"They hate us for our freedom" 2.0
The NY Times just posted one of the most atrocious pieces of journalistic malpractice I have ever read.
Less than two weeks before pivotal elections for the European Parliament, a constellation of websites and social media accounts linked to Russia or far-right groups is spreading disinformation, encouraging discord and amplifying distrust in the centrist parties that have governed for decades.European Union investigators, academics and advocacy groups say the new disinformation efforts share many of the same digital fingerprints or tactics used in previous Russian attacks, including the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.
That's a powerful statement.
There's just one problem: the article doesn't present a single bit of proof. Just anecdotes.
In fact, it doesn't even quote anyone to back up these claims, but for one single exception.
“The goal here is bigger than any one election,” said Daniel Jones, a former F.B.I. analyst and Senate investigator whose nonprofit group, Advance Democracy, recently flagged a number of suspicious websites and social media accounts to law enforcement authorities. “It is to constantly divide, increase distrust and undermine our faith in institutions and democracy itself. They’re working to destroy everything that was built post-World War II.”
Russia is why people are losing faith in our government institutions. Not because they are owned by oligarchs.
If you listen closely you can hear President Bush.
So who is Daniel Jones and Advance Democracy? That's an interesting story.
According to a report published this morning, he notes that the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which has received “significant funding” from technology billionaires, funneled $500,000 to the non-profit group Advance Democracy. That organization shares a street address with The Democracy Integrity Project.
That’s because both organizations were founded by former Senate Intel staffer Daniel Jones, who at that time worked for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who hails from just down the road from Silicon Valley in San Francisco. As TruNews has previously reported, those connections to the Senate Intel Committee have played a significant role in the ongoing “Russia Narrative” drama in Washington, D.C.Jones has been previously identified as a central figure in the investigation who served as potential go-between with the committee’s ranking Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner, and former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. That’s because TDIP, which receives significant funding from George Soros, funneled some of that money toward Steele’s research for Fusion GPS that led to the infamous dossier on President Donald Trump.
However, as Ross reports today:
“Mystery surrounds both of Jones’s operations. The identities of both groups’ donors have largely been kept secret, as Jones has avoided revealing his backers.
Nothing to see here.
Just two sketchy political organizations sharing the same street address. Perfectly normal.
“The election has yet to come, and we are already suspected of doing something wrong?” the Russian prime minister, Dmitri A. Medvedev, said in March. “Suspecting someone of an event that has not yet happened is a bunch of paranoid nonsense.”
It's not nonsense. It's scapegoating. There's a difference.
Comments
The Hill forgot Tulsi again
they can't even say it
If you have trouble pronouncing "anti-interventionism",
you lack one of perhaps three must-have skills for being a TV reporter.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
The other skills being
a perky voice and a lack of critical thinking ability? And for women, blonde hair.
"Don't go back to sleep ... Don't go back to sleep ... Don't go back to sleep."
~Rumi
"If you want revolution, be it."
~Caitlin Johnstone
Sorry, sorry tweet on Twitter about Tulsi.
Not a lick of difference between her and Bernie.
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
I assume that the meteoric rise of Farage's Brexit party
over the last couple of weeks, is all down to Putin/bots/funding.
The NYT is very much invested in the post Cold War status quo.
Gëzuar!!
from a reasonably stable genius.
Once again, NYT gets the facts wrong
That would be the Clintons and the Bushes. Both political parties and every POTUS since 1968.
In fact, I believe this is the main reason why the Dems created and are pushing Russiagate so hard. They don't want us looking at what really gave us Trump: the neoliberal neoconservative fiasco of the past 40+ years.
It's also why so many people of my generation (over 60) are having trouble understanding and accepting what's going on. To do so will require letting go of everything they thought was true. That kind of change does not come easy to many people.
I heard someone recently say "We have to elect a Dem or else our post-War advantages will disappear."
Got to wonder where he's been for the past 40 years. That horse left the barn a long time ago.
"Don't go back to sleep ... Don't go back to sleep ... Don't go back to sleep."
~Rumi
"If you want revolution, be it."
~Caitlin Johnstone
Unfortunately people really believe everything they have been
told about Russia and that they interfered with not only our elections, but in so many other countries too. I remember a time when people would insist on seeing the evidence on stuff the intelligence agencies tell them, but ever since Her lost the election they lost their minds. I'll see references to articles that say something, but offer no evidence. Like the one this essay is about.
Plus they tried to kill the Skripals. And the GOP are also under Vlad's thumb. This is why Russia Gate has to be debunked.
People say that Mueller has put to rest the fact that Russia indeed interfered with the election, but all he showed was the FBIs "belief' that they did and that some Russians will ties to Vlad hacked the DNC computers. He didn't interview anyone involved with that as laid out in my recent essay.
