Propagandists Ponder Plunging Popularity – #PropagandaWatch
Corbett • 01/07/2020
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This week on #PropagandaWatch we look at how the propagandists are wringing their hands over the plunging popularity of their dinosaur media outlets.
SHOW NOTES:
A year of media upheaval
“The News” is a Social Construct. It is Used to Program You.
Episode 370 – The Afghanistan Papers Are Establishment Whitewash BS
Some War Truth In A Single Photograph
By Bill Willers | Dissident Voice | January 5, 2020
Once I realized to my dismay that I couldn’t believe a word of what our media and political leaders said about major events in the here and now, their credibility on controversial happenings so long ago and far away entirely disappeared.” — Ron Unz, 2018
The 100th anniversary of Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, generated renewed interest in the First World War, its beginnings, its aftermath, and the lead up to World War II. For anyone brought up with the carefully-crafted narratives that constitute “popular” history, a dive into details of the World Wars can shake one’s faith in the validity of all generally accepted history. A good introduction to long buried aspects of the era of the World Wars is Patrick J. Buchanan’s 2008 book “Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War“, in which all roads lead back to Britain’s 1914 declaration of war on Germany, which soon involved much of the world. Germany’s rising power had threatened British imperial dominance within a Rube Goldberg complexity of formal alliances and secret agreements. A Serbian shot an Austrian archduke, Serbia allied with Russia, but Austria-Hungary allied with Germany, and Russia with Britain and France, etc. Ultimately, the “Great Men” leading the masses appeared powerless to stop the WW I slaughter: 8 million dead, 20 million wounded. Thereafter, the Treaty of Versailles imposed on Germany grossly unjust reparations, this leading ultimately to a humiliated Germany embracing Hitler’s rise, thence to a war with a price tag of more than 50 million human lives.
Massive works on Churchill and Hitler by the towering historian David Irving are based on every conceivable information source down to personal diaries and interviews. Irving’s departure from widely accepted “mainstream” story lines has irked some fellow historians, and because he has not been perfectly in synch with Holocaust dogma, he, like so many, has suffered unwarranted accusations of anti-semitism. He writes that many details in the generally-accepted history of WW II, apparently like much of history itself, are simply wrong. His depiction of Winston Churchill is as a central causative agent of both world wars. What’s that? you say! Churchill, during his lifetime considered the greatest living Englishman, a war monger? Likewise, Adolph Hitler struggled to avoid war? Are these too shocking to accept? Research for yourself, and you may find yourself in agreement with Caitlin Johnstone: “Our species fought two world wars (or arguably one world war with a long intermission to grow more troops) for no justifiable reason at all.”
Insight into how governmentally-sanctioned histories might be managed for mass consumption is offered by Ron Unz who cites an amazing number of A-list commentators (scroll down to subtitle “Purging our Leading Historians and Journalists”) who, on diverging from authorized accounts, were simply blacklisted, thereafter unable to get published. It seems that a thread of decency runs through the human family such that elaborate lies must be maintained by governments in order to justify and generate and perpetuate wars. If the Spanish-American War, the two World Wars, Vietnam and both invasions of Iraq have anything in common, it is that all six involved official lies used to bring We The People on board: Remember the Maine, the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin, Kuwaiti babies, Weapons of Mass Destruction. Lies.
During Christmas, 1914, certain British and German soldiers of WW I got the urge for a truce. Shouts of “Merry Christmas!” across “no man’s land” of the front led to troops emerging from trenches, exchanging food and trinkets, playing a bit of soccer. Photos are easy to find on the Internet, but one in particular crystalizes a truth about humanity, regardless of what contorted propaganda might be coming down from the damned stuffed shirts who send humans to slaughter. Historians necessarily focus on political power players and the decision makers of war, but it is decent folk within the powerless masses who are the ones driven to do the killing and the dying. The two youths in the photo — not many years beyond childhood — could be any soldiers from any period of time, of any ethnicity, in any war. Like healthy people everywhere, they would have greatly preferred to be friends, and it shows.
Dwight Eisenhower, a General turned President, is quoted as having said “I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.” Such a day is not yet visible on the horizon.
Bill Willers is an emeritus professor of biology, University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. He can be contacted at willers@uwosh.edu.
