And the Award Goes To...

 The hits just keep on coming. Who needed the Oscars orgy when we already had enough free reality to keep us engaged?

 In the space of only a few weeks, Joe Biden has sided with race-baiting Republicans in blocking criminal code reforms in Washington, D.C.; signaled that he will revive the cruel policy of jailing migrants in family detention centers; approved massive oil drilling on pristine federal land in Alaska that will release nearly 10 million more tons of carbon into the atmosphere: presented to Congress the most expensive military budget in history; accelerated plans for war with China by outfitting Australia with nuclear attack submarines; and rescued with public money a horde of tech millionaire depositors after their sketchy bank went bust.

Meanwhile, there is nothing in Biden's budget to either battle the still-raging Covid disaster, or to rescue tens of millions of poor Americans from the disaster stemming from the recent congressional cuts to food stamp and Medicaid benefits.

This is not just eugenics. This is blatant and vicious social class cleansing.

All of  the escalating predations and policy reversals under Biden and the complicit, corrupt courts and legislatures are interrelated, of course. What happens in Alaska will not stay in Alaska. Biden's deliberate acceleration of climate change will spur ever more migrations of desperate people trying to escape from locales whose crops will fail as a direct result of Biden's order to drill, baby, drill. More migration will necessitate the construction of more for-profit prisons, both for immigrants and the US-born multitudes who, if they are turning to crime in greater numbers, are doing so largely out of desperation.

 In its insane quest to remain the world's sole remaining superpower, the US hegemon under Biden isn't just marching to World War III. It's racing to World War III. It is precisely because the United States military is the world's largest consumer of fossil fuels and its champion global  polluter that it will need to extract more fossil fuels to wage more wars whose ultimate purpose is to extract more fossil fuels and more precious minerals in its quest to be the big global winner in a macabre contest of ecocide and homicide.

As for Biden, he seems to be in a race against his own 80-year time span. The White House seems to think that by presenting us with one crisis or attack after another, we'll become too befuddled and shell-shocked to react much before the next salvo.

They will, at the same time, try to divert our attention from Biden and his sinister aviator sunglasses onto the gruesome specter of Donald Trump - or worse, onto his more intelligent and even more slimily dangerous ideological spawn, Ron DeSantis.

 They'll also make a pretense of fairness. To name just one example of their placatory double talk, Biden is coupling the rape of Alaska via Conoco-Phillips's "Willow Project" with an executive order barring any drilling in the Arctic Ocean. He doesn't see fit to mention that oil companies themselves don't even want to drill in the Arctic because the US/Canada controlled western portion of the coastline is too dangerous and too expensive for them to exploit. Since it's not as dangerous or expensive to drill for oil in the more placid eastern, Norway and Russia-controlled portion of the melting Arctic, Biden's decision for Alaska makes perfect sense. His military bases in Norway and his alleged order to blow up Russia's Nord Stream pipeline last fall were only the opening gambits in a total world war for oil.

 The polite establishment media, for their part, are fretting about his legacy going down in flames. Still, as the New York Times euphemizes the rise of Biden the Berserker, his punishment of migrants and his nixing of the "soft on crime" policies in largely Black and liberal Washington, DC, is just Uncle Joe returning to his more comfortable "centrist" roots.

After two years championing some of his party’s top progressive priorities, the president lately is speaking more to the concerns of the political middle, seeking to recapture the more centrist identity that long defined him....

During the 2020 Democratic primary campaign, he overcame liberal rivals like Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and positioned himself as a sensible centrist in the fall campaign when he defeated Mr. Trump. After taking office, however, he adopted some of the more expansive policy goals of the progressive wing. He cast himself as a new-generation Franklin D. Roosevelt pressing for a modern-day New Deal, with large-scale spending on climate change, social welfare programs and student debt relief that will add trillions of dollars to the national debt in years to come.

It was all a con, people! Joe Biden was never on our side. He's had a whole half-century in politics to prove just whose side he is on.

 Framing the destruction of the planet around one mediocre elected official's political identity and prospects certainly helps them to ignore the terrifying truth that if everybody on earth is suffering, the survivors of Biden's onslaught will not much care about his legacy. If they're the wealthy benefactors of his legacy, they and their descendants can honor his birthday every year on their mega-yachts on rising oceans and in their gated communities in tropical Greenland or even from their planned space colonies.

The role of journalism in this time of the decline and fall of the American empire is not so much to inform its consumers as it is to alternately comfort them and blame all of society's ills on one or the other of the two oligarch-controlled political parties -  whose own main role is to control the population by dividing people against one another.

