Caitlin Johnstone — The Official Bad Guy Of The Day: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Warning: This is a rant. But it is a pretty good one.

Caitlin Johnstone — Rogue Journalist
The Official Bad Guy Of The Day: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Caitlin Johnstone

Are we all being gaslighted by the government? — Richard Murphy

This has become the m.o. of corporate media. It's progressed beyond propaganda to gaslighting.

"Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"

Tax Research UK
Are we all being gaslighted by the government?
Richard Murphy | Professor of Practice in International Political Economy at City University, London; Director of Tax Research UK; non-executive director of Cambridge Econometrics, and a member of the Progressive Economy Forum

The Terrorists Among US10| The IO Echo Chamber Scott Shane Joel Harding — George Eliason

Why I don't link to the NYT,

The Vineyard of the Saker
The Terrorists Among US10| The IO Echo Chamber Scott Shane Joel Harding
George Eliason

See also

Not just the Times.

Ray McGovern
Quick! Someone Tell Amy Goodman What Actually Happened – and Didn’t Happen – in Ukraine 5 Years Ago

Craig Murray Blog — How To Spot A Twitter Troll

Did you know that your favorite troll may be an intel agent?

Craig Murray Blog
How To Spot A Twitter Troll
Craig Murray, formerly British ambassador to Uzbekistan and Rector of the University of Dundee

See also

The American Ceonservative
The Tulsi Effect: Forcing War Onto the Democratic Agenda

Major Danny Sjursen, US Army (retired)

For decades, freedom and democracy have been part of the U.S. brand. That doesn’t appear to hold true any longer, at least not in established democracies.
A study commissioned by a group founded by Anders Rasmussen, the former Danish prime minister and North Atlantic Treaty Organization secretary general,showed that in many Western nations, U.S. foreign policy and well as two mainstays of its global power – the finance and technology industries – are regarded as threats to democracy.
The group, the Alliance of Democracies Foundation, and Berlin-based Dalia Research, polled 177,870 people in 54 countries about their perceptions of democracy as a concept, its state in their home nations, and in the world in general.…

Soft power dwindling away.

Checkpoint Asia
NATO Poll Finds Public Opinion in Western Countries Holds That US Is a Threat to Democracy
Leonid Bershidsky for Bloomberg Opinion

Behind the Syrian Network for Human Rights: How an opposition front group became Western media’s go-to monitor — Max Blumenthal

This is part one in an investigation into government-funded, opposition-linked NGOs that pose as impartial monitors and investigators of the Syrian conflict.

More on propaganda, disinformation, and the information wars as tools in hybrid warfare.

The Gray Zone
Behind the Syrian Network for Human Rights: How an opposition front group became Western media’s go-to monitor

Max Blumenthal

Propaganda Is The Root Of All Our Problems — Caitlin Johnstone

Bingo!

By "propaganda" Caitlin Johnstone means "narrative control."

Maintaining narrative control was relatively easy prior to the Internet and social media. Now, the process has turned to access and exclusion as the means of censorship through control of the media and social media in particular. Access and exclusion have always been a reality in the case of print media. Now this is being extended to digital platforms.

Caitlin Johnstone — Rogue Journalist
Propaganda Is The Root Of All Our Problems
Caitlin Johnstone

Caitlin Johnstone — CONFIRMED: Chemical Weapons Assessment Contradicting Official Syria Narrative Is Authentic

Big. The "official" narrative is unraveling.

Caitlin Johnstone.com
CONFIRMED: Chemical Weapons Assessment Contradicting Official Syria Narrative Is Authentic
Caitlin Johnstone

Also

RT
‘How do they sleep?’ Roger Waters calls out US, UK & France over ‘faked’ Douma chemical attack

Also

Col. Lang publishes the full assessment, which he reports receiving from the authors.

"Taken together, these findings establish beyond reasonable doubt that the alleged chemical attack in Douma on 7 April 2018 was staged." — OPCW Engineering sub-team assessment

Sic Semper Tyrannis
OPCW Engineering sub-team assessment on the Douma gas "attack" in April 2018
Col. W. Patrick Lang, US Army (ret.)

