A study done a few years ago showed that over 2/3rds of international affairs stories in major European newspapers were basically reprints of NYT articles, tweaked lightly for localization purposes. The major media outlets all sing from the same hymn sheet and the CIA and other western intel operations knows that any story they feed into the system will be reproduced around the globe and taken as ‘fact’ by most of the newspapers’ readers.

The media’s incestuous nature and its infiltration by the intelligence services really became apparent during the Syrian Civil War and the Trump presidency. It is now clear that the western mainstream media works with the spooks to shape and mold opinion, and manufacture consent, rather than innocently informing its readers about world events.

The rise of the now often used insult “conspiracy theorist”, which is really code for “dissenting opinion”, is closely related to this. The western liberal democracies are going totalitarian in real time as the window of “acceptable” opinion continues to shrink and the establishment finds new ways to censor, ban and stifle heretical thinking.

Almost all print media has been run at a loss for the last fifteen years, as publishers “adapt” to a digital publishing model. It astonished me too that money losing businesses would continue operating at almost full speed. Tom explains the current media business model:

News publishers are all loss leaders. Their goal is to provide the daily bread of propaganda to feed the masses. As Craig Murray recent tweet puts it “the Press is not a genuine commercial enterprise. It is a loss maker on which billionaires are happy to splash money to produce propaganda for tax, regulatory and governmental regimes that aid billionaires’ wider interests.”.

The Epoch Times has recently been spending a lot of money on adds on you tube and I received in my mail box a copy of their rag just before Christmas. Propaganda works and you can see the results with “half of the US population chanting Russia did it and the other half China did it”. This sort of stupidity could get us all killed.

For mainstreamers winding up their conspiracy theory rattles, Antiwar7 reminds us that people who used to work in the CIA and the NSA (Edward Snowden) confirm the above.

Former senior CIA official John Stockwell discusses how the CIA would place false reports in newspapers around the world, including in the Washington Post. Stories that were complete fabrications, that were attacking their enemies, like Cuba.

What a courageous man Stockwell is, to give up his career, his support network, and invite attacks from one of the most dangerous organizations around.

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Contributor Red Ryder met Stockwell personally:

He’s a terrific guy. Working for the NSC in the White House, he created the false stories about the Cuban soldiers raping nuns in Angola. That was his job. He’s been around in public since the ’80s but never got any Media attention.

He also was CIA officer in the Vietnam Highlands working with the Hmong against the government. He married a Vietnamese. When the US pullout was ordered he was also ordered to sacrifice 150 agents in the Highlands who worked for him. The US wouldn’t take them out.

His book “In Search of Enemies” is vital to read. He testified to Congress about the machinations of Henry Kissinger that were illegal, antithetical to US best interests, but no one gave a damn. Left him out on the limb. John Stockwell is a great voice of the Truth. A good man.

Ironic that a man who committed these crimes could be considered a voice of the truth and a good man. On the other hand, think of all those who commit war crimes and never give it a second thought.

As a former international journalist, I can confirm from first hand experience in Moscow that the news day for all the major television networks starts from the New York Times. The NYT in turn was in close communication with the State Department when I was working. It appears the NYT works more directly with DoD and CIA sources.

I know it’s hard to accept that you are lied to every day when you pick up the paper or turn on the television. It’s all part of a huge fabric of lies. Even back then journalists who told too much truth would quickly find themselves unemployed. I don’t much like The Matrix films (my partner Lucia loves them) but what the Wachowskis did get right was the red-blue pill model. So few people choose the red pill. Most people sleepwalk through life believing lies from the day they are born until the day they die. Quite sad really to spend one’s life taking sleeping pills.

Edward Snowden in some ways is a modern day Christ. He gave up his happy life at the center of NSA contracting and American prosperity to try to bring the truth to people. And almost no one wants to believe him, or even really cares, particularly in the United States. Now he must spend his life trapped in Russia, a country for which he has little affinity. Why? For telling us the truth behind the CIA and NSA lies about the extent to which our privacy and our lives have been violated.