Speaking of their implicit role of comforting the comfortable, the Times and other establishment media's overwrought, glowing, nonstop coverage of the Oscars actually vied for precedence with the Arctic drilling threat and the meltdown of Silicon Valley bank over the weekend. Gawking at Lady Gaga's see-through dress was bound to divert our attention from bank meltdowns and global warming and political malfeasance. Right?

I didn't watch the Oscars because I don't care and I don't have cable. I can, however, personally boast of having a few degrees of separation from this year's Academy Awards. Portions of "The Whale," whose lead player Brendan Fraser won best actor honors, were filmed at my apartment complex in upstate New York, just as the Covid pandemic was entering its second year.

I wrote about the abysmal treatment of the tenants of my building at the time. The gist of it was that neither the movie's producer nor the apartment management company got permission from the residents to invade our space. Nor did they compensate us for the inconvenience of literally being made prisoners trapped in our own apartments just so they could make a movie about a guy trapped in his apartment due to obesity and depression. (As an update to that original blog post, I did later file a complaint with the state attorney general's office for violations of the "right to quiet enjoyment." They took my complaint seriously and I eventually won a four-day rent abatement from the landlord.)

I haven't seen the movie, which got mixed reviews. But leave it to the New York Times (whose real estate section had already covered my complaint about the building being converted into a movie set) to include in its own negative review a classist dig at the apartment complex where I still live.

The movie camera, guided by Darren Aronofsky and his go-to cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, also stays indoors most of the time. Occasionally you get an exterior view of the drab low-rise building where Charlie lives, or a breath of fresh air on the landing outside his front door. But these respites only emphasize a pervasive sense of confinement.

The trailer of the movie actually included a shot of the drab exterior in order, I suppose, to give potential viewers a respite from the confinement. If you want to watch and judge the aesthetics of the acting and architecture for yourselves, here's the clip:

Okay, so now that I've deflected your attention from all the overriding unpleasantness, I'll close this post with some more reality, cloaked though it may be by the media establishment fantasy couture that we've come to expect.

This month's "best performance by a self-proclaimed disinformation expert" award  is hereby presented to:

For those of you who missed it,  the explosion of the Nord Stream pipeline which Joe Biden had as much as admitted was in the works has now been blamed by unknown government officials upon unknown "pro-Ukrainian forces" These forces were under the direction of neither the United States nor of its client state of Ukraine, over which the United States has no control despite its funding of the proxy war against Russia. The Times article reads like an unfunny remake of "Duck Soup," in which a country called Prokrainia goes to war against another country called Sylvania, all thanks to the largesse of the richest country on earth, aptly named Freedonia.

The reviews are in, and they're really, really bad. The New York Times reader commentariat, at least, were having none of this Mystery Science Theater plotline. So I didn't teel too bad when the Times censors rejected my own comment:

The Times has finally -finally! - deigned to respond to Seymour Hersh's scoop about the Biden administration blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline.  According to the government, either "pro-Ukrainian forces" or the Russians did it.

So this is how the Times answers all its critics who were wondering why on earth it had not reported on Seymour Hersh's scoop. I suppose the NYT couldn't keep up the "censorship by omission" policy any longer. It's like Mayor Pete finally going to East Palestine almost two weeks after the train disaster. Better late than never!

To their credit, though, the reporters writing this tongue-in-cheek story don't really try all that hard to hide the truth (or their own embarrassment) as they euphemize a skilled navy seal dive team into some fantasy "pro-Ukrainian" forces. Can't you do better than that, NYT?

1. You at least could have repurposed your last exciting episode, the one about the Chinese spy balloons. A theory that UFOs piloted by space aliens, who then converted them into invisible submarines to blow up pipelines would have been more plausible than this sad attempt at fooling maybe a couple of people. "It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids, without the knowledge of the individual, certainly without any choice. That's the way your hardcore Commie works." - Gen Jack D. Ripper, Dr. Strangelove.

Anti-Propaganda Propaganda

I'll give credit where it's due. A New York Times "explainer" piece about how Russian propaganda gets done in the United States is a pretty slick piece of propaganda itself.

It insidiously casts doubt upon independent media at the same time it tries to get the patriotic war drums pounding in the brains of its readers.

The headline blares out its piercingly shrill dog-whistle of a warning to the reading public: Russian Hackers Find Ready Bullhorns in the Media. In other words, the media outlets that published DNC and Clinton campaign emails are, if not exactly traitorous, extremely careless and naive. And if you the reader don't want to be considered traitorous or careless or naive yourself, you'll be very, very careful about what you choose to peruse.

