I still remember my brother coming home with a cell phone.
It looked like a brick and weighed as much. But hell, was it cool. That was in the late 90’s.
The world today is almost unrecognisable in comparison.
Today, people are hyper connected all the time – streaming Kim Kardashian bending over in her yoga pants or listening to Justin Bieber (why, I cannot fathom). Using some app to help park the car, another to book a hotel, yet another to organise flight schedules, and – when the novelty of all of those has worn off – an app to organise getting laid. Revolutionary stuff!
And if that weren’t enough, while all this is going on you can wear a Fitbit which will record every minuscule thing you do and feed this information back to any device of your choosing in order for you to quantify just exactly how fat and appallingly lazy you actually are.
Not only that but we’ve not even begun to discuss the homes, shopping centres, airports, etc. all regulated with sensors controlling climate, security systems, and so on.
Now, I’ll readily admit to having almost none of these gadgets, partly because I’m mean and partly because I like to keep my life simple. 90% of this stuff doesn’t do that for me.
The other reason is experience has taught me that when the new iAnything comes out it costs $1.8bn new and within 24 months you can get it for a few hundred bucks – Moore’s law being what it is. And by then, I’ve determined I don’t really want it anyway. Problem solved.
Twenty years ago, we all thought we’d be in flying cars by now. Instead we got the smartphone, exquisitely designed to build the next generation of hunchbacks.
There is a beacon of light at the end of this tunnel, though.
Two things:
Turn off the meaningless junk and recapture your life, and
Realise nobody else will, which means that we’re dealing with a growth industry. Excellent!
Tell me, how dependent are you on technology?
Think about it seriously and remember that almost EVERYTHING is connected. Look around you and you’ll realise that EVERYONE is connected.
Take a look at this:
Did you know the IOT was this large? I didn’t.
Think about those 50+ billion connected devices – each of them a vulnerability point for breach of data.
As I’ve written recently, security is an area where nowhere near enough money is being spent. This will change.
Ok, so that’s the corporate sector. And remember for many companies simply admitting to hacks taking place renders them less trustworthy in the eyes of the consumer. Most CEOs would sooner admit to genital warts than admit to data breaches. Industry experts suggest the actual number of hacks taking place are far higher than being reported. I don’t doubt them.
Government
Chairman Trump isn’t the only guy to see that cyber security is important. Certainly Hillary figured that one out. It may have even contributed to her losing the election. Here’s what Trump says about cyber security:
“I will make certain that our military is the best in the world in both cyber offense and defense. I will also ask my Secretary of Defense and Joint Chiefs to present recommendations for strengthening and augmenting our Cyber Command.”
He goes on to say:
“To enhance the defense of the other agencies of government, including our law enforcement agencies, we will put together a team of the best military, civilian and private sector cybersecurity experts to comprehensively review all of our cybersecurity systems and technology.”
What Can We Do?
On a personal level we should be protecting ourselves. Get rid of the crap that brings no value to your life. Simply not using something reduces personal risk.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then I strongly suggest watching Snowden and Citizenfour, and jumping online to watch videos given by hackers. You’ll quickly realise how vulnerable we all are.
The simple stuff like using a firewall, anti-virus software, never using public Wi-Fi, and always using a VPN should be mandatory for any device we use. It’s just so easy to use public Wi-Fi, neglect using a VPN, but the risks are asymmetric to the downside. Like wearing a seatbelt, it doesn’t matter until, well, until it does.
Will this protect you from being hacked or your history being recorded and archived? No, but it’ll substantially decrease the risks.
Out of those listed topics above, the only one I’ve had some issues with over the years has been the use of VPNs. I’ve used a number of different ones and, like anything, some work better than others, often depending on your location. I recently found what is I think the best I’ve used so far, but whatever you use, I think using a firewall, anti-virus software, and then neglecting a VPN is silly.
How to Invest
While I’m not sure this qualifies as asymmetric in nature I do think that we’re looking at a growth industry.
Here is a good resource with a host of forecasts and trends in the IOT industry.
Estimates of the current size of the IOT market range from $600 billion to $900 billion. Even if we’re working at the low end of that range, consider that the two largest ETFs in the cyber security space total a combined $870 million. That’s it.
That’s nothing!
Heck, Enron On Wheels’ market cap is now north of $50 billion and they make cars (barely) with other peoples’ parts. I’d gladly pair trade these over the next decade. Long HACK and CIBR and short TSLA.
In any event, here’s HACK:
And CIBR:
There are pros and cons to them. HACK has more liquidity, is larger in size but charges a higher expense ratio than CIBR.
Why look at ETFs?
Remember Betamax? Killed by VHS which DVDs then sent to the grave.
You want to be involved in the growth of the sector but unless you are going to dedicate your time to really understanding all the movers and shakers in that sector, diligencing balance sheets, earnings statements, competing technologies, and the like, then you’re better off making a sector bet.
If you want a set and forget play, then buying the ETF means you’re just making a sectorial bet not betting on Betamax in 1977 just as VHS was being released.
Either way, cyber security is likely to do really well over the coming years. It’s a war hedge, an innovation play, and, as long as the IOT space continues to grow cyber security, will become an increasingly required service sector.
– Chris
“There are only two types of companies. Those that have been hacked and those that will be.” — Robert Mueller, FBI Director 2012
Chinese diplomatic analysts believe further nuclear tests by North Korea could push Beijing over the edge, prompting an oil embargo that would deal a devastating blow to Pyongyang’s stability.
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told Fox News that he had been informed that “China would be taking sanctions actions on their own,” should Pyongyang conduct another nuclear test.
“Crude oil is very likely to be included as part of new U.N. sanctions if North Korea continues with its provocative nuclear tests, and China will almost certainly endorse such an effort,” Sun Xingjie, an expert on North Korea from Jilin University said on the matter.
International sanctions against North Korea have been in place for the past several years, with the most recent United Nations-backed round targeting the country’s shipping network. A Chinese oil embargo would likely debilitate Kin Jong-un’s government.
“Instead of an oil embargo of just one or two months, which is unlikely to have a major impact on North Korea’s strategic oil reserves, we are talking about a halt in Chinese crude oil supplies for at least six months. That would be a real nightmare for Kim,” said Sun.
The expert said Beijing would likely require a mandate from the U.N. to take new actions against Pyongyang absent further nuclear activity.
