The Pandora Papers: Same old nonsense in a new box
The MSM is trying to trick people into thinking they’re still journalists, by telling us things we already know.
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | October 5, 2021
The Pandora Papers are out! Following the riveting Panama Papers in 2016, and the astounding Paradise Papers of 2017, the latest entry in the trilogy of financial “leaks” is finally here, and I couldn’t be more excited.
THE “LEAKS”
So let’s get right down to it… what do the “leaks” say? Well, according to The Guardian…
The files reveal how wealthy individuals can shield their income and their assets from taxation and scrutiny by hiding them in offshore jurisdictions, more commonly known as “tax havens”.
Mind. Blown.
Rich people don’t pay tax! WHAT?!
It’s groundbreaking stuff. But that’s the kind of world-changing exposes you get when you read the work of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).
THE SOURCE
Just as with the Panama Papers in 2016 and the Paradise Papers of 2017, the ICIJ are here to tell you that off-shore accounts exist, and that rich people use them.
The big “revelations” include politicians from Ecuador, the Ivory Coast, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Ukraine and Kenya. The King of Jordan, the Prime Ministers of the UAE and the Czech Republic. Hardly a Who’s Who of hard hitters and political A-listers, instead – just as with the previous “leaks” – a collection of disposable lizard tails.
The biggest name mentioned is Tony Blair, who already has an unsalvageable public image, and is only accused of legally avoiding £300,000 in stamp duty. Or roughly 30p per Iraqi he murdered.
The papers don’t even allege any actual crimes took place, and they don’t name-and-shame any noteworthy politicians at all (largely because America has domestic tax havens), but still… they are apparently a huge deal.
Now a real investigative journalist might, at this point, ask “well who leaked these papers?” and “what did they stand to gain?”, but that’s not the ICIJ’s bag, they’re just here to unquestioningly publish documents sent to them by intelligence agencies and billionaires, and call them “leaks”.
You see, despite the name, the “International Consortium of Investigative Journalists” are not really journalists. In fact, they’re a “special project” of the creepily-named Centre for Public Integrity, a non-profit funded by various foundations and billionaires (including George Soros).
PUTIN? AGAIN? REALLY?
In a startlingly old-fashioned move, the press is pitching the angle that this “leak” reveals Vladimir Putin’s “secret wealth”, despite admitting that:
The Russian president Vladimir Putin does not appear in the files by name.
This exactly mirrors the Panama Papers, where Putin’s picture was everywhere despite the admitted fact “the president’s name does not appear in any of the records.” At the time I wrote that the Guardian had collapsed into self-parody.
The whole thing was darkly funny at the time, it is decidedly stale now. Like an actor who’s played the same role for years and has started phoning it in.
Speaking of the Guardian… our old friend Luke Harding had 2000 words about Putin’s wealth in that paper over the weekend. He alleges an illicit affair, hidden billions and a secret Monaco flat… all based on literally nothing. He cites no evidence that the woman in question ever MET Putin except – quite seriously – that they might have been on the same aeroplane.
Still, though, the need to make stuff up in order to publish it has never stopped Luke before. And he’s writing “from Monaco” so he at least managed to wrangle a tax-deductible holiday out of it. Good job Luke.
And he’s probably already halfway through a new book called something like “Red Money: The secret lives and loves of Vladimir Putin”. If he hurries he might get it done before Christmas, (especially if he plagiarizes other people’s work again).
CONCLUSION
In short, the Pandora Papers are a non-story.
“Rich people avoid taxes and lie about it” is not breaking news, and when the newspapers like the Guardian and Washington Post report it as if it is… well, it’s because it must serve some other purpose.
Possibly just a distraction, sound and fury signifying nothing. Possibly some as-yet-unrevealed plans for “financial reform” or “stricter regulations”.
Maybe a simple pantomime, trying to pretend that the world is still the same as it was pre-Covid. That we’re still good, and Russia is still bad, and that there really are different sides and they’re not all joined together behind the scenes.
Maybe just an exercise in pretending mainstream news does any kind of journalism at all. A little bit of lipstick up on a very ugly pig.
The world is corrupt, no kidding. But it’s far more corrupt than the Paradise Papers show, or that the ICIJ would ever actually admit.
I wrote a long and detailed response to this nonsense back in 2016, which you can read here. It’s nearly five years old now, but if the ICIJ can recycle old material then so can I.
Absolutely no evidence in Pandora papers leak to back up assertions about ‘hidden riches of Putin’s inner circle’
By Jonny Tickle | RT | October 4, 2021
Assertions by the publishers of the Pandora papers that the entourage of Russian President Vladimir Putin has secretly enriched itself have no substance and aren’t backed up by proof, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has claimed.
The Pandora papers are 11.9 million leaked documents published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which worked with journalists from over 117 countries, including outlets like The Washington Post and the BBC. It is said to be the biggest ever leak exposing tax evasion.
In the papers, several Russians are named, and according to the ICIJ, the country is “disproportionately represented” in the leaked documents. Two of the people named include Konstantin Ernst, the head of Russia’s most-watched broadcaster Channel One; and German Gref, the CEO of Sberbank, the country’s biggest financial institution.
