The Guardian’s Tom Phillips’ article “Venezuela Crisis Takes Deadly Toll on Buckling Health System” (January 06, 2019) is more good news for US psychopaths, such as Trump, Bolton and Pompeo. Children are dying in Venezuela. Sanctions are working!
in the last two months both Buzzfeed and The Guardian have issued “BREAKING NEWS” stories that were based on anonymous sources….both these stories were shown to be untrue in less than 24 hours.The important question is: Why does the media tell lies, if they know they will be revealed as such?
As my regular readers will probably recall, according to my personal, pseudo-Chinese zodiac, 2017 was “The Year of the Headless Liberal Chicken.” This year, having given it considerable thought, and having consulted the I Ching, and assorted other oracles, I’m designating 2018 “The Year of Putin-Nazi Paranoia.”
The Guardian has a an opinion piece today, titled: The EU’s response to Russia must be bold and unanimous. It is written by German politician Norbert Röttgen, head of the Bundestag foreign affairs committee…and it is simply massively dishonest and one-sided. The “mainstream” narrative on Ukraine has been corrected to death in the alternate media, there is no need to go back over old ground, suffice to say, here are just few of the relevent facts which Mr Röttgen leaves out of his article: The Kerch Strait is incredibly shallow, it has a canal carved into to the sea bed to allow deep-draft ships to pass. Using the canal requires a pilot, and ships can only go in single file. The Ukrainian naval ships ignored these rules. Ships using the Kerch strait are required to give 72 hours notice, due to the narrowness of the passage and the shallowness of the sea. These rules have been in place for years. Ukraine ignored them. There have been calls – both inside and outside Ukraine – to …
CJ Hopkins If you’re one of the millions of human beings who, despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary, still believe there is such a thing as “the truth,” you might not want to read this essay. Seriously, it can be extremely upsetting when you discover that there is no “truth” … or rather, that what we’re all conditioned to regard as “truth” from the time we are children is just the product of a technology of power, and not an empirical state of being. Humans, upon first encountering this fact, have been known to freak completely out and start jabbering about the “Word of God,” or “the immutable laws of quantum physics,” and run around burning other people at the stake or locking them up and injecting them with Thorazine. I don’t want to be responsible for anything like that, so consider this your trigger warning. OK, now that that’s out of the way, let’s take a look at how “truth” is manufactured. It’s actually not that complicated. See, the “truth” is … …
We’re no longer supposed to examine the lives, characters or morals of our leaders. Only “honor their memory” and be “grateful for their service”. History is presented to us, not as a series of choices made by people in power, but as a collection of inevitibilities. Consequences are tragic, but unavoidable. Like long-dead family squabbles – To dwell on them is unseemly, and to assign blame unfair.
Kit Knightly Sixty percent of us believe in “conspiracy theories”, and we shouldn’t. At least according to Hugo Drochon, Professor of Politics at Nottingham University. He doesn’t raise the question of whether or not some “conspiracy theories” may be true, his blanket assumption is that all of them are not. His article is not about WHAT people think, WHY they think it, or IF they’re wrong. The article is about rationalizing social control – specifically steps the state can take to assert control over the political opinions of the electorate. Indeed the entire premise of the article is right there in the headline: Britons are swallowing conspiracy theories. Here’s how to stop the rot British people think things they shouldn’t, and here’s how we can stop them. The flawed logic is aggressive. The patronising tone nauseating. It’s the terrifying smiling face of a Brave New World. The article deals only in absolutes. There are “conspiracy theories”, and they are all wrong. Even such vague concepts as the idea the government might publish misleading statistics or …
The “Resistance” – the loose affiliation of liberals, progressives and neo-conservatives dedicated to opposing Donald Trump – is NOT a grass-roots movement. They don’t speak for the everyman or the poor or the oppressed. They are a distraction, nothing more. A parlor game. The face to Trump’s heel. The Resistance is the voice of the Deep State – Pro-war, pro-globalisation, pro-Imperialism. It just hides its true face behind a mask of “progressive values”.
OK, so, that was a close one. For a moment there, I was starting to worry that the Democrats weren’t going to take back the House and rescue us from “the brink of fascism.” Which, if that had happened, in addition to having to attend all those horrible stadium rallies and help the government mass murder the Jews, we would have been denied the next two years of Donald Trump-related congressional hearings and investigations that we can now look forward to … I’m going to go ahead and call them the Hitlergate Hearings.
CJ Hopkins I suppose it was always just a matter of time until the global capitalist ruling classes and their mouthpieces in the corporate media combined their two main official narratives into a Ronco-type 2-in-1 kind of deal. That’s right, folks, your days of switching between the War on Terror official narrative and the Putin-Nazi official narrative are over, because now, for just $19.99, the Putin-Nazi-Terrorist-O-Matic® takes care of all your official narrative needs with just the press of one button! Here’s how it works. First, you take your classic mentally-disturbed individual, someone like, say, John Hinkley, Jr., Mark David Chapman, or Travis Bickle, or a total wack job like Cesar Sayoc, and you paint whichever clearly psychotic crimes he’s committed as acts of “terrorism.” Don’t worry about the definition of “terrorism” or how it has become a virtually meaningless label the capitalist ruling classes and corporate media can slap onto anyone. Just keep saying “terrorist,” “terrorism,” and any other lexical derivatives of “terror,” over and over, like some kind of mantra … you know, like the Hare …
Two days ago, suspicious packages were allegedly delivered to the homes of George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Later that day, and into the next, more people were “targeted”: Eric Holder, John Brennan, Robert De Niro, CNN. The list is still growing. So far, no one has claimed any credit for the packages, and none of the alleged bombs have gone off, or even got anywhere near their respective targets. Fortunately, no one has been hurt. We set down the basic facts, and the unanswered questions, here.
