cartoon by Michael Leunig from his fans’ FB page
Paranoia strikes deep.
Into your life it will creep.
It starts when you’re always afraid.
Step out of line, the men come and take you away.
We better stop. Hey, what’s that sound?
Everybody look, what’s going down?
— Stephen Stills, For What It’s Worth
When I was growing up, spies were cool and sexy, and the Russians were just incorrigible demonic Commie bad guys, except for Ilya Kuryakin of course. And then John Le Carré started writing about western spies who were just as deranged, corrupt and ideologically fixated as those from “Communist” nations. I’m sure the CIA was not impressed.
I continue to be amazed at the level of ideological fanaticism and paranoia that the western spooks, led by the CIA and the Pentagon, and firmly in control of both US Tweedle parties, exhibit. As we learn more and more about the number of leaders they assassinated, the number of popular elected governments they overthrew, and the number of nations they destabilized, corrupted and destroyed through sanctions, propaganda, embargoes, blockades and other misdeeds, I am continually shocked and chagrined that I had no idea and the media didn’t tell us about any of this.
Their fanaticism and ruthlessness surely rivals or surpasses that of the most notorious mass murderers of human history. And most of us never had the faintest inkling what was going on. We still know only a small part of what, in collusion with the spooks of other western nations, they did to turn perhaps more than half of the nations of the world into failed states. If I’d heard ten years ago what I know now about their actions, I would have shrugged it off as an impossible, over-the-top conspiracy theory.
Fast forward to ten years ago, when what was then celebrated as the Maidan “colour revolution” turned out, we found out later, to be a US-orchestrated massacre and coup of a democratically-elected government in Ukraine, simply because that government disrupted the CIA/Pentagon plans for NATO expansion and the commensurate destabilization and destruction of Russia.
I’m still a bit dazed about it all. How I could have been so wrong about what was happening. How the media that I (at that time) mostly trusted could have been so utterly complicit in the Empire’s propaganda, censorship, and mis- and disinformation campaigns. How I could have been so credulous as to believe that decades of large-scale, relentless and violent acts of undeclared war and destruction were just boys playing at being spies, just looking for ‘information’, exclusively for defensive purposes, and mostly harmless if a bit over-zealous.
Now that the blinkers are off, I see all the foreign activities of the US Empire, its allies, and their spooks, in a completely different light. And I see the ‘news’ reports in the mainstream media in a completely different light. It takes work and patience to really see through the continuous fog that this undeclared Cold War (which never really ended as we thought and hoped it had), has wrought, and not to start to see conspiracies where there are none.
The tipping point for me was Biden’s blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines, one of the greatest ecological disasters in human history, and a total betrayal of the European members of the Empire. The utterly obvious evidence that it was done by the US, with the full prior knowledge of the administration, was buried under an endless barrage of obfuscation, churned out daily and faithfully by the mainstream western media. Even without the digging of the award-winning Sy Hersh, how could anyone have possibly come to any other conclusion? But we believe what we want to believe, and most of us in the west just don’t want to believe that “our” government could do something so outrageous.
And Nord Stream is just the tip of the iceberg. Almost everything that, in our politicians’ speeches and our media reports, was reportedly done by the Russians in Ukraine and by the Palestinians on October 7th in the occupied territories, has turned out, like the reports of Iraq WMD and the reports of babies being taken off incubators in Kuwait and the hundreds of other outrage-provoking ‘stories’ about the behaviour of the US Empire’s alleged ‘enemies’, to be complete fabrications. Those fabrications are still believed by most in the US and the US Empire thanks to the endless, massive, unrelenting firehose of lies and misinformation aimed at the countries’ bewildered and dumbed-down citizens.
This is not to say that other countries don’t employ propaganda as well. The best known Russian propaganda was the photo and video of fake BLM protesters burning bibles (with large BLM signs conveniently located beside the conflagration, for the benefit of the more dim-witted racist viewers). It worked, but not terribly well. Putin, in his interview with Carlson, admitted that when it comes to propaganda, the US Empire has absolutely no peers.