Reporter Max Fisher, who recently arrived at the Times's new "Interpreter" beat from previous explaining gigs at Vox and the Washington Post, immediately asserts that Russian hacking of Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign emails is an established fact. Despite much skepticism from a wide variety of sources about the results of the government's investigation, the Russian infiltration of our democracy is no longer even up for debate, as far as the Times is concerned:

As the dust settles on Russian interference in the United States election, journalists are confronting an aspect that has received less scrutiny than the hacking itself but poses its own thorny questions: Moscow’s ability to steer Western media coverage by doling out hacked documents.

Fisher enhances the official narrative by moving beyond the Russian red herring, which deflected attention from the actual damaging content of the emails. Now it's time to inflict shame on the reporters who wrote about them, and to warn them off covering future non-sanctioned leaks. Since the Russian messenger of the email story has already been vanquished as far as Max Fisher is concerned, he can now safely move on to smearing -- in a smarmy, concern-trolling way, of course - the "stenographers" of the message. The reporters who published mainly banal exposures of the self-interest, money-grubbing and petty backbiting within Hillary Clinton's Democratic Party without vetting the original sources are as good as accessories after the fact. And if you, dear readers, pay any more attention to these emails, then you too are complicit. 

  Any journalism from here on out now that is critical of the Wall Street/war faction of the duopoly will have Putin's bloody hand-prints all over it. And, the article hints, this whole First Amendment thing might need to be reconsidered because the Russians are spoiling it:

 By releasing documents that would tarnish Hillary Clinton and other American political figures, but whose news value compelled coverage, Moscow exploited the very openness that is the basis of a free press. Its tactics have evolved with each such operation, some of which are still unfolding.

Fisher goes on to quote cyber-security expert Thomas Rid, a professor at Kings College London, who has been allegedly tracking the hacking since last summer, when Obama administration officials apparently first learned of it but did nothing. They believed, like nearly everybody else, that Hillary would beat Trump, a "Pied Piper" candidate whom they themselves had set up as the perfect loathsome target for her. They did nothing, even after the embarrassing emails started appearing in print the month before the election. Obama reportedly did not want to be seen as placing his own thumb on the electoral scales by making a huge issue out of what basically is standard international mutual spying procedure.

But that was then, and the agenda now is to delegitimize the renegade Trump victory by calling him a Manchurian candidate and simultaneously beating the drums for war on Russia. And so Thomas Rid is quoted as saying that this goes well beyond run-of-the-mill hacking. "It's political engineering, social engineering on a strategic level," he ominously told the Times.

In other words, they want you to believe that Vlad Putin not only wants to eat your brains for breakfast, he wants to steal your breakfast table and all your furniture and your house and your money and the entire American consumer culture that makes us so great.

"A New Dark Art" is how Fisher balefully describes the Russian propaganda scourge in a bold subhead.

Because unlike run-of-the mill spying and meddling, Russia is using front organizations and proxies to disseminate its propaganda across our borders. Never mind what Edward Bernays revealed almost a century ago: most propaganda you read in newspapers originates from a front group or public relations agency. In his seminal work on the topic, he singled out the New York Times: 

      The extent to which propaganda shapes the progress of affairs about us may surprise even well informed persons. Nevertheless, it is only necessary to look under the surface of the newspaper for a hint as to propaganda's authority over public opinion. Page one of the New York Times on the day these paragraphs are written contains eight important news stories. Four of them, or one-half, are propaganda. The casual reader accepts them as accounts of spontaneous happenings. But are they? Here are the headlines which announce them: "TWELVE NATIONS WARN CHINA REAL REFORM MUST COME BEFORE THEY GIVE RELIEF," "PRITCHETT REPORTS ZIONISM WILL FAIL," "REALTY MEN DEMAND A TRANSIT INQUIRY," and "OUR LIVING STANDARD HIGHEST IN HISTORY, SAYS HOOVER REPORT....

     These examples are not given to create the impression that there is anything sinister about propaganda. They are set down rather to illustrate how conscious direction is given to events, and how the men behind these events influence public opinion. As such they are examples of modern propaganda. At this point we may attempt to define propaganda.
      Modern propaganda is a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea or group.
      This practice of creating circumstances and of creating pictures in the minds of millions of persons is very common. Virtually no important undertaking is now carried on without it, whether that enterprise be building a cathedral, endowing a university, marketing a moving picture, floating a large bond issue, or electing a president. Sometimes the effect on the public is created by a professional propagandist, sometimes by an amateur deputed for the job. The important thing is that it is universal and continuous; and in its sum total it is regimenting the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers.