I've even seen people who were once against our invasions being okay with them and repeating the party line. Unfuckingbelievable!
I wonder how much of this is residual Millennial Mania
The Year 2000 was not that long ago, and we were bombarded for two decades beforehand with talk of all the dreadful things that might happen, could happen, and some people firmly believed would happen - and then didn't happen. (As it turned out, the most obvious sign of "Y2K" was the "19100" bug that plagued Web pages for months afterward. It was cosmetic and harmless, but annoying.)
I expected it to take about ten years for sanity to return - but it looks like being more like fifty.
And there will probably be some cultists who construct their own "reality" around what didn't happen, like the 1840s Millerites (who spun off the still-extant Seventh Day Adventists).
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
a relative of mine still has stuff cluttering up the
house, stuff that was acquired in order to weather the Great Y2K SHTF moment. the items are all still in the boxes in which UPS delivered them.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
It might be longer
The NYT and WaPoo have new articles out about how bad the dastardly Russians are still interfering with the whole dang country now. And WaPoo had some university do a study on how Russia tried to get people to vote for Bernie and blah, blah,...
I read an article last year saying that Bernie needs to knock off being with the Russia Gaters because he is going to be accused of being in Vlad's pockets anyway. But he's still saying that Trump is under Russia's thumb and that Russia is doing all kinds of bad stuff.
Then there's all the websites like DK, emptyhead, democratic underground and others saying that Mueller confirmed Russia did bad things and maybe if the democrats work harder on their investigations they will find stuff that Mueller missed. I think 10 years is optimistic, but however long it's going to take its going to be too long.
A lit fuse with nothing to stop it
Consider how long it took for Cold War I to finally start to ebb. It took at least a decade, and that was with the memory of a horrendous world war fresh on most minds. Now, we're so insulated from the reality of war, not even allowed reports from the battlefields, much less accurate information and numbers, that we have lost touch with the horror. Evil men such as Bolton spend every minute of every day trying to embroil us in deadly excursions and foreign entanglements. Our "intelligence" agencies are no more than modern versions of the NAZI era Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.
So, yes, it's going to take too long. Short of a miracle, I'm starting to think we're all going to be radioactive ash before Cold War II ends. There was a modicum of restraint with Cold War I; some people had enough sense to realize the end result was nuclear war. That type of sense seems nowhere to be found in Washington, D.C., these days.
the Russians
Fortunately for us ordinary Americans, the Russians really do love their children too.....
[video:https://youtu.be/wHylQRVN2Qs]
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
If Bernie is the nominee
Are they going to say they're both (Bernie and Trump) working with Russia? That would be amusing. I wonder if it would cause any of them to vote third party or not vote at all.
As someone in the industry...
...who was a software development consultant at the time, the reason nothing much happened was that’s lot of people worked their butts off for several years. COBOL programmers were dragged out of retirement and all kinds of goofy OS and library hacks were implemented to reduce the amount of work and risk.
Sometimes freaking out gets the job done!
We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg
Too funny, I hear people say
we must vote Republican to hang on tight to our post-WWII advantages!
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
It did not come easy for me anyway
I spent several years grappling with my fall down the rabbit hole. I started freeing myself from the matrix during #Occupy and towards the end of Obama's first term I was starting to really get it... at least get it enough to know I wasn't voting for him a second time. Then Bernie arrived on the scene and it was music to my ears. That pretty much completed the process for me but it STILL took time and I STILL have places where I "don't believe they are that evil" (twin towers anyone) yet I suspect that in the fullness of time I may yet find that they are in fact that evil.
I have a lot of sympathy for those still caught in the matrix. It's a really good trap. That doesn't change the fact that I see them as my enemy and the enemy of all mankind but I at least understand.
A lot of wanderers in the U.S. political desert recognize that all the duopoly has to offer is a choice of mirages. Come, let us trudge towards empty expanse of sand #1, littered with the bleached bones of Deaniacs and Hope and Changers.
-- lotlizard
I've always been clear on one thing:
Dick Cheney is as evil as any human being I've ever heard of. I doubt whether he's done everything some folks believe he's done -- but not because he isn't evil enough, only because he lacked either the guts or the necessity. I believe he would have fit in perfectly well with Himmler and Goebbels, and he would enthusiastically embraced their approach to getting and wielding power.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
I need to focus better
I had to go back and re-read your comment, as I had subconsciously read
PresidentSecurity Advisor John Bolton rather than what you wrote — Cheney.I mean, you were talking about evil men ...
They really are that evil
Just this century this country has killed a million Iraqis and who knows how many people in the other countries we've invaded? 40,000 Venezuelans died last year because of our sanctions and no matter how many people in Yemen die every day because of the Saudis we will continue supporting them.