The Terrifying Rise of the Zombie State Narrative
By Craig Murray | January 2, 2020
The ruling Establishment has learnt a profound lesson from the debacle over Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction. The lesson they have learnt is not that it is wrong to attack and destroy an entire country on the basis of lies. They have not learnt that lesson despite the fact the western powers are now busily attacking the Iraqi Shia majority government they themselves installed, for the crime of being a Shia majority government.
No, the lesson they have learnt is never to admit they lied, never to admit they were wrong. They see the ghost-like waxen visage of Tony Blair wandering around, stinking rich but less popular than an Epstein birthday party, and realise that being widely recognised as a lying mass murderer is not a good career choice. They have learnt that the mistake is for the Establishment ever to admit the lies.
The Establishment had to do a certain amount of collective self-flagellation over the non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, over which they precipitated the death and maiming of millions of people. Only a very few outliers, like the strange Melanie Phillips, still claimed the WMD really did exist, and her motive was so obviously that she supported any excuse to kill Muslims that nobody paid any attention. Her permanent pass to appear on the BBC was upgraded. But by and large everyone accepted the Iraqi WMD had been a fiction. The mainstream media Blair/Bush acolytes like Cohen, Kamm and Aaronovitch switched to arguing that even if WMD did not exist, Iraq was in any case better off for having so many people killed and its infrastructure destroyed.
These situations are now avoided by the realisation of the security services that in future they just have to brazen it out. The simple truth of the matter – and it is a truth – is this. If the Iraq WMD situation occurred today, and the security services decided to brazen it out and claim that WMD had indeed been found, there is not a mainstream media outlet that would contradict them.
The security services outlet Bellingcat would publish some photos of big missiles planted in the sand. The Washington Post, Guardian, New York Times, BBC and CNN would republish and amplify these pictures and copy and paste the official statements from government spokesmen. Robert Fisk would get to the scene and interview a few eye witnesses who saw the missiles being planted, and he would be derided as a senile old has-been. Seymour Hersh and Peter Hitchens would interview whistleblowers and be shunned by their colleagues and left off the airwaves. Bloggers like myself would be derided as mad conspiracy theorists or paid Russian agents if we cast any doubt on the Bellingcat “evidence”. Wikipedia would ruthlessly expunge any alternative narrative as being from unreliable sources. The Integrity Initiative, 77th Brigade, GCHQ and their US equivalents would be pumping out the “Iraqi WMD found” narrative all over social media. Mad Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council would be banning dissenting accounts all over the place in his role as Facebook Witchfinder-General.
Does anybody seriously wish to dispute this is how the absence of Iraqi WMD would be handled today, 16 years on?
If you do wish to doubt this could happen, look at the obviously fake narrative of the Syrian government chemical weapons attacks on Douma. The pictures published on Bellingcat of improvised chlorine gas missiles were always obviously fake. Remember this missile was supposed to have smashed through ten inches of solid, steel rebar reinforced concrete.
As I reported back in May last year, that the expert engineers sent to investigate by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) did not buy into this is hardly surprising.
That their findings were deliberately omitted from the OPCW report is very worrying indeed. What became still more worrying was the undeniable evidence that started to emerge from whistleblowers in the OPCW that the toxicology experts had unanimously agreed that those killed had not died from chlorine gas attack. The minutes of the OPCW toxicology meeting really do need to be read in full.
The highlights are:
“No nerve agents had been detected in environmental or bio samples”
“The experts were conclusive in their statements that there was no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure”
I really do urge you to click on the above link and read the entire minute. In particular, it is impossible to read that minute and not understand that the toxicology experts believed that the corpses had been brought and placed in position.
“The experts were also of the opinion that the victims were highly unlikely to have gathered in piles at the centre of the respective apartments, at such a short distance from an escape from any toxic chlorine gas to much cleaner air”.
So the toxicology experts plainly believed the corpse piles had been staged, and the engineering experts plainly believed the cylinder bombs had been staged. Yet, against the direct evidence of its own experts, the OPCW published a report managing to convey the opposite impression – or at least capable of being portrayed by the media of giving the opposite impression.
How then did the OPCW come to do this? Rather unusually for an international organisation, the OPCW Secretariat is firmly captured by the Western states, largely because it covers an area of activity which is not of enormous interest to the political elites of developing world states, and many positions require a high level of technical qualification. It was also undergoing a change of Director General at the time of the Douma investigation, with the firmly Francoist Spanish diplomat Fernando Arias taking over as Director General and the French diplomat Sebastian Braha effectively running the operation as the Director-General’s chef de cabinet, working in close conjunction with the US security services. Braha simply ordered the excision of the expert opinions on engineering and toxicology, and his high-handedness worked, at least until whistleblowers started to reveal the truth about Braha as a slimy, corrupt, lying war hawk.
