Tag Archives: disinformation

New Cambridge Study Of Disinformation Is Full Of Disinformation

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The latest effort of the academic-media complex to steer citizens in the direction that the powers-that-be prefer comes in the shape of “The Disinformation Age,” edited by Lance Bennett and Steven Livingston, Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Despite the prestigious publisher, a cursory glance is enough to tell me that this is the usual reverse-engineered history, by which I mean that the authors already know what their conclusions are going to be and are determined to rewrite history to fit them.

Just one small example. The book dwells on the influence of the Koch brothers on the establishment libertarian think-tanks like the Mercator Center and the Cato Institute, NEVER mentioning that that “beltway libertarianism” is only one form of right libertarianism, and not the most radical or convincing by any means. That brand of libertarianism is in fact constantly criticized by anarchist libertarians as well as by minarchists.

What’s more, the Cambridge book has the nerve to source the term “Kochtopus,” coined by the libertarians at Mises.org/Lew Rockwell, to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, whose use of it came several years later and whose knowledge of the whole history of the Kochtopus is at second-hand, filtered through liberal-left tropes, and filled with suspicious gaps and elisions.

LRC: 2008 March 25 How Libertarian Is the Kochtopus

MindBodyPolitic.com:  2009, April 3,  The Libertarian Kochtopus

New Yorker: 2010:  The Koch Brothers’ Covert Ops

Mayer, a documentedly uninformed and lazy investigator got the whole Kochtopus network notion from bloggers who picked it up from the Ron Paul libertarians, which included me at the time, whom Matt Taibbi, a fellow left-lib journalist, was following, plagiarizing, and misrepresenting.

According to  this Cambridge disinfo guide, “Kochtopus” is the term Jane Mayer “likes to call the network”…. no mention of the piddling fact that dozens if not hundreds of people had analyzed the network and called it that long before she did, all of them with a world-view diametrically opposite hers.

The charge of plagiarism surfaced fairly soon, but the New Yorker did its own misleading pseudo- investigation and came to the unsurprising conclusion that there was no there there.

Not surprising, since Mayer is a prime product of the nepotistic and incestuous media culture.

InfluenceWatch tells us the following:

Mayer’s maternal grandfather was Allan Nevins, founder of American Heritage magazine and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes. Mayer’s great-great-grandfather was Emanuel Lehman, who founded the investment bank Lehman Brothers. [15]

That’s who decides what’s disinformation and what isn’t. Plagiarists and propagandists live in a bubble all their lives, sheltered from any necessity to defend their ideas honestly, and the result is false, empty history.

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Vladimir Putin: Monster, Madman, or Mastermind?

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Moscow-based analyst Andrew Korybko debunks the false portrait of Putin promoted in the Western media:

Everyone is trying to figure out who exactly President Putin is and what he’s trying to achieve. Many of his opponents and even quite a lot of his foreign supporters alike have regularly misportrayed him as a strongman who’s obsessed with fighting against the West, each propagating this narrative in pursuit of their diametrically different ideological agenda. This storyline, for as compelling as it may be, is grossly inaccurate and deserves clarification.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is the most talked-about man this century thus far after commencing his country’s ongoing special military operation in Ukraine in late February. That dramatic move was intended to uphold the integrity of Russia’s national security red lines in Ukraine in particular and in the region more broadly. It followed the US-led West refusing to respect his security guarantee requests from December, which in turn prompted President Putin to kinetically defend Russia’s existential interests. The unprecedented and preplanned response by the US-led West accelerated preexisting multipolar trends connected to the ongoing global systemic transition and led to what many nowadays consider to be the worst crisis since World War II.
Amidst all of this, everyone is trying to figure out who exactly President Putin is and what he’s trying to achieve. Many of his opponents and even quite a lot of his foreign supporters alike have regularly misportrayed him as a strongman who’s obsessed with fighting against the West, each propagating this narrative in pursuit of their diametrically different ideological agenda.
According to this common interpretation of his motives, he simply can’t get over how the USSR’s dissolution in 1991 led to the erasure of Russia’s former superpower status. In their minds, he’s plotted for decades to make the move that he fatefully did in February, though each side differs over their assessment of how successful it’s been since. This storyline, for as compelling as it may be, is grossly inaccurate and deserves clarification.
Beginning with the viewpoint of his opponents, President Putin is either a monster or a madman. The first implies that he’s a bloodthirsty dictator who couldn’t give a damn for any notion of democracy and human rights, whether the objective understanding thereof or subjective interpretations of them that vary based on society. All that he wants, they claim, is to kill as many people as possible. This leads to the second viewpoint of him possibly being a madman, as in, someone who’s literally gone crazy and surrendered to whatever pathology it may be that supposedly controls everything that he does. Those who ascribe to this interpretation insist that he isn’t a rational actor and therefore mustn’t be negotiated with. Whether a monster or madman, his opponents claim that this man must be contained.
The polar opposite camp employed a proto-QAnon model to explain everything that he does by introducing the idea that he’s a mastermind who plays “5D chess”, “is always winning”, and that everyone who sympathizes with even a single element of his policies should just “trust the plan” exactly as former US President Donald Trump’s most passionate supporters suggested about that American leader.
According to them, President Putin deeply despises everything associated with the West, especially its close partners like Israel and Turkey. Anytime he pragmatically interacts with them and is caught on camera smiling alongside their leaders, they claim, he’s just “playing chess” and “tricking his enemies” in order to supposedly “gather intel” to help defeat them at a later undisclosed time.
Suffice to say, all three interpretations are flat-out ridiculous and have no resemblance to reality. President Putin isn’t a monster, madman, or a mastermind, he’s simply a man who history placed in a very unique position that ultimately compelled him to muscularly defend his Great Power’s existential national security red lines in the most dramatic way possible.