Then there's Hiroshima and Nagasaki as aliasalias stated. Oh hell yes they are that evil.
After all the millions of people...
killed and displaced around the Globe by the Empire in just this century alone, so many still can't believe this same government could murder 3000 on 9/11.
Cognitive dissidence doesn't even start to explain it.
The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?
Well, the key issue here
...is the intense access that these privatized propagandists have to the New York Times. And certainly the Times should explain why it freely publishes radical divisive stories that cannot be verified from compromised sources that have previously been exposed as disreputable. This is what Russia is accused of doing, sewing confusion and fear in the US, based on misinformation. Now the New York Times is doing it for them. The fact that a US media outlet is deliberately sabotaging the domestic tranquility with alarming lies is exactly what congress should be investigating. But any congressperson that did so would see their careers destroyed. Congress surrendered to the media monopolies a long time ago.
What we can do is confirm for Americans that they must never trust anything they read in the New York Times and the Washington Post. Remind them of the tragic facts in recent history. The lies that endangers people's lives and disables their intelligence are written between the lines.
Ayup
The NYT and WaPoo and other media are continuing to come up with new stories every day telling us something new that Russia is doing. This is not going away any time soon. Unfortunately.
So Russia is paying the embassy sitters? Or something..
Russia Gate must die.
Excellent essay. Keep 'em coming. n/t
better practice...duck and cover!
...if you see a light brighter than the sun. (1 min)
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMnKNHNfznE]
Don't you think this had a big role in the fear?
I think it is deep in our national psyche... McCarthyism modernized.
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
I can't forget those commercials nor the school drills
with us all getting under our desks or along the walls if we are in the hallway and I don't think any one of us didn't treat this as something critical for us to learn in order to survive.
As a kid that loved riding a bicycle one Public Service announcement I paid careful attention to was the instruction to do if I saw that bright flash which was to throw the bike down and curl up along the curb, I even thought about that problem on unpaved streets.
I remember bomb shelters were advertised a lot and I remember some tv dramas were about people fleeing to their bomb shelter and the dilemma of being only fit to hold a small group but had neighbors, friends and strangers pleading to be let in.
The 'Twilight Zone' series even had one episode where a very wealthy man with a shelter picked certain important people in his life, his school teacher, Priest and others were offered shelter only if they will apologize for things he'd caught criticism for his behavior in his past. Trivial stuff, but he had a screen for them to watch the destruction live.
Long story short, they'd rather die than spend the rest of their lives with him. Especially with all their friends and family gone, so he is alone, goes crazy, runs outside and is found by a policemen to be crying and babbling at a city fountain, in a city that had not been bombed, but for him it had happened and all he could see was destruction around him.
All that aside considering we'd already dropped 'the' bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki those behind all the public warnings and information that was needed in order for people to know how to survive couldn't really believe that nonsense.
Unless they could believe all those dead Japanese would've likely survived if they had ducked under their desks or curled up along a curb, and if that were true they were as loony as the 'Twilight Zone' character.
Yeah if only all those schoolchildren had jumped under their desk before the building and everything around it was obliterated.
Russians post stuff on the World Wide Web. Eeek!
So if you don’t want to see what they post just disconnect from the internet and go back inside your damn bubble.
"Please clap." -- Jeb Bush
In other alarming news....
Today I'm watching the NY Yankees vs Tampa Bay and
in the top of the ninth the screen goes black, the live stream has stopped because the electrical grid the Tropicana had shut down and the stadium was without power for the lights, scoreboard, broadcast, etc. were down.
It took about forty-five minutes for power to be restored but right when it happened I thought it was the stream I was watching so I clicked on other streaming sites and it was on a couple of them I read why all broadcasts were off.
But in the chat box I really couldn't tell if a few were joking or not when they blamed it on the Russians. One in particular didn't look like they were joking as that person repeated the claim a few times.
No kidding, and one lamented that (paraphrasing) 'now the Russians are messing with our National sport'.
THIS is what mainstream media has wrought.
Worse yet
I'd offer that this is what a mainstream media controlled by handful of corporations, reading from a script, has wrought.
Bingo
Any time something happens now people will willingly accept that Russia did something that caused it. See the tweet I posted above. Secret service agents and police are doing nothing as the Guaido goons keeps people from delivering food and stuff to the embassy sitters. One goon tried taking the bag out of a guy's hands and they just watched. One person tried to throw a cucumber and the cops pounced on him, pushed him to the ground and bloodied him up. But Russia is the one who put the embassy sitters into the embassy and is supporting them. SMDH!
Love the projection...
An organization that reports undesirable speech to law enforcement is worried about the undermining of democracy.
Got it.
The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?
It's the other way around this time
A few months ago, I made a comment to someone that it's like we're supposed to hate them (Russia) for their freedoms.