FFM here stands for Fact Finding Mission and ODG for Office of the Director General. After a great deal of personal experience dealing with French diplomats, I would say that the obnoxious arrogance revealed in Braha’s instructions here is precisely what you would expect. French diplomats as a class are a remarkably horrible and entitled bunch. Braha has no compunction about simply throwing around the weight of the Office of the Director General and attempting to browbeat Henderson.
We see now how the OPCW managed to produce a report which was the opposite of the truth. Ian Henderson, the OPCW engineer who had visited the site and concluded that the “cylinder bombs” were fakes, had suddenly become excluded from the “fact finding mission” when it had been whittled down to a “core group” – excluding any engineers (and presumably toxicologists) who would seek to insert inconvenient facts into the report.
France of course participated, alongside the US and UK, in missile strikes against Syrian government positions in response to the non-existent chlorine gas attacks on Douma. I was amongst those who had argued from day one that the western Douma narrative was inherently improbable. The Douma enclave held by extreme jihadist, western and Saudi backed forces allied to ISIL, was about to fall anyway. The Syrian government had no possible military advantage to gain by attacking it with two small improvised chemical weapons, and a great deal to lose in terms of provoking international retaliation.
That the consequences of the fake Douma incident were much less far-reaching than they might have been, is entirely due (and I am sorry if you dislike this but it is true) to the good sense of Donald Trump. Trump is inclined to isolationism and the fake “Russiagate” narrative promoted by senior echelons of his security services had led him to be heavily sceptical of them. He therefore refused, against the united persuasion of the hawks, to respond to the Douma “attack” by more than quick and limited missile strikes. I have no doubt that the object of the intended false flag was to push the US into a full regime change operation, by falsifying a demonstration that a declared red line on chemical weapon use had been crossed.
There is no doubt that Douma was a false flag. The documentary and whistleblower evidence from the OPCW is overwhelming and irrefutable. In addition to the two whistleblowers reported extensively by Wikileaks and the Courage Foundation, the redoubtable Peter Hitchens has his own whistleblowers inside OPCW who may well be different persons. It is also great entertainment as well as enlightening to read Hitchens’ takedown of Bellingcat on the issue.
But there are much deeper questions about the Douma false flag. Did the jihadists themselves kill the “chlorine victims” for display or were these just bodies from the general fighting? The White Helmets were co-located with the jihadist headquarters in Douma, and involved in producing and spreading the fake evidence. How far were the UK and US governments, instrumental in preparing the false flag? That western governments, including through the White Helmets and their men at the OPCW, were plainly seeking to propagate this false flag, to massively publicise and to and make war capital out of it, is beyond dispute. But were they involved in the actual creation of the fake scene? Did MI6 or the CIA initiate this false flag through the White Helmets or the Saudi backed jihadists? That is unproven but seems to me very probable. It is also worth noting the coincidence in time of the revelation of the proof of the Douma false flag and the death of James Le Mesurier.
Now let me return to where I started. None of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the BBC, the Guardian nor CNN – all of which reported the Douma chemical attack very extensively as a real Syrian government atrocity, and used it to editorialise for western military intervention in Syria – none of them has admitted they were wrong. None has issued any substantive retraction or correction. None has reported in detail and without bias on the overwhelming evidence of foul play within the OPCW.
Those sources who do publish the truth – including the few outliers in mainstream media such as Peter Hitchens and Robert Fisk – continue to be further marginalised, attacked as at best eccentric and at worse Russian agents. Others like Wikileaks and myself are pariahs excluded from any mainstream exposure. The official UK, US, French and Spanish government line, and the line of the billionaire and state owned media, continues to be that Douma was a Syrian government chemical weapons attack on civilians. They intend, aided and abetted by their vast online propaganda operations, to brazen out the lie.
What we are seeing is the terrifying rise of the zombie state narrative in Western culture. It does not matter how definitively we can prove that something is a lie, the full spectrum dominance of the Establishment in media resources is such that the lie is impossible to kill off, and the state manages to implant that lie as the truth in the minds of a sufficient majority of the populace to ride roughshod over objective truth with great success. It follows in the state narrative that anybody who challenges the state’s version of truth is themselves dishonest or mad, and the state manages also to implant that notion into a sufficient majority of the populace.