Gasoline prices in North Korea jumped by as much as 83 percent this week on the back of reports that China is mulling over crude sanctions for the unruly neighbor.
While China has historically supported—above all—the stability of the Pyongyang regime as a means of avoiding a refugee crisis should the political system there collapse, now it is putting equal weight on regime stability and the denuclearization of that same regime.
Ever since the stunning 2016 election caught them off-guard, Democrats, who expected to quickly fall in-line behind their new leader Hillary Clinton, have been struggling to identify a new party leader or even a cohesive message to rally around. Meanwhile, in light of the sudden power vacuum and the fact that Bernie Sanders was clearly sabotaged during the primary process, the Democratic party, much like Republicans and the Freedom Caucus, seems to be splintering before our eyes with the more “progressive” elements of the party increasingly distancing themselves from the more moderate voices.
And, as the in-fighting ramps up, it seems that Elizabeth Warren is quickly emerging as the leader of the far-left movement. In fact, she has become increasingly critical of President Obama in recent days with her most recent attack coming via an interview with the Guardian in which she suggested that Obama was disconnected from the woes of the working class people of the United States who are “getting kicked in the teeth” after 8 years of his rule.
“I think President Obama, like many others in both parties, talk about a set of big national statistics that look shiny and great but increasingly have giant blind spots,” she told the Guardian. “That GDP, unemployment, no longer reflect the lived experiences of most Americans.
“And the lived experiences of most Americans is that they are being left behind in this economy. Worse than being left behind, they’re getting kicked in the teeth.”
Of course, this latest attack came just days after Warren trashed Obama for taking a $400,000 pay day for a single wall street speech.
“I was troubled by that…the influence of money – I describe it as a snake that slithers through Washington.”
Meanwhile, Warren went even one step further by lumping many in her own party with Republicans who have “thrown their lot in with the rich and the powerful.”
The senator went on take a swipe at members of
her own party while describing the collapse of old distinctions between
left and right. “I think there are real differences between the
Republicans and the Democrats here in the United States,” she said. “The
Republicans have clearly thrown their lot in with the rich and the
powerful, but so have a lot of Democrats.”
Of course, with rumors of her interest in a 2020 run swirling, Warren also took the opportunity to trash Trump for all his flip-flopping and taking away “healthcare coverage for 24 million people” so that he could provide “tax cuts for a handful of millionaires and billionaires.”
“I think what Donald Trump did was he said, ‘The system is rigged and I will be out there for working people every single day; that is my first priority,’” she said. “He got elected and did a 180-degree turn, headed in the exactly the opposite direction.
“He put millionaires and billionaires in charge of his government; he has signed off on one law after another to make it easier for government contractors to steal people’s wages, to make it easier for corporations to hide it when they kill or maim their employees, to make it easier for investment advisers to cheat retirees.”
The prime example, she said, was Trump’s attempt to repeal and replace Obama’s signature healthcare legislation, the Affordable Care Act.
“It was like in a microcosm,” she said. “If you want one emblematic what does he really stand for, who does he really work for? It was take away healthcare coverage for 24 million people, raise costs for a lot of working families. Why? So that he could produce tax cuts for a handful of millionaires and billionaires.”
For some reason we suspect a 2020 Trump/Warren match-up would be quite entertaining…
Pocahontas is at it again! Goofy Elizabeth Warren, one of the least productive U.S. Senators, has a nasty mouth. Hope she is V.P. choice.
While one can debate if last week’s failed attempt by Trump to pass the GOP healthcare vote before the expiration of his 100 days in office counts as attempt #2 by the administration to repeal Obamacare, the Republicans are now back to square one, because based on the latest whip count by The Hill, the GOP again appears to lack sufficient votes to pass its Healthcare bill in the House, despite earlier reports from GOP leaders and the White House that it might be approved by the lower chamber this week.
The Hill’s most recent whip list reveals 22 Republicans – mostly moderates – who oppose the bill, the maximum number of GOP defections that can be afforded, meaning the GOP is just one vote away from another failure.
The latest Republican to announce his opposition is Rep. Billy Long (Mo.), a staunch conservative who often says he was “Tea Party before Tea Party was cool.” He told The Hill he wouldn’t support the bill because of the impact it could have on people with preexisting conditions.
“I have always stated that one of the few good things about ObamaCare is that people with pre-existing conditions would be covered,” Long said in a statement to The Hill. “The MacArthur amendment strips away any guarantee that pre-existing conditions would be covered and affordable.”
Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Daniel Webster of Florida and Chris Smith of New Jersey will also vote against the current bill, making their decisions public in succession Monday afternoon.
Adding to the confusion, Trump himself, who earlier in the day was optimistic the House could pass a bill Wednesday, “muddied the waters” by suggesting the measure may still be changed. “I want it to be good for sick people. It’s not in its final form right now,” he said during an Oval Office interview Monday with Bloomberg News. “It will be every bit as good on pre-existing conditions as Obamacare.” Heading into a Republican whip meeting Monday afternoon, some of the members going in still didn’t know how they would personally vote for the health care bill: Reps. Kevin Yoder, David Valadao, Erik Paulson, Elise Stefanik, and Adam Kinzinger all were undecided.
As a reminder, the fight over how pre-existing conditions are covered is at the center of the fight. Trump said Sunday the White House is pushing forward, and that the GOP plan “guarantees” coverage for Americans with pre-existing conditions. “Pre-existing conditions are in the bill. And I mandate it. I said, ‘Has to be,'” Trump said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday.
An amendment authored by Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.) would allow states to apply for waivers to two ObamaCare provisions: essential health benefits, which mandates what services insurers must cover, and “community rating,” which essentially bans insurers from charging people with preexisting conditions more for coverage. While the AHCA keeps an ObamaCare provision banning insurers from denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions, allowing states to waiver out of community rating means insurers could charge sick people more.
Trump said that “we actually have a clause that guarantees” coverage for those with pre-existing conditions and added that the health care legislation is “changing.” Unlike the mandate under Obamacare, however, under the GOP bill insurers could charge them higher rates than others in the plan if they allow their coverage to lapse.
The Hill’s whip list includes some Republicans who were ready to vote for the bill before changes made the language backed by MacArthur and Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), the Freedom Caucus chairman.