However, despite his name not appearing in the documents, some of the journalists investigating the papers say that they show the great wealth of the president’s entourage, with London-based newspaper the Guardian claiming that it reveals the “hidden riches of Putin’s inner circle.”
However, according to the Kremlin, there is absolutely no evidence for this assertion.
Speaking to journalists on Monday, Peskov said that Moscow has not seen any “hidden wealth.”
“We haven’t seen anything in particular so far,” he explained. “So far, it’s just about some assertions, and it’s not clear what they are based on. This is certainly not a reason for an investigation.”
In fact, according to Peskov, the investigation simply proves that the US is the world’s most prominent location for tax evasion.
The Pandora paper authors also name Svetlana Krivonogikh, the woman claimed by investigative website Proekt to be the mother of one of Putin’s children. The Kremlin has never responded to the allegations. In 2021, Proekt was labeled as a foreign agent.
Outside of Russia, the paper also names Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Czech President Andrej Babiš, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair as those storing money offshore.
This Week in the New Normal #7
OffGuardian | October 3, 2021
This Week in the New Normal is our weekly chart of the progress of autocracy, authoritarianism and economic restructuring around the world.
1.THE WORST ARTICLE I’VE EVER READ.
The demonisation campaign against those who decline to partake in the untested gene therapy is pervasive and seemingly limitless. Article’s pop up claiming unvaxxed people should be banned from flying, banned from healthcare, banned from state benefits, and even fired from their jobs.
But this article in The Mirror is the worst of the worst. Quite honestly the worst, most hate-filled and insidious article I have ever read, and it is literally my job to search out and read hate-filled and insidious articles.
It’s titled:
Anti-vaxxers want to kill your babies, stage a coup and cause another lockdown!”
… and you don’t really need any more information than that. Read at your own risk.
2. THE RETURN OF LAB-GROWN MEAT
… well, not “the return” exactly, because it never went away. I guess “resurgence” is the better word. There’s certainly a sudden bump in the coverage.
The Guardian “asks the expert” if lab-grown meat will replace the real thing. The “expert” in question makes and sells lab-grown meat and, rather unsurprisingly, they say “yes!”.
And then the Times, with a tone of reluctant surrender, tells us we “must embrace lab-grown meat” whether “we like it or not”.
At the same time, Sky hosts a “climate debate” on lab-grown meat. One of those fake “debates” which serves a pre-determined agenda by basing a staged disagreement on fundamental assumptions which neither side questions.
In this case, it’s just assumed that LGM is good for the planet, and that actual meat is bad for it. Neither of those things are proven to be true.
But good news everyone! Your genetically synthesised meat-like protein paste is one step closer…whether you like it not.
3. “TREAT VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AS SERIOUSLY AS TERRORISM”
The result of the Sarah Everard trial in the UK has kicked off a wave of fear-based propaganda concerning just how much violence against women goes on, and what we need to do about it. Over and over again a list of very predictable names in very predictable publications talk up the idea that women are “still not safe”, or never “feel safe” (which is not the same thing).
Clearly, any murder is a tragedy for the victim and their family, but to present our country, or society, as inherently violent or dangerous is completely disengenuous.
Let’s just check the stats, for the sake of reality.
In the UK, and most of the Western world, violent crime has been generally on the decline for decades. In 2019, EU statistics found a 32% drop in homicides since 2008. In 2020, the UK suffered ~750 murders in a population of 68 million people, meaning a crude murder rate of 0.001% (or 1 per 100,000). Less than one-third of those killed were women, and only 20% of them were attacked on the street.
Our society is not perfect, but violent crime (against either gender) has literally never been less of a danger in the history of the country. In terms of violent crime, the streets are as safe for women as they have ever been. If they don’t feel safe, well that’s probably because the media keep telling them how much “danger” they’re in.
But why? Why the massive exaggeration of the danger? And why the clarion calls for “action” on violence against women?
Well, the same exact reasons behind the “pandemic” narrative. Because hysteria is always useful. Because the people in charge need us to be afraid all the time. Because they want to make sure different genders, races and orientations are constantly mistrustful of one another. And, obviously, because it can be manipulated into increased powers for the state.
Social media companies are already being pressured to “do more to protect women”. After Everard’s murder first in the news in March, people were suggesting male-only curfews so women feel safe on the streets. If Covid has taught us anything, it’s that well-stoked public panic can be parlayed into exactly that kind of insane policy.
The title of this section is taken from a tweet by British Labour MP David Lammy:
It’s not clear what (if anything) David means by this. It’s entirely possible he’s just an idiot playing to the gallery, but anyone familiar with the real purpose, and disastrous societal fallout, of the “War on Terror” should probably be concerned about just how far those in charge could go to (allegedly) “make women feel safe.”
BONUS: THE TOTALLY-NOT-A-CULT OF THE WEEK
Just want to point out that the vaccine-pushers of the New Normal are totally not in a cult.
