Elon Musk and the Great (Twitter) Reset

If you've been paying attention, you've figured out what Musk got for the 44 billions he overpaid for Twitter; the once-in-a-lifetime chance to make the so-called "liberal establishment" poop their collective drawers. Seems our deep state betters have literally been calling the shots at Twitter and the other social media behemoths for years. You've been getting all the news approved by Washington's alphabet soup of spook agencies - and none of the news they'd rather you not see! That's gotta hurt if you're one of the gullible who still believe, against all evidence, that mainstream media are committed to truth and transparency. There's way too much sewage bubbling to the surface now for the gate-keepers to hold it back. Alas, it's a mistake to assume that Musk is a fresh broom sweeping out the "deep state." Musk is himself an integral part of the show. He's the point-man for a deep state rebranding exercise. What, you thought an outsider was going to be allowed to take over the privatized US space program? Not likely!

Twitter and Facebook incite hatred

Will Smith’s slap heard round the world was more than a gift to racist stereotypes.

The fact that after his physical assault on a person who used hurtful words, he was applauded by the elite of American popular culture, has more sinister implications.

Smith has a lot of support in some circles. Facebook and Twitter are waiving their hate speech policies and allowing rampant hate mongering against other comedians who have offended those same circles.

Tweaking algorithms in such a way as to incite hatred is not a new development. Twitter sidelined its hate-speech policies to allow anti-Russia hate to blossom.

It’s not just social media, it’s news as well. Just a few weeks ago the nabobs at CBC were determined to find connections between the truckers’ protest and far-right extremism. Now the same “journalists” are working even harder trying not to see fascists in Ukraine. After all, they are fighting Russians, and every decent person of sound mind must surely hate Putin and Russia by now, and if Nazis are fighting Russia, we need to support them.

I tune in Al Jazeera a couple of times a day. You can’t watch half an hour of their Ukraine coverage without multiple anti-Russian slurs; “Russians are animals,” for example.

The Al Thani clan, Qatar’s “royal family,” fund Al Jazeera. They play a tidy double game. On the one hand they host US military bases and provide a steady stream of anti-Russian propaganda. Their correspondent Assed Baig is particularly fun to watch.

On the other, they are relentlessly pro-Palestinian, and declined participation in the Judas Accords. Nor are they in any rush to join in those Russia sanctions Uncle Sam is demanding, because they continue to maintain cordial relations, not only with Russia, but with Iran as well.

Like many of America’s supposed allies, the Qatari’s remain on the fence, waiting to see which way the winds of change are blowing.

When the time comes, they may have to change the target of their hate-mongering.

And that’s when we’ll have to reap what we’ve sown.

Greta's white privilege

Do you ever wonder how the social media icons of our day become social media icons?

Take Greta, for example. A Swedish teen, lacking in the social graces and allegedly smitten with ass burgers, is plucked from obscurity, and overnight becomes the go-to expert on climate change.

Or Malala, youngest Nobel laureate ever. 

And who remembers Little Bana, the Syrian wunderkind revealing to the world the predations of the evil dictator Assad on Twitter in a language she couldn't even speak!

I took a look at their Twitter feeds today. Greta leads the way with 5M followers. Malala is next with 1.9M. Little Bana has almost disappeared, reflecting the West's loss of interest in bringing democracy and human rights to that benighted land, with a mere few hundred thousand followers.

Doesn't look right to me. Say what you will about Bana and her stage-managing mother; at least they had to survive an actual war.

And say what you will about Malala and her stage-manager father; she got shot in the head by the Taliban before she got famous.

And Greta? Well, there's those ass burgers, and the stage-managing parents, and the joy-ride on the five million dollar sailboat... but what price has she paid?

Smells like white privilege to me.

Breakthrough! Twitter now certified to prebunk fake news!

Here's some great news; Twitter partners with AP and Reuters to battle misinformation on its site. 

No more fake news on Twitter!

Hallelujah!

Finally, a news provider we can truly trust! 

Twitter.

And to think this development comes just a few days after the Reuters-owned Globe and Mail introduced us to the concept of "prebunking." That's where the truth-tellers decide in advance what's bunk and what's not, thereby protecting us from potentially fake news. Truly amazing!

Truth, at least on Twitter, will now be winnowed from bunk by the stalwarts at Associated Press and Reuters.

Hmm...

AP has been all aboard with virtually every disinfo campaign in the history of US journalism, from the Gulf of Tonkin to Saddam's nukes to the derring-do of those bold freedom-loving White Helmets in Syria.

Reuters was deep in thrall to the UK deep state since long before it fell into the hands of the 3rd Baron Thomson of Fleet, the Canadian billionaire with a hereditary peerage in the House of Lords.

Yup, we'll be getting the straight skinny from Twitter now.

Or maybe just a shitload of Anglo-American propaganda duly certified as "truth."

Baseless conspiracy theories without a shred of evidence

As a life-long news junkie, I've noticed that there has been a recent trend in many supposed news stories to include some version of this heading embedded either in the title or the body of the story. This is particularly noticeable in coverage of Team Trump's various challenges to the November election and also in reportage of competing pandemic narratives. In both cases there is an official narrative, and any deviation therefrom is inevitably "baseless conspiracy theory without a shred of evidence."

This marks an evolution in how news is presented. Where were the "without a shred of evidence" disclaimers when our "legitimate" news outlets were regaling us with yarns about Saddam's nukes or Qaddafi's rape squads? Perhaps a note of caution injected into those scary stories could have slowed the march to war on those countries.