They include Reps. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) and Fred Upton (Mich.). Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.) went from being a yes on the bill to a no. And four members of the GOP Whip team, Reps. David Valadao (Calif.), Erik Paulsen (Minn.), Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) and Kevin Yoder (Kansas) are undecided on the bill. Rep. Kathleen Rice (D-N.Y.) told CNN that she’s talked to centrist Republicans who say they won’t back the bill because they don’t like it, and because they don’t think it will be approved by the Senate even if it does pass the House.
“They’re being asked to walk the plank on a bill they know won’t survive,” she said.
It didn’t end there, as the Hill elaborates:
In another bad sign for the GOP’s whip count, Appropriations Committee Chairman Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.) on Monday refused to say if it had his support.
Frelinghuysen came out against the bill shortly before it was pulled from the floor last month and told reporters Monday he was “still looking” at the changes.
“I’m focusing on the appropriations bill for 2017, so that’s my focus,” he said.
“My position is that I’m focused on the appropriations process, trying to get the bill across the finish line. I haven’t been focused on anything else.”
The Republican leadership’s focus remains trying to help those moderates get comfortable with the new MacArthur amendment. Over the weekend, House leaders, as well as Pence and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, spoke with members hoping to flip enough votes to move the bill forward. Leadership aides emphasize that there isn’t much room to change the proposal at this point, but many deputy whips are trying to get members to keep the process in perspective.
“You remind them there is a United States Senate, and it will change things. What we send over there isn’t going over there on stone tablets,” said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Oklahoma.
“Going back to the drawing board would be death to repeal and replace,” one aide said.
Of course, if just one more Republican flips, the latest attemp to repeal would be dead anyway. That, increasingly appears to be the most likely scenario because after last week’s discussion, many moderates are frustrated with the process. Some say they see their party making the same kind of mistakes Republicans criticized Democrats for making back in 2010.
“We didn’t learn anything from their mistakes,” said Rep. Mark Amodei, a moderate Republican from Nevada told CNN. “We learned nothing from their mistakes.”
As to promises the bill will be changed once it’s in the Senate? “Seriously, you want me to go back and tell the people in my fourth of Nevada ‘the Senate will make it better?'” Amodei said. “What the hell?”
Should we make homelessness against the law and simply throw all homeless people into prison so that we don’t have to deal with them? Incredibly, this is actually starting to happen in dozens of major cities all across the United States. It may be difficult to believe, but in many large urban areas today, if you are found guilty of “public camping” you can be taken directly to jail. In some cities, activities such as “blocking a walkway” or creating any sort of “temporary structure for human habitation” are also considered to be serious crimes. And there are some communities that have even made it illegal to feed the homeless without an official permit. Unfortunately, as the U.S. economy continues to slow down the number of homeless people will continue to grow, and so this is a crisis that is only going to grow in size and scope.
Of course the goal of many of these laws is to get the homeless to go somewhere else. But as these laws start to multiply all across the nation, pretty soon there won’t be too many places left where it is actually legal to be homeless.
One city that is being highly criticized for passing extremely draconian laws is Houston. In that city it is actually illegal for the homeless to use any sort of material to shield themselves from the wind, the rain and the cold…
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner is taking a similar approach—his anti-encampment ordinance makes it illegal to use “fabric, metal, cardboard, or other materials as a tent or temporary structure for human habitation.” This ensures that the Houstonian homeless are vulnerable not just to the elements, but also to the constant threat of the police. Officials cite one of the most common justifications for crackdowns on the homeless: neighborhood safety (a more socially acceptable way of talking about the not-in-my-backyard mentality).
With all of the other problems that we are facing as a nation, it stuns me that there are politicians that would spend their time dreaming up such sick and twisted laws.
According to one news report, the homeless in Houston are now officially banned from doing all of the following things…
1. They can’t block a sidewalk, stand in a roadway median or block a building doorway. (AKA they can’t panhandle).
2. They also can’t do any of these things — blocking walkways — under state law that already existed.
3. They can’t sleep in tents, boxes or any other makeshift shelter on public property.
4. They also can’t have heating devices.
5. They can’t carry around belongings that take up space more than three feet long, three feet wide, three feet tall.
6. People can’t spontaneously feed more than five homeless people without a permit.
If I was a homeless person in Houston, I would definitely be looking to get out of there.
But where are they going to go?
Things are almost as bad in Dallas. In fact, it is being reported that the police in Dallas “issued over 11,000 citations for sleeping in public from January 2012 to November 2015.”
When you break that number down, it comes to 323 citations per month.
Of course some people have tried to challenge these types of laws in court, but most of the challenges have been unsuccessful. For example, just check out what recently happened in Denver…
Three people who were contesting Denver’s urban-camping ban were found guilty on Wednesday, April 5, at the Lindsey-Flanigan courthouse. The defendants — Jerry Burton, Randy Russell and Terese Howard — were determined to have unlawfully camped on November 28, 2016, and to have interfered with police operations at one location. All three were sentenced with court-ordered probation for one year and between twenty and forty hours of community service.
The case challenged Denver’s unauthorized-camping ordinance, which has been divisive ever since Denver City Council approved it in 2012.
Since the courts are generally upholding these laws, this has just emboldened more communities to adopt anti-homelessness ordinances. According to one report, dozens of major cities have now passed such laws…
City-wide bans on public camping (PDF) have increased by 69 percent throughout the United States. What used to be seen as an annoyance is now prohibited, forcing fines or jail time on those who certainly can’t afford it. The only nationwide nonprofit devoted to studying this, the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, has been tracking these changes since 2006. Their findings? There are a scary number of laws passed that ironically make it costly to be homeless.
For example, in 33 of the 100 U.S. cities they studied, it’s illegal to publicly camp. In 18, it’s illegal to sleep in public. Panhandling is illegal in 27 cities.
In 39 cities, it’s illegal to live in vehicles.
As I have warned repeatedly, we are seeing hearts grow cold all around us. Instead of doing everything that they can to try to help those in need, communities are trying to make them go some place else, and those that try to feed and help the homeless are being harshly penalized.
Sadly, all of this comes at a time when homelessness is on the rise all over America. In a previous article I pointed out that in New York City the number of homeless people recently hit a brand new all-time high, and things have gotten so bad in Los Angeles that the L.A. City Council has formally requested that Governor Jerry Brown declare a state of emergency.
We tend to think of the homeless as bearded old men with drinking problems, but the truth is that many of the homeless are children.
