Tag Archives: propaganda

Scott Walter On Jane Mayer’s Fraudulent Journalism

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Scott Walter at Capital Research.org:

In her last book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, Mayer bewails the “100 biggest known donors in 2014,” who spent “nearly as much money on behalf of their candidates as the 4.75 million people who contributed $200 or less.” Who were those terrible donors? Mayer says, “A few of the biggest spenders were now Democrats.”

Check her source in the endnotes, and you find how many “a few” equals:

Donors who gave exclusively or primarily to Democratic candidates and groups held down 52 of the top 100 spots—including by far the biggest donor of disclosed 2014 cash: retired San Francisco hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer.

I chose Mayer’s “a few” as the worst lie in the book, but I had to write a long review to catalog all her other distortions and falsehoods. One book chapter had previously appeared as a New Yorker hit piece, and my earlier dissection of that partisan journalism drew this response from John Hinderaker of Powerline:

Walter’s article was perhaps the most devastating refutation of a magazine article I have ever read. In a calm, dispassionate manner, he laid waste to Mayer to a degree that in a more just world would end her career in journalism.

Hinderaker asked readers to leave comments at Mayer’s blog, begging her to respond, but of course she refused. Silence is golden when you’re a wealthy New Yorker from a famous banking family, writing for prestige media whose business model is to give an overpaid, underinformed audience only what it wants to hear.

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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With Friends Like NATO, Ukraine Doesn’t Need Russia As Enemy

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Scott Ritter at Russia Today:

The former US intelligence officer explained that in the event of a breakdown, the Ukrainians would not be able to use the weapon. Ritter reported that the M777 towed 155mm howitzer had weaknesses. It is lighter than the previous version and is unstable when fired. This howitzer also wears out quickly in combat. Its effectiveness decreases already on the fourth day of use. The howitzer becomes completely useless within a week. To address this shortcoming, the US military stepped up maintenance on the ground. But it required highly qualified personnel and high-quality logistics. The Armed Forces of Ukraine do not have such capabilities and howitzers will very quickly become unrepairable.

Similar difficulties will be caused by the maintenance of German “Leopards” and American M133 armored vehicles. These weapons are outdated, worn out and will fail soon after the outbreak of hostilities.

Scott Ritter stated that with such friends as NATO, Ukraine does not need enemies.

Earlier, Scott Ritter said that Europe is over. In his opinion, if the current positions regarding Russia do not change, the continent will suffer irreparable damage, which has not been seen since the end of World War II.

Russian State Site Warns Against Fake Sites & Notices

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United Russia [official site] warned on April 16 of fake notices with significant social impact being published on a site spoofing it.

Today, compromising information was posted on a fake site that positions itself as the official resource of the Duma faction.
You need to be prepared for a huge amount of false information. And an example of this is the false statement spread on behalf of the faction of Russia’s largest political party. This was stated by the first deputy head of the United Russia faction Dmitry Vyatkin .
“You need to understand that this alleged “appeal to the President” is only aimed at dividing our society, compromising the Armed Forces, introducing doubts into the minds of people, and also causing damage and undermining confidence in our party. We are closely monitoring the situation, promptly responding to such sabotage and will definitely achieve punishment for those responsible – for this, United Russia has worked long and hard to improve legislation and increase the information security of our citizens,” he said.
The deputy head of the faction , Yevhen Revenko , added that this was pure provocation.
“Someone (I guess who: 10 minutes after the appearance of the fake, the reposts went through the well-known provocateur and liar Anton Gerashchenko in Telegram and 15 minutes later on the Ukrainian UNIAN resource) staged a provocation: he created a false website of our faction and began to post all sorts of nonsense, fakes on socially important topics. Some online publications were quick to pick up. Colleagues please be careful. For our part, we turned to Roskomnadzor with a request to block and remove the fake from everywhere. Well, I’ll add that just as there was no trust in the Kiev mouthpieces of the national propagandist, it still isn’t. Another confirmation,” he said.

 

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.

DeepFake AI: Was Moschun Mapped Onto Bucha?

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UPDATE

Bucha was the headquarters of General Nikolai Vatutin, who was the leader of the Red Army forces that liberated Kiev from the Nazis. Vatutin was fought by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army [UPA] organized by Stepan Bandera, the popular but controversial figure, who associated with the Nazis. Vatutin died from wounds received in battle with the UPA and there is an ongoing dispute between Ukraine and Russia about the memorial to him in Kiev and where his ashes are buried.

UPDATE

Today, I read that a car caught fire and the driver died after crashing into the gate of the Russian embassy in the Romanian capital……which would be BUCHAREST….

An odd coincidence…or not.

ORIGINAL POST

Think about the language.
MOSCHUN….visually similar to MOSCOW…..
where the deepfake video might have been made when the Ukrainians took it back from the Russians around March 24.

Then, they picked BUCHA, close by, and with a resonant name, similar visually to Buchenwald, and similar aurally to Butchery, Butcher and Bucha [Ukrainians for outcry].

Interestingly, the Ukrainians then called in a Holocaust expert to proclaim that Bucha was a genocide…reinforcing the Buchenwald association again.

