Talk about ignorance on display!

It seems one, at least, of our news networks is so uneducated, ill-informed and grammatically backward that it can't find (or can't be bothered to hire) literate editors.  Courtesy of Divemedic, we find this:

Had they never heard of "Molotov cocktails"?  Are they historically as well as linguistically illiterate?  (Or, as Divemedic suggests, they may have been reporting on Jewish riots!)

Ye Gods and little fishes . . .




Peter

When the sheep bleat in unison, you know it's a cluster-flock

If there's one thing the series of crises in 2020 has illustrated, it's that the mainstream media and mainstream politicians in the United States are almost all being manipulated.  Few, if any, of their voices are genuinely independent.  Most of them - darn near all of them - manifest a controlling hand behind them, spreading a common message, demanding that everyone walk in lockstep to the beat of the same drummer.  Individuality, critical thinking and independent responses are not just discouraged, but regarded as social, political and psychic heresy - and heretics are to be cast out, shunned, cut off from society.

In saying this, please bear in mind that I'm neither Republican nor Democrat.  I vote for the person, not the party, and on principle, not on party platform.  I neither support nor condemn the President or any other politician.  I look at their policies, their performance in office, and (very important to me) their integrity as an individual.  I weigh those factors against each other and against the politician's opponent, and make my decision based on which better embodies and/or upholds the principles I stand for.  I won't be told who to support, or brainwashed into voting in lockstep with the wishes of the political class.

Unfortunately, that's intolerable in today's America.  If you, or I, or anybody, dares to think for ourself, we're a threat.  We have to be bludgeoned and dragooned into letting others do the thinking for us.  Facts and independent judgment no longer matter.  Both sides of the political spectrum demand such unthinking loyalty, but it's far more vocal and outspoken on the left than on the right.

The Federalist sums this up with regard to the mainstream media.

It seems no great event or upheaval in our national life can pass now without the media lying to our faces about it.

They lied about the Trump campaign colluding with Russia in 2016. They lied about the Mueller probe and Brett Kavanaugh and former national security adviser Mike Flynn. They lied about Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian president and the impeachment farce that ensued. They lied about the coronavirus and the lockdowns and the White House response. And now they’re lying about the riots.

In recent days we’ve heard a steady drumbeat of lies, distortions, and disingenuousness from the mainstream media about almost every aspect of the unrest now gripping American cities. The deceit is almost too pervasive and amorphous to describe, but I’m going to try anyway.

Over the weekend we were told, for example, that the looting and violence was being instigated not by left-wing anarchists and antifa groups but by the media’s favorite villains: white supremacists. CNN, whose Atlanta offices were vandalized Friday, went on and on—without a shred of evidence to back it up—about how white supremacists might be infiltrating the protests and stirring up trouble. The New York Times, in a report that even quoted a senior police official in New York City saying outside anarchist groups were coordinating mayhem before the protests began, nevertheless veered into a long aside about how far-right “accelerationists” were hoping the unrest would bring about a long-sought second civil war.

By Monday, no one was talking about the white supremacist agitators anymore. The media had moved on to better, more plausible lies.

. . .

[Repeated incidents illustrate] a broader pattern of opposition to Trump that the media has maintained for years, that whatever might be happening in the country, whether a global pandemic or mass rioting, the most important part of the story is always that Trump is behaving badly—that he’s lying, misleading, undermining democratic norms, tweeting mean things, whatever. Nothing, not even nationwide riots, are more important than pushing that narrative.

You see the media’s obsession with this narrative everywhere, no matter what the actual facts of a story might be ... After Trump’s Monday night walk through Lafayette Park to St. John’s Episcopal Church, the media breathlessly reported stories about violent Park Police clearing peaceful protestors with tear gas. After nearly 24 hours of endless tweets, articles, and cable news stories claiming protestors were tear-gassed for Trump’s “photo op,” the Park Police information officer disproved all prior reports confirming, “No tear gas was used by USPP officers or other assisting law enforcement partners.”

One could go on and on with examples like this. Get on Twitter right now and you’re bound to find fresh examples posting every hour as reporters and pundits lie about events that are unfolding in real time.