In fact, the number of homeless children in the United States has risen by about 60 percent since the end of the last recession.
If this is how we are going to treat some of the most vulnerable members of our society while things are still relatively stable, how are we going to be treating one another when the economy completely collapses?
The feud between Trump and Steve Bannon appears to be a thing of the past.
As part of his extended interview with Bloomberg on Monday, Trump dismissed speculation that his administration is split by discord, saying he is sticking by his polarizing chief strategist, Steve Bannon, calling him a “very decent guy” who is getting a “bad rap.” Trump even revealed his own term for Bannon’s ideology, calling it “alt-left,” a pun on Bannon’s ties to the conservative “alt-right” movement.
Why alt-left? Because as Trump explains, “Bannon’s more of a libertarian than anything else, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said during the Oval Office interview.
More importantly, Bloomberg adds that Trump’s “playful approach” to the former chief of Breitbart News, arguably the biggest target of liberal fury, and his other comments about his staff suggest that a widespread shakeup of his inner circle is unlikely in the near future.
Trump added that both Bannon and Reince Priebus would likely still be in their same roles several months from now, along with two other figures in his administration who have drawn withering fire: counselor Kellyanne Conway and press secretary Sean Spicer. Confirming reports from early April, Trump also said that Bannon and his son-in-law Jared Kushner had managed to repair their relationship.
“Bannon is a very decent guy who feels very strongly about the country. Likewise, Jared. And they’re getting along fine,” Trump said, calling Kushner “a very brilliant young guy.”
The president did, however, acknowledge past tensions on the staff: “We have a lot of people that are getting along well,” Trump said. “It’s coming out better now than it was, you know, for a while. And for a while it was a little testy, I guess for some of them, but I said they’ve got to get their acts together.” Taking a walk down memory lane, Bloomberg reminds us that the heat switched to Bannon (previously it was on Priebus after the first failed attempt to pass Obamacare repeal) after his April 4 removal from the principals committee of the National Security Council. This was followed by reports of in-fighting between Bannon and Kushner. As we reported on April 8, one day prior Priebus, at Trump’s request, oversaw a session of “marriage counseling” for Bannon and Kushner. The pair agreed to resolve their differences, aides said.
The Bloomberg interview then goes over the tenuous relationship between Trump’s two (until recently) top advisors.
Priebus, the former Republican National Committee chairman, has looked to merge the outsider world of the Trump campaign with the party establishment he’s long led. Bannon, for his part, been among the most vocal advocates for a nationalist, anti-establishment approach to governance within the Trump White House.
The two men were in charge of running operations within a Trump White House that has experienced a string of blunders and missteps, including a travel ban barring visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries that was hastily written and quickly blocked by federal courts.
One White House official said last week that Trump’s top aides believe they have learned better the governing process and are now striving to keep various agency leaders and decision-makers in the loop so that no one feels shut out.
Either that, or they have both realized that with the ascent of Mnuchin and Cohn to the innermost circle of Trump advisors, their opinions simply no longer matter as much, and so it is best to simply indeed get along, or at least go along for the ride.
Trump concluded by saying that he didn’t expect to see departures from the White House soon. “Now, I will tell you, probably people are going to get job offers. You know, things happen,” he said. “But I’m very happy with our group. We’re doing very well.”
I’m constantly amazed by the ability of those in power to create a narrative trusted by a gullible non-critical thinking populace. Appealing to emotions, when you have millions of functionally illiterate, normalcy bias ensnared, iGadget distracted, disciples of the status quo, has been the game plan of the Deep State for the last century. Americans don’t want to think, because thinking is hard. They would rather feel. For decades the government controlled public education system has performed a mass lobotomy on their hapless matriculates, removing their ability to think and replacing it with feelings, fabricated dogma, and social indoctrination. Their minds of mush have been molded to acquiesce to the narrative propagandized by their government keepers.
“The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.” – Thomas Sowell
With a majority confused, distracted, malleable, willfully ignorant, and easily manipulated by false narratives, heart wrenching images, and fake news, the Deep State henchmen have been able to control the masses with relative ease. The unanticipated rise of Donald Trump to the most powerful role in the world gave many critical thinking, anti-big government, skeptical curmudgeons hope he could drain the swamp and begin to deconstruct the massive out of control Federal bureaucracy.
His rhetoric during the campaign about repealing the disastrous Obamacare abortion, cutting taxes, dismantling Federal regulatory red tape, making Mexico pay for the wall, dumping Yellen, favoring higher interest rates, and not interfering militarily in countries who are not threatening the United States, appealed to many libertarian minded people.
I’ve watched with disgust over the last month as the promises of non-interventionism by a presidential candidate have been broken by the third consecutive president. George W. promised a humble foreign policy with no nation building. He had criticized the Clinton-Gore Administration for being too interventionist:
“If we don’t stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we’re going to have a serious problem coming down the road. And I’m going to prevent that.”
With 9/11 as a convenient excuse, he invaded sovereign countries based on flawed data, passed the 4th Amendment destroying Patriot Act, allowed neo-cons to create a Orwellian surveillance state, and permitted the military industrial complex to regain its power and control over the political apparatus in Washington D.C. With no Cold War to fill their coffers, neo-cons in Congress, warmongering think tank co-conspirators, military brass and their arms dealer cronies needed to create a new war to keep the racket going.
The War on Terror is unwinnable because you can’t defeat a tactic, and that is just what the Deep State is counting on. An unwinnable war, like the War on Drugs and War on Poverty, results in never ending funding, no evaluation of success or failure, continuous propaganda designating new enemies whenever convenient, and a narrative questioning the patriotism of anyone who argues against foreign interventionism.
After Bush’s reign of error, the election of a liberal community activist as president surely would result in a dramatic reduction in military intervention around the world. It was so certain, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for just being elected for promising hope and change. He ran against neo-con tool McCain who never met a country he didn’t want to invade. Obama’s words as a candidate echoed those of Bush Jr. before he was placed on the throne by the powers that be.
“We continue to be in a war that should never have been authorized. I am proud of the fact that way back in 2002, I said that this war was a mistake.”