Whether it’s dressing up dancers like syringes to prance around with glassy-eyed soul-dead TV hosts:
Or literally citing God as the source of the vaccine:
This is all very normal behaviour, and if you perceive it as creepy or cultlike, it’s only because you are a heretic…sorry, I mean a science denier.
BONUS II: PROJECTION OF THE WEEK
For those of you who don’t know who Keith Olbermann is, well I envy you..and apologise for introducing you to his existence. He’s a petty, ill-informed, opinionated loudmouth who takes up irrational and bigoted positions on pretty much everything, and trumpets those views loudly to anyone who’ll listen.
And yesterday, he tweeted this…
It takes a serious lack of self-awareness to get your third untested vaccination against a disease you have a 99.5% chance of surviving, and then lambast everyone not worried about the disease for being scaredy cats.
IT’S NOT ALL BAD…
The world of sport, especially American sports, is somewhat of a hotbed of “vaccine hesitancy”. This is down to several factors, most probably to do with many US athletes coming from working-class demographics with longstanding (and entirely justified) suspicions of both the media and big pharma.
By way of contrast with Olbermann’s spittle-spraying diatribe, we present the calm and rational position of NBA star Jonathan Isaac, speaking at a press conference on September 27th:
The NBA has already said they will dock the pay of unvaxxed players who refuse to comply with local mandates. And both the NBA and NFL have put in place massive restrictions on unvaccinated players to pressure them into getting the shot. The media, likewise, is piling on the pressure to conform.
All the players resisting in the face of such a powerful campaign deserve respect. And they serve as a reminder that Covid sceptics, or even just those people who want nothing to do with the vaccine, are not anything like the tiny minority the media tries to pretend we are. And our arguments are rational and informed, not based on the insults and mindless frothing outrage of those trying to pressure us into conforming.
All told a pretty hectic week for the new normal crowd, and we didn’t even mention the “mysterious rise in heart attacks” or the UK’s entirely manufactured “fuel crisis”.
It appears the Canadian military’s covert Covid propaganda operation has made unjabbed citizens enemies of the state
By Rachel Marsden | RT | September 30, 2021
The shocking revelation that the armed forces implemented a secret information campaign in 2020 to brainwash people over the pandemic is proof of deliberate intent to quash critical and independent thought and freedoms.
As a Canadian citizen who recovered from Covid and acquired natural immunity and antibodies without the anti-Covid vaccine, the government doesn’t much appreciate my narrative.
Proof lies in the fact that when I arrived back home in Vancouver from my work base in Europe in August, the federal government demanded that I pay for my own three-day imprisonment in a government mandated facility at a cost of up to $2,000. Refusal resulted in being ordered in writing to immediately get back on a plane and leave my own country under threat of penalties up to and including imprisonment. All because my acquired immunity didn’t jibe with the government’s “one size fits all” two-jab narrative.
Now I’ve learned that the Canadian military was deployed against unconventional and inconvenient narratives like mine in favor of lockstep groupthink. Does that make me an enemy of the state?
The Canadian military’s Joint Operations Command implemented a propaganda campaign in April 2020 with the intent to manipulate unsuspecting Canadians into falling in line with the federal government’s official positions on Covid-19. The brainwashing operation’s termination was ordered a month later, but in the meantime, it “relied on propaganda techniques similar to those employed during the Afghanistan war,” according to the Ottawa Citizen’s exclusive report on documents obtained under Access to Information.
The operation’s aim, according to the military, was to “head off civil disobedience by Canadians during the coronavirus pandemic and to bolster government messages about the pandemic.”
Generally, government intelligence operations rely on ear-bending friendly journalists and think-tank analysts to publish the state’s talking points in mainstream publications or online. Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein, best-known for breaking the Watergate scandal, wrote in a Rolling Stone magazine article titled “The CIA and the Media,” back in 1977, how the CIA used “journalist-operatives” to “plant subtly concocted pieces of misinformation.”
He further noted: “There are perhaps a dozen well known columnists and broadcast commentators whose relationships with the CIA go far beyond those normally maintained between reporters and their sources. They are referred to at the Agency as ‘known assets’ and can be counted on to perform a variety of undercover tasks; they are considered receptive to the Agency’s point of view on various subjects.”
Another known tactic used by military intelligence to manipulate its own country’s citizens is to send out retired generals to spew talking points on various media platforms. In 2008, the Los Angeles Times wrote of the Pentagon’s Iraq War era “message multipliers” program. At the time, Democratic Congressman Paul Hodes had introduced an amendment – overwhelmingly adopted – to investigate the Pentagon’s public opinion manipulation program, unveiled by the New York Times as “cultivating former military officers who became regulars on Fox News, CNN and the broadcast networks.”
“They were fed administration talking points, believing they were getting independent military analysis,” Hodes said at the time of the public manipulation campaign.
So despite the Ottawa Citizen’s reporting that the program was officially quashed one month after its deployment, we really don’t know how much damage was done and to what extent the propaganda distribution it sparked may have since become autonomous and taken on a life of its own.
Canadians now need to know exactly what “government messages” were propagandized and where, and what “enemy narratives” were targeted for smears. Only then is it possible for the public to assess how much of the current conventional wisdom is the result of deliberate boosting or suppressing.