These are truly chilling times.
In the next installment I shall consider how the Establishment is brazening out similar lies on the Russophobe agenda, and sticking to factually debunked narratives on the DNC and Podesta emails, on the Steele Dossier and on the Skripals.
Uiyghur “Activist” Quickly Exposed As CIA Asset Slandering China
By R S Ahthion | December 12, 2019
Rushan Abbas an Uyghur “activist” has worked for a long list of US regime change organisations from US State Dept, Dept of Justice, Radio Free Asia, Homeland Security and even Guantanamo Bay
A map of the countries that support and denounce Chinas handling of it’s Uiyghur security problem. Doesn’t take much of a glance to realise that Muslim countries support China and the people that denounce China are the same ones that have been bombing, murdering and torturing Muslims for the last 2 decades straight. In fact if you overlaid the countries that denounce China’s policy you basically have a map of NATO.
Last night an AMA started on Reddit claiming: “Hi, I’m Rushan Abbas. I’m one of the Uyghur People of central Asia, and the Chinese Government has locked up many of my friends and relatives in concentration camps.”
For those not sure what any of the above words mean Reddit is a social media site. And an “AMA” stands for Ask Me Anything. Many celebrities have done AMA’s as well as regular folk (if you wanted to ask a doctor/farmer etc. what their daily life entails). The format (unsurprisingly) is one of people asking them questions and the celebrity/person responding.
This AMA was, quite predictably, a long list of propaganda aimed at China and Rushan Abbas advising further trade war against China could be “something Western Countries can do”
Also plugging a narrative that China is some kind of Nazi Germany. This kind of atrocity propaganda being a staple of US regime change. We need not forget the faked Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify the Vietnam war. Hilary Clinton claiming Ghaddaffi handed out Viagra to soldiers to rape to justify destroying the most successful country on the continent of Africa (Libya).
Anyone else remember WMDs in Iraq and 45 seconds to launch?
Incubator babies in Iraq? (to justify the first invasion in the 1990s).
She also bandies about “3 million Uyghurs in camps”.
The original number was “1 million” which has since been disproved by the excellent Grayzone.
This seems to be a staple of shitlibs. To just say an outlandish ridiculous and easily disprovable claim but hope it sticks. However the fake news media (from WaPo to NYTimes ) are more than happy to run with it. Just a coincidence a trade war between US and China is on, right?
However using the Archive.org website which holds archives of other websites someone discovered a page with a Rushan Abbas on it. And what we learn there is she’s essentially a US intelligence asset
Rushan Abbas brings over 15 years of experience in global business development, strategic business analysis, business consultancy and government affairs throughout the Middle East, Africa, CIS regions, Europe, Asia, Australia, North America and Latin America. She also has extensive experience working with U.S. government agencies, including Homeland Security, Department of Defence, Department of State, Department of Justice, and various U.S. intelligence agencies. In her role at ISI Consultants, Ms. Abbas leads the business development activities of the firm, which includes developing and leveraging international relationships to serve our clients. She also acts as the firm’s key liaison with US and foreign government departments, agencies and embassies in support of international business efforts. Before joining ISI Consultants, Ms. Abbas was the Director for International Business at Leo A. Daly, an internationally recognized leader in the design of the built environment that is consistently ranked among the top design firms in the world. Prior to that, she ran her own consulting firm, working with companies on the set-up, development and implementation of their international business and providing market intelligence and consumer insight to capitalize on new business opportunities in international markets. Ms. Abbas also served as International Marketing Liaison at Pelco (a subsidiary of Schneider Electric) and as International Business Development Manager at Perity Land Inc. the largest commodity exporter in North America. She was also employed at L-3, as a consultant at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, supporting Operation Enduring Freedom during 2002- 2003 and as a news reporter at Radio Free Asia. Ms. Abbas has also worked as a linguist and translator for several federal agencies including work for the US State Department in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and for President George W. Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush. Ms. Abbas holds a Bachelor of Science from Xinjiang University in China and completed a graduate program in International Business from California State University in Fresno. Outside of work Ms. Abbas has been an active campaigner for human rights and works closely with members of U.S. Senate, Congressional Committees, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, the U.S. Department of State and several other US government departments and agencies.
