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Why One Should Distrust the News

January 7, 2019

Why One Should Distrust the News

An article by the BBC on “The world’s most nutritious foods” ranks the healthfulness of foods on the basis of an article at the supposedly scientific PLOSone journal, titled “Uncovering the Nutritional Landscape of Food”. That study is based on a dataset that entirely ignores antioxidant-content of foods. Antioxidant-content has come to be recognized during recent decades as constituting perhaps the most important factor in nutrition. It’s probably even more important than vitamin-content and than mineral-content and than protein, carbohydrate, and fat content. So, the basis upon which the article’s ranking was done is the factors that were known about, in 1950, to be important, but that are now known to be far less determinative of a person’s health and longevity than are foods’ anti-oxidant contents. Neither the article nor its underlying dataset even so much as just mentions “oxidant” anywhere. The authors of the BBC and PLOSone articles and of the underlying dataset were apparently entirely ignorant of the findings in nutritional research during the past 60+ years — findings about antioxidants, which have transformed our understanding of nutrition. (Furthermore, there were many other important methodological flaws producing that PLOSone ranking, not only its ignoring antioxidants.)

This is not unusual.

(Incidentally, “ORAC Values: Antioxidant Values of Foods & Beverages” is a ranking of foods on the basis of antioxidant-contents, as measured by ORAC; and this is likely a far more accurate indicator of the relative healthfulness of foods than is the ridiculous BBC-PLOSone ranking — but far fewer people are being exposed to it.)

Here’s another example of the untrustworthiness of news-media and of other allegedly nonfiction presentations, even in many ‘scientific’ journals — but this one will be an example from what has become overwhelmingly the world’s leading encyclopedia: Wikipedia.

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

What the New York Times Has in Common with the National Enquirer

December 20, 2018

What the New York Times Has in Common with the National Enquirer

The National Enquirer is in the news rather than reporting it—not for printing that Elvis is alive and well, but for its alleged role as “a dirty-tricks shop for Donald J. Trump in 2016,” as The New York Times put it in an article that described the supermarket tabloid as “the most powerful print publication in America.” The Enquirer served as a propaganda rag for The Donald, first targeting Ted Cruz during the primaries and then amplifying anti-Hillary conspiracy theories like “PizzaGate,” the ridiculous stories that candidate Clinton was sleeping with Huma Abedin and that she had hired a “hitman” to murder people who annoyed her.

It paid $150,000 for the story of a former Playboy model who said she had an affair with our current president—so they could bury it. (They call this a “catch-and-kill” deal.)

Even for the pond-scum standards of the National Enquirer, this is super sleazy. Mainstream media outlets like the Times are pointing out how gross and yucky the Enquirer is and they’re right to do so.

What these august guardians of the Fourth Estate are not as eager to talk about is how, when it comes to a little-known law with a massive effect on libel and defamation law, respectable print institutions like the New York Times are on the same side as such exemplars of yellow journalism as the National Enquirer.

Twenty-eight states—including many of the most populous—have “anti-SLAPP” laws ostensibly designed to protect newspapers, radio and television outlets from being sued for libel or defamation.

Their real purpose is to allow the media to get away with murder.

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

This Isn’t News. This Is War Crimes Apologia.

December 19, 2018

This Isn’t News. This Is War Crimes Apologia.

The fact that George W Bush has given Michelle Obama two pieces of candy is once again making headlines in mainstream outlets like Time, The Hill, and Newsweek. He has not given her any new pieces of candy since the last time he did so at his father’s funeral. He also has not ceased to be the man who facilitated the murder of a million Iraqis and inflicted a whole new level of military expansionism and Orwellian surveillance upon our world. As near as I can tell, the only reason this story is once again making headlines is because Michelle Obama and the mainstream media have decided to bring it up again.

“He has the presence of mind and the sense of humor to bring me a mint, and he made it a point to give me that mint right then and there and that’s the beauty of George Bush,” Obama said of the war criminal in conversation at the SAP Center over the weekend, which we apparently need to know about because the news is telling us about it.

“We’re all Americans. We all care about our family and our kids, and we’re trying to get ahead,” Obama continued. “And that’s how I feel about [Bush]. You know? He’s a beautiful, funny, kind, sweet man.