“Russian Disinformation” Is The New “Racism”

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Revolver News [h/t LRC] explains why, with the refusal of the media establishment to admit that it blatantly and concertedly lied about the legitimacy of the Hunter Biden laptop and dismissed it as Russian propaganda,  the “Russian disinformation” label has replaced “racism” or “sexism” as the state-of-the-art term in cancel culture…

Why? Revolver argues it is because national security is a reason that allows the harshest repressive measures.

Well, that has always been true.

Some twenty years ago, political dissidents or even just free-thinkers were labeled “domestic terrorists,” a label which also invoked national security.  Then there was the War on Terror and dissidents got called “Jihadis” or “Islamofascists”.

So  the “Russian disinfo” label is NOT some new line being crossed. It’s the same old tired ploy….and actually not nearly as effective as “public health hazard” which can get you into quarantine camp, have you forcibly injected with poisons, and hospitalized against your will. I’ll take jail over that.

Anyway, Revolver recommends the following:

[with my comments on each recommendation below]

1. Never believe the “disinformation” scam ever again, for any reason. The intelligence services have entirely forfeited any and all public trust on this topic. At this very moment, hundreds of Republican lawmakers, pundits, and D.C. creatures are being herded like cattle into supporting greater censorship of Russia, China, or anyone “supporting” them. This is a grievous blunder. Indeed, lower-level establishment flunkies and stooges will only have themselves to blame when these new powers are turned back against them. Of course, the ability to wield these tools like a weapon over a cowed populace is exactly the real purpose of expanding such powers in the first place.

[Lila: Now, hmmmm.  Whom would that help? Never is too strong. Do you mean to say no other country or power will ever utilize disinformation against us?  What if the WEF or the EU employs disinformation, may we say so? Baby, bathwater, etc.]

2. Take the news out of the press’ hands. In hindsight, it was clearly a mistake for Rudy Giuliani to try and carefully release the laptop’s contents through press outlets. The story trickled out too slowly, and it was too easy for the press and Big Tech to unite in simply shutting out the New York Post entirely. If the laptop’s entire contents had simply been uploaded online for anybody to read, a la Wikileaks, suppressing the story would have been much harder, verging on impossible.

[Lila: And if you do upload it online, who do you suppose allows visibility on the net? The material could lie there and not be read by anyone. Actually,  a couple of videos of Hunter were uploaded online and that’s where I saw them. That doesn’t seem to have made a difference. The point is the general public still assesses the credibility of information based on who puts it out: how credentialed or well-regarded or prestigious, not on the merits. Wikileaks itself was initially promoted via a massive concerted effort of all the major media organs….just search Wikileaks on this blog.]

3. Defund the intelligence state. America’s intelligence agencies have essentially gone rogue. They spied on the Trump campaign in 2016 and sabotaged President Trump internally from 2017 onward. They constantly deliver preposterous lies in the guise of “expertise”, which is then used to justify mass censorship and the stripping of Americans’ rights. Oh, and they’re the same group behind warrantless espionage and the Iraq War and so much else. The intelligence agencies have become one of the chief impediments to American liberty, and they have declared American nationalists, populists, and conservatives a de facto enemy class. Breaking the power of these agencies should be the primary political goal of all decent Americans in the years to come. A good blueprint for a future Republican presidency? Declassify everything, so agencies can no longer conceal their blunders, lies, and outright crimes under the cloak of “national security.”

