Well, why are you talking to them? They’re nuts…

From an interview with Kim Iskyan, Publisher, Stansberry Churchouse Research

Me: The thing is, a lot of what you read in the media goes through a sort of prism. How do you learn how to sort through it?

Jim Rogers: I'm trying to teach my children – they're still very young – to get information from five or six different sources, preferably contrasting sources, left-wing, right-wing, call them what you will, from different countries and then you figure out what's really happening. If you read the Communists and the Fascists and the Nazis and the Capitalists or the religious, if you read them all, you get all sorts of different views but it'll help you figure out what really happened.

Sometimes, I get interviewed by different kinds of people. A few will say, "Well, why are you talking to them? They're nuts, they're crooks, they're blah, blah," whatever they have to be. And I try to say, "No, no, first of all, the one problem in the world right now is we don't talk to each other. We should be talking to everybody, no matter what you think of them. And second, that's how you get your message out. If you talk to them, they have to listen to you no matter how nuts they are. And also, you can help possibly change the world."
So talk to everybody, read everybody. The weirder the better.

Clickbait News

Article from Charles hugh Smith on www.zerohedge.com about Snesationalist Clickbait that passes for news:

The Old Media followed this nostrum: If it bleeds, it leads, meaning the gory airline crash or auto pile-up was the leading "news story." In an era in which fact-free, evidence-free accusations that just happen to align with CIA agendas are passed off as "news," and anyone who questions the "authorities" is slandered as "promoting fake news" (talk about doublespeak), that promotion of mere gore now seems quaint.

Though the Corporate Media denies it, of course, the lines between propaganda, paid content and actual reporting have blurred. The C.I.A. has played a major role in the Corporate Media for decades. If you doubt this, please study the following:

The CIA and the Media by Carl Bernstein

The CIA and the Media: 50 Facts the World Needs to Know This article by Professor James Tracy first published in August 2015 is of particular relevance in relation to the “fake news” campaign directed against the alternative media.

Operation Mockingbird

www.zerohedge.com

Fake News?

Media outlets that Western elites refer to as “independent” really are not independent.  They are major corporations with inherent conflicts of interest that both determine their output and allow them to peddle it widely.

The most-watched news channel in the US, for example, NBC, has been owned by one of the world’s biggest nuclear weapons manufacturers, and does not like to publicize this or its many other conflicts of interest, even though they might be of some interest to viewers.

But one might argue that we could still call corporate media businesses independent since at first glance they appear to at least be independent of government.  We would have to admit this would be a sneaky move because it would still attempt to downplay the corporate conflicts of interest, but let’s see if it is even accurate to say corporate media are independent of government.

The owners of these corporations are some of the wealthiest people in the US (and world), and as major studies out of US Ivy League universities have amply documented, US government policy is determined not by the US population, but by people in the top tiers of the income scale.  (Chomsky points out the US is “not a democracy, and was not intended to be.”)  So to claim that major corporations are independent of government is also misleading, since major corporations, to a very large extent, are the US government.

Not only do their owners exert major influence over government policy, but people from the highest points in the media corporations also continually cycle between the corporations and influential positions within the government.

Further, as has been amply documented by many journalists including Carl Bernstein, this corporate government clandestinely collaborates with top media corporations to further regulate their output.  Bernstein quotes William B. Bader, a former CIA intelligence officer, who divulges that “[y]ou don’t need to manipulate Time magazine, for example, because there are Agency people at the management level.”

Thus, it seems a bit of a stretch to call the major US media corporations “independent” in any sense of the word.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/12/63811.html

More about ‘Fake News’

First it was fake news that affected the election, then it was run by the ‘Russians’.  Really? After all the shuck & jive from the media, do you really belive this?

This from a media that has been caught accepting CIA money to plant news stories, ‘journalists’ running stories past the politian that they are supposedly covering, and simply publishing government written stories without questioning the motives or explicitly identifying it as government sourced.

The following is a response from one of the fake news writers…

Lone Blogger Rages Against The Washington Post's Russian "Hit List"
// Zero Hedge

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

I have to admit I’m quite honored to see that Liberty Blitzkrieg was recently included on a list of some of the most illustrious, impactful and successful alternative news websites on the planet.

The list was created by an anonymous group of status quo crybabies who simply can’t handle the fact their beloved chosen oligarch was defeated in a democratically held election by Donald Trump (who I didn’t even support). As such, they are lashing out at alternative news outlets deemed most effective in countering the smothering and nonsensical pro-Hillary narrative tirelessly propagated by the fake mainstream news media.

The group in question calls itself PropOrNot, and self-describes in the following manner:

PropOrNot is an independent team of concerned American citizens with a wide range of backgrounds and expertise, including professional experience in computer science, statistics, public policy, and national security affairs. We are currently volunteering time and skills to identify propaganda – particularly Russian propaganda – targeting a U.S. audience. We collect public-record information connecting propaganda outlets to each other and their coordinators abroad, analyze what we find, act as a central repository and point of reference for related information, and organize efforts to oppose it.

We formed PropOrNot as an effort to prevent propaganda from distorting U.S. political and policy discussions. We hope to strengthen our cultural immune systems against hostile influence and improve public discourse generally. However, our immediate aim at this point is to empower the American voter and decrease the ability of Russia to influence the ensuing American election.

Unfortunately, this is apparently all we know so far about this shadowy organization, which is simply hilarious considering the group deems any alternative news source that does not agree with the U.S. government narrative to be either outright Russian propaganda, or “useful idiots.”