After being elected Obama immediately changed his tune about the business of war. He withdrew troops from Iraq as required by the agreement signed by Bush with the Iraq puppet government, but he ramped up the never ending Afghanistan war – now sixteen years old and still not won. The vacuum left by our epic failure in Iraq allowed the rise of ISIS. Obama essentially created ISIS by providing arms to “moderate” rebels fighting Assad in Syria.
By the end of his term, troops were back in Iraq and more are on the way. Obama and a Secretary of State named Clinton decided to overthrow Gaddafi even though he posed no threat to U.S. interests. They have left a lawless chaotic failed state, now home to ISIS, Al Qaeda, and various other terrorist factions.
Obama should have won the Nobel Drone Prize as he launched ten times as many attacks as Bush, killing thousands, blowing up wedding parties, and murdering hundreds of innocent civilians. He bombed seven countries even though we are not officially at war with anyone. He renewed all aspects of the unconstitutional Patriot Act. Edward Snowden revealed the mass surveillance on all Americans by Obama’s spy agencies.
His continued support for the overthrow of Assad, so Saudi Arabia and Qatar could build a natural gas pipeline to Europe, was thwarted by Putin. Hysterically, after eight years of war mongering and expansion of the warfare/welfare surveillance state, Obama is now portrayed as a pacifist. The fact is Obama, like Bush, filled his role in the imperial empire, policing the world, enriching the military industrial complex, and doing the bidding of his Deep State sponsors.
Now we have Donald Trump, the billionaire champion of the common man, who campaigned on getting out of the nation building business. Where have I heard that before? Exactly one year ago, Trump gave a foreign policy speech laying out his vision for the U.S. role in the world.
“We’re getting out of the nation-building business and instead focusing on creating stability in the world. However, unlike other candidates for the presidency, war and aggression will not be my first instinct. You cannot have a foreign policy without diplomacy. A superpower understands that caution and restraint are really truly signs of strength. Although not in government service, I was totally against the war in Iraq, very proudly, saying for many years that it would destabilize the Middle East. Sadly, I was correct, and the biggest beneficiary has been has been Iran, who is systematically taking over Iraq and gaining access to their very rich oil reserves, something it has wanted to do for decades.”
He scorned Obama and Bush’s foolish attempt at creating western style democracies in 3rd world den of snakes, inhabited by factions of Muslim religious fanatics. He railed against the trillions wasted fighting worthless wars, leaving countries in anarchy, and allowing terrorists organizations like ISIS to fill the vacuum. His arguments sounded like they were being spoken by Ron Paul. He clearly ran as a non-interventionist.
“We went from mistakes in Iraq to Egypt to Libya, to President Obama’s line in the sand in Syria. Each of these actions have helped to throw the region into chaos and gave ISIS the space it needs to grow and prosper. Very bad. It all began with a dangerous idea that we could make western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interests in becoming a western democracy.
We tore up what institutions they had and then were surprised at what we unleashed. Civil war, religious fanaticism, thousands of Americans and just killed be lives, lives, lives wasted. Horribly wasted. Many trillions of dollars were lost as a result. The vacuum was created that ISIS would fill. Iran, too, would rush in and fill that void much to their really unjust enrichment.”
Trump rationally promised to have peaceful relations with the other two nuclear superpowers. He was diplomatic, lucid and non-confrontational when talking about the two countries neo-cons love to hate. His promises of improved relations lasted about as long as it took the Deep State to create a blatant false flag in Syria.
“We desire to live peacefully and in friendship with Russia and China. We have serious differences with these two nations, and must regard them with open eyes, but we are not bound to be adversaries. We should seek common ground based on shared interests. Russia, for instance, has also seen the horror of Islamic terrorism. I believe an easing of tensions, and improved relations with Russia from a position of strength only is possible, absolutely possible. Common sense says this cycle, this horrible cycle of hostility must end and ideally will end soon. Good for both countries.”
There seems to be a common theme when it comes to how all presidents end up doing the bidding of the military industrial complex as soon as they settle into the Oval Office, no matter what they said during their campaigns. Trump is the latest example of talking diplomacy, no nation building, non-interventionism, and not putting boots on the ground, and then doing the exact opposite within weeks of taking office.
The game plan is tried and true. The Deep State either creates or provokes a false flag event to set in motion the pressure to respond militarily. They utilize their propaganda emitting media mouthpieces to spread disinformation and create the opinions of the non-critical thinking masses. Dramatic visual images and a storyline with an evil villain are essential to properly influencing a pliable, easily misled, oblivious public.
The use of false flag events, fake news, and staged graphic photographs to control and manipulate public opinion has been utilized for decades by the Deep State to push the country into military conflict craved by the military industrial complex. We’ve known for almost a century war is a racket, as described by General Smedley Butler in 1935.
“War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”
We were warned by the most respected general of the 20th Century about allowing the military industrial complex to gain control over our government and politicians. Eisenhower experienced the influence of the Deep State from the military perspective and firsthand as president. Sadly, his hopes for an alert and knowledgeable citizenry keeping the military industrial complex under wraps were dashed on the shoals of a purposefully failing public education system and a relentless propaganda campaign championing never ending war.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
Those controlling the levers of power have understood the power of propaganda since Edward Bernays taught them how to manipulate the public mind with his theories of propaganda in 1928. He believed the masses were driven by biological urges which needed to be channeled and guided by highly intelligent corporate elite overseers. His contempt for the masses was born out in his corporate fascist view of the world.
He believed our dangerous animalistic urges needed to be subdued to keep society sedate and controllable by those constituting the invisible government (aka Deep State). He trained the controllers to use propaganda in order to mold the minds of the masses in a way most beneficial to the state.
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized.
Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” – Edward Bernays – Propaganda
The use of propaganda and the flogging of false flag narratives by the corporate media acting as mouthpieces for the Deep State has worked wonders and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of American boys and innocent victims (collateral damage according to neo-cons) around the world. An explosion that sunk the USS Maine was used by William Randolph Hearst and William McKinley to provoke a war with Spain in 1898.
The Gulf of Tonkin incident was a false flag used by LBJ and the war party in 1964 to kick off the Vietnam War, resulting in over 58,000 American deaths, 153,000 Americans wounded, hundreds of thousands mentally scarred for life, and the deaths of over 2 million Vietnamese. For who? For what? The American boys sacrificed on the altar of the Deep State were nothing but cannon fodder in the warped minds of McNamara, LBJ, Westmorland and the rest of warmongering elitists. Only the military industrial complex benefited, as the burgeoning welfare/warfare state resulted in raging inflation during the 1970s.
