Crucial History: Alfred McCoy, The CIA and Me

 

How I Learned Not to Love Big Brother

Defeated in the public arena, the CIA retreated to the shadows and retaliated by tugging at every thread in the threadbare life of a graduate student. Over the next few months, federal officials from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare turned up at Yale to investigate my graduate fellowship. The Internal Revenue Service audited my poverty-level income. The FBI tapped my New Haven telephone (something I learned years later from a class-action lawsuit).

Advertisements

Barlett Exposes Syria Lies Again

Free Syrian Army fighters prepare a rocket launcher prior to firing it towards forces loyal to Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad in Izra’a in Deraa countryside May 21, 2015. REUTERS/Alaa Al-Faqir – RTX1DXSX

 

link

#SciFi Prompt 100!!! – F.U.D.

J. Giambrone

We are in dire straits with an all-out assault on science, evidence and reason coming out of the White House all day long, every day now. The direct attack on science is part of a much-wider trend.

Science is imperfect and the truth has no billionaire backer fighting for it. The deck is stacked in the other direction.

FUD

Fear Uncertainty Doubt:

Fear, uncertainty and doubt (often shortened to FUD) is a disinformation strategy used in sales, marketing, public relations, talk radio, politics, religious organizations, and propaganda. FUD is generally a strategy to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information and a manifestation of the appeal to fear.

…By spreading questionable information about the drawbacks of less well known products, an established company can discourage decision-makers from choosing those products over its own, regardless of the relative technical merits.

President FUD is the living embodiment of these…

View original post 327 more words

The Weasel Slide Backward

 

Propaganda site “The Washington Post” has posted a mealy-mouthed half-hearted explanation for its journalistic malfeasance.

Washington Post Appends Editor’s Note to Russian Propaganda Story

Editor’s Note: The Washington Post on Nov. 24 published a story on the work of four sets of researchers who have examined what they say are Russian propaganda efforts to undermine American democracy and interests. One of them was PropOrNot, a group that insists on public anonymity, which issued a report identifying more than 200 websites that, in its view, wittingly or unwittingly published or echoed Russian propaganda. A number of those sites have objected to being included on PropOrNot’s list, and some of the sites, as well as others not on the list, have publicly challenged the group’s methodology and conclusions. The Post, which did not name any of the sites, does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media outlet, nor did the article purport to do so. Since publication of The Post’s story, PropOrNot has removed some sites from its list.

 

Sniveling, Despicable Liars Inc.

Fuck you, Washington Post, we know who you work for.

 

 

Gullible Americans: 75% of the time

Most Americans Who See Fake News Believe It, New Survey Says

Fake news headlines fool American adults about 75% of the time, according to a large-scale new survey conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs for BuzzFeed News.

 

Post-Modern Pizza Propaganda #pizzagate

 

by Joe Giambrone

A Democratic Party connected pizza restaurant, which just happens to be run by a gay man, is under siege from right-wing extremists, and even Alex Jones has tried to distance himself from the more obvious bullshit (after promoting it in the first place).

The alleged child sex ring run out of a DC pizza parlor, “#pizzagate,” has been debunked repeatedly, but that doesn’t matter to a whole lot of post-truth personalities you’ll run across on Facebook. A Youtube rumor mill churns out twists and turns daily, and these obvious propaganda pieces get re-posted unquestioningly. Lies always outpace the truth.

I’ve blocked several people whom I’m not sure genuinely believe what they’re posting. Some do, and that’s just as problematic. Snopes has a pretty good summation of this fiasco to date.

Now that assault-rifle-wielding vigilantes have taken up the cause we had all better take a step back and consider where we are as a nation. Most Americans believe mountains of bullshit all the time. And I do mean you, the reader. With the corporate media’s credibility at all-time lows the information void has been filled by trolls, scammers, political dirty tricksters, and all other varieties of dark intelligence type mercenaries. Much of what comes across the feeds is wholesale bullshit deliberately fabricated to push buttons.

What’s most damaging about all this is that it erodes the truth, making it more difficult to find or to care about. The noise barrage prompts apathy among the many and insane overreactions within a few.

