China threatens to "poke out eyes" of Uncle Sam's chorus girls

Well, here's some nasty trash talk from the Yellow Peril!

Seems the commies have their knickers in a twist over this joint statement released yesterday by the foreign ministers of the US and their toadies in the "Five Eyes" club. That's a mighty impressive finger wag on freedom of speech, coming from a cartel of America's most obsequious ass-kissers. The Five Eyes are devoted to free speech so long as it's aimed at the enemies of Empire. If, perchance, free speech is wielded by the likes of Julian Assange, these stalwarts of free speech and rule of law don't hesitate to run roughshod over the law to stifle freedom of speech.

You'd think the junior members of the Five Eyes club would take a moment to survey the battleground they are preparing. They are hitching their little me-too wagons to the exceptional, indispensable nation, the nation that hasn't won a war since 1945 in spite of having started so many (ok,ok... they whupped Grenada fair and square).

What could go wrong?

Julian who?

 Julian Assange's extradition hearing resumes today. The result is a forgone conclusion. Assange will be packed off to the US where he will spend the rest of his life in the most solitary of solitary confinement in the most maximum of maximum security prisons. 

Given what's at stake for journalism, you'd think that our top journos would be all over the story. Instead, there's a virtual news black-out. Not a peep about it in today's Globe and Mail. The CBC is marginally better, with a single anonymous AP story which helpfully informs us "Assange's legal troubles began in 2010, when he was arrested in London at the request of Sweden, which wanted to question him on allegations of rape and sexual assault..."

No, I'm afraid that's fake news. Assange's legal troubles began when WikiLeaks released the infamous "collateral murder" video. That's when the world got to see US war crimes up close as a couple of America's Top Guns yukked it up while machine-gunning unarmed Iraqi civilians from their Apache helicopter.

That was Assange's crime; exposing US war crimes. It's not that Canada's corporate journalists aren't aware of this. Their silence is due to the fact that they like their corporate paycheques and wish to keep them coming.

That's how "press freedom" works!

Fake news before Donald Trump

Remember Saddam's weapons of mass destruction?

Of course you do. And when the mass media in our vaunted democracies climb aboard a patently false and deliberately promoted narrative, bad shit happens. The fact that the bad shit mostly happens somewhere else just helps us downplay the consequences.

Simon Houpt has an interview with former Guardian ed in chief Alan Rusbridger in yesterday's Globe. The article oozes gravitas.  We've got one journalist interviewing another, and both are convinced that it is primarily their profession that stands between the light of civilization and the darkness lurking just out of view... that darkness in which democracy shall surely perish.

In the hysteria leading up to the Iraq war the Guardian was just as guilty as everyone else in the newsbiz big leagues of pushing the war agenda being promoted by London and Washington. To Rusbridger's credit, they were one of the first major brands to climb down from that, apologizing as early as 2004 for having mislead their readership.

Houpt interviewed Rusbridger for this article on November 29. Two days prior, Rusbridger's former paper had a notable scoop on view, and quite a salacious one at that. According to the Guardian, disgraced former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret meetings with Julian Assange right there in the Ecuadorian embassy in early 2016!

And what a scoop that would be! The disgraced Trump underling and the evil Assange huddling up together, plotting god knows what!?

If there were the slightest chance that this story had anything to it other than wishful thinking, we would have heard a lot more about it, but it's kind of drifted away, hasn't it? The Ecuadorian embassy is probably the most heavily surveilled piece of real estate on earth. There would be evidence galore.

Alas, the story seems to be nothing more or less than fake news.

If the people in charge of our reputable news outlets are seriously concerned that Donald Trump is undermining their credibility with his constant cries of "fake news," their first order of business should be to make sure they're not promulgating fake news.

Democracy dies in darkness

That howler was adopted as a slogan by the Washington Post about a year and a half ago, just months after they released the manifestly fake ProporNot list of 200 fake news sites.

I must admit I don't understand how any thinking person can read that slogan without arching an eyebrow or two. The Washington Post has long been regarded as the unofficial mouthpiece for the CIA, and that was long before it was purchased by the world's richest man, whose connections to the CIA are a matter of public record, at least some of them.

Note how they've painted themselves as champions of press freedom since the untimely demise of their occasional contributor Jamal Kashoggi. That's every bit as hilarious as Erdogan claiming that mantle. Kashoggi was a reliable pro-Kingdom stooge for his entire journalism career, until the palace coup that brought in MBS. Suddenly the Kashoggi clan were on the wrong side of KSA history, and Jamal decided to self-exile himself to DC, there to do whatever he could to further the cause of his side in the internecine struggle for the rulership of the Kingdom.

That's why he's dead now. The irony of his having become a posthumous symbol of journalistic freedom seems to be lost on the public at large. One gets the impression that the vast majority of those shocked and appalled at the Kashoggi murder are folks who can't wait for Assange and Snowden to face "justice" in the American judicial system.

The fact that the WaPo is promoting Jamal as a martyr for "press freedom" tells you that the CIA is, at least for the moment, throwing their weight behind the old guard in the Kingdom.

Having said that, it's good to see that at least some US media outlets get the bigger picture. Unfortunately, those outlets are hemoraging money and won't last much longer...

Sooner or later the CIA will buy them too.