As time passed, the propagandists have become immensely more sophisticated in their messaging, psychological assessment of a dumbed down American populace, and manipulation of patriotism, symbolism and emotions to run roughshod over those opposing nonsensical, illegal, and immoral military intervention around the world. The most successful technique utilized by the Deep State for the last few decades has been “atrocity propaganda”. Appealing to the emotions of people who have been indoctrinated by government schooling to feel rather than think has been wildly successful in controlling the agenda.
Atrocity propaganda was initially employed to sway public opinion to support the First Gulf War against Sadaam Hussein, engineered by Madison Avenue maggots from Hill & Knowlton on behalf of the Kuwaiti government. In emotional testimony before Congress an unidentified 15 year old girl, who happened to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S., gave false testimony that she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers take babies out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital, take the incubators, and leave the babies to die.
This propaganda successfully convinced a clueless public to support our involvement in the Gulf War. With the end of the Cold War, how could the military industrial complex generate immense profits without enemies? Afterwards, Stormin Norman Schwarzkopf was glorified as the brilliant courageous hero. The masses need a hero to worship.
Whether 9/11 was a false flag or a monumental security blunder, it was hijacked by the neo-con faction within the government to wage perpetual war and turn our country into a surveillance state. A critical thinking citizen or honest journalist might wonder how the 342 page Patriot Act, which changed 15 existing laws and created entire new agencies, could be written, debated, and signed into law within 45 days of the 9/11 attack. It almost seemed like it was already written, awaiting the opportune time to implement. The War on Terror had begun. The Deep State managed to create a war against a tactic, which could never be won. It has done wonders for the military industrial complex, as arms industry stocks have risen 400% to 500% since 2001 versus the 100% rise in the S&P 500. War is a profitable racket.
The neo-cons immediately began their propaganda campaign to invade Iraq, even though they had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. There were virtually no religious Muslim zealots inhabiting the country. Hussein hated bin Laden and his ilk. The propaganda machine, driven by Cheney and Wolfowitz, churned out false stories about 9/11 involvement and the imminent threat from Hussein using “WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION”. The Colin Powell show on national TV convinced the fearful American populace to support the invasion of a country who threatened us in no way, without a declaration of war from Congress.
The invasion of Iraq set the precedent that presidents can wage war around the globe with no legislative approval. The invasion became a reality TV show called Shock & Awe. In retrospect, the Iraq War was either a colossal error of judgement or exactly what the Deep State had in mind. The ultimate financial cost of our Middle East adventures will exceed $6 trillion, while 4,400 young men gave their lives, 32,000 were badly wounded, thousands more are afflicted with PTSD, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed or maimed, all for a worthless cause. Iraq is now a failed state, with Muslim terrorists controlling large swaths of territory.
The warnings from men of stature, integrity and nobility like Smedley Butler, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Ron Paul have gone unheeded by an increasingly dumbed down, iGadget absorbed, intellectually lazy, willfully ignorant, emotionally stunted populace. They question nothing. They believe whatever the boob tube tells them to believe. Their extreme level of normalcy bias allows the Deep State to maintain control and become outrageously bold in their lies, misinformation, and ability to convince the masses of the most ridiculous narratives. Only one voice in the wilderness remains. Speaking truth to power only creates change if an educated populace says enough is enough.
“How did the American people ever reach this point where they believe that US aggression in the Middle East will make us safe when it does the opposite? How did the American people ever reach the point where they believe that fighting unconstitutional wars is required to protect our freedoms and our Constitution? Why do we allow the NSA, CIA, FBI, TSA, etc. to destroy our liberty at home, as part of the Global War on Terror, with a pretext that they are preserving our liberty?
Why are the lying politicians reelected and allowed to bankrupt our country, destroy our money, and enter wars without the proper consent? Why do the American people suffer in silence and not scream “Enough is enough!”? We’ve had enough of the “humanitarian do-gooders” and the proponents of “American exceptionalism” who give us nothing but war, economic suffering, and less freedom. This can and must be stopped.” – Ron Paul, Swords into Plowshares: A Life in Wartime and a Future of Peace and Prosperity
“The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil water-way leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky–seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.” – Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
In Part Two of this article I will detail various recent false flag and propaganda episodes which are being used by the Deep State to push the world toward war. The acceleration of events based on false narratives, appeals to patriotism, and fake news puts the lives of millions at risk, with no comprehension of how they are being manipulated through propaganda techniques refined to a science. Imperial empires always fall due to their hubris and military overreach. We are being led into a heart of immense darkness.
The price of Bitcoin accelerated its recent exponential trend higher, soaring to daily all-time highs over the past few days, rising above $1,300 on Friday, then pushing $1,400 on Monday, and even above $1,500 on the second-largest BTC exchange, and was last trading just above $1,460 on Coinbase amid a buying frenzy attributed to speculative investment across the cryptocurrency sector, coupled with liquidity problem at some exchanges which were having problems processing fiat-based transactions.
Assuming a price of $1,400 – which is a rough estimate as there has been a wide discrepancy across the exchanges over the past week – would make bitcoin one of the best performing currencies, or assets – depending on one’s view – of the year. Bitcoinhas never traded above $1,300, $1,400, or $1,500 before Friday. On the Hong Kong-based exchange Bitfinex, the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, the price rose as high as $1,548. On CoinDesk, the price crossed $1,400 on Monday, and traded as high as $1,422.
As the WSJ’s Paul Vigna observes, “Bitcoin has been struggling with a seemingly intractable internecine debate over network scaling, while similar projects have been drawing talent and investment dollars. But the price in 2017 has been generally rising, and rising sharply, amid a confluence of factors. Not all of the factors, ultimately, may turn out to be positive.”
For now however, holders of bitcoin, as well as various other cryptocurrencies have been rejoicing at the move higher, expressing little concern about the possible negative implications.
“The space is definitely seeing more traction,” Charles Hayter, CEO of research site CryptoCompare. He pointed out, however, that a “mixed bag of reasons” was behind the weekend surge. One reason is a surge of investing across cryptocurrencies. Another are withdrawal problems plaguing specific exchanges, with liquidity drying up and supply-and-demand factors forcing the price higher.