So now, through this lens of doubting everything I am told by the governments and their compliant media, I’m looking at the two latest events about Russia. I’m doing this keeping in mind the parting statement from the little-too-blabbermouthy uber-imperial-ideologue Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland, the women who orchestrated the Maidan massacre and coup. In that statement she “promised” Putin that her departure would be followed by some acts of “asymmetrical warfare” that he (Putin) would be unprepared for.
And then we had the death of Navalny, the anti-Putin politician, a month before the Russian elections. Of course, US Empire leaders raced to blame Putin for the death, insinuating he was murdered. But now I’m starting to ask a question, whenever a politically inflammatory event occurs and the mainstream media and Empire leaders rush to judgement in the absence of evidence: Who stands to gain? The coroner ruled the death came from natural causes, and they turned the body over to his mother, who could have, if she wished, had a second autopsy performed. He suffered from multiple medical conditions, and prison life is never particularly healthy, in any country.
But the death was a huge embarrassment to Putin. He had nothing to gain from having Navalny killed or deprived of essential medical care, and everything to lose. Navalny was not running in the election. He is by all accounts not very popular in Russia, and he embarrassed Amnesty International after they came to his defence, by issuing a series of inflammatory anti-Muslim racist and xenophobic videos.
Even worse, if the CIA paid someone to kill him, that would make Putin look incompetent, allowing a mole to kill someone in a supervised prison. In fact, one of Navalny’s complaints was that the prison guards videotaping their check-ups on him throughout the night was a form of sleep deprivation torture. Maybe the Russians read about the Epstein case. So: Who stands to gain? Same answer as the Nord Stream pipeline bombings. Certainly not Putin. Navalny’s cause of death probably was just what the death certificate said. But don’t try to tell that to Empire politicians or their media, or the Empire’s befuddled citizens.
And then we had the Moscow concert hall attack, allegedly by four ISIL members from Tajikistan. The staggering bias of the western media was again immediately evident: The CBC subheaded their story “Russian media reported that the men were tortured during interrogation”, and said they “showed signs of severe beatings”. The story contained no information on the motive for the mass slaughter. The “Russian media” that “reported” this torture were not identified, nor was any evidence offered.
But toss aside the western media and you start to get some sense of Who stands to gain. The gunmen fled into a forest near the Ukraine border and were pursued and caught by dozens of Russian police. No surprise that they looked pretty rough in court. That doesn’t mean they weren’t beaten by police. But Who stands to gain if any confession they might now come out with is discounted by the west (and readers of shoddy, biased western media like the CBC) as being merely the result of police torture in prison?
Especially if those confessions are admissions that they were paid a million rubles to do the deed (that was apparently the sum offered, according to non-western sources). And especially if the confessions reveal that, especially as they occurred during Ramadan, the mindless slaughter actually had absolutely nothing to do with ISIL — they were just paid to say they were from ISIL. But then, people will say anything if they’re tortured, so clearly they were just ISIL zealots who hated Russia.
Couldn’t possibly be the “asymmetric warfare” that Nuland warned Putin about just before the attack.
Who stands to gain? If you want to send a warning to someone that you hate, by embarrassing them and committing atrocities against their civilians, that would be you.
Of course Putin is no saint, and the Russian prison system is probably as ghastly as most prison systems, and their cops are probably as brutal and corrupt as cops in many countries.
But just keep asking that question, and the claims and allegations from the Tweedles of US Empire and its vassal states, and the reporting from our unquestioning, compliant and incompetent media start to have a uniformly really bad smell.
It’s really shocking, and dismaying, what we can be made to believe. Especially if it’s nice and neat and ‘good vs evil’ simple, and what we want to believe.
