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| McTell News |
This has been going on for decades and is going on daily now too.
The military NSA does not limit its blackmail campaign to government officials, no, it uses some of the data to "influence" the media too.
The following couple of stories will give you a feel for information that is not coming to you if you digest only main stream media data flows (congrats if you are already aware of them).
Nuclear pollution is blanketing the West Coast with surges from time to time:
In fact, a previous alert, from Nov. 26, specifically cited the Fukishima, Japan, nuclear disaster, where a power plant was struck first by an earthquake, then by a tidal wave created by the undersea quake.(Radiation alerts hit U.S. cities). The mysterious die off of certain sea creatures along the West Coast, including those in aquariums, could be related to Fukushima radiation in a direct and/or indirect way:
The organization reports that several of the individual reactors at Fukushima melted down and exploded, releasing massive doses of radiation into the air and water.
Yother said the records show that Seattle, which once was one of the lowest radiation reporting sites in the nation, has been rising ever since the disaster.
“We can tell it has been increasing,” he said.
The mysterious illness has the potential to wipe out all the sea stars along the west coast of North America, said Paula Romagosa, a marine biologist and curator at the Shaw Ocean Discovery Centre in Sidney. “Events like this have happened before but on a much smaller scale. We’ve never seen one of this magnitude.” The die-off of sea stars was first detected in August in small pockets in Howe Sound, off West Vancouver and in Indian Arm. Since then, the extensive die-off has been reported along the shoreline from Alaska to California. [...] The virus affects the animals in different ways. A sea star at the Shaw Ocean Discovery Centre showed it was unwell by developing a bald spot. [...] Others look completely healthy except for their guts coming out in strings. [...] There is speculation that the die-off could be due to water-borne radiation originating from the Fukushima nuclear plant.(West Coast Die Off). It is no secret that the Global Warming induced Climate Change problems require global solutions.
The media impair such solutions when they tend to foster war ideologies which militate against global cooperation ... remember this:
"Iraq is developing a long-range ballistic missile system that could carry weapons of mass destruction up to 700 miles." Iraq is progressing towards "dirty bombs that spew radioactivity, mobile bio-weapons facilities, and a new long-range ballistic missile." An Iraqi defector "tells of work on at least 20 hidden weapons sites." It is an "undisputed fact" that September 11 attacker Mohamed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence officers in Prague.(Guardian, "Media failure..."). I do not think that such media failures are inadvertent, rather, I think that they are substantially deliberate, as they have been for a century:
Those claims appeared in mainstream newspapers during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. All those claims were false. The nonexistence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in Iraq immediately prior to the invasion and the absence of links between Iraq and al-Qaida eventually became the official U.S. position with the Duelfer Report and the report of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
A decade later, those media failures are relevant not only because of the war's six-figure death toll and because the Iraqi per capita GDP has so far failed to return to prewar levels, but also because they remind us that the media, including highly reputable newspapers, can sometimes get things quite wrong.
A similar media failure is arguably under way this very moment with regard to climate change. The most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded with near certainty that human economic activity is responsible for ongoing global warming, and some of the largest insurance companies on the planet have blamed the increase in losses from extreme weather events to climate-related disasters.
This has not kept some newspapers from reporting that Arctic ice is "recovering", a rather adventurous claim in light of the fact that the Arctic has lost 40% of its ice cover since 1980 and that ice extent is now lower than during several millennia preceding 1980. A recent quantitative analysis of climate coverage in the Australian media confirmed that misreporting of the science is widespread.
There are some interesting similarities and differences between the media failures involving Iraqi WMDs and climate change.
One of the most important comments on deceit, I think, was made by Adam Smith. He pointed out that a major goal of business is to deceive and oppress the public.(The Deceit Business). A professor of law at Harvard, Cass Sunstein, wrote a paper during his career, before he came to work for the federal government, that openly advocated infiltration and the like as valid functions of government on any issues the government chooses to label as conspiracy theories:
And one of the striking features of the modern period is the institutionalization of that process, so that we now have huge industries deceiving the public — and they're very conscious about it, the public relations industry. Interestingly, this developed in the freest countries—in Britain and the US — roughly around time of WWI, when it was recognized that enough freedom had been won that people could no longer be controlled by force. So modes of deception and manipulation had to be developed in order to keep them under control" ...
What can government do about conspiracy theories? Among the things it can do, what should it do? We can readily imagine a series of possible responses. (1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories. (3) Government might itself engage in counterspeech, marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy theories. (4) Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in counterspeech. (5) Government might engage in informal communication with such parties, encouraging them to help. Each instrument has a distinctive set of potential effects, or costs and benefits, and each will have a place under imaginable conditions. However, our main policy idea is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories, which involves a mix of (3), (4) and (5).(The Empire Strikes Back). The very idea of addressing problems imposed on society by Oil-Qaeda, so as to develop solutions, does not seem to occur to them.
The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.
