Media malfeasance

Within forty-eight hours of Nancy Pelosi announcing the Trump impeachment initiative, the brain trust that runs Canada's national newspaper of record weighed in on the matter with utter certainty; Trump was guilty of treason.

There's a belief among Globe and Mail "thought leaders" that they can't be seen as deviating too far from whatever the NYT/WaPo/WSJ consensus might be.

If they would stick to reporting actual news, that editorial would not have happened. Ukraine-US history didn't begin with Trump's phone-call to Zelensky. It didn't even begin with the US sponsored 2014 Maidan coup.

Nor did political corruption in the Oval Office begin with that call. As near as I can tell, even when you put the worst possible spin on Trump's "arm-twisting," it's nothing more than a business-as-usual moment in American history.

Trump may be a serial liar, but he's not the first American president to tell a lie, or lots of them.

Trump may be using the office to enrich himself, but that's a time-honoured American tradition. A number of US presidents of the past were born in poverty. None of them died in poverty.

What was the Clinton Foundation other than a massive pay-to-play scheme?

If our "free press" were even remotely free, they'd be giving us the whole story.

Instead, they relentlessly pursue an obviously partisan agenda that bears little or no resemblance to lived reality.

Ultimately, this is not about Trump. The same media that today denigrates Trump at every turn, never missed a chance to kiss his ass in the twenty-five years before he entered politics. How else did Trump become a "celebrity?"


What's really threatening America's elite isn't having a serial liar in the White House. It's having a self-proclaimed "socialist" knocking on the door.

Getting to the bottom of the bullshit at the Global Conference on Media Freedom

Paul Waldie has another report on the Global Conference on Media Freedom in the Globe and Mail today. Once again, we need not invoke the name "Assange" in covering a conference on "press freedom" in London, because after all, Assange is not a journalist.

Instead, we meet Maria Ressa, whose plucky anti-Duterte website "The Rappler" is fast becoming a darling of the mainstream "press freedom" warriors. Oddly enough, up until Duterte's election in 2016, nobody in the capitals of the West ever gave a shit about democracy or the lack thereof in the Philippines, let alone how free the press might be there.

So what changed with the election of Duterte? He's threatened to follow an independent foreign policy and forge better relations with Russia and China. That's why "democracy" and a "free press" in the Philippines are suddenly top of mind.

Waldie informs us that a Pierre Omidyar "charity" has taken Ressa under it's wing. Omidyar is the  billionaire founder of eBay, and, like so many of his billionaire buddies, has taken to investing his spare time and spare hundreds of millions dabbling in politics and journalism.

A quick scan of his Wikipedia page reveals that Omidyar has lots of fun collaborations with like-minded super-rich. He's on the advisory board of Berggruen Institute, a vanity project of billionaire Nicolas Berggruen, son of billionaire art dealer Heinz Berggruen and fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, the grand-daddy of America-uber-alles think tanks.

He also funds, along with George Soros and others, the Poynter Institute, a non-profit "journalism" school which recently provided the public with a list of over five hundred "fake news" outlets. Alas, their list was quickly exposed as being fake news, and was taken down in a matter of days, in a replay of the Washington Post's (another billionaire plaything) ProporNot scandal.

Waldie quotes Ressa as claiming that Google and Facebook are "the real threats to media freedom because they've provided an accelerant for populism to take hold across Europe and Asia." Nevertheless, a few paragraphs later we learn that Ressa is now "working with Facebook in the Philippines."

So apparently that plucky website The Rappler has Facebook AND a bunch of billionaires in its corner. That should give Ressa the immunity card she needs to take on Duterte.

As for Facebook, let's not forget they were also a partner in the Integrity Initiative, a UK government attempt to shape what "news" your eyes get to light on. Ironically, the Integrity Initiative was exposed by RT and Sputnik - the two media outlets banned from the Global Conference on Media Freedom in London, because they "spread disinformation."

So, did I get to the bottom of the bullshit? Hell no!

But I think I can make a preliminary conclusion about the Global Conference on Media Freedom. When the likes of Jeremy Hunt, Chrystia Freeland, and Facebook are looking out for media freedom, at a conference where uttering the name of Assange is verboten, it's probably already too late.

Top cheerleader treats entire football squad to leg-spread

A couple years ago there was a rumour to that effect going round the local high school.

Apparently said rumour was kicked off by a "rival" who had an eye on one of the boys on that team, a boy who was smitten by that top cheerleader.