So: Why do I care? So what if the fanatic, paranoid ideologues who control both the Tweedledum and Tweedledee parties in just about all western ‘democracies’ in the US Empire are orchestrating a quiet and undeclared war of terror on anyone who doesn’t fall into line? So what if the media are so corrupt and/or incompetent that they mindlessly scribe the propaganda, mis- and disinformation fed to them, and censor anything that would arouse suspicion?
After all, as I keep saying, we’re all just acting out our conditioning. The Empire ideologues that control all major political parties and all major media believe that the world will not be safe until Russia and China and the entire Mideast and disobedient states in Asia and Africa and Latin America that elect ‘socialists’ are brought into line, made compliant, and absorbed into Empire where they can be controlled by their betters. They’ve been conditioned to believe that all their lives, and will die with that belief.
Why do I care? I guess it’s my own conditioning — I was brought up to deplore cruelty, violence and war, and, above all, to hate liars. And I’m ashamed at having fallen for so many of the lies. This horrific, devastating global ‘Cold War’ has been going on for my whole life, undeclared, under the radar, and under my radar. How can I not have known, not have seen it?
And as this war rages, the larger battle that threatens us all — the accelerating global economic, ecological, political and social collapse we are seeing everywhere — is being ignored. Our collective struggle to come to terms with collapse will depend on our willingness to set aside our differences and work together. And as long as the wars and the lies continue, that cannot happen. And as it’s our conditioning that is continuing to drive the wars and the lies, there is no chance of that changing.
I would have hoped that, in collapse, we would at least show a little dignity, a little humility, a little humanity. One more thing I was foolish to believe. But that’s where we are. It couldn’t have turned out otherwise.
Who stands to gain? This is an important question, but it’s not always easy to interpret the answer.
Who gained from the dissolution of the Soviet Union? Certainly all the people in the countries of Eastern Europe, including the people of Ukraine. Did the US gain anything by the post-dissolution enlargement of NATO and the EU? Perhaps something, but far less than the people directly involved in Europe.
Who gained from the invasion of Ukraine? Not the economies of European countries or any member of NATO. So why would those European countries or any member of NATO want to provoke a Russian invasion? If Russia wins the war, it gains a client state, with a wealth of natural resources, completely subservient to Russia, never to join the EU.
Who gained from the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines? Ukraine retained some gas transit fees and access to gas and US LNG exporters gained a new market. But since both pipelines were not in use anyway and didn’t look like they would ever be used as long as the invasion continued, the gains I mention pre-dated the pipeline explosions. The explosions meant virtually nothing. Nobody gained.
Who gained from Navalny’s death or the attack on the concert hall? With regard to Navalny, Putin clearly gained, whether Navalny was murdered or not. A big thorn in his side was gone (perhaps why he was poisoned in the first place). Nobody gained from 133 dead at a concert. Perhaps that is why the US warned Russia about a possible attack.
We could go back and forth on who stands to gain by these events, but consider this, Dave: how do we know that the Soviet Union dissolved, that Ukraine was invaded, that the pipelines were blown up, that Nalvalny was dead or that a concert attack happened? We know because of mainstream journalism. The so-called 5th estate, internet commentators, know nothing that isn’t already reported on by regular media outlets. They rely on others for the record of events about which they comment, but if they want they can also just make things up, QAnon style.
If you are not going to believe any analyis from the mainstream media, why believe that any of the events reported by them actually happened? It seems to me that your next step must be to go full-on Alex Jones and claim that everything in the news is either a hoax or a false flag operation. Perhaps that ship/bridge collision in Baltimore was faked? Better ask Sy Hersh or Caitlin Johnstone if it actually happened. Sad to say it, but that looks like where you are headed.
Qui bono? Not an important question when you are the Hegemon.
When you run the world’s Empire then you make the rules for everybody but you don’t have to play by any rules.
The psychopaths running the other countries are green with envy to see that their “colleagues” in the Empire are heaving a ball while they lack this magical power.
Of course, when the Empire inevitably goes into decline, things become seriously dangerous for everybody.