View image on Twitter

I have always respected Michelle Obama. But continuing to glorify a mass murderer responsible for the death of over a million defenseless innocent civilians, reflects more on her own character than on that of that despicable war criminal.

If you’re starting to feel like attempts to rehabilitate George W Bush’s image are being aggressively shoved down your throat by the mass media at every opportunity, it’s because that is exactly what is happening.

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

The real reason Western media & CIA turned against Saudi MBS

December 15, 2018

The real reason Western media & CIA turned against Saudi MBS

Forces are aligning against Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, lead by elements within the CIA and strong players in the mainstream media. But what is really behind this deterioration in relationship, and what are its implications?

Following the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, western media and various entities, including the CIA, appear to have turned their back on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman (MBS). In response to the scandal, the Guardian released a video which its celebutante, Owen Jones, captioned“Saudi Arabia is one of the biggest threats on Earth. Time to stop propping up its repulsive regime.”

The Guardian was not alone in its condemnation. “It’s high time to end Saudi impunity,” wrote Hana Al-Khamri in Al-Jazeera. “It’s time for Saudi Arabia to tell the truth on Jamal Khashoggi,” the Washington Post’s Editorial Board argued. Politico called it “the tragedy of Jamal Khashoggi.”

Even shadowy think-tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Atlantic Council released articles criticising Saudi Arabia in the wake of Khashoggi’s death.

A number of companies began backing away from Saudi money after the journalist’s death, including the world’s largest media companies such as the New York Times, the Economist’s editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, Arianna Huffington, CNN, CNBC, the Financial Times, Bloomberg, Google Cloud CEO, just to name a few.

The CIA concluded that MBS personally ordered Khashoggi’s death, and was reportedly quite open in its provision of this assessment. Antonio Guterres, secretary-general of the UN, also took time out of his schedule to express concern over Saudi Arabia’s confirmation of the killing.

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

Why is it so Easy to Lie to Us? The Case of Russia and Climategate

December 13, 2018

Why is it so Easy to Lie to Us? The Case of Russia and Climategate

Our media feed us routinely with lies and the story of the involvement of the Russian Secret Service with the Climategate hack is just one of them. I thought it was worth discussing it here in light of the fact that it is one of the most blatant lies I could ever find. Also a good illustration of the incredible persistence of legends in the mediasphere.

Last week, I cited the Climategate story, noting how it was part of a wide-ranging anti-science propaganda effort and that it must have involved some professional hacking work to break into the server of the East Anglia University. On that point, I received a comment from “Andy Mitchell” that went as:

The Climategate hack has only one suspect: the Russian Petrostate. There are no other suspects.

Note the absolute certainty of this statement: it is a typical characteristic of legends. So, I thought it was intriguing enough to deserve a little examination.

The origin of the story of the involvement of Russian Secret Services with Climategate is easy to find: it is an article of the Daily Mail dated 6 December 2009. Then, debunking legends normally takes a little work but, in this case, it is remarkable how there is nothing to debunk: the Daily Mail article contains no facts, no evidence, no data.

You can read the article yourself, and you’ll be amazed at how obvious it is that it is something invented out of whole cloth. The only vague connection with reality is that the Climategate files may have been stored for a short time in Tomsk, a Russian town.

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

The Largest Conspiracy Theory Peddlers Are MSM And The US State Department

December 12, 2018

The Largest Conspiracy Theory Peddlers Are MSM And The US State Department

The US State Department has issued a statement accusing the Syrian government of having carried out a false flag chemical weapons attack in northwestern Aleppo with the intent to blame it on the jihadist factions in the region, citing “credible info” that the public has not been permitted to see. Never mind the known fact that there are actual, literal Al Qaeda affiliates who have admitted to using chemical weapons in Aleppo, and who are known to have used chemical weapons throughout Syria even by the State Department’s own admission: the Official Narrative is that only the Syrian government uses chemical weapons, so the chemical weapons usage must necessarily be a false flag staged by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

Except they didn’t use the words “false flag”. Despite the accusation being the exact definition of the thing that a false flag attack is, you won’t see the US government using that term, nor will you ever see it used in this instance by any of the authorized mainstream narrative-framing institutions like CNN or Fox News. This is because the term “false flag” is reserved solely for mention when referring to crazy, kooky Kremlin propaganda, as in the insane, unhinged, tinfoil hat belief that terrorists in Syria might possibly have some kind of motive to stage a false flag chemical attack in order to get the US, UK and France to act as their air force in a retaliatory strike against the Syrian government. That kind of false flag would be completely inconceivable to any right-minded empire loyalist, and is forbidden to even think about.

