski tosses into the Twitterverse every day, presented in his typical casual, offhand way without any self-significance. But if you actually pause and think about what he’s saying here, how true it is and what it says about the mass media institutions which people rely upon to form their worldviews, it’s actually a damning indictment of our entire society.
It is a fact that far more news media energy is going into one trivial aspect of an impeachment agenda that will with absolute certainty fail to remove Trump from office than there is for the known fact that the US government fought to suppress indisputable proof that American officials have been consistently lying about an 18-year military occupation which continues to this day. This fact should, by itself, be sufficient to completely discredit the mainstream press. This one tiny piece of information, that there’s vastly more buzz about an irrelevant impeachment sideshow than there is over the Afghanistan Papers, should in and of itself cause everyone to regard the entire establishment media complex with the same amount of respect as it gives the Flat Earth Society.
This last week teaches us that temporarily freezing and then unfreezing future military aid to one of our many far-flung client states is huge national emergency but the government systematically lying about every aspect of the longest war in US history is a forgettable non-issue
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Le Mesurier Gets Cross
Le Mesurier Gets Cross
Perhaps the only fact on James Le Mesurier about which I would agree with the MSM war cheerleaders is that he was a very busy man. It is remarkable therefore that he found the time and inclination to follow “Philip Cross” on twitter. Given that “Philip Cross” has virtually never posted an original tweet, and his timeline consists almost entirely of retweets of Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch and openly pro-Israel propaganda accounts, why would Le Mesurier bother to follow him?
“Philip Cross” has never posted any news other than to retweet columnists. He has never given an insight into a story. In addition to James Le Mesurier, why then were all these MSM journailsts following “Philip Cross” from before “he” gained notoriety for his Wikipedia exploits?
Oliver Kamm, Leader Writer The Times
Nick Cohen, Columnist The Guardian/Observer
Joan Smith, Columnist The Independent
Leslie Felperin, Film Columnist The Guardian
Kate Connolly, Foreign Correspondent The Guardian/Observer
Lisa O’Carroll, Brexit Correspondent The Guardian
James Bloodworth, Columnist The Independent
Cristina Criddle, BBC Radio 4 Today Programme
Sarah Baxter, Deputy Editor, The Sunday Times
Iain Watson, Political Correspondent, The BBC
Caroline Wheeler, Deputy Political Editor, the Sunday Times
Jennifer Chevalier, CBC ex-BBC
Dani Garavelli, Scotland on Sunday
Prominent Freelancers
Bonnie Greer (frequently in The Guardian)
Mason Boycott-Owen (The Guardian, New Statesman)
Marko Attilla Hoare (The Guardian)
Kirsty Hughes
Guy Walters (BBC)
Paul Canning
What attracted all of these senior MSM figures to follow an obscure account with almost no original content? No reasonable explanation of this phenomenon has ever been offered by any of the above. What a considerable number of them have done is to use the megaphone their plutocrat or state overlords have given them, to label those asking this perfectly reasonable question as crazed conspiracy theorists.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Are You Ready For A Catastrophically Cold Winter? Here Is What The Mainstream Media Won’t Tell You…
Are You Ready For A Catastrophically Cold Winter? Here Is What The Mainstream Media Won’t Tell You…
Experts are warning us that this will be a “freezing, frigid, and frosty” winter, and even though the official beginning of winter is still over a month away, it already feels like that in much of the country right now. Over the next several days, it will literally feel like it is mid-January in much of the central and eastern portions of the United States. Many areas will be hit by temperatures that are 30 degrees below normal, and heavy snow is expected in some areas of the Midwest. Unfortunately, this bitterly cold weather is coming at a very bad time for corn farmers. According to the latest USDA crop progress report, only 52 percent of the corn in the middle of the country has been harvested. So about half of the corn is still sitting out there, and these extraordinarily low temperatures could potentially be absolutely devastating. In essence, this cold front threatens to put an exclamation point on an absolutely horrific year for U.S. farmers. According to the National Weather Service, we could possibly see “170 potential daily record cold high temperatures” over the next three days…
“The National Weather Service is forecasting 170 potential daily record cold high temperatures Monday to Wednesday,” tweeted Weather Channel meteorologist Jonathan Erdman. “A little taste of January in November.”
The temperature nosedive will be a three-day process as a cold front charges across the central and eastern U.S. from Sunday into Tuesday.