There's more at the link.

The way the mainstream media march in lockstep, to the bidding of their corporate and political masters, was very well illustrated in 2018 when Sinclair Broadcast Group (a conservative-leading corporation) made its many TV stations read the identical manifesto on air, making a mockery of their "editorial independence".  (Yes, this was right-wing, rather than left-wing - as I said, the problem exists on both sides of the political spectrum.)  See and hear for yourself.

The resulting mashup made headlines, and rightly so - but those headlines failed to point out that precisely the same thing was, and is, being done by opponents of the President.  The problem is universal.

This reality is very clearly illustrated in recent mainstream media news headlines and reports of the rioting.  Almost every one circles back to lay the blame for the unrest at the President's feet, despite the fact that he, personally, had nothing whatsoever to do with it.  The news media are taking their marching orders from their puppet-masters, both directly through private channels and through sites such as Common Dreams, Think Progress, etc.  They're also influenced by discussion among activists on sites such as Democratic Underground.  The pattern is very clear.  Look at the "leads" and "talking points" being generated on those Web sites, and you'll see them reflected in news reports and opinion pieces in the mainstream media within hours - sometimes within minutes.  The same goes for public response to those reports.  Those commenting on them all too often parrot the "party line" rather than display independent thought.  Everybody has to be "on message".  Anyone straying from the "party line" - such as the New York Times publishing Republican Senator Tom Cotton's views on the riots - is rapidly cut down to size by savage criticism, and forced back into line.

Fortunately, this simplifies our response.  When we see almost every mainstream media report saying the same thing, and blaming the same people;  when we hear almost every politician parroting the same talking points;  when we can't hear the still, small voice of reason over the clamor bidding us not to think, but simply to believe and do as we're told . . . then we know we're being misled and manipulated.

The cure is to ignore all those influences, get the facts for ourselves - and yes, that can be hard work sometimes, digging through the dross to find the few nuggets of truth available - and then make up our own minds.  Only by doing so can we be the responsible citizens this country so desperately needs right now.

We should also cherish the few objective voices that still exist in the media.  There are a few.  I personally have come to value the reporting of John Solomon and Sharyl Attkisson.  Both try to be as honest and objective as possible.  They don't mince their words or pull their punches, and they take on both sides of the political spectrum as and when necessary.  That's all too rare these days.  (I also value the opinion of Tucker Carlson, who's not a reporter but a commenter on the news.  He's conservative, but by no means lockstep Republican, and has criticized both left and right in his analyses.  YMMV about his opinions, of course.)

Let's conclude with Sharyl Attkisson telling us "how astroturf, or fake grassroots movements funded by political, corporate, or other special interests, very effectively manipulate and distort media messages".  It's a very good talk, and worth your time, IMHO.

Consider how such influences are currently at work in the news media, and how they're portraying our current crises. They're doing their best to shape and guide our thoughts, rather than allow or encourage us to think for ourselves. Caveat emptor.

Peter

Organizing the riots, fake news, and other matters

It seems that the organizing effort behind the current, allegedly "spontaneous" riots is extensive, well-planned, and very well coordinated and equipped.  More and more evidence is coming to light.  As just one example, here's part of their instructions, dropped by a riot organizer and publicized on Twitter.  Click the image for a larger view.

Note that every page has to be initialed by recipients, and strict discipline is imposed on them.  I ran that image past my law enforcement contacts in a few states and cities.  Several replied that they'd seen the same sort of thing in their areas.  One pointed out that the handout shown above was 26 pages long, and that enough other pages had been found in various places (mislaid, or on the person of arrested organizers) to reconstruct almost the whole document.  The radio frequencies and encryption used by the riot coordinators are also known by now, and interceptions are happening in real time.  There's a massive effort underway to coordinate intelligence and information, in the hope that this will lead to a crackdown on those responsible.  It can't happen too soon for me!

Be aware that much of the news about these riots is false.  Many in the mainstream media are deliberately tailoring their output to reflect the "party line", shooting TV footage from specific angles to maximize the social justice perspective and minimize the thuggery.  Quotes are selective, images unfavorable to the politically correct narrative are simply not used, and reporting is biased in the extreme.

