Tuesday, January 29, 2019

SUGGESTED READINGS 29/01/2019


Buzzfeed gets a lot of guff for being the people who helped bring us such anti-journalistic horror-shows as "listicles", which feature such information-free topics as plastic surgery "did they or didn't they" reports and sideboob galleries. But over the last few years, they've really been upping their game. Case in point, Hannes Grassegger's report on The Unbelievable Story of the Plot Against George Soros, sub-titled "How two Jewish-American political consultants helped create the world's largest anti-Semitic conspiracy theory", which begins:

The glass tower that houses George Soros’s office in Manhattan is overflowing with numbers on screens, tracking and predicting the directions of markets around the world. But there’s one that’s particularly hard to figure out — a basic orange chart on a screen analyzing sentiment on social media. 
The data, updated regularly since 2017, projects the reactions on the internet to the name George Soros. He gets tens of thousands of mentions per week — almost always negative, some of it obviously driven by networks of bots. Soros is pure evil. A drug smuggler. Profiteer. Extremist. Conspiracist. Nazi. Jew. It’s a display of pure hate.
The demonization of Soros is one of the defining features of contemporary global politics, and it is, with a couple of exceptions, a pack of lies. Soros is indeed Jewish. He was an aggressive currency trader. He has backed Democrats in the US and Karl Popper’s notion of an “open society” in the former communist bloc. But the many wild and proliferating theories, which include the suggestion that he helped bring down the Soviet Union in order to clear a path to Europe for Africans and Arabs, are so crazy as to be laughable — if they weren’t so virulent. 
Soros and his aides have spent long hours wondering: Where did this all come from? 
Only a handful of people know the answer.
How's THAT for an opening that grabs you by the balls? And in case you were wondering, YES, the questions raised therein get answered, and YES, Grassegger names names. In fact, if anything, it's almost too detailed, leaving no stone unturned and no box unchecked in its exhaustive exploration of the evidence assembled to back up the thesis presented. This means that the article takes a while to read, which automatically reduces its potential readership by, like, half, right off the bat. 

This is unfortunate, because it's so well researched, articulately argued, and meticulously laid out, that I believe it is ESSENTIAL READING for anyone hoping to achieve an accurate big picture take on our current political moment. This includes the rise of the New Fascist International(e) on a global scale, and the absolute helplessness of those previously dominant, consensus-dependent political structures that are currently supposed to serve as our bulwark against these types of ideological attacks and incursions.

So, whatever your politics, I urge you to read and absorb this article. It's well worth your time. It's one of those articles that you're going to want to clip and save so you can refer to it and share with others.
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So, did you hear the one about the "transparency" organization that sent out emails to various media outlets featuring a list of topics NOT to report on? I refer, of course, to Wikileaks, and the missive in question is apparently very real... and very ridiculous., listing 140 statements that they believe SHOULD NOT BE PUBLISHED! These statements, which they call “false and defamatory”, are pretty much all about their cult-like figurehead, founder, and spiritual leader, Julian Assange. Check it out:
Among the assertions that WikiLeaks labeled “false” or “defamatory” were allegations that Assange had ever been an "agent or officer of any intelligence service” or has close ties to the Kremlin or Russian President Vladimir Putin. 
"There is a pervasive climate of inaccurate claims about WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, including purposeful fabrications planted in large and otherwise 'reputable' media outlets," the email read, according to Reuters. 
"Consequently journalists and publishers have a clear responsibility to carefully fact-check from primary sources and to consult the following list to ensure they are not spreading, and have not spread, defamatory falsehoods about WikiLeaks or Julian Assange." 
The email was labeled “Confidential legal communication. Not for publication."
The ironies basically never stop with this Kremlin stooge!

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Speaking of Kremlin stooges, it's looking like there are some actual, non-compromised journalistic transparency advocates out there who are willing to go where WikiLeaks fears to tread (for some mysterious, inexplicable reason*). Yes folks, that's right... it's Vladimir Putin's turn in the barrel! That means the most successful organized crime figure of the new millennium -- along with the Russian oligarchs and Kremlin apparatchiks spared by WikiLeaks in the past-- is getting his emails hacked and leaked! Keep your eyes on their Tor site, Distributed Denial of Secrets, and the related Twitter account.

*Actually, it's totally explicable: Wikileaks has long been co-opted by the Kremlin tentacle of the New Fascist International(e) conspiracy

Friday, January 25, 2019

JUST A COUPLE NOTES TO PASS ALONG

Hey y'all! It's me, yer old pal Jerky, here with a few nuggets that I've come across recently that I feel like sharing with anyone who might accidentally surf on over to this page.

First of all, here's a really great @Maddow segment on Trump's repeated parroting of extremely obscure conspiracy narratives emanating exclusively from a handful of known Russian propaganda outlets. Very much worth a watch. I mean, even if you don't think Trump is literally Putin's puppet, it's genuinely concerning that the president of the united states seems to be repeating the Kremlin line, over and above that of his own foreign policy experts at State and beyond.

And of course, the next naturally arising question is... Why? Where is he getting all these weird takes on the politics of countries that he probably wasn't even aware existed prior to learning, and spreading, these obscure (and mostly erroneous) "facts" about them?

I, myself, had completely forgotten the Poland theory, which is just obscure as it gets. And I remember him repeating other stuff, during the campaign, that made me go, "Wow! That's literally the RT/Sputnik line."

Anyway... nothing to see here, I'm sure. But watch anyway!


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What does a sketchy, possibly fake Leonardo da Vinci painting have to do with the Russian mob using Trump and his assets to achieve a rather spectacular level of money laundering? Surf on over to Wonkette to find out for yourself!

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QUOTE OF THE DAY

“I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this. I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

- In case you were still wondering what could possibly be behind some people’s ongoing support of Donald Trump, a New York Times dispatch from the small, politically conservative, hurricane-and-shutdown-ravaged town of Marianna, Florida, features the above, supremely revealing quote from semi-disgruntled prison worker Crystal Minton. So the answer is, yes, friends, Trump supporters really are subhuman shit golems.