At the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lang was the Defense Intelligence Officer (DIO) for the Middle East, South Asia and counter-terrorism, and later, the first Director of the Defense Humint Service. At the DIA, he was a member of the Defense Senior Executive Service. He participated in the drafting of National Intelligence Estimates. From 1992 to 1994, all the U.S. military attachés worldwide reported to him. During that period, he also briefed President George H. W. Bush at the White House, as he had during Operation Desert Storm.

He was also the head of intelligence analysis for the Middle East for seven or eight years at that institution. He was the head of all the Middle East and South Asia analysis in DIA for counter-terrorism for seven years. For his service in the DIA, Lang received the Presidential Rank Award of Distinguished Executive. — Wikipedia

See also

A new book called Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons by Kris Newby adds significantly to our understanding of Lyme disease, while oddly seeming to avoid mention of what we already knew.

Newby claims (in 2019) that if a scientist named Willy Burgdorfer had not made a confession in 2013, the secret that Lyme disease came from a biological weapons program would have died with him. Yet, in 2004 Michael Christopher Carroll published a book called Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Germ Laboratory. He appeared on several television shows to discuss the book, including on NBC’s Today Show, where the book was made a Today Show Book Club selection. Lab 257 hit the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list soon after its publication.

Newby’s book reaches the same conclusion as Carroll’s, namely that the most likely source of diseased ticks is Plum Island....

Counterpunch
Where Lyme Disease Came From and Why It Eludes Treatment

David Swanson

For nearly two decades, one of the most overlooked and little known arrests made in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks was that of the so-called “High Fivers,” or the “Dancing Israelis.” However, new information released by the FBI on May 7 has brought fresh scrutiny to the possibility that the “Dancing Israelis,” at least two of whom were known Mossad operatives, had prior knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Shortly after 8:46 a.m. on the day of the attacks, just minutes after the first plane struck the World Trade Center, five men — later revealed to be Israeli nationals — had positioned themselves in the parking lot of the Doric Apartment Complex in Union City, New Jersey, where they were seen taking pictures and filming the attacks while also celebrating the destruction of the towers and “high fiving” each other. At least one eyewitness interviewed by the FBI had seen the Israelis’ van in the parking lot as early as 8:00 a.m. that day, more than 40 minutes prior to the attack. The story received coverage in U.S. mainstream media at the time but has since been largely forgotten.

The men — Sivan Kurzberg, Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Yaron Shimuel and Omar Marmari — were subsequently apprehended by law enforcement and claimed to be Israeli tourists on a “working holiday” in the United States where they were employed by a moving company, Urban Moving Systems. Upon his arrest, Sivan Kurzberg told the arresting officer, “We are Israeli; we are not your problem. Your problems are our problems, The Palestinians are the problem.”

For years, the official story has been that these individuals, while they had engaged in “immature” behavior by celebrating and being “visibly happy” in their documenting of the attacks, had no prior knowledge of the attack. However, newly released FBI copies of the photos taken by the five Israelis strongly suggest that these individuals had prior knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center. The copies of the photos were obtained via a FOIA request made by a private citizen....

Mint Press News
Newly Released FBI Docs Shed Light on Apparent Mossad Foreknowledge of 9/11 Attacks

Whitney Webb

Caitlin Johnstone — Mainstream Media Is Now Killing People Directly

...the mass media is not in the business of reporting facts, it’s in the business of selling narratives. Even if those narratives are so shrill and stress-inducing that they imperil the health of their audience....

Fear-mongering is taking its toll. Caitlin Johnstone observes that the problem is not as much Trump as the media and its manufactured narratives. Good read.

Caitlin Johnstone — Rogue Journalist
Mainstream Media Is Now Killing People Directly
Caitlin Johnstone

Bill Mitchell — More Brexit nonsense from the pro-European dreamers

What editorial control does the UK Guardian exercise on Op Ed pieces? Seemingly none if you read this article (December 24, 2018) – What Labour can learn about Brexit from California: think twice – written by some well-to-do American postgraduate working for DiEM25 in Athens. But when Thomas Fazi and I sought space to discuss our book – Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World (Pluto Books, 2017) – or when I have sought space to provide some balance to the usual neoliberal, pro-Europe bias, the result has been no response (yay or nay). We never received a response to our solicitation. Even if we ignore the obvious imbalance in experience and qualifications (track record) of the respective ‘authors’, it seems that the UK Guardian only wants a particular view to be published even if the quality of that view would make the piece unpublishable in any respectable outlet. Go figure. Anyway, I now have read the worst article for 2018. And, I thought that the Remain debate had reached the depths of idiocy but there is obviously scope for more if this Guardian attempt at commentary is anything to go by. And I know the Guardian journalists read this blog – so why not allow Thomas and I to formally respond to all this Remain nonsense?...