I'll give you just one example of biased reporting.  Here's a headline from BET (Black Entertainment Television) yesterday:

Beloved Louisville Restaurant Owner

Who Provided Free Meals To Cops

Killed By Police

David McAtee was shot by law enforcement

early Monday morning during a protest for Breonna Taylor.

Sounds terrible, doesn't it?  How could those brutal, heartless police kill such a wonderful man?  Well . . . turns out the reality was rather different, as Fox 19 reported (also yesterday).

LMPD says new video

shows David McAtee firing gun

before he was killed by law enforcement

You'll find other reports out there.  They agree that at least two surveillance cameras, at different businesses, showed Mr. McAtee firing at police before they returned fire and killed him.  Compare and contrast the two headlines.  Which sounds closer to that reality?  Which report is more accurate?  (By the way, the same information was available to both outlets before they published their articles.  Note what BET left out!)

The problem is, most BET viewers and readers will never see another report from a different perspective.  They'll be outraged by what they perceive - what has been implicitly portrayed - as police brutality.  This, I suggest, is precisely the effect BET journalists and editors are trying to achieve.

I wouldn't trust a single report about the rioting in the mainstream media.  I'd check, double-check and triple-check everything, using input from all sides of the political and media spectrum, before making up my mind.  News - accurate news - is too important to be left to journalists and editors, who have all too often proved to be biased, dishonest and corrupt.

I think the ever-thought-provoking Heather Mac Donald has the best input on what we're seeing on our streets.  Bold, underlined text is my emphasis.

Savagery is spreading with lightning speed across the United States, with murderous assaults on police officers and civilians and the ecstatic annihilation of businesses and symbols of the state. Welcome to a real civilization-destroying pandemic...

. . .

This pandemic of civil violence is more widespread than anything seen during the Black Lives Matter movement of the Obama years, and it will likely have an even deadlier toll on law enforcement officers than the targeted assassinations we saw from 2014 onward. It’s worse this time because the country has absorbed another five years of academically inspired racial victimology. From Ta-Nehisi Coates to the New York Times’s 1619 project, the constant narrative about America’s endemic white supremacy and its deliberate destruction of the “black body” has been thoroughly injected into the political bloodstream.

Facts don’t matter to the academic victimology narrative. Far from destroying the black body, whites are the overwhelming target of interracial violence. Between 2012 and 2015, blacks committed 85.5 percent of all black-white interracial violent victimizations (excluding interracial homicide, which is also disproportionately black-on-white). That works out to 540,360 felonious assaults on whites. Whites committed 14.4 percent of all interracial violent victimization, or 91,470 felonious assaults on blacks. Blacks are less than 13 percent of the national population.

If white mobs were rampaging through black business districts, assaulting passersby and looting stores, we would have heard about it on the national news every night. But the black flash mob phenomenon is grudgingly covered, if at all, and only locally.

The national media have been insisting on the theme of the allegedly brutal Minneapolis police department. They said nothing as black-on-white robberies rose in downtown Minneapolis late last year, along with savage assaults on passersby. Why are the Minneapolis police in black neighborhoods? Because that’s where violent crime is happening, including shootings of two-year-olds and lethal beatings of 75-year-olds. Just as during the Obama years, the discussion of the allegedly oppressive police is being conducted in the complete absence of any recognition of street crime and the breakdown of the black family that drives it.

Once the violence began, any effort to “understand” it should have stopped, since that understanding is inevitably exculpatory. The looters are not grieving over the stomach-churning arrest and death of George Floyd; they are having the time of their lives. You don’t protest or mourn a victim by stealing oxycontin, electronics, jewelry, and sneakers.

There's more at the link.  Highly recommended reading.

Finally, in response to several queries from readers following my two articles on Monday, I remind you that last year I published an article titled "An interesting look at urban defense".  It contains links to several other articles on the subject.  All are thought-provoking and worth reading.