All of that is just typical teenage drama, but social media magnifies these petty wranglings into shit that becomes really important, certainly for those reading about it on Facebook, which, as much as I find it hard to believe, is where a whole lot of folks get their news.

And that should be truly frightening.

I don't mean to sound elitist here, but if you get your news from Facebook, you're a retard.

Shop around a little. All the news sites are bullshitting you one way or another. With a little time and a little experience, you'll gradually work your way to a place where you can, at least most of the time, tell the difference between the wheat and the chaff.

The difference between the Shit and the Shinola...

**********

For those who get their news from Facebook, I suggest you fork out a few bucks per month to check out WSJ, NYT, and the WaPo.

Canadians should augment that with a daily perusal of the Globe and Mail, even though they're unlikely to find anything interesting there that didn't originate in the already mentioned titles.

Canada is, after all, first among the me-too nations.

While you're busy taking in the Empire's point of view, you should also take a peek at what's up at Sputnik, RT, AJE, Press TV, and the Jerusalem Post.

And there's plenty of once-prime English language journo's, even Pulitzer types, who have been blackballed from the mainstream and are basically glorified bloggers now, because, get this, they thought it was their job to speak truth to power!

So you'll find Chris Hedges at Truthdig.

Robert Parry founded Consortium News.

Seymour Hersh shows up on the fringes sometimes, but he's clearly not welcome in the MSM.

Spend enough time rooting around in the bowels of social media and those foreign news feeds, and you'll soon discover that errant cheerleaders are the least of our problems...

Plagscan

I notice in the "traffic sources" file on my blogger dashboard that I've had a visit from plagscan.com. That's an outfit that sniffs out plagiarism on the internet.

As far as I can tell you have to fork out cash to use plagscan. Who the fuck would bother using it on this blog? While I'm pretty sure I've never had an original thought in my life, I'm 100% sure every blog I've ever posted is in my own words.

So what would motivate someone to check this extremely obscure blog for plagiarism?

Hmm...

Maybe it's the CIA trying to finger the foreign agents behind neumann's blog? After all, the think tank here at Falling Downs does take a dim view of that toxic virus commonly referred to as "American Exceptionalism."

Or Mossad. Ya, that's it! As far as I know, I'm the guy who tagged Bibi with the "greatest leader since Moses" label. Maybe they were just checking before my name went on a hit list?

Or maybe it was Putin. He's behind pretty much everything these days.

Or... maybe it was the legal department at the WaPo doing their due diligence before offering me Khashoggi's vacant slot?..


Gonna have to load up the vaporizer and give this conundrum some thought...

A new fascism for a new century

One thing easy to miss during the last two years, as our "free press" was incessantly waving the Russiagate hoax at the public, is how the purveyors of fake news are incrementally shutting down our ability to access news that comes from alternative sources.

The Washington Post gave acres of free publicity to an outfit called PropOrNot in late 2016. PropOrNot claims to be working diligently to ferret out "Russian propaganda" on the internet. They compiled a handy list of websites to shun if one wishes to avoid having one's thoughts contaminated by "fake news." I'm a regular visitor to a number of those sites, and I like to think I'm intelligent enough and sufficiently well read to decide for myself when I'm reading bullshit.

PropOrNot would prefer that I not imbibe the propaganda to be found on sites like Global Research or truthdig. Frankly, my bullshit detector has to work a lot harder when I'm reading the Washington Post than when I'm reading those sites.

Similarly, the Integrity Initiative was a UK government effort to steer the public away from "fake news." It is beyond ironic that the fakery of the Integrity Initiative was exposed by one of those fake news sites we're supposed to avoid.

That concept of a "network of networks" detailed in the RT story clarifies a lot of things. It goes a long way to explaining the White Helmets' journey from al Qaeda auxiliary to Hollywood, and eight-year-old Bana al-Abed's journey from Aleppo to the Oscars.

Unfortunately, the powers that be are working overtime to make those alternative news sources harder and harder to find. Our tech overlords are joining with governments and the corporate media to restrict our access to information that might be upsetting to the establishment narrative. The Facebook-Twitter-Google crowd are all-in for making sure that your delicate sensitivities will be spared inconvenient facts.

It's all for your own good, of course.

In Albert Speer's Spandau prison memoir, the former Hitler deputy observed that if the Nazis had had television, they would have been unstoppable.


The new fascists have way more than television.

A Senator and a CIA guy walk into a bar

A Senator and a CIA guy walked into a bar around noon last Tuesday for a quick bite and a drink or two. Jon had a Ruben and Mike had a BLT and they had a couple of beers.