We are being told that low temperatures in certain portions of Texas could plunge into the teens, and all across the Upper Midwest we could see low temperatures that are well below zero.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
MSM Adamantly Avoids The Word “Coup” In Bolivia Reporting
MSM Adamantly Avoids The Word “Coup” In Bolivia Reporting
There has been a military coup in Bolivia backed by violent right-wing rioters and the US government, but you’d hardly know this from any of the mainstream media headlines.
“Bolivian President Evo Morales steps down following accusations of election fraud” proclaims CNN.
“Bolivia’s Morales resigns amid scathing election report, rising protests” reports The Washington Post.
“Bolivian Leader Evo Morales Steps Down” says The New York Times.
“Bolivian President Evo Morales resigns amid fraud poll protests” declares the BBC.
“President of Bolivia steps down amid allegations of election rigging” we are informed by Telegraph.
“Bolivia’s President Morales resigns after backlash to disputed election” says the Sydney Morning Herald.
So there you have it. The indigenous leader of a socialist South American government which has successfully lifted masses of people out of crushing poverty, which happens to control the world’s largest reserves of lithium (which may one day replace oil as a crucial energy resource due to its use in powering smartphones, laptops, hybrid and electric cars), which has an extensive and well-documented history of being targeted for regime change by the US government, simply stepped down due to some sort of scandal involving a “disputed election”. Nothing to do with the fact that right-wing mobs had been terrorizing this leader’s family, or the fact that the nation’s military literally commanded him to step down and are now currently searching for him to arrest him, leading to ousted government officials being rounded up and held captive by soldiers wearing masks.
All perfectly normal and not suspicious at all.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Technology Spurs On Our Ability To Deceive
Technology Spurs On Our Ability To Deceive
Caught between the forces of mainstream media and government propaganda it seems we can believe nothing we see or hear. Much of this problem is rooted in the agendas of large companies and those who control them. These companies have become so big and powerful that they now influence government’s message and direction. Fake news and false flags have left many of us having a difficult time deciding what is real, adding to this is the rapidly growing ability of computers to generate and alter human images. This is all about to go to a whole new level.
Margrethe Vestager, the European Union Antitrust Chief, is busy touting that the EU’s influence gives it the opportunity and power to shape the world. She insists the EU is ready to take on companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon which she contends has used their power to undermine competition, keep out innovation and collect data on us. This has given these companies great power to manipulate society. Google did this when it used the power of its search engine to favor its own comparison shopping service. While the EU has signaled it is going to make several big companies use their power in a way that’s fair and doesn’t discriminate the fact is this is easier to say than do.
The EU plans to do this by flexing its muscle with a combination of competition policy and regulation changes, however, whether it will be successful remains to be seen. Like many people, I remain dubious. These powerful companies already are overly involved with shaping the message of media and government propaganda are about to unleash upon society a great deal more computer-generated models and images. These have advanced to where they blur reality and diminish the need for humans to act as spokespeople or to represent organizations.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Imperial Propaganda Machine: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
The Imperial Propaganda Machine: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
It’s important to avoid fake news, Russian media or conspiracy theorists. We must only trust those reputable news outlets who tell us that neoliberalism is working fine, that US foreign policy is perfectly sane, and that protests are only happening in Hong Kong and nowhere else.
The difference between state media and western media is that in state media the government controls what information the public is given about what’s going on in the world in order to prevent political dissent, whereas in western media this is instead done by billionaires.
Any attempt to understand the world which fails to take into account the fact that extremely powerful people are pouring massive amounts of money and resources into manipulating your understanding of the world will necessarily result in a distorted worldview.
Whenever news media reports unsubstantiated assertions from anonymous sources in government agencies, just mentally insert “Here is something the government told us to tell you:” into the beginning of the report, because that’s all they’re doing.
Russia and China haven’t become any more of a threat to you than they were three years ago, yet you think about them many times more often than you did back then. That’s propaganda at work, FYI.
All the establishment loyalists you argue with are ever really saying is, “No! The TV would NEVER lie to me!”
Sometimes all I can do is stare in awe at the power and efficiency of the imperial propaganda machine. When I first started this gig in 2016 Assange had way more support, from Berners, Greens, Trumpers, all across the spectrum. Now a large amount of that support has been eroded. For Trumpers Assange is being extradited for his own good to bring down the Deep State.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