It’s a sad fact that the Canadian military has seen fit to use similar techniques to those that US intelligence has long deployed on foreign opponents. Declassified US intelligence manuals drafted in 1987 show that both the Pentagon and the CIA used similar propaganda techniques in Latin America, with the aim of indiscriminately brainwashing both civilians and guerrillas to support the US-backed movements. And like with the Canadian military campaign, it involved monitoring innocent people for their thoughts and beliefs while minimizing consideration of both basic human rights and the rule of law.
Lest we forget that Canadians were also victims of some of the most egregious brainwashing experimentation under the CIA-led MK-Ultra program to test various mind control methods, including LSD, sensory deprivation, and electroshock therapy, on unwitting Canadians at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal between 1957 and 1964.
We really have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes with this recent revelation that Canadians were once again treated as experimental guinea pigs – this time in the interest of quashing critical thinking or dissent amid the pandemic. What we do see, however, it’s probably just the tip of the iceberg, and that its aim of creating a compliant citizenry has been successful.
More than three in four double-jabbed Canadians consider their unjabbed fellow citizens selfish and irresponsible, according to a new Leger poll. If they’re jabbed, and they have so much confidence in the jab preventing them getting ill, then what do they care what anyone else does? How much has the Canadian military and government propaganda played a role in shaping their views?
The whole truth about the extent of this psychological abuse of innocent Canadian civilians needs to come out – if only so the manipulated can see to what extent they were coerced into turning against their fellow citizens for simply making a different personal choice in what, after all, is supposed to still be a free and democratic country.
Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist and host of an independently produced French-language program that airs on Sputnik France. Her website can be found at rachelmarsden.com
If YouTube’s block of RT’s German channels is about ‘misinformation’, when will MSNBC & CNN be banned for Russiagate conspiracies?
By Glenn Diesen | RT | September 30, 2021
Russia is locked into yet another standoff with an American tech company. This time, it’s YouTube, which has taken down two of RT’s German-language news channels and provoked a furious response from Moscow’s most senior officials.
The decision, understood to have been taken over allegations the broadcaster tried to circumvent a ‘community standards strike’ handed down over ‘medical misinformation’, has seen Russia’s regulators rally round RT DE and its sister account, Der Fehlende Part.
Roskomnadzor, the Russian federal executive agency responsible for overseeing the media, warned Google it would be fined if did not end the suspension. At the same time, RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, cautioned that this was “a declaration of media war against Russia by Germany,” and argued in favour of retaliatory restrictions against German media in Russia.
The closure of German-language RT channels should be seen in the context of growing censorship in the West and hostility to Moscow’s media outlets.
The rise of censorship in the West
Censorship has acquired a new dictionary over the past few years, with the rise of concepts such as safe spaces, cancel culture, and de-platforming – which are synonyms for striking down what people can and can’t say. Terms like hate speech and propaganda are defined increasingly loosely and censorship is therefore imposed on a wider and more inconsistent basis. The US government works hand in glove with the private tech giants to re-label censorship at platform policies.
There is especially a growing effort to legitimise censoring news and media related to Russia, which is usually conducted under the auspices of “countering propaganda.” We are constantly informed that Russia is launching a disinformation and propaganda campaign against the West to undermine its democracies. The response to this alleged threat by Western governments is a firm campaign of one-sided fact-checkers and efforts to out-propaganda the supposed propagandists.
The problem is that what is framed as counter-propaganda usually looks indistinguishable from propaganda, and merely undermines and ignores the arguments on the other side. Propaganda is the science of persuading an audience without reason by instead appealing to group psychology and emotional rhetoric. If propaganda entails “closing the mind to argument,” then countering propaganda implies appealing to reason by objectively presenting competing arguments.
British philosopher Bertrand Russell is known for arguing during the Cold War that countering communist propaganda did not necessitate simply censoring the Soviet Union, as such a move would merely give space for British propaganda. Instead, he envisioned counter-propaganda as facilitating all perspectives by, for example, organising a debate between Stalin and the Archbishop of Canterbury. By redefining propaganda as anything that presents Russia favourably – debates that give Russian arguments a platform and legitimacy are deemed dangerous and thus require censorship. Under this new definition of propaganda, even the Russian Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine and Russian cartoons are considered propaganda.
It is only a year ago that Hunter Biden’s laptop scandal unfolded ahead of the US presidential election, purporting to reveal that now-US President Joe Biden was involved in corruption with Ukraine and China. Fearing that this revelation could cause Joe Biden to lose the election, the Biden campaign adopted the same Russiagate playbook as the Clinton campaign – blame Russia.
By labelling the entire scandal a Russian disinformation campaign, the media chose not to report on the matter while social media platforms outright censored the story from their platforms. Well, last week the evidence was in – the incriminating emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop were completely authentic and Moscow had absolutely nothing to do with it. Much like the conspiracy theories linking former President Donald Trump to the Kremlin and the tale of Russia placing bounties on US troops in Afghanistan – the disinformation came from the Western media.