In a surreal read she has worked for almost every arm of the US regime change machine: from Radio free Asia, US State department, Homeland Security, Department of justice and “various US intelligence agencies”.
So tied to the United States she even worked at Guantanamo Bay during the Bush administration.
Given she worked at Guantanamo Bay it would be interesting to find out her role there. Was she a translator while the CIA torturers beat, shackled, sleep deprived and water boarded detainees against the Geneva convention?
As displayed in a recent article in how the West is ramping up hybrid warfare against China, the NED ( a regime change arm of the United States) proudly displays the fact they pour 22 million US dollars into the Xinjiang region to fuel separatism.
Apparently this is enough to get you an AMA on reddit.
A screenshot of Rushan Abbas’s page when she was an ISI consultant:
The OPCW Scandal is Now a Bona fide Cover-up
21st Century Wire | December 30, 2019
Last Friday night saw the fourth round of internally leaked documents found on WikiLeaks from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), showing once again how the organisation’s official report on an alleged 2018 ‘chemical attack’ attack in Douma, Syria – was in fact doctored by the chemical watchdog’s executives in order to justify a three-way attack by the US, UK and France against the Syrian government.
RT International’s Murad Gazdiev reviews the key takeaway points of this latest round of leaks:
Christiana’s Howler!
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | December 30, 2019
Don’t worry about facts, Christiana!
https://twitter.com/CFigueres/status/1211351748847124480
The claim is based on a Silly Jilly article in the Grauniad here. However the Guardian claim is based on electricity only, and not all energy, a distinction that apparently is beyond Christiana.
Furthermore, a third of renewable electricity comes from biomass, which most experts now accept is extremely bad for the environment and will not reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
When we look at total primary energy consumption, we find that Christiana’s much vaunted wind and solar power only contributes a paltry 4% in Q3, even when hydro power is added in. Meanwhile fossil fuels accounted for 77%.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/total-energy-section-1-energy-trends
Meanwhile Mark Carney is trying to get pension funds to divest from fossil fuels, because he is convinced the world will stop using them in the near future.
DoD study: climate change will destroy us … in 2020
By Larry Kummer | Fabius Maximus | December 29, 2019
Summary: In February 2004, headlines in The Guardian and other news media told us of a secret DoD report predicting a climate catastrophe by 2020. Read the study and gain perspective about today’s warnings of a Climate Emergency.
Photo 50590315 © Strahil Dimitrov – Dreamstime.
“Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us.”
The Guardian | 21 February 2004.
“Secret report warns of rioting and nuclear war. Britain will be ‘Siberian’ in less than 20 years. Threat to the world is greater than terrorism.”
“Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters. A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world. … Randall added that it was already possibly too late to prevent a disaster happening. ‘We don’t know exactly where we are in the process. It could start tomorrow and we would not know for another five years,’ he said. …”
Other journalists gave uncritical coverage to it (e.g., Fortune, Grist ). The secret report is now public. Read it and feel the terror!
“An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security.”
By Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Commissioned by DoD’s Office of Net Assessment. Published October 2003.
Schwartz is a “futurist”, co-founder of the Global Business Network consulting firm and big in the “scenario planning” gig (Wikipedia). Randall also worked at GBN.
Excerpt from the Executive Summary
The research suggests that once temperature rises above some threshold, adverse weather conditions could develop relatively abruptly, with persistent changes in the atmospheric circulation causing drops in some regions of 5-10°F in a single decade. Paleoclimatic evidence suggests that altered climatic patterns could last for as much as a century, as they did when the ocean conveyor collapsed 8,200 years ago, or, at the extreme, could last as long as 1,000 years as they did during the Younger Dryas, which began about 12,700 years ago. {Perhaps caused by an asteroid impact.}
In this report, as an alternative to the scenarios of gradual climatic warming that are so common, we outline an abrupt climate change scenario patterned after the 100-year event that occurred about 8,200 years ago. This abrupt change scenario is characterized by the following conditions.
- Annual average temperatures drop by up to 5°F over Asia and North America and 6°F in northern Europe.
- Annual average temperatures increase by up to 4°F in key areas throughout Australia, South America, and southern Africa.
- Drought persists for most of the decade in critical agricultural regions and in the water resource regions for major population centers in Europe and eastern North America.