Maybe because the Guardian has become the voice of the UK neoliberal pseudo-left, much like the New York Times and the Washington Post are in the US? Can the deep state be far behind, too, providing anonymous sources off the record? Even the "news" is no longer actually news. What then of opinion pieces?

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
More Brexit nonsense from the pro-European dreamers

Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Caitlin Johnstone — Mass Media’s Russia Hysteria Is Openly Acknowledging The Power Of Propaganda

FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver, a fairly reliable establishment loyalist, tweeted today about the new Russia report saying “If you wrote out a list of the most important factors in the 2016 election, I’m not sure that Russian social media memes would be among the top 100. The scale was quite small and there’s not much evidence that they were effective.”

“For instance, this story makes a big deal about a (post-election) Russian social media disinformation campaign on Bob Mueller based on… 5,000 tweets? That’s **nothing**. Platform-wide, there are something like 500,000,000 tweets posted each day,” Silver continued.…

What fraction of overall social media impressions on the 2016 election were generated by Russian troll farms? 0.1%? I'm not sure what the answer is, but suspect it's low, and it says something that none of the reports that hype up the importance of them address that question.

Then there is the question, "what to do about this?"

They tell you their concern is that Russians are trying to manipulate your mind with propaganda, but really their concern is that they want to be the only ones manipulating your mind with propaganda. They tell you Russian propaganda is so dangerous that it’s necessary to censor the internet and hide all narratives which aren’t in line with the ruling establishment in order to protect democracy, but really all they want is to have full control of the narratives you consume. This is evidenced in the article by the Washington Post which kicked off this latest round of Russia panic, which reports the following:

The report expressed concern about the overall threat social media poses to political discourse within nations and among them, warning that companies once viewed as tools for liberation in the Arab world and elsewhere are now threats to democracy.

“Social media have gone from being the natural infrastructure for sharing collective grievances and coordinating civic engagement to being a computational tool for social control, manipulated by canny political consultants and available to politicians in democracies and dictatorships alike,” the report said.

Caitlin Johnstone — Rogue Journalist

Mass Media’s Russia Hysteria Is Openly Acknowledging The Power Of Propaganda
Caitlin Johnstone

Mohamed Elmaazi and Max Blumenthal — Inside the Temple of Covert Propaganda: The Integrity Initiative and the UK’s Scandalous Information War

The Grayzone entered the carefully concealed offices of a covert, British government-backed propaganda mill that is at the center of an international scandal the mainstream media refuses to touch.

The entire extremely shady enterprise, as Miller explained, is an elaborate front for the British military-intelligence apparatus. Its covert coordination with friendly politicians and mainstream journalists recalls the Cold War-era intrigue known as Operation Mockingbird.

That scandal involved the unmasking of “more than 400 American journalists who…in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency,” as Carl Bernstein revealed in a 1977 Rolling Stone report.

The exposing of the Integrity Initiative has just scratched the surface of what appears to be a much more sophisticated, insidious, and extremely online version of Operation Mockingbird. With new internal documents appearing each week through a hacker’s organization called Anonymous Europe, the revelations are yielding one of the most potentially explosive national security scandals in recent times.

But even as members of Britain’s parliament thunder with demands for official accountability, the UK and US mainstream media still strangely refuses to touch the story....

Best reporting yet on this unfolding scandal, at least of which I am aware. This story has legs and the establishment is going to try to bury or kill it. It draws back the curtain.

Gray Zone
Inside the Temple of Covert Propaganda: The Integrity Initiative and the UK’s Scandalous Information War
Mohamed Elmaazi and Max Blumenthal

See also

Sputnik International
FBI Memo Implies Dossier on Trump Russian Collusion Funded by Clinton

See also

Zero Hedge
Christopher Steele Admits He Was Hired To Help Hillary Challenge 2016 Election
Tyler Durden

See also

RT
UK psyops bigwig pushed plan to 'mine Sevastopol Bay' during 2014 Crimea crisis – leaked documents

Moon of Alabama The 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity, To Create The "Russian Threat"

The British government financed Integrity Initiative is tasked with spreading anti-Russian propaganda and with influencing the public, military and governments of a number of countries. What follows is an incomplete analysis of the third batch of the Initiative's papers which was dumped yesterday.