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

How Plutocratic Media Keeps Staff Aligned With Establishment Agendas

December 12, 2018

How Plutocratic Media Keeps Staff Aligned With Establishment Agendas

Why do mainstream media reporters within ostensibly free democracies act just like state media propagandists? Why are they so reliably pro-establishment, all throughout every mainstream outlet? Why do they so consistently marginalize any idea that doesn’t fit within the extremely narrow Overton window of acceptable opinion?Why does anyone who inconveniences western establishment power always find themselves on the losing end of a trial by media? Why are they so dependably adversarial toward anything that could be perceived as a flaw in any nation outside the US-centralized power alliance, and so dependably forgiving of the flaws of the nations within it?

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There is no consistency in how mass arrests are depicted in Western media. If this took place in a “hostile” country, it would be declared state-sponsored repression by an authoritarian regime https://twitter.com/AFP/status/1071677086778048512 …

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Replying to @AFP

The way I see it there are only two possible explanations for the unanimous consensus in mass media on these issues:

Explanation 1: The consensus exists because the mass media reporters are all telling the truth all the time.

Explanation 2: The consensus exists because there is some kind of system in place which keeps all mass media reporters lying to us and painting a false picture about what’s going on in the world.

Those are the only two possibilities, and only one can be true, since any mixture of the two would result in the loss of consensus.

Most mainstream westerners harbor an unquestioned assumption that Explanation 1 is the only possibility. The things they see on CNN, the BBC and the ABC are all accurate descriptions of what’s really going on in the world, and the consensus in their descriptions exists because they’re all describing the same objective reality.

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

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…

The Russia Investigation is about Criminalizing Peace

December 7, 2018

The Russia Investigation is about Criminalizing Peace

“For those who long wondered why throughout the presidential campaign Trump could not bring himself to say a critical word about Russian President Vladimir Putin, we now know the answer: Trump was hoping to do business in Russia, and doing so would require the approval of Putin.” – USA TodayOpinion

Make no mistake, the mainstream left and state serving-media voices are trying to gaslight an entire generation into believing any candidate that wants peace with Russia may be a foreign conspirator worthy of prison, shame, and family persecution.

Former congressman Ron Paul, as a peace presidential candidate, did not regurgitate war propaganda against Russia either. Neither did Senator Rand Paul when he ran. What Paul hotel do you see in Moscow? Yet for future generations, many in the media want to ensure no such candidate ever runs again without baked-in misgivings of treason and criminality.

No serious observer of recent events can honestly believe the mono-narrative the old media, including “hard news” outfits, has tried to curate about the 2016 election. However, the aim of the last two years of conspiratorial hysteria has been to sear into the minds of low information voters suspicion of any successful political figure who even half challenges the conventional wisdom that America must perpetually spend hundreds of billions on NATO, collect citizens’ private conversations, sanction Russian citizens, and intervene in Russia’s local border disputes.

This is nothing new. When Martin Luther King Jr. used his national spotlight to challenge the moral authority of the Vietnam War, he was denounced as a subversive agent of enemy foreign powers.

What voters need to understand is that those who challenge bipartisan orthodox foreign policy are the leaders most likely to keep them safe from foreign authoritarians.

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

Mercury rising

December 7, 2018

Mercury rising

Mercury is back in the news. And it’s not good.