The psychopaths on all sides might even have a final ball with lots of fireworks.
Caitlin Johnstone, whom you quote and link to regularly, has been unmasking the U.S.-led empire for years now. Jimmy Dore, whom you never mention, has been showing doggedly that the U.S. and its allies are the world’s worst terrorists, inflicting harm just about everywhere they intervene and projecting on our supposed enemies actions undertaken by the U.S. Tom Engelhardt has been writing at TomDispatch (along with a host of others) for many years about the maniacal depredations of U.S. empire. Andrew Bacevich, a West Point grad and former service member, has written and edited numerous books over a couple decades (at least) chronicling and criticizing U.S. belligerence and warmongering. Those are just the ones off the top of my head. The information is certainly out there. I have modest patience for those fundamentally ignorant of these commentators, but to dismiss their arguments confidently only to come around to their perspectives later is, well, frustrating to witness. So yeah, if the scales have finally fallen from your eyes, what other revelations will you own up to in time?
I didn’t wake up till 2014. Thanks to the shenanigans in Ukraine. I am so glad I did! Better late than never…
Ya can’t know until you know. :-)
What about covid? Still think everything govt did/said about that was true?
“The government” downplayed and dawdled in their CoVid-19 response every step of the way. The national and global public health agencies, massively understaffed and stuffed with incompetent political appointees, completely botched their response, undercutting and overruling public health professionals. The front-line public health professionals (many of whom I know and enormously respect) worked furiously to minimize the damage and unearthed and told the truth all along.
The net result is that at least 15 million people died needlessly from a pandemic because governments impeded the necessary actions until it was too little too late, and because citizens were propagandized by corporate and right-wing groups to ignore the advice of public health professionals, who were overruled by incompetent managers and incompetent and irresponsible politicians.
A complete debacle and a disgraceful squandering of human life because incompetent ideological politicos were in charge of the response, instead of the public health front line professionals who were ready, willing and able to do what needed to be done to shut down the pandemic, but were not allowed to. That’s what I think.
Now these same ideological whack-jobs are encouraging parents to send unvaccinated kids into measles-infested schools, because it’s “their kids, their bodies, their choice”. Monstrous.
Measles — another fake-out scare by Big Pharma… IMO…
there are some really good articles on it floating around…
Will send a link if I come across one again…
Cheers Dave, most people will never admit it. I’ve known some of it since I was a kid because my dad would get drunk and go on rants about the Dulles Brothers, the United Fruit company, the CIA, and a whole lot more. Years later I read Naomi Klein’s 2007 book, ‘The Shock Doctrine’ and I laughed because she sounded like my old man in the mid 1970’s – I kid you not. As for poor Joe, he’s like you used to be – it’s far too painful for him and I’ll wager he has not and will not look at the evidence that backs all your claims 100%. Notice how Joe, like the worst of establishment media said a bunch of shit yet he did not include a single piece of evidence and the Alex Jones dig is their go to guy. The exactly the same response as the establishment media uses – it’s Godwin’s law 2.0.
Only Alex Jones loving lunatics would make such claims about the empire, and their vassal’s and what their intelligence agencies have been doing for decades. How about the Guardian Joe? Are you Gonna claim they are Alex Jones fan boys too?
Now the truth emerges: how the US fuelled the rise of Isis in Syria and Iraq
“The sectarian terror group won’t be defeated by the western states that incubated it in the first place”
“The war on terror, that campaign without end launched 14 years ago by George Bush, is tying itself up in ever more grotesque contortions. On Monday the trial in London of a Swedish man, Bherlin Gildo, accused of terrorism in Syria, collapsed after it became clear British intelligence had been arming the same rebel groups the defendant was charged with supporting.”
“The prosecution abandoned the case, apparently to avoid embarrassing the intelligence services. The defence argued that going ahead with the trial would have been an “affront to justice” when there was plenty of evidence the British state was itself providing “extensive support” to the armed Syrian opposition.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/03/us-isis-syria-iraq
Hey Joe, what about straight from the horses mouth, the CIA themselves?