More evidence.

Moon of Alabama
The 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity, To Create The "Russian Threat"

See also

Zero Hedge
Leaked Memo Touts UK-Funded Firm's Ability To Create "Untraceable" News Sites For "Infowar Campaign"

Tyler Durden

Moon of Alabama — Syria - 'Activist' Posts Fake Picture - Fact Checkers Fall For It

More MSM fake (Photoshopped) news  exposed. If you are wondering whether The Guardian is also involved, the answer is yes.

Morons (anchor bias, confirmation bias) or complicit (propaganda).

Hey editors, unanalyzed pictures are no longer evidence. Save yourselves some embarrassment Oh, wait, you already knew that!

Moon of Alabama
Syria - 'Activist' Posts Fake Picture - Fact Checkers Fall For It

See also

With its strongly misleading report Reuters, or at least its correspondent in Geneva, is obviously supporting the neocon campaign that they hope will lead to war on Iran.
It is fakenews from one of the prime 'western' news agencies about Iran's declared intentions.

Reuters Creates Fakenews About Iran - Intentionally Conflates Two Different Missiles - Misquotes Official

Also from Moon of Alabama

The People Of France Reject Macron's Policies - How Long Can He Survive?

Elizabeth Vos — The Guardian’s Reputation In Tatters After Forger Revealed To Have Co-Authored Assange Smear

Anyone still reading The Guardian? "Guardian" of what one asks? The Establishment?

Is there another option to the editor being either a moron or else complicit? Unless there is an exculpatory explanation quickly forthcoming that passes the smell test, some people need to be fired.

Needless to say, The Guardian has joined a growing list of unreliable media that I will no longer be linking to, at least until there is a change in management.

Disobedient Media
The Guardian’s Reputation In Tatters After Forger Revealed To Have Co-Authored Assange Smear
Elizabeth Vos

See also

Zero Hedge
Top Ecuadorian Diplomat Destroys Guardian's Claim That Manafort Visited Assange

Tyler Durden

See also

Consortium News
The Guardian’s Vilification of Julian Assange

Jonathan Cook

Paul Kindlon — The Psychological Origins of American Russophobia

Narrative creation operates based on pattern-recognition and repetition. "Tell a lie big enough and often enough and ….

The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous. — Joseph Goebbles, Aus Churchills Lügenfabrik, quoted in Big Lie at Wikipedia

 Paul Kindlon explains the mechanism.

 The psychological reason behind this trick has to do with “pattern recognition”. Human beings – through evolution – have learned to identify a phenomenon as real and true because it repeats again and again and again. After a while, the mind interprets this consistent pattern as proof of truth value. In psychological terms, “schemata” are created by a layering of memories similar in nature over time so that all events associated with the phenomenon are perceived through a prism of previous repetitions. In other words, even if a certain type of behavior is different from the norm it will still be identified as belonging to the typical pattern regardless. It is literally a trick of the mind…

This process induces the cognitive biases of anchoring and confirmation bias.

Russia Insider
The Psychological Origins of American Russophobia
Paul Kindlon | Professor of Humanities (1994-2017)
Moscow University Touro, Russia

Related

Visual Capitalist
24 Cognitive Biases That Are Warping Your Perception of Reality
Jeff Desjardins

Paul Robinson — LACK OF INTEGRITY

Smackdown.

It’s a common complaint that Russian media are controlled by the state. By contrast, the Western media, and Western opinion formers, such as academics and think tank members, are considered to be independent and impartial. Yet in reality, the relationship between them is often far cozier than people understand, and sometimes far cozier than it ought to be. I’m sure that everybody involved in the Integrity Initiative believes that they are acting for the best. But if they have been secretly working with government officials in pursuit of political objectives, they shouldn’t be surprised that some people don’t trust them. There’s a reason why people turn to sources of information which are accused of peddling ‘fake news’: they don’t believe traditional sources. Projects like the Integrity Initiative help strengthen the impression of secret conspiracies and double standards. Far from solving the problem, therefore, they accentuate it.