The expert is a Ukrainian-born Israeli citizen Eugene Finkel. This will ensure that influential Jewish lobbies everywhere will pressure their governments to intervene. Use- the-Jews is the cynical name of the game and the Ukies are using it to deflect attention from the non-fake fact that Jews [Zelenksy, Kolomoisky, Soros etc.] and Nazis [Azov et al.] are actually collaborating here in the Ukraine and in NATO and the US.

The same logic applies to the international press given a Holocaust survivor allegedly killed during Russian shelling of Kharkhiv. I suppose I should tack on alleged to practically everything in this war of lies.

All these associations are calculated to hit emotionally at global audiences. This is psychological warfare, not at the Russians, who can see through it, but at the domestic population.

A subliminal association of MOSCOW with BUTCHERY and the HOLOCAUST is set up.  Ordinary Jews get triggered and Jewish lobbies campaign furiously to intervene.

We’ve been here before how many times?

Deepfake AI can be used to manipulate satellite imagery and map one location onto another so the falsification is practically invisible to a layman.

Former WSJ Publisher Censors News Websites With Nutrition Labels

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From Politico.com:

Labeling through extensive disclosure is more practical on the internet than in print or through broadcasts, where space is limited. Disclosures online can be detailed enough to give readers all the information they need to decide how trustworthy to consider a source. My analyst colleagues at NewsGuard often write “Nutrition Labels” for news sites in the thousands of words, with numerous citations, to explain why sites like RT and Sputnik News fail basic criteria of journalistic practice and differ fundamentally from government news sources with effective independent charters such as the BBC. Microsoft makes NewsGuard’s detailed ratings and reviews of news websites available to its users, but the other large platforms don’t yet provide this kind of transparency to their users. And labels work: Gallup research found that when given access to apolitical source ratings, a majority of readers became less likely to believe or share news from websites rated untrustworthy and more likely to believe and share news from websites rated trustworthy.”

Yet another example of the pervasive censorship and distortion that plagues the so-called free press.

Lower ratings will automatically be slapped on unpopular political positions, even those voiced by completely marginal internet blogs and websites, the last remaining strong-holds of pure truth-telling. The lower ratings will translate into lower rankings by the search engines and that will lead to a precipitous drop in readership. Wrong-think will not simply be devalued. It will be silenced.

Hate-Russia Is Part Of The Internet Counter-Reformation

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The Internet Reformation [h/t to Anthony Wile of The Daily Bell ] is the notion that the widespread use of the internet was the equivalent of the  widespread use of the printed word, following on Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press.

It was an unveiling of things that had been hidden until then, from the teachings of the Bible to the workings of nature. It was an apocalypse, if you will, of the same magnitude as what is taking place today, with the adoption of the Internet.

Something similar was supposed to have happened with the Internet. The monopoly of the large media houses was supposed to have been shattered and replaced by the voices of citizens. And it was. But this Reformation was barely underway in 2007, when the Internet Counter-Reformation mounted its assault, using dozens of large anonymous or pseudonymous “citizen media” outlets, which, on careful examination, proved to have been astro-turfed.

That is, they led straight back to the mainstream media [MSM] and to the mainstream alternative media, to use an oxymoron.

I have explained who these mainstream alternatives are elsewhere.

They include outlets like Democracy Now, Alternet, Breitbart, Daily Caller and dozens of others.

These are just a few I’ve picked that are widely read on all sides of the political spectrum.  There are scores of other sites that are just as influential that I have not named. They too belong here. As do hundreds of smaller ones, for whom the words below are equally relevant.

The mainstream alternatives constitute what the now-disappeared Zahir Ebrahim

[who seems to have resurfaced through a mirror blog of some kind]

has dubbed the dissentstream, 

a body of dissent, which, on closer examination, reinforces in subtle ways the assumptions and conclusions of the mainstream media, both establishment and alternative.

This body of dissent mixed with disinformation is allowed to exist because of the variety of uses it has for the state:

It acts a  release-valve for citizen frustration and hostility

It provides maximum cognitive diversity in the information environment

Is provides maximum cover for information operations and black operations conducted by the intelligence services

It allows war- gaming of various planned or mulled future scenarios

It traces and surveils social networks of potential and real dissidents

It disciplines bloggers/citizens to self-censor, through high-profile highly visible pundit take-downs and cancellations

It tests the public mood and readiness for various covert and public projects

It employs predictive programming, aka “revelation of the method,” as described by Michael Hoffman

[The notion of predictive programming is regarded as a conspiracy theory by the media-academic-think-tank complex, which is now sending anyone who looks for it on a Google search to the term, predictive coding. Previously, you could find predictive programming on the first page of a Google search for the term.]

It generates and develops memes that mold public consciousness and markets

It taps potential markets and creates new one

It takes without credit, ideas, research, innovations, and leads and uses them to reward and enrich preferred individuals and companies  and to suppress and impoverish other voices

That is not an exhaustive list, by any means.

Bottom line:

The media is not about informing the public. It is about misleading it and milking it.

The media is not about revealing the truth. It is about paralyzing the will and diverting/exhausting attention and resources.