Likewise, our truth-tellers in the mainstream media never asterisked four years of Russiagate hysteria with that disclaimer. Any anonymous leak from the "intelligence community" that served to obstruct Trump was presented as gospel, when in reality they actually were baseless conspiracy theories without a shred of evidence.

I ran into the phrase this morning in this CBC story about billionaire and Clinton crony Frank Giustra, one of the biggest donors to various Clinton "philanthropies." Unpaid intern Jason Proctor lays it out in his opening sentence;

West Vancouver billionaire Frank Giustra has been given the go-ahead to sue Twitter in a B.C. courtroom over the social media giant's publication of a series of tweets tying him to baseless conspiracy theories involving pedophile rings and Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Hmm... "...tying him to baseless conspiracy theories involving pedophile rings..."

Sorry, what ties Giustra to those baseless conspiracy theories are stories like this one from The Guardian, and this from CNBC. 

Seems there was this sociopathic pedophile named Jeffrey Epstein. He was an actual convicted pedophile who cultivated the who's who of America's political elite. He is believed to have continued both his diddling and his cultivating until ending it all in a spasm of remorse in a NYC prison last year.

There's an old folk maxim we're all familiar with; you are judged by the company you keep. That Giustra kept company with folks who ran with Epstein doesn't prove him guilty of anything, of course.

But the "pedos in high places" story would seem a long way from "baseless conspiracy theory."

Media savants admit bullsh#t about election meddling was bullsh#t

Don't take my word for it.

Take the word of the media savants at McGill's Digital Democracy Project and Ryerson's Social Media Lab.

And don't blame me. My twitter account, which peaked at twelve followers and then lost a couple, has been suspended for over a year. I desperately wanted to meddle in the election but obviously my voice was silenced.

Our flawed democracy wobbles on...

Russiagate: the hoax lives on

When we read news on RT or Sputnik, most readers will take it with a grain of salt. After all, those outlets, financed by the Russian government, will no doubt be putting a pro-Russian spin on their stories.

If, however, we read a story published by NATO, there is no salt required. Of course not! NATO is us... the good guys! Not NATO nor anyone in our media would put a pro-Western slant on a story. It's strictly objective truth and nothing but the truth!

The CBC has a story on view regarding Russian Twitter trolls.  A NATO "academic journal" has unearthed more proof that the Ruskies were meddling in the 2016 election! Writer Kaleigh Rogers reminds us that "the goal of the Russian campaign was not to sway voters one way or the other, but to stoke debate and division among Americans," as if Americans need outside help becoming more divided.

In the first place, it's a pretty lame-ass election-meddling strategy the Ruskies have cooked up if its goal wasn't to sway voters.


More importantly, if encouraging debate and division is election meddling, isn't that what the Americans have been doing with Radio Free Europe since 1949?

What is fascism?

That's a word that gets tossed about a fair bit, fascism.

But what does it mean?

Nobody seems to know. The old school guys want to direct you to Gramsci's prison notebooks, but I wouldn't recommend that... unless you're in prison too and have as much time to read them as Tony had to write them.

We've been hearing the word more often since the advent of the Trump era. A lot of folks who never gave the question of fascism any thought pre-Trump suddenly got woke and realized America was in the clutches of a fascist dictatorship.

Or almost.

Or something...

They're not wrong, but it's got little or nothing to do with white supremacist 45 sitting in the White House today. White supremacist 44 wasn't much different when measured by policy outcomes.

So what is fascism?

Not sure, but when the interests of FacebookTwitterGoogle align so perfectly with the interests of the war profiteers at BoeingLockheedMartin, and when the guy who owns the Washington Post does hundreds of millions in business with the CIA, maybe some of us aging radicals should lay off the ganja for a spell and try and make some sense of it all.


It's not looking good.

Bolshevik Bob and the Grace of God

I think it was Bolshevik Bruce, if I'm not mistaken...

But "Bob"  rhymes with "God" so I'm happy enough to leave it there.

Let me tell you about Bolshevik Bruce. Or Bob.

That was gonna be my "twitter handle".

Only after I was informed that "Falling Downs" was taken.

Ya, while I've never done anything totally crass like "monetize" this blog, it does cross my mind from time to time to do a little more to promote it. Tried to set up a Facebook account for Falling Downs once. The process just got way too complicated. That in itself should tell you something. There's not a nine year old in North America who is intimidated by the process of setting up a Facebook account, but it's way too much for me.

That was pretty much the experience I had with "Twitter."

Last time I had a "handle" was when me and Terry ran cross country in the middle of winter delivering his Harley to Calgary. Figured we'd do well with a CB radio in the 77 Impala, the one with the 350 4bbl motor that was standard issue in the Corvette.

An Impala with a Corvette motor, in other words.

So we hook up this CB system, and I swear, the only time we used it between Guelph and Calgary was when we were looking for a liquor store in Brandon Manitoba.

Which, thank God, we found!

And while I am happy to report that said Impala could well bury the speedometer even while towing a trailer with a Harley in it, the point of that CB has always escaped me.

Just like 30 years later the point of that "Twitter handle" escapes me again.

Anyway, I was somewhat at loose ends when I found out that "Falling Downs" was a Twitter handle already taken. How the fuck does that happen? Must have been that opportunistic shit who was tweeting all my blog posts when they hit BEFORE ITS NEWS.

So I'm a bit put on the spot, and wracking my brain I come up with... Bolshevik... Bruce? After all, that's the county I live in...

But I have to admit that "Bolshevik Bob" has a better ring to it.

But for the grace of God I'd be calling Calgary "home" today...

And that 1400 square foot side-split I almost bought in Rundle for $78,000  is now worth half a million...

But for the grace of God...