Frankly, Edward should loosen up a little and enjoy life in Russia more. If you learned to code competently, you can learn Russian too. We only live once: enjoy it.

Everyone else – please wake up. Think of the improved dinner conversation – table talk with zombies is crushingly dull.

Paint the Russians as poisoners and you only have to sacrifice a pawn for a new round of sanctions. The timing here makes it more than obvious that a Navalny poisoning would be to help US policy. This month has been taken up with the attempt at overturning the Belarussian state (it’s early in that game yet, there’s some more moves to be made but they depend on putting the Russians on their back heel) and sabotaging Nord Stream II.

Poisoning your own man at risk of death and/or lifetime disability is a substantial sacrifice to make, but to a cynical imperialist mind well worth it to either win Belorussia, shut down Nord Stream II or even both.

Micron makes the medical case in more detail.

I do not really see the point of delving into complicated medicinal debates. Even if one of us here was a qualified MD, even a doctor would need to have access to the patient’s records to have an informed opinion. So, we are all shooting in the dark anyway.

The problem is intractable. Russophobes will never trust the Russian doctors and results of tests done in Russia, as nobody can fully exclude falsification or political pressure.

Sane people (sorry, I meant non-russophobes) will not trust Germany either. I mean, Navalny was practically given a BND escort and Angela Merkel’s spokesman has already gone on the record accusing Russia in an underhanded way. How can you trust whatever the German doctors will say, in an hospital a few hundred meters from Germany’s political decision centers and literally swarming with BND operatives ? Which doctor will have the guts to contradict political leadership and risk being found at the bottom of the Spree in a few weeks ?

Only conclusion is that the beliefs that Navalny was or was not poisoned are equally infalsifiable and cannot be proven. I do not see what could be admitted as conclusive proof by all the parties.

So we can only fall back to the good old cui bono analysis. And here, simple logic dictates that poisoning Navalny is easily the worst move of the decade for Russia, at the worst possible time : when Russia is trying to stabilize the Belarusian situation, as well as completing Nord Stream II pipeline. We are asked to believe that Putin basically said “hey you know what, screw the international situation and my carefully nurtured strategic projects, I absolutely need to eliminate a guy who polls at around 2% for some elections no one outside Russia cares about, and which my party would have won anyway”. The same guy who for years has gone out of his way to appease Turkey in Syria, and has systematically been extremely cautious in the Donbass despite half of Russia clamouring for annexation.

When faced with all this, the only answers I saw until now from MSM/Russophobes are either
1. Putin doesn’t care about international opinion, he kills whomever he wants. Sure, then why doesn’t Putin annex Donbass, or bomb the Turkish military to smithereenr, or kill dozens of guys much more nefarious and influential than Navalny ?
2. Putin is just an evil madman.

It’s a testament to the West’s extraordinary propaganda machine that there are still people who can utter or imply such insanities without being laughed out of the room.

Any one silly enough to blame the Russian government for what happened to Alexey Navalny has either not been paying attention or is deliberating disseminating false information. Both type of players are useful to the US propaganda war on Russia (and China and Iran and Venezuela). The US list of evil enemies is becoming awfully long. Heck, long time targets Cuba and North Korea and Syria had to be temporarily shelved to leave enough attention for those four.

Imagine being a US asset now though. You would have to wonder when your masters are coming for you, when your sacrifice will be considered worthwhile.

Iconoclast422 points out the ludicrous hypocrisy of the US anti-communist, pro-capitalist, semi-libertarian cheerleaders:

You got AMZN forcing it’s small business competition to close, you got AAPL blocking its competition from even entering the market at all. And they call this capitalism.

Philipat answers that what we live under now is not capitalism but fascism:

Free market capitalism died years ago, what we have now is fascism. That’s a major reason why the new generations are so unhappy; they see enormous wealth inequality and have never known the opportunities created by free market capitalism. Just as importantly, they have never known the scourge of communism.