CIA publicly acknowledges 1953 coup it backed in Iran was undemocratic as it revisits ‘Argo’ rescue
The coup overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and cemented the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
“While revealing new details about one of the most famed CIA operations of all times — the spiriting out of six American diplomats who escaped the 1979 U.S. Embassy seizure in Iran — the intelligence agency for the first time has acknowledged something else as well.
The CIA now officially describes the 1953 coup it backed in Iran that overthrew its prime minister and cemented the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as undemocratic.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/cia-publicly-acknowledges-1953-coup-backed-iran-was-undemocratic-revis-rcna120154
~~
Argo was a piece of shit movie -bad acting and full of more empire lies.
How The CIA Overthrew Iran’s Democracy In 4 Days
https://www.npr.org/2019/01/31/690363402/how-the-cia-overthrew-irans-democracy-in-four-days
The 1979 Iranian revolution and Iran’s shift to a theocracy, is the collateral damage.
For Joe or anyone who thinks it’s conspiracy talk. The empire’s record speaks for itself, so if you have the courage to look at the record, you best make popcorn, because you’ll be up half the night reading. It’s that long and bloody
List of Atrocities committed by US authorities
Definition: An extremely wicked or cruel act, typically one involving physical violence or injury.
“If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don’t care for human beings.” – Nelson Mandela
https://dessalines.github.io/essays/us_atrocities.html
How Hollywood became the unofficial propaganda arm of the U.S. military
Second World War launched Hollywood into a propaganda war that continues to this day
‘Originally published on May 11, 2020. This is the first of a three-part series on IDEAS called Myths on Screen: Hollywood at War.’
“”The head of the Office of War Information was Elmer Davis who said, ‘The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize they’re being propagandized,'” Mirrlees said.
Hollywood had received its marching orders from the military, and during the war, he says, “people who’d been trained to sell soap, cereal and home appliances were now being enlisted by the state to sell war to the American public.”
“Historians and other academics point out that arrangement was the beginning of a uniquely American mission that continues even now. Relationships forged between U.S. government agencies and Hollywood during the Second World War and Cold War shaped how stories about the military are still being told.
“Many of [Hollywood’s] films are embedded in the American military. And made to glorify the American military,” Mirrlees said. “No country in the world churns out as many images of itself as the military hero… like the United States does. That is a unique cultural phenomenon.”
Shaping popular opinion
Films were, and are, the perfect vehicle for shaping popular opinion, largely because seeing a movie provides such a galvanizing, shared experience.
In the 1940s, “something like 90 million Americans [were] going to movies every week,” said Dan O’Meara, a political science professor at the University of Quebec and the co-author of Movies, Myth and the National Security State.”
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-hollywood-became-the-unofficial-propaganda-arm-of-the-u-s-military-1.5560575
~~
From patriotism to recruitment: How Hollywood helped the U.S. military sell the War on Terror
Audiences often unaware they’re watching government propaganda, author Tom Secker says
“As the Twin Towers lay in rubble and the embers continued to smoke for over 100 days, a meeting was taking place.
Pentagon officials and a veritable who’s who of Hollywood producers, directors and screenwriters met in the wake of the attacks, according to Tanner Mirrlees, an associate professor of communication and digital media studies at Ontario Tech University.
“[They] brought all of these people together to brainstorm about future threats and attack scenarios at this U.S. Army-funded Institute for Creative Technologies,”
“From Graham Greene’s 1955 novel The Quiet American to the 2018 television series Jack Ryan, popular culture and film have been fuelled by America’s national security state for almost a century.”