There are real conspiracies. Powerful people do commit crimes, lots of them. They are not, however, so inept and incompetent about it to be running child sex slave rings out of pizzarias! To believe such nonsense requires a level of gullibility that is shocking. It requires one to be divorced from reality, living in a TV type world where such crimes are easily perpetrated and plot holes don’t matter. And neither does credible evidence.

Things have become more dire, news wise, with the recent hysteria over alleged Russian propaganda. Similarly debunked claims of Russian state involvement were sanctioned by the Washington Post. Evidence, of Russian connections to US independent media, is non-existent. Specious fake journalism appeared right in the supposed bastion of truth, where the US government routinely proclaims its objectives and floats its excuses. There is no shortage of “fake news” to rail against.

The #pizzagate fiasco was clearly the work of Trump supporters acting anonymously to drum up a hot-button smear against Hillary Clinton, just prior to Election Day. But the mainstream media has taken up the banner to try and assail all alternative news sources–alternative to them–their direct competitors. With this new escalation into the realm of vigilante violence, and with the multitude of hate crimes witnessed since the election, the country teeters in a state of trepidation over what will come next when Trump takes over.

But #pizzagate is not over yet. We still have the unfortunate business of Jeffrey Epstein to contend with.

“Epstein, who counts among his pals royal figures, heads of state, celebrities and fellow billionaires, spent 13 months in prison and home detention for solicitation and procurement of minors for prostitution. He allegedly had a team of traffickers who procured girls as young as 12 to service his friends on ‘Orgy Island,’ an estate on Epstein’s 72-acre island, called Little St. James, in the U.S. Virgin Islands.” (“Flight logs show Bill Clinton flew on sex offender’s jet much more than previously known”, Fox News, May 13, 2016)

And it’s not just right-wing sources reporting on Epstein. Says The Daily Beast:

“Epstein’s little black book and flight logs read like a virtual Who’s Who: Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Larry Summers, Kevin Spacey, Prince Andrew, and Naomi Campbell all hitched rides on Epstein’s private planes… In 2008, Epstein was convicted of soliciting sex from an underage girl and quietly paid settlements to scores of alleged victims who said he serially molested them… Epstein had 14 private numbers for Trump and his family in his little black book. Meanwhile, Bill and Hillary Clinton have remained mum about their ties to the Palm Beach pedophile—despite evidence that shows Bill was one of the most famous and frequent passengers on Epstein’s‘Lolita Express’ and that Epstein donated money to the Clinton Foundation even after his conviction.”

 

I am reminded of Sibel Edmonds’ take on the elites and how politicians are vetted to insure they do have skeletons in their closets, so that they can be controlled by the Deep State. All of these crimes are known to intelligence at the highest levels, and that is why these people are allowed to rise into positions of power. It is expressly because they have dark secrets that these individuals become our so-called “leaders.”

We can see why the trolls wanted to limit the pedophilia charges to a Democrat friendly pizza parlor in D.C., now that Donald Trump himself has been connected to Jeffrey Epstein’s “Lolita Express.” The hysteria was carefully focused and localized, no matter how glaringly false it happened to be.

Don’t look for Alex Jones to pursue Donald Trump’s link to Epstein, however. He’s already been busy attempting to deflect the charges. Don’t look for that link to go wider among the right-wing trolls, even though the President-Elect has been exposed exactly as Bill Clinton was. The right cares nothing for reality, but instead creates a false reality daily to suit their political ambitions. It is a lust for power, not for justice.

#pizzagate #hypocrisy

---

 

Joe Giambrone is an author and filmmaker and an enemy to propagandists of all stripes.

Corporate News Discrediting Itself Over False Russia Claims

FAIR:

Why Are Media Outlets Still Citing Discredited ‘Fake News’ Blacklist?

USA Today (11/25/16), Gizmodo (11/25/16), PBS (11/25/16), The Daily Beast (11/25/16), Slate (11/25/16), AP (11/25/16) The Verge (11/25/16) and NPR (11/25/16) all uncritically wrote up the Post’s most incendiary claims with little or minimal pushback. Gizmodo was so giddy its original headline had to be changed from “Research Confirms That Russia Played a Major Role in Spreading Fake News” to “Research Suggests That Russia Played a Major Role in Spreading Fake News,” presumably after some polite commenters pointed out that the research “confirmed” nothing of the sort.