How The Media Works

I wrote this in April of 2014, just after the US-backed coup in Ukraine. The media was very biased, as usual, and supported the coup enthusiastically. Then I ran into a friend who has no internet.

I pointed out to a man yesterday that our news media is biased, yet it is subtle enough that people miss it. For instance, the neo nazi coup leaders in Ukraine were immediately called "the Ukranian government" by ALL of our talking heads. The people resisting the fascist coup are called "Russian separatists", instead of nazi resisters. I guess they're what was called in the US, before WW2, "premature anti-fascists".

Anyway, he lives out in the woods and has no internet or cable, but does get the 3 networks. He said that he never heard, not one time, that the coup leaders were neo-nazis until well after the coup, when NPR mentioned it one time. And he said, Wait! What?!!! Neo nazis?

And then never heard it mentioned again until I brought it up yesterday. But, the one mention was probably to stop critics from saying that they never mentioned it. Yeah, they did. About a month ago. Once.

The Endless Wars of the US

I'm watching a 1983 documentary about the US destruction of Vietnam. There is one Marine interviewed who was smart enough to realize the insanity of what he was doing, and was able to explain it on camera, but the rest seem to think that invading a country and turning rainforest into desert, murdering millions of people and driving the rest into concentration camps, is a perfectly normal thing to do.

The logistical difference between the invasion of Vietnam and later US attacks on various countries stands out.
They sent hundreds of thousands of soldiers to do the deed in Vietnam, and they didn't have air conditioning, or Taco Bell, or cell phones to call their families. They had to deal with the heat and mosquitoes and leeches and mud in Real Life.
The news media went out and filmed the action, without being embedded with the military, and put it on the TV news.

Yes, the fight was overwhelmingly unbalanced, with US air power, napalm, Agent Orange and massive bombs vs lightly armed farmers, but it still wasn't as unbalanced as later US attacks. It took 57,000 dead Americans to kill 3,000,000 Vietnamese, a far smaller percentage than more recent massacres.

One guy calmly talks about moving an entire village of 3,000 people out to a concentration camp, and how they then destroyed every house, burned or poisoned the stored foods, killed their animals, "defoliated" their fields and bulldozed the entire thing. Cause, you know, freedom.

At the time, 50 years ago, those of us who opposed the war believed that the total barbarity of the destruction of that country had ''turned the world against us''. But that clearly wasn't true. It all went down the Memory Hole.
And then, in the 80s, we thought that the barbarity of the attacks on the people of Central America had ''turned the world against us".
Also not true. Also down the Memory Hole.
And then we thought that the vicious destruction of Iraq and the torture centers we set up had ''turned the world against us''.

But, here we are now, replacing the elected leaders of sovereign countries, bombing the people of at least 7 countries, ordering the world to boycott targeted countries, threatening to start WW3....and ''the world'' seems to be going along with it.

We must really be Exceptional, like they tell us.

Marching with the Fascists, Swimming with the Sharks

I got my nursing license and my last job long before the increasing repression started. I watched as the young ones were forced to give their fingerprints, pee in cups and pay for background checks, but that particular net skipped me.
Everyone adjusts to the new paradigm, no matter how outrageously oppressive.

When I told the young 'uns that we didn't used to submit to such indignities, that applying for a job was separate from being accused of a crime, they didn't believe me.
Surely, it was ever thus, that your boss had the power to make you prove yourself innocent, or be considered guilty.

Now I am watching as the tribe I used to belong to, the liberal tribe, is expertly herded towards acceptance of a police state and endless war.

They used to support free speech. Now they cheer on censorship and approve of physically attacking anyone who says something they don't like.

They used to support a free press. Now they yammer on about the need to censor, and they enthusiastically support the persecution of Julian Assange.

They used to distrust the CIA and the FBI. Now they viciously attack anyone who points out obvious lies and abuse of power by those agencies.

They used to oppose war. Now they scream about the Evil Russians and the Devious Chinese, the Horrible North Koreans and the Oppressed Syrians and Venezuelans, and happily support provocations to those countries (among others).
I am left standing here on the beach, feeling the sand slip away under my feet, as the tide goes out, and this country becomes more and more fascist, with my former tribe happily swimming with the sharks.

"Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame."
Sept. 1, 1939
H.W. Auden

Notre Dame

The most beautiful, the most majestic, the most awe-inspiring places on planet Earth are natural, to be sure. And it is sad to see humans destroying the forests, the oceans, the mountains and rivers, and millions of amazing life forms that also share this planet.