In many cases, mainstream outlets have championed claims that were at the time unsubstantiated, and now fully discredited, without ever correcting themselves. American networks including MSNBC and CNN have played host to some of the most egregiously untrue Russia-gate conspiracy theories. Those, like Rachel Maddow, who unapologetically championed them, have never faced repercussions for their careers, and their sensationalist content still sits online proud as punch and without retraction or amendment. Accountability, it seems, is something reserved for other people.
Western states are also countering alleged Russian disinformation with ‘fact-checkers’. The problem is that these fact-checkers do not actually check facts, they check narratives, impose their own, and thereby operate as a Ministry of Truth.
Case in point, the EU fact-checkers label the reference to ‘coup’ to describe the events in Ukraine in February 2014 as Russian disinformation, as it was argued to supposedly have been a ‘democratic revolution’ and that former leader Viktor Yanukovich chose to leave the country voluntarily.
Actual fact-checkers would check objective facts: Did the OSCE characterise the election of President Yanukovich as free and fair? – Yes. Did the removal of Yanukovich from power violate the Ukrainian constitution? – Yes. Did the toppling of Yanukovich enjoy support from a democratic majority of the Ukrainian population? – No. Did the US and EU support the removal of Yanukovich? – Yes. Instead of fact-checking, the fact-checkers employ ambiguous and contradictory terms such as ‘democratic revolution’ to delegitimise the Russian position. Subsequently, these fact-checkers send an unmistakable signal to Western media that they cannot discuss the extent to which a coup occurred in Ukraine, as this can be considered peddling Russian disinformation.
Diversity of perspectives demands a diversity of media
The media landscape is polarising both domestically and internationally. Within the US, liberals who appear on conservative media platforms are chastised for their lack of loyalty to the group. Within Europe, the media polarises between pro-Brexit and anti-Brexit, or between pro-EU and anti-EU.
Groupthink is amplified and the subsequent polarisation implies that the nuances disappear as political questions are framed as a struggle between right and wrong, or good and evil. With the death of objective reporting, the solution for the audience to remain informed is a diversity of media – both CNN and Fox News, both The Daily Telegraph and the Guardian, both Haaretz and Al Jazeera.
The Western media acts in conformity with a heavy anti-Russian bias that reflects the alliance system and security architecture of a divided Europe. Those interested in Russian politics should by no means limit themselves to RT as the sole arbiter of truth, but RT is an important contribution to a severely polarised media landscape.
The Western media has exceptionally poor reporting on Russia, as it is ideologically constrained from recognising Russian security concerns. All political questions are filtered through the simplistic and outdated binary stereotypes of ‘democracy’ versus ‘authoritarianism’ that provides little if any heuristic value to understand the complexities of the socio-economic, political, and military conflicts.
The inability to recognise that the West can threaten Russian security makes it impossible to have any reasonable analysis of Russian foreign policy. By neglecting external threats and limiting the analysis of Russia to its internal characteristics, Russian policies can only be explained by referencing Putin’s belligerent personality or nostalgia for empire.
The information space is becoming a key battleground in great power rivalry, and for the sake of an informed population, we have to hope what some see as propaganda is countered with reason – not just more propaganda.
Glenn Diesen is a Professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway and an editor at the Russia in Global Affairs journal.
It’s unacceptable that Canada’s military ran a secret psyops campaign to manipulate & control public views on Covid
By Eva K Bartlett | RT | September 28, 2021
The plan, devised by the Canadian Joint Operations Command, relied on propaganda techniques like those used during the Afghan war. What on earth is going on in the upper echelons of Ottawa?
High-up elements of the Canadian Forces have been waging psychological operations on the public over Covid-19 to manipulate their emotions and thoughts, and to gauge their reactions. While this is not uncommon around the world, getting caught is.
A new article in Canada’s National Post states that the Canadian Joint Operations Command used “propaganda techniques similar to those employed during the Afghanistan war” on the Canadian public.
The Post cites a December 2020 investigation by retired Major-General Daniel Gosselin, who was asked to look into it by then-Chief of the Defence Staff General Jon Vance.
According to the article, the federal government was innocent and not aware of the plan – a claim I find unbelievable, considering the amount of gaslighting and knowingly pointless regulations the government has subjected Canadians to since the start of the pandemic scare.
The plan involved “shaping” and “exploiting” information, the Post noted, to “head off civil disobedience by Canadians” and “bolster government messages about the pandemic.”
Among the stranger aspects was scaring Canadians with stories of a wolf invasion.
This, according to the Post, involved Canadian Forces’ military information operations staff forging a letter from the Nova Scotia government warning about wolves on the loose, in September 2020.
The Post claims the letter’s release was inadvertent, and basically ran with the Canadian Forces’ claim that this was down to a few bad apples, reservists who “lacked formal training and policies governing the use of propaganda techniques.”
Canadian journalist Dan Dicks, who was among the first to report on and analyze the wolves story, noted at the time that it was a classic example of a psychological operation.