Irrussianality
LACK OF INTEGRITYPaul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa

Caitlin Johnstone — Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix.

It's actually more than this. All of us have a world view, but we don't all share the same world view. Everyone takes their own world view to be "reality," and rejects other world views as erroneous, deceitful, degenerate, primitive, or uneducated, or primitive view of reality.

Culture, including early upbringing and education, and especially group think heavily influence the formation of one's world view. Group think is fostered by narratives. Whoever controls the narrative controls the view of reality in that group, whether it be a subgroup or an entire society. 

America and Britain as doing their best to impose their joint world view on the world in the name of liberal globalization based on "freedom and democracy."

In the movie The Matrix, humans are imprisoned in a virtual world by a powerful artificial intelligence system in a dystopian future. What they take to be reality is actually a computer program that has been jacked into their brains to keep them in a comatose state. They live their whole lives in that virtual simulation, without any way of knowing that what they appear to be experiencing with their senses is actually made of AI-generated code.

Life in our current society is very much the same. The difference is that instead of AI, it’s psychopathic oligarchs who are keeping us asleep in the Matrix. And instead of code, it’s narrative.

Society is made of narrative like the Matrix is made of code. Identity, language, etiquette, social roles, opinions, ideology, religion, ethnicity, philosophy, agendas, rules, laws, money, economics, jobs, hierarchies, politics, government, they’re all purely mental constructs which exist nowhere outside of the mental noises in our heads. If I asked you to point to your knee you could do so instantly and wordlessly, but if I asked you to point to the economy, for example, the closest you could come is using a bunch of linguistic symbols to point to a group of concepts. To show me the economy, you’d have to tell me a story.…"

Caitlin Johnstone — Rogue Journalist
Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix.
Caitlin Johnstone

David F. Ruccio — Socialism or truth

On truth and truthiness.

"We have the ocean in our bucket. We built a special bucket to contain it. So get lost."

Meanwhile, socialism rises.

Occasional Links & Commentary
Socialism or truth
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

Oxford Study: Political Data Mining Companies are Manipulating Elections Around the World — Sharmini Peries interviews Samantha Bradshaw

An extensive new Oxford University study shows that governments, political parties, and NGOs spend well over half a billion dollars around the world to influence elections and public opinion, most of it in a completely unregulated and secretive manner. We speak to the study’s co-author, Samantha Bradshaw….

TRNN
Oxford Study: Political Data Mining Companies are Manipulating Elections Around the World

Sharmini Peries interviews Samantha Bradshaw, senior fellow at the Canadian International Council, where she researches computational propaganda, and a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute, where her dissertation is on the government use of social media to spread disinformation.

William Craddick — CIA Teams Up With Defense Industry To Undermine Korea Negotiations

In a new development that will shock no one, factions within the CIA attempted for the second time in just over a month to undermine President Donald Trump’s peace overtures towards North Korea by leaking information calculated to decrease confidence in Kim Jong Un’s willingness to earnestly negotiate.

On June 29, 2018, NBC News released a report quoting anonymous CIA officials who claimed that North Korea was increasing nuclear production at “secret sites” without providing any actual evidence for such claims. The report’s credibility is further weakened by the fact that it also cited reports from a think tank which has strong connections to the defense industry and other private special interests.

In disseminating their report, the CIA used NBC reporter Ken Dilanian as an outlet for leaks. As Disobedient Mediapreviously reported, Dilanian was outed by the Intercept in 2014 as a CIA asset. In the aftermath of the disclosure, Dilanian’s previous employers at the Tribune Washington and Los Angeles Times disavowed the disgraced journalist. In at least one instance, the CIA’s instructions to Dilanian appears to have led to significant changes in a story that was eventually published in the Los Angeles Times.

Since that time, Dilanian has persisted in pushing articles written by former CIA officials who continue to perpetuate the “Trump-Russia” collusion narrative without any regard to facts, such as Steven Hall’s Washington Post article titled: “I was in the CIA. We wouldn’t trust a country whose leader did what Trump did.”…

Are people still falling for this stuff?

Disobedient Media
CIA Teams Up With Defense Industry To Undermine Korea Negotiations

William Craddick