Peter

Thinking for ourselves, rather than being told what to think

Last week, we talked about "The corruption of the 'news' media into the 'propaganda' media".  In that context, I was interested to come across an article by my friend in meatspace and cyberspace, author Cedar Sanderson.  I think she makes a very good point.

The death of critical thinking and logic in our culture has become more and more evident in the last few years, reaching a feverish peak during the recent crisis ... if we do not start exercising our abilities to think clearly, skeptically, and seek truth, we can and are giving up much of what our ancestors fought and worked so hard to gain.

We have got to figure out how to think for ourselves again. And it seems the first step toward doing that is to reach over to the remote and turn off the news. Also, switch off Youtube if you’re trying to use that for ‘news’ and definitely flee the flaming dumpster that is Twitter.

What’s left?

That’s a good question. A very good question, and one I don’t fully have an answer for ... When I hear some tidbit of information, I spend a few minutes to track it back and verify it. Yes, this is a lot harder than simply letting the talking heads fill my mind with what they want to allow me to hear and think. On the other hand, with the world wide web of information at my fingertips, and a little knowledge of how to read critically, I can be a lot closer to the facts and finding the truth than I ever can if I rely on the mass media to think for me.

There's more at the link.

Cedar quotes from an article by William Lehman, in which he considers the damage done to human society by the increasingly-cut-off-from-reality press.

There once was a time when the “traditional” press was in service to the community.  Seems for the most part, that ship sailed.  Newspapers, the oldest mass media existent, are going the way of the dodo… well, they helped themselves become extinct, and I shall not much mourn their passing.  When the news existed to serve the community, and SURE, to expose corruption, and malfeasance, they served their purpose.  After Watergate though, it seems like the press got drunk on their own power.

. . .

Where once there were thoughtful articles weighing both sides of an issue, the “USA TODAY” and others of their ilk developed the Splash box, the Text box in a box, and all of the other things designed in a most P. T. Barnum way to excite, to stir the emotion, to catch your attention for mere seconds and then on to the next thing, in the style of “THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS!” “SEE THE EGRESS!” “THE EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD, THE EGRESS!” until you find yourself dumped out at the end having passed through to “the egress” which of course, means EXIT, knowing no more than you did when you started, and wondering, “just what happened here?”

In short, they forgot their roots.

. . .

I desperately want you to question.  Take nothing, including what I say, at face value.  Always assume there’s a motive, an agenda.  My personal agenda I will be quite clear about, I want freedom, freedom for my nation, freedom for my people, and for my family.  I want people to THINK.  If I am trying to win your thoughts, it’s to cause you to question, to examine, and to reason. And I want you to question, including questioning me.

Again, more at the link.

I think both articles have the right of it.  Recommended reading.

Peter

The corruption of the "news" media into the "propaganda" media

Two recent articles have underlined the collapse in objectivity, factual reporting and trustworthiness of the news media.

Victor Davis Hanson asks, "Do the media even exist?"

The problem is not that reporters are human and therefore sometimes err. The rub is not even that they are poorly educated or rarely write well ... The crisis instead is that they are now almost always wrong, and predictably wrong because they are lazy and biased—and they deny it to the point of self-delusion. The result is that, for all practical purposes, journalists no longer exist for the general public as sources of news.

More than half the country now assumes that the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, the networks, and the cable news outlets are culpable not of merely failing to tell the truth but of being incapable of telling the truth. Even if they wished to, or had the skills to report empirically and dispassionately, they simply cannot, given their investments in the progressive agenda, and its investments in them. In other words, they are owned—creatures of that agenda.

. . .

To understand the media coverage of the greatest economic self-inflicted wound in American history is simple: as long the virus remains active, Trump is cast as culpable for the spread of the epidemic by not locking down the country earlier and longer; once the virus disappears, Trump caused the ensuing depression by locking down the country too early and far too long.

Every story until Election Day will serve those two master media themes. After Journolist, the John Podesta email archive, the serial CNN fables, the daily White House correspondents circus, and Trump Derangement Syndrome, no one can believe the news anymore—to the extent Americans still read and watch it.

There's more at the link, including many examples of journalistic malfeasance.