Here’s “the list:”

Fake News

williambanzai7

https://youtu.be/uyS3Ghevf2I

Zero Hedge

Once I was a scuba driver in the sea of words, now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Nicholas Carr

Interesting essay by Peggy Noonan on the impact of the internet on politics and journalism. Or maybe the lack of ‘journalism’ i the classic sense.  I have noticed that reporters don’t investigate but raather repeat the press releases.

This year I am seeing something, especially among the young of politics and journalism. They have received most of what they know about political history through screens. They are college graduates, they’re in their 20s or 30s, they’re bright and ambitious, but they have seen the movie and not read the book. They’ve heard the sound bite but not read the speech. Their understanding of history, even recent history, is superficial. They grew up in the internet age and have filled their brainspace with information that came in the form of pictures and sounds. They learned through sensation, not through books, which demand something deeper from your brain. Reading forces you to imagine, question, ponder, reflect. It provides a deeper understanding of political figures and events.

Watching a movie about the Cuban Missile Crisis shows you a drama. Reading about it shows you a dilemma. The book makes you imagine the color, sound, tone and tension, the logic of events: It makes your brain do work. A movie is received passively: You sit back, see, hear. Books demand and reward. When you read them your knowledge base deepens and expands. In time that depth comes to inform your work, sometimes in ways of which you’re not fully conscious.

http://www.peggynoonan.com/the-politics-of-the-shallows/

If you can’t read deeply you will not be able to think deeply. If you can’t think deeply you will not be able to lead well.

Peggy Noonan

So I failed. I was a fool to try.

So I failed. I was a fool to try. I let myself forget that I was dealing with a class of people where the gap between actual and perceived ability is not only wide, but is a gaping chasm. To expect mainstream science reporters to understand science is like asking an environmentalist to be reasonable. I should have remembered most journalists suffer from reporteritis, the degrading ailment whereby because reporters cover important people and events they come believe they are important, too. Sadly, there is no known cure.

William Briggs

This concerns the paper Lord Christopher Monckton, Willie Soon, David Legates and I wrote entitled “Why models run hot“, which carries the good news that we have a potential and likely explanation why climate models perform so badly that they should not be trusted.

Yet instead of celebrating this or at least asking relevant or pertinent questions related to the physics, those of a certain political persuasion panicked. What matters to these sad people is not truth but belief. Only evidence which is consonant with their belief is countenanced. Evidence which questions or refutes their belief isn’t challenged or engaged, instead it is anathematized, and the bearers of the bad tidings are damned and hounded.

Now it is utterly, completely, starkly irrelevant, and obvious to any but a bug-eyed zealot, how the four of us came to our result. It does not matter if Greenpeace itself, as that cult-like organization often does, paid for the writing of the paper. It doesn’t matter if the government, awash as it is in billions, asked us to do the work. It even doesn’t matter if we discovered the results printed small on a Chinese fortune cookie. The result is what and is all that is important.

http://wmbriggs.com/post/15337/

You’ve heard it said that the science is settled. And it’s true. It is settled—settled beyond the possibility of any dispute. A fundamental, inescapable, indubitable bedrock scientific principle is that lousy theories make lousy predictions.

Climate forecasts are lousy, therefore it is settled science that they must necessarily be based on lousy theories. And lousy theories should not be trusted.

William Briggs

No reasonable excuse

Those who go into the law enforcement profession typically do it because they have a desire to shoot minorities,

Elizabethtown News-Enterprise quoted John Ward as saying.

What?

Fortunately this was not the NYT but a local paper. Read the response of a responsible newspaper: Hotair.com

He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.

Confucius

Thirty years ago, the diversity of the world's news media was broad. In 1983, some 50 companies owned "the media" in the US and the world; obviously, with so many companies vying for listeners, viewers and readers, competition was intense -- not just for audience but for advertisers as well.

Fast forward to 2014: That field of media companies has been winnowed down to just a half-dozen companies: Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, Viacom (formerly CBS) and General Electric-owned NBC.

In a word, that's pretty scary

Natural Health News

These corporate behemoths control most of what we watch, hear and read every single day. They own television networks, cable channels, movie studios, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, music labels and even many of our favorite websites. Sadly, most Americans don't even stop to think about who is feeding them the endless hours of news and entertainment that they constantly ingest.

Michael Snyder - Economic Collapse Blog Visit the link to see who owns what…

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

Thomas Jefferson

No honest journalist should be willing to describe himself or herself as 'embedded.' To say, 'I'm an embedded journalist' is to say, 'I'm a government Propagandist.

Noam Chomsky

Why have the data still not been published about the conversations between the air traffic controllers and the pilots of the Boeing? Why haven't the data been presented from the international investigation of the black boxes? Who doesn't want this to happen?

Anatoly Antonov, Deputy Defense Minister

The Telegraph

QF: It is a sad day for American journalism when the real US news is found in the British papers and on RT.

I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.

Christopher Hitchens

Today’s Critical Update

What’s going on…

National security is about keeping illegal conduct concealed from the American public until you're forced to justify it because someone ratted you out.
Joshua Dratel

Owing to technological developments and changes in the political environment, power -- defined crudely as the capacity to kill, destroy, disrupt, cause alarm, and compel society to divert vast resources to security -- is coming into the hands of smaller and smaller groups whose grievances, real or imaginary, it would not always be possible to satisfy. How democracies deal with this, and remain democracies, is one of the major challenges we face in the late twentieth century.
Brian Jenkins

And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that.
John Dalberg Lord Acton

Why we are clueless …

http://youtu.be/Vemh-vw1tuM