Then they had a couple more beers and sat around and shot the shit for awhile.

After that they had a few more beers. They were brainstorming.

Midafternoon the barkeep brought over a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue. That really helped the brainstorming. Beer. Scotch. Brainstorming.

Around 7:30 Jon says to Mike, well I should go but ya know, I fink we fuckin got us somethign here ya know...

And Mike says fuckin rigght we fukin do an ya know what ?

What sez Jon.

Ya know what?

What?

I think we fukin got us ya this is kgood I thidn we cna ya. We should call whathisfukinface agt the Post.

Ya, the Post. They'll publishish it fgor sure...


Jon and Mike made it safely home that night. Their story appeared in the Washington Post today.

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.

TRUMP TREASON REVEALED!!!

And it wasn't the Mueller investigation that revealed it; it was the Entous investigation.

Adam Entous, formerly of the Washington Post and the WSJ, has a fifteen page expose in the June 18 issue of The New Yorker detailing the Trump team's collusion with several foreign powers. Seems that Mueller's been looking at the wrong foreign power. His year and a half investigation has thus far served up some woefully thin gruel from which to make a case for Russian meddling in America's sacred democracy.

Instead of Russia, it seems he should have focused on Saudi Arabia, UAE, and, especially, Israel. Entous' investigation reveals collusion between agents of those foreign powers and the Trump team virtually 24/7 throughout the lead-up to the 2016 election. This collusion occurred at the highest levels, including between the future President and the heads of state of these foreign entities.

Entous' story has been out for well over a month now, so I'm surprised there's been no outrage in our major media about this foreign meddling. Surely somebody's going to be calling for sanctions on these rogue states any day now!

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.

Sarah Kendzior; disingenuous, misguided, or just plain stupid?

I like Sarah Kendzior. Back when she was a freshly minted Dr. Phil who found herself squeezed off the tenure track, she used to write about that. The writing was heartfelt and convincing because she knew what she was talking about.

She has yet to find that track, but she may no longer care. Check out the brand she's built. This woman is going places! She's one 60 Minutes profile away from becoming a serious public intellectual!
 
But when I consider that, and when I read of the various accolades she has won over recent years (Foreign Policy named her one of the 100 people you should follow on Twitter to make sense of global events - as if Twitter is required to make sense of global events...), I have to marvel at the fact that the bar has been set so astoundingly low.

Take her latest effort as "op-ed columnist for the Globe and Mail" for example; Gutting net neutrality is a death knell for the resistance.

Ah yes, "the resistance!"

That one word conjures all sorts of imagery of heroic anti-Nazi derring-do in occupied Europe during the '40s. The French resistance. The Dutch resistance...

The Greeks and Poles resisted too. In every case we saw courageous citizens, infinitely out-manned and out-gunned, standing against the Nazi behemoth.

Although she is fully aware that's the image you'll carry in your mind's eye when you read the word "resistance," that's not the resistance Kendzior is talking about. No, she's talking about the resistance to Trump's election victory. This is not a resistance led by courageous partisans hiding out in the woods and risking their lives for a cause.

It is a resistance led by Hillary Clinton and a Democratic Party elite that a year ago lost an election in spite of having more Wall Street money behind it than any previous campaign in US electoral history.

It's not the resistance of the oppressed.

It is the resistance of an entitled ruling class clique who are pouting because another, perhaps slightly less entitled ruling class clique, grabbed the steering wheel out of their hands.                    

I can see why they'd be pissed.

At the same time, the claim that the Dem Party establishment or any of the mainstream media platforms Kendzior regularly appears on are even remotely threatened is beyond hokum.

Seriously?

Some players in the internet ecosystem want to squash net neutrality so they can make more money, not because they want to silence the Globe and Mail and the US news sites the Globe reflexively parots, the Washington Post and the NYT.

Pretty sure they're not interested in silencing Kendzior either.

As you know, all those platforms are vehemently anti-Trump.

What's being silenced are media platforms that question the narrative of Kendzior, Dem Party elites, and the "resistance," sites like RT and Sputnik and Michael Chossudovsky's Global Research.

So relax, Sarah... so long as you continue to faithfully toe the official DNC line, you've nothing to worry about!

Did pot-addled hillbilly coin term "fake news?"

I see where Callum Borchers at the Washington Post has sniffed out another Donny J fib. Apparently Trump has been bragging about inventing the term "fake news."