Supporting Mr. Hanson's contention, Daniel Greenfield points out that many journalists being sponsored to work in local news media are, in fact, political activists first, and journalists second.

While Report for America claims that it’s funding local journalism, what it’s actually doing is embedding social justice activists in local papers who are often targeted at pursuing a narrow political agenda.

Leah Willingham was placed at the Associated Press to focus on the "Mississippi state legislature" and its "actions affecting the poor", Kyeland Jackson was planted in Twin Cities Public Television to cover the "causes, effects and solutions to racial disparities in Minnesota", Shivani Patel was dispatched to the Ventura County Star to write about “equity in education in the county”, and Devna Bose was shoved into The Charlotte Observer to report on "poor and minority communities in prosperous Charlotte".

The agenda is often built into the very description of what Report for America’s activists are doing. Or at least it is to Report for America’s donors who are told what the activists they fund are doing. But ordinary readers of local publications and stations are often not told that what they’re reading isn’t real local reporting: it’s the work of activists funded by a national organization and its wealthy backers.

The lack of transparency is dishonest, unethical, and a new low even in the era of fake news.

The left-wing foundations and donors aren’t funding journalism, they’re buying coverage that fits their agenda. And local newspapers are renting out their newsrooms to wealthy left-wing organizations. Beyond the usual radical foundations like the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Knight Foundation, the Facebook Journalism Project has poured millions of dollars into RFA.

. . .

Facebook has often been accused of spreading fake news. Here it, along with the Google News Initiative, which kicked in $400,000, is literally financing a fake news project which pays half the salaries of the reporters it embeds in local newsrooms, while its own funding comes from wealthy left-wing groups.

Most newspapers are happy with the arrangement: it’s the readers who are cheated.

Facebook has claimed that its Journalism Project will fight fake news, instead it’s funding it. If the social media monopoly giant wanted to support journalism, it could do so in any number of ways. By financing Report for America’s activism, it’s helping fund papers on the condition that they run propaganda.

This isn’t philanthropy, it’s politics.

Again, more at the link.

Both articles underline the fact that we can no longer depend on or trust any news report at face value.  We now have to verify it, sift through evidence for or against the claims made in the report, and make an informed judgment about what's believable - and what isn't.  Sadly, the average voter can't or won't take the time or trouble to do that . . . which is perilous indeed for the survival of our democracy - and is, of course, the reason behind the manipulation of our news media in the first place.

Peter

The pandemic, free speech, and censorship

Famed journalist Matt Taibbi speaks out about the danger of silencing dissenting or contradictory voices in the current crisis.

Earlier this week, Atlantic magazine – fast becoming the favored media outlet for self-styled intellectual elites of the Aspen Institute type – ran an in-depth article of the problems free speech pose to American society in the coronavirus era. The headline:

Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal

In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.

Authored by a pair of law professors from Harvard and the University of Arizona, Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods, the piece argued that the American and Chinese approaches to monitoring the Internet were already not that dissimilar:

Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices… But the trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.

They went on to list all the reasons that, given that we’re already on an “inexorable” path to censorship, a Chinese-style system of speech control may not be such a bad thing. In fact, they argued, a benefit of the coronavirus was that it was waking us up to “how technical wizardry, data centralization, and private-public collaboration can do enormous public good.”

Perhaps, they posited, Americans could be moved to reconsider their “understanding” of the First and Fourth Amendments, as “the harms from digital speech” continue to grow, and “the social costs of a relatively open Internet multiply.”

This interesting take on the First Amendment was the latest in a line of “Let’s rethink that whole democracy thing” pieces that began sprouting up in earnest four years ago. Articles with headlines like “Democracies end when they become too democratic” and “Too much of a good thing: why we need less democracy” became common after two events in particular: Donald Trump’s victory in the the Republican primary race, and the decision by British voters to opt out of the EU, i.e. “Brexit.”

A consistent lament in these pieces was the widespread decline in respect for “experts” among the ignorant masses, better known as the people Trump was talking about when he gushed in February 2016, “I love the poorly educated!”