- Winter storms and winds intensify, amplifying the impacts of the changes. Western Europe and the North Pacific experience enhanced winds.
The report explores how such an abrupt climate change scenario could potentially de-stabilize the geo-political environment, leading to skirmishes, battles, and even war due to resource constraints such as {these}.
- Food shortages due to decreases in net global agricultural production.
- Decreased availability and quality of fresh water in key regions due to shifted precipitation patters, causing more frequent floods and droughts.
- Disrupted access to energy supplies due to extensive sea ice and storminess.
From the body of the report
By 2005 the climatic impact of the shift is felt more intensely in certain regions around the world. More severe storms and typhoons bring about higher storm surges and floods in low-lying islands such as Tarawa and Tuvalu (near New Zealand).
In 2007, a particularly severe storm causes the ocean to break through levees in the Netherlands making a few key coastal cities such as The Hague unlivable. Failures of the delta island levees in the Sacramento River region in the Central Valley of California creates an inland sea and disrupts the aqueduct system transporting water from northern to southern California because salt water can no longer be kept out of the area during the dry season.
After roughly 60 years of slow freshening, the thermohaline collapse begins in 2010, disrupting the temperate climate of Europe, which is made possible by the warm flows of the Gulf Stream (the North Atlantic arm of the global thermohaline conveyor). Ocean circulation patterns change, bringing less warm water north and causing an immediate shift in the weather in Northern Europe and eastern North America. {It lists many many more bad things that happen.}
The Weather Report: 2010-2020
Drought persists for the entire decade in critical agricultural regions and in the areas around major population centers in Europe and eastern North America. Average annual temperatures drop by up to 5°F over Asia and North America and up to 6°F in Europe. Temperatures increase by up to 4°F in key areas throughout Australia, South America, and southern Africa. Winter storms and winds intensify, amplifying the impact of the changes. Western Europe and the North Pacific face enhanced westerly winds. …
2012: Severe drought and cold push Scandinavian populations southward, push back from EU. Flood of refugees to southeast U.S. and Mexico from Caribbean islands.
2015: Conflict within the EU over food and water supply leads to skirmishes and strained diplomatic relations 2018: Russia joins EU, providing energy resources.
2020: Migration from northern countries such as Holland and Germany toward Spain and Italy.
{And many many more bad things happen around the world. It gets even worse after 2020.}
—————– End of excerpt. —————–
Climate scientists leapt into action!
The Schwartz – Randall report is an example of the climate alarmists’ typical exaggeration of scientists’ confidence in unvalidated theories (i.e., theories far out of consensus). So climate scientists responded to misuse of science by condemning it. Just kidding! I cannot find any who condemned it, because alarmists are honorary members of the Climate Science Club – with all sins forgiven.
While climate scientists were MIA, some journalists provided a balanced analysis. Such as this at the NY Times by Andy Revkin.
Notes from the past
A doomster vision of the future was popular back in 1971, just as it is today. On 15 January 1971 Americans watched a TV show by a hot new director, the 24-year old Steven Spielberg: “L.A. 2017.” We learned that in 46 years pollution would destroy the Earth’s ecology and force the remnants of humanity to live underground.
Before we panic about DoD’s 2003 climate study, remember that they eagerly join every parade that might give them more money. Such as the CIA’s paean to global cooling: “Potential Implications of Trends in Population Growth, Food Production, and Climate“ in August 1974.
“{A} number of climatologists are in agreement that the northern hemisphere, at least, is growing cooler. … According to Hubert Lamb – an outstanding British climatologist – 23 out of 27 forecasting methods predicted a cooling trend through the remainder of this century. … A number of meteorological experts are thinking in terms of a return to a climate like that of the 19th century.”
If you are still calm, remember Peak Oil? DoD’s Office of Force Transformation hired LMI Government Consulting to produce “Transforming the Way the DoD Looks at Energy” (January 2007). Only massive transfusions of cash could save our military from peak oil. The doomsters were ecstatic! To avoid embarrassment, all online copies have been put down the memory hole.
Conclusions
The best guides we have are the reports of the IPCC and major climate agencies. The IPCC’s scientists assign a confidence level to each of their findings. Most are “medium”; few are “very high” (see their recent Special Report) – because we have much to learn about climate dynamics. This is the key fact that alarmists and their journalist enablers conceal from us.