This has got Borchers righteously miffed. While he doesn't exactly claim that he personally coined the term, he does want you to know he used it before Trump ever did. His editors at WaPo seem to think that's newsworthy...

Hey dude, check out the title of this blog-post; Real news, fake news, and conspiracy theories, posted right here in February of 2012! Looks like I beat both you and Trump to the prize!

Not that I coined the term. I'm pretty sure Mark Twain mentioned "fake news" at one time or another...

After Assad, Duterte?

The Beltway Brahmins have been telling us for five years now that Assad has to go, and he's still there. Furthermore, there's every possibility that he'll still be there five years hence. The failure to affect regime change in Syria, however, isn't preventing the think-tankers and opinion makers in Washington from pencilling in the next candidate for regime change.

This time around it's President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines who's gone rogue. In the four months since his election he's been making all sorts of "anti-American" pronouncements, and America's ruling class has noticed. Check out the scolding tone in this Washington Post missive today; "...Duterte discovered this week that his actions have consequences."

Yup! Filipinos, from the lowliest expat maid to the President himself, occasionally need to be reminded of their place, don't they?

And here's Foreign Affairs chiming in with a polemic about Duterte's defiance. Different venue, same condescending tone.

And don't miss The Limits of Duterte's Anti-Americanism, on view at The Atlantic.

My favorite is the Foreign Policy hit job titled President Duterte's Crazy Drug War Is Just The Beginning. The sub-head tells the tale; the antics of this mad-man and his crazy shenanigans are an attack on the very foundations of democracy, don't you know! When you read that kind of rhetoric you know that calls for a humanitarian intervention to save the people of the Philippines won't be long in coming.

When those leading mouth-pieces for America's policymakers are singing the same song in unison within a day or two of one another, you know there's more at work than coincidence. Luckily, the Beltway Big-boys still have the Filipino military establishment in their pockets.

All Duterte has is a 74% approval rating from his people.

Alas, that won't be nearly enough...

White House 2016; choosing an overseer for the disintegration of the Empire

America is in decline.

Any serious person already knows this. Even the serious people who opine in the hallowed pages of the NYT or the Washington Post know they're talking shit when they talk about "American exceptionalism" etc. They know the jig is up but they're committed to maintaining the illusion.

Rodrigo Duterte, recently elected president of the Philippines, knows the jig is up too. That's why he's A-OK telling Obama to go to hell.

And he's only the most recent example of former vassal states giving the finger to Uncle Sam. NATO ally Turkey has gone rogue. The Saudis are no longer reliable allies. Israel has long been laughing off American scolding about their egregious land theft and ethnic-cleansing strategy. And why not? After forty years of American finger wagging about their settlement policy, they were just rewarded with the biggest "aid" package in US history; 38 billions in American military aid over ten years. (The fact that this is in reality a 38 billion dollar gift to the US military-industrial complex is another story.)

So the truth is, more and more former allies no longer take America seriously.

The US electorate is poised to elect a caretaker to oversee the next four years of America's decline. Due to the deliberately engineered slovenliness of America's education system, the vast majority of eligible voters are convinced that they have but two choices; Trump or Clinton. Yes, it's a forgone conclusion that one of those will be the next POTUS.

Trump claims he wants to "make America great again." Nobody knows what he means when he says that. Looking at his record, I'd guess he's hoping to make Trump even greater. He'd like to see more Trump Towers in more places. However crass and narcissistic you may find the man, there's nothing about the guy's track record that suggests he'd take any pleasure in setting entire nations aflame. No, he'd much rather see a Trump Tower in Damascus than nuke the place. Or Moscow. Or Manilla. Or anywhere.

Clinton is another story. She has a long record of setting entire nations aflame. If you saw General John Allen's flame-thrower of a speech at the DNC you can bet there'll be lots more to come.

America is indeed exceptional. Homeless vets live in the streets by the thousands. Twenty military veterans chose to end their own lives every day. America remains the only developed nation without a national single-payer health care program. America's schools continue their inexorable plunge in international rankings.

That's exceptional alright.

If you want a president who will grab the naysayers like Putin and Erdogan and Duterte by the neck and shake some sense into them, vote Hillary.

If you'd rather have a president who wants to get along with Putin and Erdogan and Duterte, and will settle for a few more buildings with his name on them, vote Trump.

Electing Trump might result in a few more Trump Towers in the short term. In the long term it might result in more people realising that the USA desperately needs serious electoral reform.

Electing Clinton would more likely result in serious conflict on any number of fronts, to the point where the entire world will be in flames... at which time it will probably be too late for those election reforms.