[Lila: Now, this I can fully endorse. Knowing the past is the best way to handle the future.]

FALSE FLAG ALERT: US Warns Of Russian Chemical/Biological Attack

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From The Times of India:

The Biden administration publicly warned Wednesday that Russia might seek to use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine as the White House rejected Russian claims of illegal chemical weapons development in the country it has invaded.

With Nuland’s admission yesterday that the US biolabs were indeed bioweapons labs and not simply health stations, and with the revelation by Russia of documentary proof that the Ukrainians government had ordered all stocks of those weapons/pathogens destroyed, the stakes have been seriously upped for NATO.

Thus the Biden announcement, intended as an inoculation against a Ukrainian biological attack that can be blamed on the Russians.

The Russians seem not have fully factored in the immense psychological and disinformation capacities of the concerted media of the West.

As always, those of us outside the realm of power must be cautious and trust the evidence.

The evidence was that Trump, while offering a point of resistance to the NWO within the US, although not outside it, was finally too much beholden to it to strike the necessary blows. But he made possible the rise of Ron de Santis. Who I think might.

Similarly, Putin himself might be too beholden to the oligarchs to actually become an effective locus of resistance to them, but he may well lead the way to those who will be. In any case, in the rest of the world, those who tried to remain neutral in this tragedy are taking notes.

 

 

 

Ukraine War: List Of Useful Sites

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There is a huge dearth of decent commentary on the war, or, when there is good commentary, it is scattered between blog posts and video, making it hard for busy people to get the gist of what is happening without an enormous expenditure of time.

For the self absorbed among us, for whom a war is just another excuse to update Facebook this hardly matters, but the rest of us need to know what we are supporting before we open our mouths…or the blood is on our hands too.

Sanctioning Russia implies the collective guilt of its citizens for not overturning Putin.

Well, what about the collective guilt of Americans in allowing into the White House a man in serious mental decline, incapable of handling international crises?

Shouldn’t ordinary Americans be punished for that too?

Or for Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, and endless other interventions which had less justification than Putin’s?

But who will sanction the sanctioners?

With that, here is a list of sites that could help  understanding the war in Ukraine.

NOTE: I DO NOT ENDORSE ANY OF THEM.

I have serious problems with about 3/4 of what is on them, and likely most, if not all, have some intelligence ties, or toe the intelligence line, or they would not flourish. You can take that as you wish. I know nothing about the owners, funders etc., although in some cases I can take a good guess.

But from bitter experience I will keep those guesses mostly to myself.

I am not part of any organized resistance, communist, anti-communist, Russian, Prussian,  or anything else. The only resistance I am whole-heartedly part of is resistance to my own unwanted habits, weaknesses and failings. The only line I toe is, whether something is true and helpful or not. There are true things that are not useful.. such as the personal crimes or sins of some of our oligarch enemies and friends. Interesting, but not necessarily relevant.

However, where relevant and useful,  there is also another consideration. If I put this information up, will the blowback be worth it, for someone who has only her wits and a couple of hours of free time, to aid her?

Will I go under too, like a thousand other small blogs and sites in the great purge that began in 2015-2016 and has accelerated ever since?

So I hold my tongue, which is now black and blue from the effort.

WEBSITES/BLOGS

Michel Chossudovsky’s website, Center for Research on Globalization [Long-standing researchers on geopolitics from a parapolitics angle. Criticizes as pushing Chinese and Russian propaganda.]

GreatGameIndia: Shelly Kasli’s wonderful investigative site that hasn’t been given sufficient credit for the ground breaking work it did on Covid, and before that, on demonetization and the cash ban. Possibly vetted by Indian intelligence, but not certain.

Zero Hedge: Lots of good stories mixed in with some disinfo, as I am almost certain this site is a group effort.

Strategic-Culture Foundation [reportedly part of the pro-Russian ecosystem, allegedly linked to the Russian state, just as all other media is linked to the ecosystem of the US, UK, EU, and their allies]

Oriental Review  Ditto

Covert Shores: Good analysis of Moskva sinking, open source intel from a naval guy. Western viewpoint.