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/from-patriotism-to-recruitment-how-hollywood-helped-the-u-s-military-sell-the-war-on-terror-1.5580543
~~
The CIA’s insidious Hollywood propaganda: New report highlights alarming details about “Zero Dark Thirty”
The award-winning film depicting the death of Osama bin Laden was guided more by the government than we thought
“It makes sense that “Zero Dark Thirty” comes off like it was written at CIA headquarters, and that’s because, for all intents and purposes, it was.
With each passing year, the story surrounding the making of “Zero Dark Thirty” becomes tawdrier and tawdrier. We already knew that the CIA helped shape the narrative of the film, Now, thanks to an inspector general’s report about “Zero Dark Thirty” unearthed by Vice’s Jason Leopold and Ky Henderson, we know that the relationship between the agency and the filmmakers was even closer than previously disclosed.
Leopold and Henderson’s reporting makes it clear that the CIA was involved at every single stage of the filmmaking process, and that that was exactly how Bigelow and writer Mark Boal wanted it to be. The duo “won unprecedented access to secret details about the bin Laden operation, and…got agency officers and officials to review and critique the ‘ZDT’ script,” among other things, they write. Bigelow and Boal also took CIA agents out for meals and tried to ply them with expensive gifts; some of this back-and-forth wound up coming dangerously close the agency’s own internal rules.”
https://www.salon.com/2015/09/11/the_cias_insidious_hollywood_propaganda_new_report_highlights_alarming_details_about_zero_dark_thirty/
The CIA’s Mop-Up Man: L.A. Times Reporter Cleared Stories With Agency Before Publication
A Los Angeles Times intelligence reporter routinely submitted story drafts to the CIA for review.
“Email exchanges between CIA public affairs officers and Ken Dilanian, now an Associated Press intelligence reporter who previously covered the CIA for the Times, show that Dilanian enjoyed a closely collaborative relationship with the agency, explicitly promising positive news coverage and sometimes sending the press office entire story drafts for review prior to publication. In at least one instance, the CIA’s reaction appears to have led to significant changes in the story that was eventually published in the Times.
“I’m working on a story about congressional oversight of drone strikes that can present a good opportunity for you guys,” Dilanian wrote in one email to a CIA press officer, explaining that what he intended to report would be “reassuring to the public” about CIA drone strikes. In another, after a series of back-and-forth emails about a pending story on CIA operations in Yemen, he sent a full draft of an unpublished report along with the subject line, “does this look better?” In another, he directly asks the flack: “You wouldn’t put out disinformation on this, would you?”
“Dilanian’s emails were included in hundreds of pages of documents that the CIA turned over in response to two FOIA requests seeking records on the agency’s interactions with reporters. They include email exchanges with reporters for the Associated Press, Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other outlets. In addition to Dilanian’s deferential relationship with the CIA’s press handlers, the documents show that the agency regularly invites journalists to its McLean, Va., headquarters for briefings and other events. Reporters who have addressed the CIA include the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius, the former ombudsmen for the New York Times, NPR, and Washington Post, and Fox News’ Brett Baier, Juan Williams, and Catherine Herridge.”
https://theintercept.com/2014/09/04/former-l-times-reporter-cleared-stories-cia-publication/
Just exactly how deep is the rabbit hole? I do not know, but I could go days listing one piece of evidence/example after another.
Hot off the press.
Global Warming Acceleration: Hope vs Hopium
29 March 2024
James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha
“Accumulating evidence supports the interpretation in our Pipeline paper: decreasing human-made aerosols increased Earth’s energy imbalance and accelerated global warming in the past decade. Climate sensitivity and aerosol forcing, physically independent quantities, were tied together by
United Nations IPCC climate assessments that rely excessively on global climate models (GCMs) and fail to measure climate forcing by aerosols. IPCC’s best estimates for climate sensitivity and aerosol forcing both understate reality. Preservation of global shorelines and global climate patterns – the world humanity is adapted to – likely will require at least partly reversing global warming. Required actions and time scale are undefined. A bright future for today’s young people
is still possible, but its attainment is hampered by precatory (wishful thinking) policies that do not realistically account for global energy needs and aspirations of nations with emerging economies. An alternative is needed to the GCM-dominated perspective on climate science. We will bear a heavy burden if we stand silent or meek as the world continues on its present course.