You know what happens when you split equal time between the flat-Earth and round-Earth arguments? The flat-Earther loses. Because an impartial viewing of the evidence proves them wrong. Propaganda is fragile. A false consensus has fault lines. Lies can be torn down by the gentlest of winds. The truth always wins a fair fight.
One MI6 shill selling the work of another just sums up the level of factual journalism at the Guardian. Tutisicecream Not only was Pippa Crerar one of the Guardian’s deputy editors called out for her pious tweet from the Labour conference writing: “Corbyn criticises some parts of British media, claiming they “smear the powerless, not take on the powerful”. As a journalist, makes me very uncomfortable to hear him leading attack on our free press. Dangerous, Trumpian territory.” Corbyn criticises some parts of British media, claiming they “smear the powerless, not take on the powerful”. As a journalist, makes me very uncomfortable to hear him leading attack on our free press. Dangerous, Trumpian territory. — Pippa Crerar (@PippaCrerar) 26 September 2018 The comment got her loads of flack from the general twittering public for her attempted smear, but then today we get another implausible piece of spin from Luke Harding. The hubris at the Guardian is palpable. The reason I am writing connecting these two points is to demonstrate just how bad the standards of …
There is a war being waged. Not the one in Syria or Yemen. Not the Nazis shelling the Donbass or the warlords selling slaves in Libya. Not America’s drones executing an entire garden party in Pakistan because somebody on that street might have googled “bomb components” and “American Airlines” on the same day 10 years ago. Not even between the ridiculous buffoon Trump, and the equally absurd “resistance”.
A different kind of war.
Ricardo Vaz from IvestigAction Venezuela was rocked this past Saturday by an attempted assassination of President Nicolas Maduro, during a public event, using drones armed with explosives. But as more details started to become available, the coverage of the mainstream media actually moved in the opposite direction: one after the other they have looked to sow doubt on the events, using words such as “apparent” or “alleged”, focusing instead on the government using this “alleged” event to step up repression. In the end, it is hard to tell apart the media coverage from the statements of John Bolton, one of the more hawkish advisers to the US president. Although there are plenty of examples to choose from, we are going to focus on our personal champion of dishonest Venezuelan coverage – The Guardian. A quick search of Guardian headlines with “assassination attempt” shows that a qualifier such as “alleged” is never used. Be it Jacques Chirac, Guinea’s president, or even Saddam Hussein’s deputy, nobody had their assassination attempts questioned as a hoax to be used as a pretext to stamp out dissent. Such is the …
The following comments – sent in by one of our readers, 0use4msm – were censored by the Guardian. Which of the well-publicised CiF “community standards” did they breach? Removed comments, posted under the opinion piece “Aggression, abuse and addiction: we need a social media detox”: The article was published at 6.00am yesterday morning – August 4th – its comment section was closed by 4pm. Screen shot of where they used to be: Do they “misrepresent the Guardian and its journalists”? Are they “persistent trolling or mindless abuse”? Are they “spam-like”? Or “obviously commercial”? Are they “racism, sexism, homophobia or hate-speech”? Are they “extremely offensive of threatening?”? Are they “flame-wars based on ingrained partisanship or generalisations”? Are they not “relevant”? If none of the above – why was it taken down? see our archive of censored comments. And if you see any egregious examples of the Guardian censoring its “free” comment sections – email us at editor@off-guardian.org, and send us screen caps if possible
by Kit The Guardian’s “Comment is Free” section makes for predictable reading this morning. John Harris says Brexit is bad and Corbyn is to blame, Shon Faye writes that trans rights are a class issue and Rhil Samadde going off on one about handshakes and Donald Trump. There’s nothing there about veganism or how Vladimir Putin causes global warming, but it’s still only early. Truly serious issues covered — None. Set-menu “liberal” agendas pushed — Several. Virtue signalled — Loudly and at length. The worst offender is Polly Toynbee, and that’s not really unusual: She thinks we should have a “right to die” law. The Gosport Scandal involved healthcare workers murdering patients with morphine, and Harold Shipman murdered patients with morphine. Polly thinks the best way fix this would be to make murdering patients with morphine legal. The logic is flawless. She outright dismisses the argument such a law could be abused with one sentence: The difference between unwanted death and assisted suicide can be encapsulated in one word: choice. And then does the same …
Back in 2003 the Guardian still remembered – sometimes – that facts are sacred and even occasionally spoke truth to power. Here it tells the story of the UK’s various conspiracies (there really is no other word) to overthrow the Syrian government in 1957, by means of false flags, “encouraging internal dissent” and assassination of key figures. Can Jonathan Freedland, Nick Cohen et al still claim the West has the moral high ground when fifteen years ago their own paper was proving it didn’t and never had? SOURCE:https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/sep/27/uk.syria1 Documents show White House and No 10 conspired over oil-fuelled invasion plan Nearly 50 years before the war in Iraq, Britain and America sought a secretive “regime change” in another Arab country they accused of spreading terror and threatening the west’s oil supplies, by planning the invasion of Syria and the assassination of leading figures. Newly discovered documents show how in 1957 Harold Macmillan and President Dwight Eisenhower approved a CIA-MI6 plan to stage fake border incidents as an excuse for an invasion by Syria’s pro-western neighbours, …
Heather Stewart, The Guardian’s chief stenographer political editor, has copied and pasted a press release written a new article all about “Russian bots”. The trouble is she doesn’t seem to know what either of these words actually means.
Less than 24 hours after Sergei Skripal and his daughter, have allegedly been found in a collapsed state on a park bench in Salisbury, with no official claims of foul play and no announcement of likely cause, UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson is already announcing what he plans to do “If things turn out to be, as many members on both sides of the House suspect they are.”