War Zone The Drive 

Very good analysis of  war and armaments. Western

Intel Slava Z on Telegram

Unz.com [Counterpunch writers and some others who’ve migrated to a site run by Ron Unz, a tech entrepreneur and smart Jewish dissident; likely to be some disinformation, intended to co-opt so-called anti-Semitic criticism]

Voltairenet [Theirry Meyssan is excellent]

Dissident Voice [left centered dissident opinion on a variety of topics]

Counter-currents [ed. Binu Matthews] Socialist, people oriented, pro-global warming.

Indian Punch-line [M. Bhadrakumar, a retired Indian diplomat]

Life-site News [pro-life Catholic site]

The Saker.is – Orthodox Russian resident in the US, economically left, culturally right. Very pro Russian.

A Son of the American Revolution [American military analyst]

Andrei Martyanov’s blog [Russian military analyst. Very pro Russian]

The Gateway Pundit [pro-Trump right, conspiratorial]

National File [investigative, non mainstream right]

The Last Refuge [pro Trump Christian right]

Moon of Alabama

Lew Rockwell [Libertarian pro-market, antiwar site] Paleolibertarian and Christian libertarian

Revisionist Review, from Michael Hoffman, a so-called holocaust denial site, but I can vouch that it is entirely free of Nazi sympathy of any kind. Deep analysis of staged events, masonic conspiracy, and Talmudic influence.

Sputnik News  

and TASS

[Russian state outlets]

Srb.info [Serbia news] Pro Russian Serbian news site.

Gonzalo Lira [Chilean businessman on site in Kharkiv, has now gone missing]:  First-hand account of events in Kharkhiv, ear-to-the-ground reports of other areas.

Patrick Lancaster: Ex-US Navy, on the ground at battle fronts, with Russian army.

The Duran

[Have not watched this much, will add, when I find time to.]

That’s all for now. I don’t necessarily agree with the positions of these sites on other issues, or even with everything they say about the war, but they carry useful information to counter the incessant propaganda about Ukraine and Russia.

The best weapon against the media war is

Accurate information about the background and progress of the war

Clear understanding of the motivations and justifications of the different actors

Healthy skepticism toward the moral grandstanding of third parties with no skin in the game.

 

 

The Guardian Stages Surveillance Theater

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Image Credit: Saving the republic

The Guardian is running a piece by Trevor Timm, of the Greenwald-Poitras-Snowden- associated Freedom of the Press foundation. (H/T to Scott Lazarowitz, LRC)

It’s about Stingray, a technology that lets the government locate and track you via cell-phone tower signals.

Timm  is correct to point out the privacy implications of the NSA’s meta-data collection, which has filtered down to local police departments.

Meta-data is data about communications that doesn’t include the actual content.

It’s the date, the address (from and to), the length of time, the location.

Very rich, if collected continuously.

All very well, but, as even Timm does admit in the Guardian, this technology has been around for a couple of years.

Yet, last year, in a piece at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Timm wrote:

A few months ago, EFF warned of a secretive new surveillance tool, commonly referred to as a “Stingray,” being used by the FBI in cases around the country.”

Secretive and new? Really?

The Louisville Law Review says the Feds used the Stingray from 2006 on.

[The Stingray is really a brand that refers to a family of technologies, says the Review.]

Local police departments were using the Stingray as early as 2007 (seven years ago).

“Oakland’s Targeted Enforcement Task Force made 21 ”Electronic Surveillance [StingRay] arrests” in 2007, 19 in 2008, and 19 in 2009 for charges including robbery, kidnapping, attempted murder and homicide. Further records show employees receiving up to 40 hours in training on the technology.”

This was discussed in the major media, at least as far back as 2011.

At the cyber- security blog, Schneier on Security, a commenter in January 2013, called the Stingray “very old technology.”

And the Stingray is now old and very expensive technology, I’d actually be more woried by the likes of pocket picocells that hackers cobble together from COTS equipment for less than 200USD. “

A spy technology for under 200 bucks?

I’d be more worried by picocells too.

So, why isn’t the Guardian?

Or the EFF?

Or the Freedom of the Press Foundation?

Birth-Control Fatwas & Oops Factors

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denver colorado skyline

Zahir Ebrahim, author of The Poor Man’s Guide to Modernity, brings up a problem in the comment section to my previous post.

I reproduce it here as a separate post, because it’s something that has stumped me, as well.

Briefly: How to get in front of false-flags, red herrings, and black ops before they unfold, or, at least, how to derail them after they’ve begun?

How indeed.

Bloggers and activists who write as things unfold are quietly censored through Internet filtering and monitoring, (eg. Google). and content manipulation (eg. Wikipedia).