Our paper, Global Warming in the Pipeline,1 was greeted by a few scientists, among the mostactive in communication with the public, with denial. Our friend Michael Mann, e.g., with alarge public following, refused to concede that global warming is accelerating. We mention Mike because we know that he won’t take this notation personally.Accelerated global warming is the first significant change of global warming rate since 1970.It is important because it confirms the futility of “net zero” hopium that serves as present energy policy and because we are running short of time to avoid passing the point of no return. We will focus on advancing our research now and completing Sophie’s Planet in 2024, so we must limit our interactions this year. We will send out updates every other month for the remainder of this year, as described in a recent note. This is the March update”
https://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2024/Hopium.MarchEmail.2024.03.29.pdf
Climate change is not the only thing the rightwing, BIG money denier scum went after.
They duped millions. Scratch a climate change denier and you will likely find an anti vaxxer. The deniers sound the same because the same people manufactured both propaganda campaigns.
How The Koch Network Hijacked The War On COVID
As Omicron surges, a shadowy institute filled with fringe doctors appears to be part of big business’ two-year strategy to legitimize attacks on pandemic interventions.
“Earlier this month, as the Omicron variant began to spread, a small liberal arts school on a tree-lined campus in Michigan called Hillsdale College announced it was launching an Academy for Science and Freedom to “educate the American people about the free exchange of scientific ideas and the proper relationship between freedom and science in the pursuit of truth.”
The academy was inspired by the pandemic. “As we reflect on the worst public health fiasco in history, our pandemic response has unveiled serious issues with how science is administered,” noted the college president in a press release.
But the venture isn’t exactly an effort to apply science to the COVID-19 crisis. The so-called “fiasco” was government pandemic measures like mask and vaccine mandates, contact tracing, and lockdowns.
Hillsdale is a conservative Christian institution with ties to the Trump administration. And the scholars behind the academy — Scott Atlas, Jay Bhattacharya, and Martin Kulldorff — are connected to right-wing dark money attacking public health measures.
The trio also has ties to the Great Barrington Declaration, a widely-rebuked yet influential missive that encouraged governments to adopt a “herd immunity” policy letting COVID-19 spread largely unchecked, even as the virus has killed more than 800,000 Americans.”
https://www.levernews.com/how-the-koch-network-hijacked-the-war-on-covid/
Deniers of all kinds are easy to spot. They make claims, but rarely provide any evidence.
Famous,
I’m well aware of how nefarious the CIA and NSA can be, and how many covert and overt military actions of the US were totally unjustified, even evil. The invasion of Iraq was probably the biggest US mistake of this century and Mandela was right to call out Blair and Bush for even proposing it. I just think that sometimes it’s too easy for people to blame the US for everything bad that happens in the world. Other countries do bad things too.
I read widely, from what I consider to be fairly reliable sources. Sometimes a news source will have an orientation that is really stupid (the Economist’s fetish about economic growth, for example), but I still find it worth reading for its good reporting. I’m 75 years old, have traveled widely and lived abroad for four years, and I think I am a pretty good judge of bullshit vs sound analysis. I’m perfectly comfortable with my assessment of important issues in the world today. I’m certainly averting my eyes from the “truth” because it is so painful.
Dave is a great and prolific writer. I wholeheartedly agree with Dave on many things, from his take on Covid policy, the basic “no free will” issue, and virtually all of his analysis of our collapsing civilization, but there are some things where I beg to differ. That’s something that grownups should be able to do without too much difficulty or hard feelings. That all of the mainstream media output is “an unrelenting firehose of lies” is just one of those things with which I don’t agree, but it’s not follower-killing. I still look forward to his posts.
I’ve closed comments for this post and deleted a couple of comments that were getting a bit out of hand.