A new report just released by IPEN (a global network of public interest NGOs) documents the high levels of this potent neurotoxin found in women surveyed in 21 countries, including many small island states. Almost 75 % of the women surveyed had mercury levels greater than 0.58 ppm in hair samples—a level considered the threshold for potentially harmful effects in women of child-bearing age. The predominant cause of this toxicity is the mercury found in fish—the main source of protein in numerous populations on small islands and isolated coastal communities, particularly in regions close to the Arctic. The consumption of fish and other marine animals is considered to be the main source of methylmercury exposure in most populations worldwide.

But a more dramatic report was actually published a few weeks earlier–and seems to have gone unnoticed by the mainstream media. A comprehensive review of mercury levels in human populations over the period 2000 to 2018, was published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives in October this year. Led by Dr Niladi Basu at McGill University in Montreal, the team analysed almost 435,000 mercury biomarker measurements from 335,391 individuals across 75 countries.

Within the cross-sectional studies, the researchers identified 71 populations from 18 countries that were specifically studied because of concerns associated with the consumption of fish and other aquatic animals. Exposure to mercury in this group of people was approximately four times higher than in the general background population.

Not surprisingly, populations associated with bodies of water tend to have higher levels of mercury. Inland groups that were linked to rivers and lakes had almost seven times more mercury in their blood than normal levels.

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

MSM Is Getting Weirder, More Frantic, And More Desperate By The Day

December 5, 2018

MSM Is Getting Weirder, More Frantic, And More Desperate By The Day

When even the Washington Post is saying your Russiagate article is bad journalism, your Russiagate article is really, really bad journalism.

In an article titled “The Guardian offered a bombshell story about Paul Manafort. It still hasn’t detonated.”, WaPo writer Pul Farhi draws attention to the fact that it has been a week since the Guardian published a claim that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort met repeatedly with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, without any evidence backing up the claim, using solely anonymous sources, and despite the claims contradicting known records of Assange’s guests at the Ecuadorian embassy. Criticism and demands for answers have been growing louder and louder from both friends and enemies of WikiLeaks, with new plot holes opening up in the Guardian‘s narrative daily, and the scandal is now moving into mainstream awareness.

And the Guardian remains silent, with its editor-in-chief Katharine Viner refusing to utter so much as a peep of defense this entire time. The only comment the publication has issued has been repeated day after day verbatim to every news outlet which writes about this bizarre occurrence: “This story relied on a number of sources. We put these allegations to both Paul Manafort and Julian Assange’s representatives prior to publication. Neither responded to deny the visits taking place. We have since updated the story to reflect their denials.” Which is basically just implying that they can print any libelous nonsense they want about anyone if their denials aren’t sent to the proper email address on time.

This, clearly, is bananas.

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

Who I Am, Where I Stand, And What I’m Trying To Do Here

December 3, 2018

Who I Am, Where I Stand, And What I’m Trying To Do Here

Every so often I like to write an article describing exactly what I’m about in the interests of transparency, and for the benefit of any new followers who aren’t quite sure what they’re looking at here. It’s a good exercise for me because it allows me to clarify for myself exactly why I got into this gig and what specifically I’m trying to get out of it, and it lays all my intentions on the table so readers can decide if I’m their cup of tea or not.

Brief bio: I am Australian, lived in Melbourne nearly all of my life, two kids, twice married and once divorced. I got a journalism degree in 2003 but figured out long before completing the course that the media deck is stacked so far against truth that I wouldn’t be able to do the kind of work I wanted to do, so I did some environmental activism while paying the bills with corporate work. I had a bunch of transformative personal experiences during that time period, then in 2016 I got a job at a self-publishing news outlet where I quickly gained an audience for my opinion articles about the Bernie Sanders movement (which arose from a commentary void I’d noticed needed filling while I was participating in Bernie Facebook groups). In 2017 I got a Patreon account and became a fully crowd-funded writer who is answerable to no one, a privileged position I exploit to its fullest in saying things I think need to be said regardless of the taboos against saying them.

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

Smear Slander Rinse and Repeat

December 3, 2018

Smear Slander Rinse and Repeat

Frans Masereel Montmartre 1925

The way ‘news’ is reported through known outlets changes so fast hardly a soul notices that news as we once knew it no longer exists. This is due to a large extent to the advent of the internet in general, and social media in particular. On the one hand this has led to an absolute overkill in ‘news’, forcing people to pick between sources once they find they can’t read or view it all, on the other hand it has allowed news outlets to flood the former news waves with so much of the same that nobody can compare one source with the other anymore.