Or, we are dismissed as “conspiracy theorists” by the mandarins of the mainstream media, because we cannot reach into our pockets and come up at once with documents in triplicate with signed confessions from the Mossad and CIA to prove our claims.

Of course, some forty years hence, some appointed mouthpiece will, at tax-payer expense,  force open the requisite dusty archive where half-redacted memos, still greasy with guilt, will give the game away.

Masks will briefly slip from Olympian profiles, but until then…..

….even if activists do get heard, the media prince-lings who deign to respond, choose their place and time in ways that leave us bloodied and the issues even more bedraggled.

During the ruckus that ensues, the false-flag or black operation unfolds with the panache of an Augustan comedy….except that to those of us in the peanut-gallery it is tragedy.

That is how, as Zahir Ebrahim writes, no less than the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran fell victim to the Malthusian disinformation of the banking cartel:

“Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini introduced Birth Control through a fatwa (I haven’t seen the fatwa myself, only read or heard about it), as the population of Iran had almost doubled from the time of the Shah by the time of this fatwa in the late 1980s.

Well in the 2000s (I do not recall the year), the successor Ayatollah had to issue a new Fatwa encouraging families to have more children and not less children.

According to the understanding given to me on this topic, the first fatwa on birth-control had been issued because of the fears of over-population and Iran not being able to feed itself under the Malthusian construct.

(Not obvious how this fear was implanted in Iran under the Ayatollah, for he was always most wary of the Western agenda. But then again, he also fell victim to it in uncontrollably waging the eight-year war against Iraq — a war that was foisted by the West upon both the peoples of Iran and Iraq equally, and not just Iran alone ,which the people of Iran always tend to forget.)

Anyway, After the birth rate among the Shia Muslims declined drastically, while the minority Sunni Muslims (aprox. 20% of Iranians) had ignored the fatwa and had concentrated on having more and more children (Sunni Muslims do not accept Fatwas from Shia theologians, and vice versa), the demographics of Iran suddenly started to change. T

The Sunni strategy, I imagine both intellectually and financially supported from somewhere, was to come to key positions of power in Iran through the change in demographic. All legal, nothing subversive about it. In fact, it is the method that Palestinians have been employing to overwhelm their Israeli conquerors these past six decades. A most effective strategy!

This strategy, and the declining birth-rate among the middle class in the Shia households, woke up the Iranian government to the folly of the previous “ill-conceived” and “flawed” fatwa.

Now the impetus in Iran is to encourage more children — but not unsurprisingly, the next generation of the middle class and upper middle class, those whose parents or themselves grew up under the directive of the first fatwa, don’t seem to be energetically inclined towards having more children. Career paths dominate in Iran as much as they do in the West. A more detailed study of this is of course necessary. This is just the anecdotal version.

What this shows me however, is that “oops” cannot always be avoided — we are all human. But surely, as you put it: “that the ultimate source of such laws is an ideology crafted with MALEVOLENT intent by the foundation-funded think-tanks and research institutes.” can always be recognized and interdicted. No?

Provided of course that the government machinery, its media, and its intellectuals, are not already co-opted into either silence, acquiescence, or actually putting down their signatures to their own enslavement.

This is the real problem facing both India, Pakistan, and South East Asia. How to overcome our “asininity” which continually leads us to “oops” ex post facto?

Wikileaks’ Julian Assange “In Danger” From Pentagon?

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More on the ubiquitous founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange. I maintain a neutral to positive rating on Assange, despite criticism of him. The whistleblower emails on anthropogenic global warming that were published on Wikileaks (climategate) hugely damaged the climate cabal, but there are some credible writers who maintain that he’s passing off disinfo as well. I honestly can’t tell one way or other. Lately it’s occurred to me that that the controversy might relate to infighting between factions of the intelligence community, but how is the question. Anyway, that’s pure speculation on my part. Continue reading →

Wikileaks’ Role In Julius Baer Case Linked to Soros, Sachs, & Spooks?

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From The Wayne Madsen Report (a subscription-based service) comes this analysis (April, 2010) of the attack on the financial privacy of Swiss money manager, Julius Baer Group, exposed by whistle-blower Rudolf Elmer:

“WMR’s financial intelligence sources report that the unauthorized disclosure of a compact disk to Wikileaks that contained financial details of the clients of the secretive and usually highly-secure Zurich-based independent money management Julius Baer Group was designed to destroy the firm’s standing with its customers and make it ripe for a hostile takeover by interests associated with multi-billionaire vulture capitalist George Soros, including Goldman Sachs. Julius Baer was founded in the 19th century. Continue reading →