Narrative Managers Claim White Helmets Founder Was Driven To Suicide By Syria Skeptics
By Caitlin Johnstone | American Herald Tribune | December 29, 2019
Imperialist spinmeisters are trial-ballooning a new Syria narrative that is so breathtakingly stupid it needs its own article solely for the purpose of mockery.
On Christmas Eve PBS aired a bizarre segment on the death of James Le Mesurier, the former military intelligence officer who founded the extremely shady propaganda construct known as the White Helmets. The segment makes relentless, ham-fisted appeals to emotion, even attempting to associate the White Helmets with Armistice Day using wistful camera pans over poppy flowers and misty war memorial art exhibits, but by far the most yogurt-brained part is its repeated suggestions that Le Mesurier killed himself because people had been accusing him of being a propagandist.
“And now a story of a humanitarian trying to help Syria: the suspicious death in Turkey last month of James Le Mesurier, the co-founder of the White Helmets rescue organization in Syria,” opens PBS News Hour‘s Judy Woodruff. “Friends and colleagues fear that he may have been murdered or driven to suicide by a campaign of character assassination.”
“Whatever the cause, Le Mesurier was a victim of a very modern war,” the special’s narrator solemnly intones. “There is no hiding place in cyberspace. Le Mesurier was at the epicenter of a propaganda war, and his friends are appalled at what they regard as a campaign of character assassination.”
“The amount of abuse, the amount of ill-placed propaganda, disinformation that’s on social media and the Internet coming out of Russian bots and Syria, Syrian regime, and others was unbearable,” Col. Hamish de Bretton-Gordon mourns.
This ridiculous narrative was picked up and run with by Syria narrative managers on Twitter.
“On lethal disinformation— a thread,” tweeted virulent Syria narrative manager Idrees Ahmad. “This is a disturbing report by Malcolm Brabant on the lethal consequences of conspiracism. It shows how slander and disinformation may have pushed James Le Mesurier, one of the finest humanitarians, to his death. The report highlights the pernicious lies issuing from the self-described ‘Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media’, which is a small group of academics, none specialising in Syria or the Middle East, in alliance with a group of pro-Kremlin trolls like Vanessa Beeley et al.”
It is true that both Beeley and the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media have accused Le Mesurier of running a propaganda operation on behalf of western governments using western government funding. But if Ahmad truly believed that accusing people of conducting propaganda caused them to kill themselves, he should turn himself in for attempted murder, because he accuses people of being propagandists constantly.
Here’s a link to Ahmad calling journalist Max Blumenthal a “propagandist for Maduro”. Here’s a link to Ahmad calling Beeley a “pro-regime propagandist”. Here’s a link to Ahmad calling award-winning journalist Jonathan Steele “a fabricator and a propagandist”. Here’s a link to Ahmad calling CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou “a propagandist for Putin”.
Talk about “lethal disinformation”, Idrees.
But of course, no one really believes that accusations of conducting propaganda actually drive people to suicide. If they did, people like me would have thrown ourselves off a building years ago.
I am accused of being a propagandist nearly every day. At the height of Russiagate hysteria it happened many times a day in my blog post comments and social media notifications. Depending on what’s in the news and how I’ve responded to it I’ve been accused of writing paid propaganda for the Kremlin, Assad, the Iranian government, Palestinians, Pyongyang, Beijing, Maduro, the alt-right, George Soros, and WikiLeaks, just off the top of my head.
Every anti-imperialist, anti-interventionist, and antiwar activist with any kind of platform has had this experience. Ever since the new McCarthyism of establishment-driven Russia hysteria took off, accusing people who question imperialist narratives of conducting psyops for foreign governments has become the norm in political discourse. It’s created an extremely hostile and vitriolic environment in which productive conversations are vanishingly rare.
Where’s our PBS special? Does anyone care? Is there any compassion from these hand-wringing establishment loyalists for the fact that Vanessa Beeley and the members of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media are hounded day in and day out by establishment narrative managers and their brainwashed followers with accusations of spreading propaganda, supporting genocide, and embracing war crimes? I know I’ve never had a garment-rending Idrees Ahmad thread written about concerns for my psychological well being, and I’ve been targeted by multiple online harassment campaigns over the years.
The amount of hateful vitriol that gets leveled at people for simply opposing imperialism, for wanting peace, is truly astonishing. Just for saying “Hey here are some reasons we should maybe reconsider toppling yet another government in yet another Middle Eastern nation” will bring in complete strangers calling you all sorts of names, calling you disgusting, calling you evil, calling you a monster. For supporting peace.