 

 

Jacque Attali in 2009: Hopefully, A Pandemic Will Bring About World Government

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Alex Jones cites a supposed quote from Jacques Attali.

A number of social and print media outlets are running with the same quote.

Poynter says the text that social media cites is fraudulent or a wild misinterpretation.  Now I accept that social media might be running disinformation on this, but I am pretty much 100 percent sure that Poynter is.

The text is from a book that is now unavailable and out of print so we have to take the word of third parties who claim to have copies of it.

As for Attali, as he is a plagiarist and liar, I am not really interested in anything he has to say.

I found this, via Poynter, from Attali’s  blog in l’Expres in 2009.

History teaches us that humanity only evolves significantly when it is really afraid: it then first sets up defense mechanisms; sometimes intolerable (scapegoats and totalitarianisms); sometimes futile (distraction); sometimes effective (therapeutics, discarding if necessary all previous moral principles). Then, once the crisis is over, it transforms these mechanisms to make them compatible with individual freedom, and to inscribe them in a democratic health policy.

The pandemic that is beginning could trigger one of these structuring fears.

If it is not more serious than the two previous fears linked to a risk of pandemic (the mad cow crisis of 2001 in Great Britain and the bird flu crisis of 2003 in China), it will first have significant economic consequences (fall in air transport, fall in tourism and the price of oil); it will cost about 2 million dollars per contaminated person and will make the stock markets fall by about 15%; its impact will be very brief (China’s growth rate fell only in the second quarter of 2003, only to explode in the third quarter); it will also have organizational consequences (in 2003, very rigorous police measures were taken throughout Asia; the World Health Organization set up global alert procedures; and some countries, particularly France and Japan, stockpiled considerable quantities of drugs and masks).

If it is a little more serious, which is possible, since it is transmissible by humans, it will have truly planetary consequences: economic ( models suggest that it could lead to a loss of 3 trillion dollars, that is to say a drop of 5% of the world’s GDP) and political ( because of the risks of contagion, the countries of the North will have an interest in the countries of the South not being sick and they will have to ensure that the poorest have access to the medicines that are currently stocked only for the richest); a major pandemic will then bring out, better than any humanitarian or ecological discourse, the awareness of the need for altruism, which is, at the very least, self-serving.

And, even if, as we must obviously hope, this crisis is not very serious, we must not forget, as with the economic crisis, to draw lessons from it, so that before the next, inevitable one, prevention and control mechanisms and logistical processes for the equitable distribution of medicines and vaccines are put in place. To do this, we will have to set up a world police force, a world stockpile and therefore a world tax system. We will then come, much more quickly than would have been possible on economic grounds alone, to set up the foundations of a true world government. It was through the hospital that the establishment of a real state began in France in the 17th century.

In the meantime, we could at least hope for the implementation of a real European policy on the subject. But here again, as on so many other subjects, Brussels is silent.

j@attali.com

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

I also ran into this explanation from dailyhunt.in:

Attali, a former adviser to late French president François Mitterrand, has written numerous books. However, none of them were called “The Future of Life”.

“Future Life”, published in 1981 in French as “L’Avenir du Futur” and later translated into English, was written by Michel Salomon and features an interview with Attali in which he answers the question “Is it possible and desirable to live 120 years?”

The book’s publisher, Seghers, sent AFP a copy of the passage in which Attali is quoted.


Excerpt featuring Attali’s interview in the original French version of “Future Life”

At one point in the interview, Attali says: “...as soon as a person gets to be older than sixty or sixty-five, and his productivity and profitability begin to slip, he costs society dearly.” And later: “Actually, from the viewpoint of the cost to society, it is much preferable that the human machine abruptly stop functioning than that it deteriorate very gradually.”

Which is considerably more sinister than the article that Poynter pulled up, which obscures Attali’s real position.

Racist Western Elites In Denial That Russia Has Military Superiority

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Andrei Martyanov:

 It is really an old truism, when your sparring partners are 7-year old kids from the sand-box you are bound to lose qualifications and skills. When it is aggravated by the blind and illiterate geopolitical planning and doctrine-mongering–it becomes a recipe for the loss of situational awareness and a disaster. The United States may not have produced world-class strategists with the exception of Mahan, but operationally, come on–everyone uses Boyd’s OODA Loop, Net- Centric Warfare is a routine today in Russian Armed Forces, so why such a catastrophic failure to learn from themselves, forget about learning it from those who defeated time after time best fighting forces in history? 

The answer is clear as a day: Wehrmacht couldn’t conceive that Slavic subhumans can produce T-34 and excellent fighter-planes, not to speak of a superb artillery. They also miscalculated with the level of education and adaptability of the Red Army, and in terms of Soviet industry. The US repeats here Nazi Germany’s path–US “elites” are afflicted by the genocidal, racial hatred towards Russians and they cannot conceive, especially through the “labor” of Soviet and Russian dissidents who sold BS about USSR and Russia for decades, that the US simply doesn’t know or understand Russia. That what it “knows” about her and her people is a complete bunk conceived in the dark recesses of ideological imperatives of the Cold War 1.0. “