Dicks has also pointed out what the National Post omitted, highlighting:
“They created a fake letter from the government saying there are dangerous wolves, and they set up loudspeakers in the area, projecting out wolf noises. This isn’t just research, this isn’t just a training exercise, they’re actively engaging in this psychological operation to scare people using loudspeakers.
‘Psyops’, he noted, is a term used “to denote any action which is practiced mainly by psychological methods with the aim of evoking a planned psychological reaction in other people,” and they are “aimed at influencing a target audience’s value system, belief system, emotions, motives, reasoning, or behaviour.”
Canadian journalist James Corbett likewise commented on this at the time, pointing out how a rumour is floated to see how the public reacts:
“This entire coordinated campaign to convince an entire public of a threat that doesn’t exist, in order to test how they will react to that, what will the public respond to and how will they respond? That really speaks volumes to the world we are living in. And you really think they are going to do all of that, but they are never going to use that for any nefarious purposes?”
An article in the Ottawa Citizen noted at the time that Canada’s Department of National Defence claimed: “The fake letter wasn’t meant to be released to the public and an investigation is underway to determine how that happened. The letter was an aid for the propaganda training.”
The department also claimed to not know why the loudspeaker was set up to transmit wolf sounds.
I guess a member of the public who read the letter must have taken it upon themselves to set up the loudspeaker then, hey?
The same Ottawa Citizen article cites Bard College professor Emma Briant, who specializes in researching military propaganda, calling the stunt a “major violation of ethics.”
UK “anti-masker” razor-blade poster hoax
The “shaping” and “exploiting” of information on Covid-19 to gauge and shape the public mood is, of course, not unique to Canada. To give another example, in May 2020, the UK Column obtained a leaked internal document of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) from March 26, 2020, which advised:
“Use the media to increase the sense of personal threat. Use the media to increase the sense of responsibility of others. Use the media to promote positive messaging around actions. Tailor the messaging and use and promote social approval for desired behaviours.”
I recently spoke to UK-based journalist Iain Davis on a variety of issues pertaining to fear porn and media hype around the issue of Covid-19.
In our interview, Davis spoke of another hoax that appeared on the BBC last July: a Cardiff woman who claimed she had been cut by a razor blade allegedly stuck on the back of an ‘anti-mask’ poster.
What the BBC did not bother investigating was that the poster in question was laminated, thus stiff, and the razor blade stuck flat to the back of it, making it virtually impossible that the woman had actually cut herself.
“When you took it off the wall, it would have been like a card, not a piece of paper you could scrunch up, it would have been a stiff card,” David said.
Nor did the BBC question why she threw away the ‘evidence’ instead of turning it over to the police she had contacted. They didn’t look into her apparent history of outlandish and improbable claims, like being disemboweled and walking to hospital holding her intestines in, nor her admitted history of self-harming, lending credence to the likelihood she staged the sliced-hand photo.
While this story seemingly originated from an unstable individual, it was pushed unquestioningly by British state-owned media.
Further, as Davis noted, the nonsensical razor poster story re-emerged two months later, this time with London transport warning of “anti-mask posters with razor blades.”
In this story, the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union cited by the BBC actually said it wasn’t aware of any razor-blade incidents. Yet the BBC ran with the claims nonetheless (using the previous unstable person’s photo to support the claims).
These were not the first razor-blade poster stories, though. In 2020, the BBC and other media ran stories claiming razor blades (and needles) had been put behind anti-5G posters, again not providing any actual evidence to back the claims.
Anti-mask, anti-5G… and ‘razor-blade posters’. Clearly, this looks like another psyop to indoctrinate the public into equating people who have legitimate and science-based concerns about particular issues as being not only bat-s**t crazy, but dangerous, a menace to society.
But these stories are being cooked up in underhand ways by some powerful forces that shouldn’t be engaged in these matters, while the masses actually concerned about these issues are raising their concerns in peaceful manners: petitions, peaceful demonstrations, scientific papers… All that is easily obscured by a few tabloid stories with screaming headlines.
According to Davis, the point is “to seed the idea into the public imagination to associate people that question vaccines with extremism, ultimately with terrorism. There is a lineage going back quite a few years where you can see this narrative being seeded into the public consciousness. It has really ramped up in the last couple of months.”
Indeed, in November 2020, the Ottawa Citizen revealed the Canadian Forces’ desire to “establish a new organization that will use propaganda and other techniques to try to influence the attitudes, beliefs and behaviours of Canadians,” noting they’ve already spent over $1 million to “train public affairs officers on behaviour modification techniques of the same sort used by the parent firm of Cambridge Analytica.”
While noting nominal opposition and concern by the defence minister, the Citizen reported that “work is already underway on some aspects of the plan and some techniques have been already tested on the Canadian public,” as well as that “a series of town halls were already conducted last week for a number of military personnel on the strategies contained in the draft plan.”
Dan Dicks, in his commentary on the wolves scare story, aptly opined, “It frustrates me so much that the government is actively trying to silence me as being ‘fake news’ or putting out ‘false information’, when they are actively engaged in propaganda campaigns to distribute false information designed to scare Canadians.”
Indeed, we who speak out on uncomfortable issues are censored, ostracized, and labeled as ‘conspiracy theorists’, while governments are actively spewing misinformation and manipulating the masses.