There are all kinds of people in the world who are very deserving of harsh words. Powerful exploiters, oppressors and manipulators. People who destroy the environment for profit. People who get rich selling weapons of war while paying politicians and think tanks to advance the cause of war. War criminals who’ve never faced justice. With all those people in the world who we can all agree are terrible, you wouldn’t think peace activists should feature anywhere near the top of anyone’s list. But they do. Because war propaganda is just that influential.
And, of course, nobody cares. None of these narrative managers care about what psychological burden they might be placing on people by assuring their audiences that it’s perfectly sane and normal to hound and harass anyone who questions imperialist propaganda. Their concern is not and has never been about anyone’s psychological health. Their concern is in managing narratives in a way that favors the US-centralized empire that they serve.
I do not know what caused Le Mesurier’s death; to be in any way confident that a known spook committed suicide at all, or was murdered by Russians, is absurd. Maybe he killed himself because he failed to listen to the adage “Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.”
What I absolutely do know, with absolute certainty, is that only idiots believe that skepticism about western regime change agendas in the Middle East kills people.
Hoax Confirmed: Honking on Hanukkah (2019)
Semitic Controversies | December 27, 2019
According to the ‘Times of Israel’ there has been an ‘anti-Semitic hate crime’ at Yeshiva University in Manhattan, New York city.
To wit:
‘A man was arrested and accused of setting fire to a Yeshiva University dormitory on Friday using matches set out for Hanukkah, authorities in New York said.
Peter Weyand, 33, is suspected of setting three fires in the Schottenstein Residence Hall dormitory in Midtown Manhattan as students slept, New York’s Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said in a statement.
Firefighters responded within five minutes and there were no injuries in the fires, he said.
Surveillance video released by the fire department shows the suspect kicking in a glass door to break into the building at about 3:50 a.m. Friday. The department said Weyand used matches that had been set out for lighting Hanukkah candles.
FDNY
✔
@FDNY
FDNY Fire Marshals have arrested Peter Weyand, age 33, for breaking into the Yeshiva University Schottenstein Residence and using matches intended for a Chanukah menorah to set three separate fires in the building.
“Attacking any religious institution is a serious crime and we have zero tolerance for acts of arson in this city. Thanks to the thorough investigative work of our Fire Marshals, a dangerous individual has been quickly apprehended,” Nigro said.
Weyand is being charged with arson, burglary with criminal intent, reckless endangerment of property, criminal mischief, criminal trespass and aggravated harassment, the fire commissioner said.
Authorities did not indicate if there was any hate crime motive in the incident.’ (1)
Going by the video that has been helpfully provided; Weyand broke in to the lobby of the Schottenstein residence, couldn’t find or get access to anything to steal and promptly began trying to light the place on fire instead. This is clearly not an ‘anti-Semitic hate crime’ by Weyand if we go by the video footage and this is further supported by the lack of any ‘hate crime’-related charge being made by the authorities in New York, which has subsequently been confirmed to be the case by the NYPD. (2)
We have also been informed that Weyand is the grandson of famous jewish physicist and creator of the Hydrogen Bomb Edward Teller (born Ede Teller in Budapest) and is therefore jewish himself. (3)
Go figure.
Regardless of this however; it was quite the attempt prank… no?
(1) https://www.timesofisrael.com/man-arrested-for-setting-fire-to-yeshiva-u-dorm-with-hanukkah-matches/; alternatively see https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/nyregion/yeshiva-university-ny-fires.html
(2) https://forward.com/fast-forward/437220/yeshiva-univeristy-arson-dorm-edward-teller/
(3) Ibid.
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In 2014, Michael Parenti Wrote A Prophetic Article About Ukraine
The Dissident | January 28, 2026
This week, the influential left-wing scholar Michael Parenti passed away at the age of 92.
Parenti was well known for his sharp criticism of U.S. foreign policy and U.S. imperialism throughout his life, waking up many to the reality of it and the lies used to justify it.
This is best underscored in one of his last published articles, “Ukraine and Regime Change”, which was published in the book “Flashpoint In Ukraine: How the U.S. Drive for Hegemony Risks World War III”, where he predicted to a tee what the result of the 2014 U.S. backed coup in Ukraine would be. … continue
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