Humans are variously described as ugly leaking bags of mostly water, or long intestinal tubes with appendages, or hairless monkeys with a strong drive for conformity and a lack of the ability to discern truth from fantasy. All true.

But, every once in a while, they do something amazing, and I think that Notre Dame was one of those things.

Yes, a forest fire is more tragic and causes much more loss of life, but the fire at Notre Dame was also disturbing.

Oh. Are We Back to #metoo?

In another blatant case of liberal whiplash, we are now being subjected to liberals defending the oppressive state dragging a muckraking journalist to a kangaroo court, en route to a rendition to another kangaroo court. Because, let's all chant it together....
"He's a rapist!"

I thought we weren't using sexual accusations to dispose of people anymore. I thought that the #metoo movement had faltered on the shores of overreach. To be sure, there was a resurgence last fall, with the attack on the right wing judge applicant. His appalling record as a judge was never mentioned by the media or the liberals. They preferred to focus on something he might (or might not) have done when he was a teenager.

But then the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, a serial abuser of young female teenagers, were blown off as unimportant.
And more recently, videos of Joe Biden fondling girls and women were explained as "he's just friendly".
So, it seemed that sexual crimes being used to bring down men were over. But if video evidence of unwanted fondling is to be disregarded, what to think of the indignation and newly rekindled concern for the claims of a woman in Sweden?
Sweden has laws which no other country has. The claim made was that Assange did not use a condom the second time he had consensual sex with a woman.


Now we have liberals, especially women, refusing to stand up for freedom of the press and freedom of speech because the targeted individual did not use a condom in Sweden.

It is difficult to find the words to express the absurdity of their conditioned responses. "The personal is political" NEVER meant that political struggles could be reduced to the personalities of the humans involved in struggle. It never meant that personal foibles of any person could be used to destroy century-old civil rights. The women who used the phrase meant that some of the difficulties of their personal lives, employment discrimination, low pay, loss of economic rights with marriage...were problems that could not be solved on an individual basis, only through united political action. It is a travesty to see today's politics played out on the theatrical media stage as a giant soap opera of sex scandals.


And it is insulting to actual rape victims, such as the girls and women, in countries targeted by our ruling overlords for destruction, who are raped by our soldiers or our proxy terrorists, sometimes repeatedly, to have their terror trivialized by citizens of the US/NATO countries responsible.

The same people who cheer on the destruction of entire countries, ruining the lives of girls and women with rape and murder, as well as destruction of their civil societies, forcing widows and orphans into the sex trade, have the nerve to speak of unwanted male attention, clumsy passes and/or unsatisfying consensual sex as "rape". This is an outrage. The hypocrisy is unbearable and disgusting.

PS. Jim Acosta, heroized by the liberals for his verbal attacks on Sarah Sanders, the press secretary, is getting a "Truth to Power" journalism award, while Assange is locked up in a London prison. It would be difficult to make up something as absurd and twisted as this. It's almost as if our rulers have a sick sense of humor.

Huey Long Was Right

Somebody once asked the late Huey Long if he thought we would ever have fascism in the United States. “Sure we will,” predicted Long, “only we’ll call it anti-fascism!”
(Quoted in “Try and Stop Me", Bennet Cerf, 1944.)

Nuremberg Trials Inverted-Julian Assange

What if Nazi Germany had won the war? What if they reigned supreme in Europe and around the world? What if they had almost complete control of the world's governments, the world's economy and the world's media? What if there had been no Nuremberg trials?

No need to speculate. We are watching it play out, as the US Empire stomps down on the free alternative media, and the exposing of war crimes in Iraq.

Behold the groveling submission of Australia, Sweden, the UK, Ecuador and the Mighty Wurlitzer of propaganda we are taught to call the "legitimate" media. The publisher who has been holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy for the past 7 years, to escape the wrath of a country he has NEVER been to, has been betrayed by the new, bought-off leader of Ecuador, and turned over to the police of UK.


Everyone knows that the real persecutor is the United States of America, which holds power over the world, and believes that its war crimes should be covered up, no matter how vicious or egregious. Everyone knows that American "justice" is a farce, that US prisons are barbaric, and that, whatever the charges filed, the real crime of Julian Assange was to publish Forbidden Truth.

The idiot Teresa May said "in the United Kingdom, no one is above the law."

Let me fix that for you, Ms. May. "In the United Kingdom, an Australian citizen in an Ecuadorian Embassy, who never broke any laws of England OR the USA can be arrested on behalf of the US Empire. No one is beyond the reach of the US repressive apparatus, even in the UK".

This is the final nail in the coffin of English common law, the Magna Carta, freedom of speech and freedom of the press. This is a sad day.