Where Was All The Investigative Journalism On US Airstrikes The Last 20 Years?
By Caitlin Johnstone | September 18, 2021
The Pentagon has finally admitted to the long-obvious fact that it killed ten Afghan civilians, including seven children, in an airstrike in Kabul last month.
In an article with the obscenely propagandistic title “Pentagon acknowledges Aug. 29 drone strike in Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians,” the New York Times pats itself on the back for its investigative journalism showing that the so-called “ISIS-K facilitator” targeted in the strike was in fact an innocent aid worker named Zemari Ahmadi:
“The general acknowledged that a New York Times investigation of video evidence helped investigators determine that they had struck a wrong target. ‘As we in fact worked on our investigation, we used all available information,’ General McKenzie told reporters. ‘Certainly that included some of the stuff The New York Times did.’”
Indeed, the Pentagon only admitted to the unjust slaughter of civilians in this one particular instance because the mass media did actual investigative journalism on this one particular airstrike. This is an indictment of the Pentagon’s airstrike protocol, but it’s also an indictment of the mass media.
This after all comes out following a new Byline Times report which found that “at least 5.8 to 6 million people are likely to have died overall due to the War on Terror – a staggering number which is still probably very conservative.”
It also comes out two months after whistleblower Daniel Hale was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for leaking secret government information about America’s psychopathic civilian-slaughtering drone assassination program.
It also comes a few months after a Code Pink report found that the US and its allies have been dropping an average of 46 bombs per day in the so-called War on Terror for the last twenty years.
Do you remember seeing an average of 46 news reports a day on bombings conducted by the US and its allies? Do you remember even reading about one single US bombing per day in the mainstream news? I don’t. The US power alliance has for decades been continuously raining explosives from the sky on impoverished people in the Global South and the mainstream news reports on almost none of those instances, much less launches an in-depth investigation into whether each one killed who the military claims they killed.
The difference between the August 29 airstrike and the thousands which preceded it in America’s post-9/11 wars was that this one was politicized. The Biden administration ordered it to look tough on terrorism after the Kabul airport attack (most of the fatalities from which were probably due to panicked gunfire from US and/or allied troops), amidst a withdrawal for which Biden was being aggressively slammed by plutocratic media outlets eager to paint ending US wars as a bad thing that everyone should oppose.
The Pentagon doesn’t care that it snuffed out innocent lives in an airstrike; it does that all the time and its officials would do it a lot more if that’s what it took to secure their futures as lobbyists, consultants, board members and executives for defense industry corporations after they retire from the military. And the mass media don’t care either; they only cared about this one particular highly politicized airstrike during a withdrawal from a military engagement the mass media vehemently opposed.
“Pentagon acknowledges Aug. 29 drone strike in Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians.” Can you believe that headline? Not “admits” but “acknowledges”. Not “killed children while targeting an aid worker based on flimsy evidence” but “was a tragic mistake”. How many times did New York Times editors rewrite this? Imagine if this had been a Russian airstrike.
Think about all the murder victims we’d have known about if the news media had done its job and used their immense resources to investigate them as journalists should over the last twenty years. Think about how much harder it would have been for the war machine to inflict these evils upon the world if they had. Instead it’s been left to obscure bloggers and indie journalists to question these actions using scant resources and shoestring budgets.
They’ve shown that they can do these investigations into the validity of US airstrikes, and they’ve shown that they’ve spent two decades choosing not to. The mass media manipulators who provide cover for mass military murder by journalistic malpractice and negligence are just as complicit in these depraved acts of human butchery as the people firing the weapons and the officials giving the orders.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff demands Facebook censor “disinformation”
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | September 26, 2021
Salesforce CEO, and Time Magazine owner, Marc Benioff has criticized Facebook allowing the spread of “disinformation” on its platforms.
In an interview on CNN, Benioff said: “This digital revolution really kind of has the world in its grip. And in that grip, you can see the amount of mistrust and misinformation that is happening.”
According to the tech billionaire, what he says is misinformation on social media is making it harder to solve climate change.
“Look at how it is affecting the world. You can talk about the political process. You can talk about climate. You can talk about the pandemic,” Benioff said. “In each and every major topic, it gets connected back to the mistrust that is happening and especially the amount of it being seeded by the social networks. It must stop now.”
Benioff singled out Facebook as the platform with the greatest misinformation problem. He has been one of Facebook’s most vocal critics and has previously called for the breaking up of the Zuckerberg empire, which is now worth approximately $1 trillion.
“Some of these social media companies, especially Facebook, you can see that they don’t really care that their platform is filled with all of this disinformation,” Benioff said.
He continued to suggest that Congress should do something to address the disinformation problem on Facebook.
“I own Time and I am held accountable for what is produced on my platform,” Benioff said, adding that mainstream media outlets are also held accountable. “In regards to Facebook, they are not held accountable. So they do not have an incentive from the government. That has to change.”
