There is something strange about the media coverage of the Grenfell tragedy. The BBC is giving over acres of space to the pain and anger of the residents. The Guardian’s front page currently looks the The Canary, and in it Opinion section Jonathan Freedland is saying Grenfell will “forever stand as a rebuke to the Right”.
The evidence for some form of fakery here is now undeniable. Not only are some of the major players shown to be previously involved in pro-western regime change narratives and/or politically active in the bid to unseat Assad, but the footage taken by the BBC itself shows clear signs of being less than real.
Jeremy Corbyn has won two leadership contests, and gained the largest vote share for Labour in decades. Hillary Clinton had to cheat to get past Bernie Sanders, and was then humiliated by Donald Trump. The UK voted to leave the EU. After two years of getting the “wrong” results thanks to voters refusing to do as their told, some areas of the media and intelligentsia are finally asking the tough question: Is voting bad for democracy?
In an attempt to restore some his fast-disappearing credibility, Jonathan Freedland gives a half-hearted, over-qualified apology to Jeremy Corbyn. It’s self-serving, dishonest, and far more revealing than he meant it to be.
Despite the two-year long rabid anti-Corbyn propaganda from the Murdoch tabloids, traditional Tory press and establishment at large. Despite the shamefully lukewarm and last minute semi-endorsement from the Guardian. Despite the opinion polls that apparently predicted an increased Conservative majority and a collapse of the Labour voteTheresa May and her colleagues achieved the near impossible and contrived to be so incompetent, blundering, arrogant, vitriolic, greedy and estranged from reality they ended up with a tottering minority government, no mandate and – as a bonus – a complete moral victory for Corbyn and his team and a rout for the Blairite wing of the Labour party.
For the first time in my living memory a General Election is happening with a real choice on offer. Not just a political either/or, but a real moral decision. There’s no other way to put it, voting Conservative, on these issues with these policies, is immoral.
This is supposed to be a “spontaneous peace group” laying down a floral tribute following the alleged London Bridge attack. But as this video makes clear, it’s basically a movie set with the “actors” being put on their marks and carefully posed for maximum effect.
Sarah Walker was an invited audience member on the BBC’s flagship debate show “Question Time”earlier this year. Here she recounts some of her observations, including some rather odd behaviour by the host David Dimbleby
If the bullets hadn’t flown, John Fitzgerald Kennedy might have been one hundred years old today. Granted, it’s not likely, put definitely possible. If the parade route hadn’t been changed, and the roof taken off the limousine, and the secret service ordered to stand down, the world would likely be a very different place. If the man had safely negotiated the last 54 years, and was still breathing today, what would he make of this mess?
At the end of a pop concert by US singer Ariana Grande in Manchester, an enormous ‘controlled’ explosion killed at least 22 people and injured 59, as reported by British media. Many of them are children and adolescents, as most of the concert-goers were young people. The singer is unharmed. The concert hall accommodates 21,000 people. After the blast, panic broke loose, resulting in a mass stampede. It is not clear whether people were also killed in the stampede.
British elections are planned for 8 June 2017.
Buzzfeed and other sources have a running tab on the huge amount of alleged fake news erupting around the alleged terror attack in Manchester. We don’t need to agree with Buzzfeed’s approach to recognise this bizarre amount of fakery raises many important questions.
ne of the more significant features of the recent French Presidential election was the widespread predictability of the outcome. It was taken for granted that the establishment, cardboard cut-out, hologram candidate – Macron – representing the alt-centre, would win the final electoral contest against Madame Le Pen by a comfortable margin; and so it turned out, Macron winning by 66% to Le Pen’s 34% of votes cast. Okay, there was a widespread abstention amounting to 25% of the registered electorate, a 10% spoliation of ballot papers, and, in addition, tactical voting against Le Pen in the second-round run-off.
Remember “Saydnaya Military Prison”? It was the subject of enormous media attention a while back on the basis of a “report” from Amnesty International that turned out to have been fabricated in the UK by a virtual reality company. Well, the totally imaginary interior of Saydnaya now – according to US State Dept – has a totally theoretical “crematorium” added to it in which to dispose of all the alleged corpses being generated by the unsubstantiated murders. Here is the massively impressive and plausible Stuart Jones telling us all about it.
The whole Comey/Russophobia issue continues to spiral past propaganda, past delusion and into total madness. Social media is boiling with neoliberals telling each other Trump is a “new Nixon” for sacking Comey. The WaPo suggests a Russian photographer smuggled a bug into the Oval Office. Fox TV host Julie Roginsky tells viewers Russia is invading countries and “forcing” the inhabitants to speak Russian, and will soon be America’s “new overlords.” Ex-Tory MP Louise Mensch thinks the only way to stop that happening is to do “precision bombing raids” (on Moscow presumably). What is the root of this dangerous folie en masse? In an article at Defend Democracy, Robert Parry posits this as evidence the intelligence agencies are now de facto kingmakers, who have created the Russia-gate and Comey issues in a bid to both discredit and manipulate Trump, just as they promoted the investigation of Clinton’s email irregularities to destroy her chance of the Presidency. President Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday reflected a growing concern inside the White House that the …
A while back we said we’d watch and wait for developments in the UK General Election. So far nothing is happening that could not be expected. The Tory press are almost uniformly bent on destroying Corbyn’s credibility. The notional “left” press are being a little less committed, leaving open the small possibility of support for a Labour win if the circumstances permit. The Labour Party itself is riven, with many of its MPs seeming to prefer to lose the election than suffer Corbyn as PM.
The recent marches on April 22nd to promote science and to celebrate Earth Day were perhaps well-intentioned, but they were delusional and conducted without any sense of irony. They served power and its propaganda. Obviously science has benefited us in certain ways, but it has become untethered from any sense of moral limits in its embrace of instrumental rationality and its unending efforts to sabotage faith in human freedom by rationally “proving” its illogical deterministic credo.
Generally speaking, ideas are like plants and animals. Over time, they evolve, things change – we keep what works and throw away what doesn’t. Humans don’t have tails. Dolphins don’t have feet. Moths without camouflage get eaten. Methods and techniques are perfected, and accepted as “the way things are done”. If you want to move something efficiently, you need wheels. If you want to lift something heavy, you use levers and pulleys. We make knives out of steel because it’s hard and can take an edge. We make clothes out of wool because its warm. Nobody makes teapots out of chocolate….and yet terrorists routinely use tools that are not fit for purpose.
Radio 4 is the only aspirational talk-radio station on British airwaves and the second most popular radio station in the UK. Many who disavow and distrust the BBC TV news are inclined to view R4 in a more forgiving light, as essentially benign. As an ever-increasing number of people switch off BBC News programs, Radio 4 audience size is actually increasing. Its millions of listeners are invited to tune-in and zone out to the reassuring sounds of a BBC of yesteryear.
Yes, we have noticed Theresa May has called an election for June 8. Yes, it’s highly possible the Tories will engineer a win, by legal, or less than legal means. But…after Brexit and the bizarre Trump win we think making firm predictions about how any of this will go is a waste of time. Particularly at this stage.
