I'm on a mission today. (Part of the mission includes searching out a free copy of this book, which comes highly recommended.) Will have something for you tonight...
Quickly: Have you noticed the ferocity of the Trumpist counterattack? I'm seeing it everywhere: The CNN "scandal" seems to have emboldened them. Frankly, I think that CNN's retracted story -- the details of which we still don't know -- probably traces back to an O'Keefe-style sting operation. If the readers know of any evidence along those lines (or, to be fair, counter-evidence), please pass it along!
Meanwhile, there is a concerted effort to paint Comey and Mueller as puppets of Evil Hillary, the Conspiracy Queen. Apparently, we are supposed to believe that Comey's letter helped Hillary.
8 comments:
Comey's letter helped HIllary? Then why isn't Donald Trump crying that he didn't get a letter from Comey because then he probably would have won the popular vote as well. (that was sarcasm). Gosh, that was so easy to write, so that's how they do it on the dark side.
Allesandro, on the dark side, it's not just sarcasm, though it's often used, they love topsy-turvy logic and the complete disregard for truth and facts. Easy to write, endlessly adaptable. That may well be their tempting purple Kool-Aid, as it was for the sophists of old.
Of course it was O'Keefe.
I was so down yesterday. I had a brilliant plan to get together a band of merry Fake Russians and cheerily greet ("Privet!") the $35k a seat donors to Trump's first re-election fundraiser at the Trump Hotel in DC....tonight. Normally, I have zero problems with simply going out as a one-woman protest (in fact, did it in May here in Bmore) but the logistics of getting to DC plus the idea that we could be a troupe, a la Billionaires for Bush, led me to reach out on my neighborhood Facebook groups.
I got a couple of "sorry, I have to work" responses but a ton of young, white rightwing taunts. Of course, all too young to remember Billionaires for Bush, or even Code Pink, back in their more theatrical days. I know way too few creatives here. The activists I do know are too entirely serious for street performance. For the most part I got a string of "gifs" (moving picture memes) indicating I was a nutcase (I responded for them not to be scared because street performers are not generally arrested), but one young man with a heart-warming sense of humor asked me, "Will there be a jumbo-tron? We're powerless without our memes!"
With zero sense of irony one young woman wanted to know why I would want to taunt people (why did her fellow millennials want to taunt me?) and another informed me she was going to donate to Trump. I commiserated that she didn't have a spare 35k or she could attend the fundraiser but she was too thick to get what I meant, probably because I was playing it very straight and chirpy (they are my neighbors, after all). When one guy opined I probably had five cats, I replied "if only!" (I have mice, which I might finally be motivated enough to kill today since I can't taunt Trump donors.)
Anyway, this long story because I was shocked to find out about that CNN retraction. When a couple of these next-generation rightwingers linked me to youtubes of "fake Russian stories" I thought they were just some conspiracy nuts in a bubble. But that CNN retraction is like the Dan Rather ouster and the Comey letter. It's a shitstorm of talking points for the right.
Not sure if this has happened to anyone else, but if you've ever tried to read up on every report of a trending story, you may mess up and hit a link before you realize it's not a reputable source. Your entire computer is invaded with ads and demands to "clean up" your virus and all you can do is shut down the machine. That's what forced me over to Firefox...can't even use my Internet Explorer anymore. I think that's what happened to CNN and the "Pulitzer prize winning" writer. In the frenzy over the Russian story, one of the sources was bogus, as you suspect, Joseph. I was hoping you'd be writing about this, but we're in a heap of pain now because they've managed to discredit the very real, very egregious crimes and collusion. And I had an entire day yesterday seeing how it shuts down minds, once they have a talking point.
I guess the one upside (for me) is that the timing of playacting Russians couldn't be worse, so not being able to troll that damned fundraiser is less of a regret.
Looking forward to hearing your take on that book, Joseph. And let us know if Joe Scarborough is in there. He helped orchestrate the takeover of congress thru school boards, then the move to newsrooms...and the final step involves infiltrating the arts. He used to give lectures on it, plus I overheard a private conversation on it after my intrepid Boston activist friends and I stood up and turned our backs on Katherine Harris at Harvard. I went straight to the hotel pub after we were kicked out and it took them forever to recognize the woman at the bar as one of the protesters, hahaha, when they went for a drink after the event. Maybe I should give lectures on how to protest and infiltrate! Protest needs some future steps. Maybe an online million meme march to bring in the young folk!
Look at what Google have done to the interface on their news aggregator, Google News. They've "optimised the experience for smartphone users", degrading it for people who are used to reading proper-length lines of text.
PREDICTION: soon Google will similarly degrade the experience with their websearch engine for users of any device other than a "smartphone". A smartphone that they and the NSA can track.
I'm predicting Google will make it hard to search the web - with their services or anyone else's - unless you're on a smartphone.
In other news, there are indications that a market crash may be imminent.
1) The arrests of senior figures at Barclays Bank for alleged fraud.
This goes back to the rescue of the British banking system in 2008. When Lloyds and the Royal Bank of Scotland were part-nationalised, bailed out by the British government, Barclays got their bailout money from a foreign government, Qatar.
2) The blockade of Qatar by the Saudi dictatorship rampant.
Th Qatari sovereign wealth fund is bigger than China's and three-fifths as big as Saudi's. Don't tell me there won't be effects in Switzerland and the global banking system.
Thirty years ago, in 1987, in response to US military attack, Iran under the Shiite ayatollahs triggered the crash in which the Dow Jones Industrial Index fell 22.6% in one day. In 2017, could the Salafist dictatorship in Saudi be about to make a similar move?
3) The charges against Vatican finance boss Cardinal Pell.
Thee charges have been issued in Australia. Pell was brought in by Bergoglio as the man who could clean up the Vatican Bank.
Regarding George Pell, the knives are out for his friend, former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott, who is defending Pell against the accusations that he denies.
Abbott is in a major row with Malcolm Turnbull's government over whether Australia should go ahead with the $50bn deal to buy French diesel-powered submarines. He says they should buy nuclear-powered subs from the US.
Australia of course needs no military submarines whatsoever. This is all premised upon a supposed Russian "threat" that was sold in the media ("a Russian fleet off the coast of Brisbane") at the time of the G20 conference in 2014.
Clearly someone thinks they can get a lot of money out of the Australian state treasury on this pretext. Meanwhile Australia has stopped bombing Syria, ostensibly in response to a Russian warning. Watch this space.
b, interesting about Australia, thanks. re: the Google searches, I fear you're right re mobile devices and it dismays me. Interesting thing when I was trying to gather some rabble-rousers for Trump's first re-election fundraiser. Of course, I tried to reach out to Code Pink, although I have not been active when them for some time. I know Medea Benjamin's still around and active. Every aspect of their website was slow as mud, and when I finally got the contact info for Medea, my gmail froze as I was typing in her email. I just rebooted and gave up. We will have to find ways around every roadblock. Too many ways to block.
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