Once you achieve that situation, you’re more or less free to make the news, rather than just report on it. The rise of Donald Trump has made the existing mass media realize that one-sided negative reporting on the man sells better than anything objective can. The MSM have sort of won the battle versus the interwebs, albeit only in that regard, and only for this moment, but that is enough for them for now; just like their readers, they don’t have the scope or the energy to look any further or deeper.

This is in a nutshell, and we really should take a much more profound look but that’s another chapter, what has changed the news, and what will keep on changing it until the truth sets us all free. This is what drives outlets like CNN, the New York Times and the Guardian today, because it provides them with readers and viewers. Which they would not have if they didn’t conduct a 24/7 war on a set list of topics they know their audience can’t get enough of.

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

MSM Is Like Big Pharma: The Rewards Of Malpractice Outweigh The Penalties

November 28, 2018

MSM Is Like Big Pharma: The Rewards Of Malpractice Outweigh The Penalties

“As part of the plea bargain, Purdue agreed to pay the federal government $600 million and 27 states $20 million. The three executives agreed to $34.5 million in fines but avoided jail-time. By contrast, Purdue has earned an estimated $31 billion in total revenues from extended-release oxycodone since its launch. Rather than deterring fraudulent marketing, the penalties simply became a cost of doing business.”

A cost of doing business. The preceding is an excerpt from a Harvard study published last year titled “The Opioid Epidemic: Fixing a Broken Pharmaceutical Market“. It describes the illicit marketing practices advanced by Purdue’s executives for its wildly profitable opioid Oxycontin, and how the criminal and civil cases brought against the company for those practices weren’t consequential enough to prevent those practices from remaining highly profitable.

Big pharma has the highest profit margins of any industry in the United States and is also the number one lobbying industry in the United States, a correlation which won’t surprise anyone who knows anything worth knowing about politics in capitalist societies. One of the many, many ways that the US government has collaborated with these massive pharmaceutical corporations to increase their profit margins has been to put into place laws which make them obscenely difficult to sue, therefore rendering the cost of the few lawsuit settlements which get through a mere drop in the bucket of profits made by unethical marketing practices. Even fines for downright illegal practices can be chalked up to mere overhead, with the largest fine ever levied against a drug company being $3 billion against GlaxoSmithKline, which sounds like a lot if you don’t know that Glaxo raked in $27.5 billion just that year.

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

Six Recent US Antiwar Demonstrations Your Rulers Don’t Want You Talking About

November 14, 2018

Six Recent US Antiwar Demonstrations Your Rulers Don’t Want You Talking About

A friend told me yesterday that he hadn’t seen an antiwar protest in America in ten years. It was a sincere comment; he genuinely hadn’t seen any coverage on any peace activism in his country during that time. And of course he hadn’t; it is mainstream media’s job to distort public narratives in favor of the war-hungry plutocratic class which owns the media outlets. But I’ve actually been noticing a lot of antiwar activism lately which, while often far from the spotlight of mass media attention, has given me much hope for the future.

It is true there was a noticeable lull in vocal demonstrations against military violence since George W Bush left office, largely due to mainstream US partisan dynamics. Mainstream liberals supported Obama, so they avoided bringing attention to his continuation of Bush’s policies of mass murder, while mainstream conservatives ignored the Obama administration’s violence since they focused on attacking him as a weakling and a terrorist sympathizer, and of course had no ground to stand on for any criticisms of warmongering after supporting eight years of Bush. Some antiwar activism did happen in the US during that time, but not much.

And, bizarrely, we’ve seen a mutation of this trend continue well into the Trump administration, with mainstream liberals herded into holding demonstrations in support of the empty Russiagate conspiracy theory. The mass media-endorsed collusion narrative has fed into an anti-Russia hysteria among Democratic Party loyalists that has been used to manufacture support for dangerous cold war escalations and an obscenely bloated military budget, while any objection to Trump’s warmongeringand advancement of longstanding neoconservative agendas has been intentionally lost in the shuffle.

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

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