In addition to Bitcoin, ethereum, ripple, and other established cryptocurrencies have all soared in the past week amid a new trend, called the initial coin offering, or ICO, that has been growing in the sector. In an ICO, a startup issues its own bitcoin-like asset, either as a straight-ahead investment or as a token for use with a service or product offering. There have been dozens of new coins minted and offered for sale, the WSJ notes.
Putting bitcoin’s recent gains in the dust has been Ethereum, the leading bitcoin alternative, which traded above $80 on Monday, rising more than fourfold from under $20 as recently as the beginning of March.
Even an alternative version of Ethereum called Ethereum Classic has been rising. On March 1, it traded at $1.29. On Monday, it was trading at $6.59. Ethereum has a more direct connection to the ICO trend than bitcoin, since many of the firms issuing these new coins are building products and services on the Ethereum network.
In addition to ICO, another catalyst cited for the move higher is “plain old supply and demand.” While unclear if the result of a regulatory crackdown seen recently in Chinese-based exchanges, Hong-Kong based Bitfinex and some other crypto exchanges in the industry “have been dealing with liquidity and withdrawal issues the past few weeks.” Specifically, Bitfinex had trouble processing transactions after the Taiwanese banks that handle them started blocking requests. That’s part of a trend where some banks are pulling out of sectors they deem risky.
While we will have a more comprehensive writeup on the recent troubles at Bitfinex, a representative from the xchange confirmed to the WSJ that the inability of investors to withdraw bitcoin is affecting the price. Perversely, instead of forcing the price of bitcoin lower, the liquidity squeeze is forcing traders to offer higher bids to get their bitcoin out, which is subsequently forcing the price up.
“This is not healthy,” said Vinny Lingham, CEO of bitcoin-based startup Civic and a high-profile trader.
For now, however, just like in the stock market, traders – at least those who are long the various cryptocurrencies – are happy with the move higher. If and when structural problems emerge, and the price tumbles, it may be a different story, although that may not take place for a while, because as the Nikkei reports, more than 10 Japanese companies are launching exchanges for bitcoin and other virtual currencies, with an eye to tap growing demand after legal changes that make such trades cheaper and easier in the country.
As discussed previously, starting July, Japan’s consumption tax will no longer apply to purchases of virtual currencies. Exchanges in Japan have also been required since April to obtain a special license, which has requirements for finances and asset management structures, from the Finance Ministry.
One example: SBI Holdings has set up SBI Virtual Currencies, an exchange between the yen and cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and that of the Ethereum platform. The GMO Internet group is also establishing its own company, with plans to increase the number of digital currencies it trades based on demand. Kabu.com Securities and foreign exchange trader Money Partners Group plan to enter the field as well.
Which means that just as the Chinese bubble frenzy in bitcoin is fading, it may be replaced with a new one, in which thousands of Mrs. Watanabe traders shift their attention away from the FX market and toward digital currencies. If the transition is seamless, there is no telling just how far this particular bubble can grow.
On several occasions we’ve pointed out that the baby boomer generation is, to put it mildly, ill-prepared for retirement. In fact, over 50% of baby boomers have basically no savings set aside for retirement at all. Now, a new survey from Northwestern Mutual helps to shed some light on why Americans are completely incapable of saving money.
First, roughly 50% of Americans have debt balances, excluding mortgages mind you, of over $25,000, with the average person owing over $37,000, versus a median personal income of just over $30,000.
Therefore, it’s not difficult to believe, as Northwestern Mutual points out, that 45% of Americans spend up to half of their monthly take home pay on debt service alone.…which, again, excludes mortgage debt.
Of course, if Americans are incurring this much debt then it must be for absolute necessities like healthcare and basic nutritional needs, right? Afterall, the entire federal entitlement farce is dependent upon helping good hardworking, trustworthy Americans who, for the most part, spend their money wisely but sometimes need just a little extra help to make ends meet.
Well, at least that’s the illusion that Democrats would love for you to subscribe to…unfortunately it couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality, the Northwestern Mutual survey found that Americans spend 40% of their monthly income on discretionary expenses including “entertainment, leisure travel and hobbies.”
Adding insult to injury, nearly a quarter of all respondents said that “excessive/frivolous spending” was the cause of their debt problems.
Aside from basic necessities, on average, Americans spend about 40% of their monthly income on discretionary expenses such as leisure travel and hobbies. In fact, one quarter cite “frivolous/excessive spending” as a financial pitfall.
Meanwhile, nearly 20% of people can only afford to make minimum payments each month on their credit card debts.
So, for the taxpayers of this great country, rest assured that your tax dollars are being put to good use to buy Joe and Jill Schmo a nice annual trip to Cancun.
In the aftermath of the 2016 US Presidential election, "fake news" was blamed as a major reason for Donald Trump's upset victory over Hillary Clinton. A wide range of players, from Russian propagandists to paid partisan puppeteers, were accused of fabricating stories which were then widely circulated via social media to influence the hearts and minds of voters.
A national debate then raged — and still does — about whether "fake news" truly exists and, if so, should it be tolerated. And, immediately after the election, a number of major media outlets, including Google and Facebook, announced planned steps to block 'suspect' content sources on their platforms.
Amidst this tumult, a college professor compiled an aggregated list of "False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and/or Satirical “News” Sources", which quickly became known as the "fake news list". The mainstream media immediately latched on to this list of culprits, and circulated it heavily across the headlines of major outlets like CNN, The Washington Post, Fox News, The Boston Globe, New York Magazine, USA Today, Business Insider and The Dallas Morning News
(Full disclosure: this website, PeakProsperity.com, was initially included on the list. We've learned it has since been removed.)
So many questions have been raised by this list. Is naming these sources a public service? Or it is censorship? What criteria are used to declare content "fake"? Who comes up with those criteria, and who is making the decisions? What are their qualifications? Is it the media's job to "protect" the public from information? Or is it the reader's responsibility to judge for themselves what is and isn't a trustworthy source?
To explore answers to these — and many more — questions, on this week's podcast we discuss the "fake news list" with its creator, Dr. Melissa Zimdars, assistant professor of communications at Merrimack College.
Chris' line of inquiry is brutally direct. And many of Dr. Zimdars' answers are more nuanced then many of her critics will expect. Wherever you fall on this topic, you'll find this an exceptionally open, frank debate of the key issues at stake on the public's right to information in the modern age.