The Atlantic was at the forefront of the argument that The People is a Great Beast, one that cannot be trusted to play responsibly with the toys of freedom. A 2016 piece called “American politics has gone insane” pushed a return of the “smoke-filled room” to help save voters from themselves. Author Jonathan Rauch employed a metaphor that is striking in retrospect, describing America’s oft-vilified intellectual and political elite as society’s immune system:

Americans have been busy demonizing and disempowering political professionals and parties, which is like spending decades abusing and attacking your own immune system. Eventually, you will get sick.

The new piece by Goldsmith and Woods says we’re there, made literally sick by our refusal to accept the wisdom of experts. The time for asking the (again, literally) unwashed to listen harder to their betters is over. The Chinese system offers a way out. When it comes to speech, don’t ask: tell.

. . .

We do actually have to talk about this. We can’t not talk about it out of fear of being censored, or because we’re confusing real harm with political harm.

Turning ourselves into China for any reason is the definition of a cure being worse than the disease. The scolders who are being seduced by such thinking have to wake up, before we end up adding another disaster on top of the terrible one we’re already facing.

There's more at the link.

I couldn't agree more.  I, too, have noticed the Atlantic becoming more and more dictatorial in its approach, more prescriptive to society, less willing to tolerate independent thought, dissent, and contrary opinions.  I don't know why, but I suspect there's more than a little outside money involved.  "Follow the money" is usually a pretty accurate indicator of why something is happening.

When you silence dissent and conflicting opinions, you take away freedom.  It's as simple as that.  Without free speech, you are no longer free as an individual, and the society in which you live is no longer a free society.  Two quotes attributed (falsely) to Voltaire, but which do accurately express his philosophy, sum it up:

I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.

They say a mouthful!

Peter

"Fake news", caught in the act

The Gateway Pundit reports:

Many of you have by now seen various photos of medical workers boldly standing in front of lock down protesters like they are in Tiananmen Square or something — but what the media hasn’t shown you is that the photos are being faked.

In an instance of photo staging by the media caught on Facebook Live, a car with lock down protesters comes to a stop at a traffic light. As soon as they did, a medical worker hopped in front of their car with photographers, had a few photos snapped, then crossed the street like nothing happened.

The woman filming the staged photo-op quickly called the photographers out and urged them not to publish the faked photos.

“You’re a fraud!” she screamed as they walked off, never having actually protested.

Click over there to follow the Twitter link and see the video for yourself.  It's a classic example of media fakery - and proves that photographic "evidence" may not necessarily be true at all.

It's come to the point where one should automatically distrust any and every media report about the coronavirus pandemic, or President Trump's handling of the situation, unless and until it's corroborated by independent, trustworthy sources.  The media generally isn't interested in the truth - only in how they can twist the "facts" to suit their partisan political agenda.




Peter

Am I a prophet, or what?

Yesterday I wrote an article titled:  "Should we pay companies to move manufacturing out of China?"  In it, I suggested (bold, underlined text is my emphasis):

Aid can be given to help critical industries diversify production, so that it's spread across several countries in more than one region (thereby preventing loss of production in one country from shutting down manufacture of that product altogether).  Additional subsidies to bring at least part of that manufacture back to the USA might also be feasible.  They might not involve payment up front, either:  if the US government guaranteed the purchase of a given amount, or a given proportion of domestic production, that might be sufficient incentive.

Well, guess what?  Within hours of my publishing those words, Presidential economic advisor Larry Kudlow, who's also the Director of the United States National Economic Council, was interviewed by Fox Business.  At about 8m. 35s. in the interview, he had this to say:

A 100% tax write-off of all expenses involved in moving production from China back to the USA?  That's a good start, and demonstrates I wasn't far off the mark.  I have little doubt additional subsidies will be made available once our economy is firing on all cylinders once more.

I suspect a public avowal like that of support for manufacturing repatriation is unlikely to please China.  We'll have to see what their reaction might be:  positive, negative, or a combination.  They can crack down on US companies already there, or offer them incentives to keep their production in China, or both.  Which way will they jump?  One thing is for sure;  they'll put their own interests ahead of those of the United States.  That's a given.

Peter