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...

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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...

True fakery, fake truthiness, fake news, true fake news, and fake news that might be true...

I see where the White Helmets are in the news again. Well, obliquely, anyway.

As regular readers will know, I'm more than a little skeptical of the official story. You know, those plucky volunteers who work exclusively in areas of Syria held by the "rebels," meaning ISIS/al Qaeda, and their affiliates.

Ya, I'm fully aware Assad is a bad dude and all that, but...

That plucky band of Syrian volunteers was originally organized by James Le Mesurier, a non-Syrian, non-Arab, non-Muslim white guy with deep connections to the UK military. And, for "volunteers," they've managed to hoover up an incredible amount of money from the same constellation of foreign state actors who have been behind the Syrian "civil war" from even before the get-go.

So here's the latest story.  Some version of it has been on virtually every "fake" news channel on the internet (although I believe it's absent from Glenn Greenwald's "The Intercept"). This of course is where things get dodgy. How do we know what's fake news on the internet? That original Propornot disinformation piece at the WaPo, advising us what was fake and what was not, turned out to be more fake than true itself.

Our official media, on the other hand, has not even acknowledged the existence of this story.

Anyway, this alleged report from the OPCW (the folks who are charged with investigating alleged chemical weapons attacks) was allegedly deep-sixed by the OPCW itself. If that is the case, and if that allegedly quashed report is indeed the real deal, then the entire "White Helmets are heroes" narrative goes down the shitter, as does the credibility of the OPCW itself.

That would be a huge story.

The allegedly quashed OPCW report was leaked to an outfit called the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media, a bunch of mainly Brit academics who you'd think would know enough to put a comma after Propaganda. I'm not sure what their fakery rating might be, but they've done some yeoman work on the faker-than-fake Integrity Initiative (lots of initiative, a little light on integrity).

So, who/what to believe? Let me know if you figure it out.

"Free Press" can't remember who Julian Assange is

The Globe and Mail's opinion section was today given over to a celebration about how great and vital a free press is. I don't disagree with that. But I think a lot of the self-congratulatory twaddle I read there today misses the point.

In twelve pages of supposed journalism we are treated to innumerable references to Donald Trump, but one solitary passing reference to Julian Assange, and that was in the Discuss section, in an email exchange between two non-journalists. Unless there erupts a public furore over Assange's kidnapping from the Ecuadorian embassy, he's on his way to Donald Trump's USA, where he can expect to spend the rest of his life in prison.

That furore is unlikely to erupt when our "free press" refuses to acknowledge that the persecution of Julian Assange is the signal current event defining how free our free press is allowed to be, which is very free, so long as your journalism hews to approved parameters. That's why once acclaimed journalists like Robert Parry and Seymour Hersh are no longer affiliated with mainstream media; they crossed that line.

They've been reduced to writing blogs after they got carried away with "speaking truth to power."

Much is made of the fact that some thirty journalists died on the job in the past year. I think they missed a couple in Israel, but our free press misses a lot of stuff that goes on in Israel. Be that as it may, thirty is not a big number. That stat tells me that professional journalists are far more likely to die of complications from alcoholism than they are as a result of their journalism. Farmers and construction workers face far greater mortality risks than professional journalists do.

As for Trump, it should be beyond obvious that POTUS 45 doesn't actually have a lot of clout in terms of decision making in the Exceptional Nation. Generally, once Trump announces a policy initiative, the opposite happens, unless of course it's a tax break that the billionaire class can live with. Beyond billionaire-friendly tax breaks, Trump doesn't get to decide much beyond whether he'll have KFC or a Big Mac for lunch.

The stand-out story in those twelve pages was by Steve Adler, editor-in-chief of Reuters. The sub-head of his article is "Journalists must take steps to restore public trust in the work that they do."

That's exactly right. The credibility of journalism wasn't destroyed by conspiracy theorists and it wasn't destroyed by Donald Trump.

It's been eroded over a long period of time by shoddy journalism produced by professional journalists working at the most prestigious titles in news media.

How to forget history

On March 16 the New York Times published this article by Elisabeth Malkin about the upcoming trial of former Guatemalan dictator Rios Montt on charges of genocide.

Today an edited version of the same story appears in my New York Times International Weekly. One thing that has been edited out of the original is Ms. Malkin's reference to US knowledge of the genocide;

   "...American diplomats and intelligence agencies knew that the Guatemalan army was carrying out the massacres, even though the Reagan administration argued in public that human rights conditions were improving."

Apparently even that oblique concession to reality was too much for the editors at the Times. America's complicity in the murder of tens of thousands of peasants and natives throughout Central and South America goes far beyond knowing about it. These murders in Guatemala and beyond were actively supported as a matter of US policy.

See for example the excellent article by Robert Parry, Reagan's Hand in Guatemala's Genocide.

Thirty years later Rios Montt finally gets a trial.

Ronald Reagan gets statues.