Mainstream Media’s Massive Government Payoff
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | September 26, 2021
There’s one piece of the U.S. federal government’s $3.5 trillion spending plan you’re not hearing about on mainstream news, and one reason for that may be because it’s the media themselves who are the beneficiaries.
Dubbed the Local Journalism Sustainability Act, the legislation, if passed, could mean upward of $1 million in payroll tax credits for larger news organizations like The Philadelphia Inquirer. Specifically, it bails out failing news agencies by helping to pay reporters’ salaries with tax credits and other perks.
Several newspapers have already taken advantage of bailouts previously offered during the pandemic, with The Seattle Times getting $9.9 million while The Tampa Tribune walked off with $8.5 million.
“Every American should tell their member of Congress to oppose this idea,” The Daily Signal says. “And even more importantly, they should tell their local news outlets the same thing. No journalist subsidized with tax dollars should ever be taken seriously in this country.
“Most Americans distrust the media. They were rightfully outraged when journalists entirely ignored the Hunter Biden scandals in the final weeks of the 2020 election. But now it looks like their allies in Washington, D.C., are going to reward them for their loyalty. It will be a dark day in our nation when ‘journalists’ become beneficiaries from the federal spoils system.”
SOURCES:
‘Humanity is doomed!’ Young people stressed over climate change
© Getty Images / LeoPatrizi
By Rachel Marsden | RT | September 24, 2021
Almost half of 16-25 year olds admit their ‘feelings’ about climate change negatively impact their daily lives. Perhaps they should try getting one first, with some personal challenges and goals on which to focus.
According to a recently published climate change attitude survey of 10,000 young people aged 16-25 in 10 countries, 75% feel that the future is frightening and 65% figure that governments are failing young people, with only 33% believing that governments are protecting them, the planet and future generations.
Just over half of respondents also feel that humanity is doomed. But despite this overwhelming negative outlook on life, only [???] 39% are hesitant to have kids.
Because the situation is clearly not bad enough to warrant derailing one’s own selfish personal desires. It’s only concerning enough to whine about it, distracting yourself with millennia-old planetary shifts that you (like governments) have no control over – unlike your own daily life.
“This study paints a horrific picture of widespread climate anxiety in our children and young people. It suggests for the first time that high levels of psychological distress in youth is linked to government inaction,” noted the study’s co-author, Caroline Hickman of the University of Bath and the Climate Psychology Alliance. “Our children’s anxiety is a completely rational reaction given the inadequate responses to climate change they are seeing from governments. What more do governments need to hear to take action?”
Exactly how many more Ponzi schemes do they want governments to create to relieve people of their money and freedom?
So what kind of picture does all this paint? One of overreliance on nanny-state government, a lack of critical thought amid constant eco-propaganda in the mainstream media, an inability to function outside the comfort of one’s own safe space, and the clear absence of any real-life adversity.
These kids have bought into a government-peddled fairy tale. Decades worth of nonstop state propaganda has brainwashed them into believing the ridiculous notion that if you give them enough of your parents’ hard-earned money, governments will be able to control the Earth’s thermostat. The lack of return on investment is a win-win for the authorities, who will blame their poor results on the fact that they just need even more of your money, or need to impose new systems of behavioral control on citizens, in order to better address climate change.
The alternative would be to accept that there are things we simply can’t control in life – like climate cycles – and that we just have to adapt and carry on.
That the overwhelming majority of youth feel that the future is frightening, with 56% concluding that “humanity is doomed,” is proof that life has apparently become too easy and these youngsters haven’t faced enough adversity to be able to relativize issues they face and adapt to become more resilient people.
The panic promoted by governments and their special interest handmaidens supersedes ground-truth reality and focuses on some future apocalypse because creating a frightened citizenry fosters increased dependence on government to solve the problem, while providing a pretext for further transfer of funding from people’s productive labor to the coffers of the ruling class.
In turn, these funds are then distributed to privatized entities handpicked by the state – often with cronies at the helm – under the guise of “solving” the problem. It’s the classic model used in defense contracting to “solve” the problem of endless warfare.
Young people used to have a healthy distrust of government. Now, they buy into governments’ framing of issues on everything from the climate to Covid-19. If you don’t trust the state to begin with – relying primarily instead on your own instincts, observations, and critical thinking – then you’re much more able to judge for yourself whether the government is manipulating you.
If young people looked around and realized that life really isn’t that bad, and is rife with modern comforts and conveniences compared with those enjoyed by previous generations, they’d be more satisfied and less anxious.
How many of the youth surveyed have had the experience of fighting on the frontline of a war, or have lived through a famine or an actual plague (no, Covid still doesn’t count)? A quick trip through the cemeteries of the landing beaches of World War II in Normandy would be a wake-up call to teenagers who think that life is tough because it was really hot in some places this summer and the government isn’t doing enough about it.
Get a bloody air conditioner already and stop whining.
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The toxic legacy of nuclear weapons testing serves as a stark warning of the danger these weapons pose
By Scott Ritter | RT | March 11, 2021
Millions of people suffer and die from the effects of radiation exposure from decades of nuclear weapons testing. Their experience should give serious pause to those who continue to embrace the viability of a nuclear deterrent. … continue
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