I might argue with the term fascism, it looks more like corporate plutocracy on the surface to me. Corporations enjoy the same rights as people but do no carry the same level of personal responsibility, corporations can fund and interced in electoral campaigns. The US is run by the wealthy, for the wealthy.

Mike1010 suggests all tech is compromised and that one needs to choose one’s master.

Edward Snowden has revealed a long time ago that US spy agencies have been spying on the whole world. This means that non-Chinese made equipment is probably compromised by US spy agencies.

All equipment is probably compromised either by the US government or the Chinese government. So, you can only decide if being spied on by the US government or the Chinese government is worse for you.

If you are doing some kind of black market thing or avoiding taxes in USA, then I’d say that being spied on by the US government is probably worse for you. You’d be better off getting Chinese phones and equipment to avoid being spied on by the US government.

But if you live in Hong Kong or some place where the Chinese government has some influence and control, and you are saying and doing things against the Chinese government, then you definitely should get US made equipment.

The US government has a much wider reach and a lot more influence around the world, than China. So, if you are traveling around, then you are probably better off using a Chinese made phone. Although even in this case, there is no guarantee that some US spy agency didn’t tamper with your phone during its shipment from China.

I partially agree with him, that as a citizen of Empire, I should not possess empire’s devices as they can and will be used against me if the occasion arises. We all keep far too much personal data on our mobile phones and connected devices (tablets/iPads, computers). On the other hand, the CIA and NSA are combing every single Huawei, TP-Link and ZTE device for compromised code and backdoors. They’d urgently like to announce these backdoors and have to make do with made up stories, seeking malice in holes in core open-source network libraries like Telnet.

Metachron, also feels he has more to fear from domestic American security agencies than the Chinese.

I have a Huawei P30 handset purchased in Canada – an excellent, high-performance phone, still running Android. I figure if the Chinese are spying on me through a chip back channel, its better than the NSA. I don’t have much that the Chinese can use, and they aren’t coming after me. The USA, on the other hand, I’d shut off at the source.

I would reset the phone to the Aurora OS if I could. At least then you might have the freedom to hack and update your own device. Remember when you could do that with Android? Didn’t last long I know.

Yes, the excitement with Android in the beginning is that unlike the iPhone, it would be free and open. Instead it changes radically with every iteration making it almost impossible to keep applications up to date and secure. The Google Play Store is steadily more and more locked down against any applications which will interfere with government prying and/or Google advertising.

What we really need is a mobile OS which is simple, reliable and secure. The only country still building that kind of technology is Russia. The Western way, at least as far as Silicon Valley has taught us, is to try to build products so complicated and proprietary that we can keep our competitors and users from ever understanding them, let alone build on them.

By “we”, I mean free-thinking citizens of empire who value their privacy. It’s astonishing the best we can do for a mobile OS is LineageOS or /e/, both simply de-Googlised versions of Android, ported to a select range of hardware. The work Gaël Duval and the LineageOS development team are doing is admirable and invaluable (/e/ is the fastest affordable path to a secure and private smart phone) but their work remains too close to source, and hence intrinsically vulnerable.

The reason Assange was dragged out of the Embassy this week is that the US had finally given up waiting for the exit of the UK from the EU (no deal Brexit should have taken place last week) and will have to take its chances against EU courts whose standards for human rights – for better or worse – are much higher than those of the United States or Great Britain.

When I was in high school, the USSR was infamous for its persecution of dissidents like writers and thinkers Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov and Vasily Aksyonov. When I grew up, the United States has become infamous for its persecution of dissidents (‘whistleblowers’), suspension of habeas corpus, violation of the Geneva Convention (‘enemy combatants’ and waterboarding) and its executions without trial (drone strikes). In contrast, Russia is now well known for its systematic advocacy for international law and national sovereignty.

What a curious world we live in.