But now Thomas Rid and the Times act as though this tactic is both brand-new and lethal. As Fisher breathlessly Timesplains: 

Great powers have long meddled in one another’s affairs. But Russia, throughout 2016, developed a previously unseen tactic: setting up fronts to seed into the press documents it had obtained by hacking.

“Doing public relations work in order to get the hacked material out as an exclusive story with the Daily Caller or Gawker or the Smoking Gun, that is new,” Mr. Rid said.

That public relations work was initially done by two web presences that appeared this summer, Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks, each posing as activist-hackers in the mold of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks chief. Though neither acknowledged it, and the links were not immediately known, online security experts later concluded that both were Russian fronts.

Of course, Professor Rid is being disingenuous. Fisher doesn't inform his readers that his source is an alumnus of the RAND Corporation, a public-private think tank which has been churning out imperialistic American propaganda since the end of World War Two. Many of its activities and position papers are highly classified. 

 RAND was once castigated by the Soviet news agency as the "American Academy of Science and Death" and by Stanley Kubrick as the BLAND Corporation in Dr. Strangelove. It was the physical source of the eventually stolen top-secret Pentagon Papers, which revealed the lies and coverups about the Vietnam War. As Alex Abella outlined in a book he wrote about RAND, it received most of its corporate and taxpayer money during the Cold War decades:

 I worked for RAND as a national security analyst from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, and people there spoke of those earlier times with wonder and nostalgia. Thanks to ever-expanding cold-war budgets, the Air Force essentially dumped a truckload of money at RAND’s front door every year. The organization was permitted to spend that money at its discretion. Although most of it funded useless research—I recall a 1960s-era report on the Black Death in the Middle Ages as an example of societal catastrophe and recovery—some of it helped to invent nuclear strategy, Sovietology, and systems analysis (probably RAND’s most lasting contribution to its military clients). Other analysts developed such far-reaching pursuits as game theory and rational-choice theory.

Speaking of game theory, and going back to Max Fisher's slick propaganda explainer piece in the Times, propaganda just wouldn't be slick if its practitioner didn't also play the Both Siderism game. Fisher continues with his 'splaining about those dastardly Russian PR shops and how they so easily fool dumb journos:

In July, for instance, DCLeaks published emails belonging to retired Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove. The Intercept, a left-leaning site, covered the emails in a story that portrayed Mr. Breedlove as trying to foment hostility against Russia. The story did not note Russian links to the hack. Its lead author, Lee Fang, said he had no interactions with DCLeaks and pointed out that the group’s suspected Russian ties were not widely publicized at that time.

Lee Fang is a respected independent investigative reporter. But never mind all that. Because when it comes to shilling for Putin, Fisher implies, he's just as Strangelovingly "preverted" as the often-scurrilous Daily Caller: 

In September, DCLeaks contacted Peter Hasson, a reporter at the Daily Caller, a right-leaning site, with an offer: password-protected access to hacked emails belonging to Colin Powell, the former secretary of state.

The Daily Caller’s story also did not note the growing belief that the documents had been hacked by Russia and leaked as part of an influence operation. Mr. Hasson said he was unaware of the alleged Russian links at the time.

And to give a good back-handed smack to smaller independent ("peripheral") news sites, Fisher, in a more subtle variation of the discredited PropOrNot way of smearing them as Russian propaganda tools, actually praised the conspiracy site InfoWars as being moral enough to refuse to publish some of the leaked DNC  emails. If InfoWars of all places is turning down Russian leaks, then why can't more reputable organizations? Or so Fisher slickly implies in his article.

But Fisher is not done yet. Because as the final sinister subhead to his article prescribes, it's way past time to be "Developing Antibodies" to all this Russian mental germ warfare.

Get it? Independent news that afflicts the powerful is like contaminated food. You just never know who packaged the bread on that sandwich you're eating. The baker, in turn, has no real way of knowing the provenance of the flour she used, and the farmer has no earthly idea where his seed came from, or whether the pesticides he used on his crops are more toxic than the manufacturer asserted.

Ergo: we had all better quit reading and listening to consuming unsanctioned stuff that embarrasses or damages our betters and their agendas. We must not become angry and take to the streets in protest. At the very least, we should restrict our diets to such BLAND and healthy establishment sources as the Times and CNN and the Washington Post and MSNBC.

"I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.... It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids, without the knowledge of the individual, certainly without any choice. That the way a hardcore Commie works." -- Dr. Strangelove, 1964.