Click the play button below to listen to Chris' interview with Dr. Melissa Zimdars (33m:57s).
Full Transcript below:
Chris Martenson: Hello, everyone. And welcome to this Peak Prosperity podcast. I am your host Chris Martenson and it is April 13, 2017. Fake news. Now, it hit the airwaves in the weeks especially after the election of 2016. And we’re gonna be talking about fake news today.
A website, opensources.co, assembled a list of fake news sites and was flooded with new entries in the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump. In November and December of 2016 news organizations extensively featured that list, with The Los Angeles Times headlining a story, “Want to Keep Fake News Out of Your News Feed? College Professor Creates List of Sites to Avoid.” News organizations such as CNN, The Washington Post, Boston Globe, New York Magazine, USA Today, Business Insider and The Dallas Morning News, all cited the list in their articles. Full disclosure, Peak Prosperity made it on that list for a brief period of time in what was called the unknown category but has since been removed. However, other websites you will know remain on the list.
Speaking with us is Dr. Melissa Zimdars, who is an assistant professor of communications at Merrimack College. Dr. Zimdars, welcome to the program.
Melissa Zimdars: Thanks for having me.
Chris Martenson: First, right at the top, what is fake news?
Melissa Zimdars: Yeah. So fake news, originally actually communication and media, referred mostly to satire or tabloid press, but through the election it became a term used to describe outright false information, sort of fabricated to circulate basically any kind of information online in order to generate profit. And, of course, we’ve seen the term fake news now expand to include a lot of different definitions, some more accurate than others.
Chris Martenson: Well, you mention the profit motive, but there’s also sometimes political motives, are there not? I’ve noted, in times past, political parties on both sides have circulated things that have proven to be untrue as part of campaign cycles. Are you – would that be included as well?
Melissa Zimdars: Yes. So I think when the fake news frenzy really took off, a lot of people, especially in mainstream news organizations, were focusing mostly on the Macedonian teenagers producing a lot of news, the St. Louis suburban dad who became famous for circulating news, but you’re right in that fake news can also be released by various political organizations or really far sort of information sources, often in the form of propaganda.
Chris Martenson: Okay. Great. So this list. First, what made one necessary, in your mind?
Melissa Zimdars: So, it wasn’t actually supposed to be a list originally. This all started as media literacy exercise in my Intro to Mass Communication course. I felt like my students were having a difficult time determining the credibility of sources.
Because most people now get their news on social media, and social media kind of democratizes information in the sense that it all looks the same as we see it coming through our news feeds. So, I created some tips, some that I thought of, some that I took from media literacy resources or elsewhere, and the goal of the original document I created was to have students try to figure out what these sources were. And then that took off, inaccurately actually, as a fake news list when it never was. And so that’s why OpenSources sort of developed, to try and delineate between different kinds of sources, ranging from outright fake news to political information that is still credible, because partisan information is inherently problematic, and just more neutral, credible sources.
Chris Martenson: All right. So we have a list and it consists of websites almost entirely. But they’re categorized in various ways. As you say, fake news was this catch-all bucket. But it was more granular than that. What are those categories?
Melissa Zimdars: So, the categories are: fakes news, and that can be any kind of political orientation. A lot of fake news does target different political parties. It can also be very – sort of more the click-bait style, sort of just outright fake, how to lose ten pounds in ten days for ten dollars type stuff.
Then it can also include conspiracy information. So, this normally encapsulates fairly well-known conspiracy theories, such as the flat earth theory or Ken Trails. And again, conspiracy can travel across the political spectrum.
And then junk science. So, this was mostly information that is contrary to established medicine or scientific knowledge. So, stuff like anti-vaccines or vaccines causing autism.
And then click-bait, which even reputable organizations sometimes use. So click-bait was to denote a kind of style or sensational reporting.
And then hate, which categorizes websites that are basically circulate news from organizations that are categorized by various organizations as being hate groups.
And then bias, which is politically motivated reporting that often uses very loaded language that can decontextualize information or circulate misleading information.
And then political, which is also political or partisan, but that doesn’t always do that. So they maybe sometimes sensational, but generally they’re credible. They maintain informational integrity.
And then the final is just credible. Generally neutral, striving for objectivity. They, of course, may make mistakes, but usually those mistakes become publicized, they’re retracted, apologies go out, et cetera.
So again, it’s a whole range of different kinds of information.
Chris Martenson: All right. So, within these categories then, I noticed some of them, like bias, is fairly often a subjective term, unless you’re really careful with it. I, myself, notice bias all the time in what basically are essentially editorial pieces masquerading as news articles. I see them come out all the time in my newspaper. Many of them you recognize. But I’m very sensitive to understanding when loaded, bias oriented language that’s facts-free and without context is up. Because this is something I study very carefully and I’m alert to. So you mention at OpenSources that there’s a research team that is helping to sort of collate and curate this list. Who’s on that team and how do you assure that there’s neutrality there?
Melissa Zimdars: Yeah. So, the team was basically a group of kind of kind of volunteer librarians. As this was sort of going viral, my original google doc, a few different librarians reached out to me, or to the creators of some browser plug-ins who were working – who were helping support OpenSources develop into a database. And so I haven’t asked permission to make those names public because I received a lot of hate mail. So, I kind of became the transparent lightening rod for any kind of criticism. But right now, actually, I am the only one, me and one other librarian, are the only ones actively analyzing.
And there’s transparency in the fact that if an outside source, for example, questions a labeling or if we internally questions something, it’s reviewed multiple times. So we have multiple spaces for people to debate and contest each other. Because textual analysis, or discourse analysis, which is basically what I’m doing on these websites, is open to a certain level of interpretation.
Most often we find agreement through discussion, but then I think that makes the list at least more reliable.
It’s also meant to be a guiding tool. We take snapshots of websites and the information they circulate and if the website substantially changes over time, or if we analyze it and we find that it’s not circulating the kind of news information that we’re interested in, it may be removed or altered. So, it’s meant to be somewhat dynamic and responsive to critique.
That being said, I agree with your comments about bias, especially – I think one of the major problems in general concerns for bias is that often times it’s not clear whether we’re dealing with opinion, punditry, or news. And this is a problem in credible mainstream journalism. When something isn’t labeled as opinion on Facebook all the way to partisan sources. So, I agree with you on that one for sure.
Chris Martenson: Well, and it’s a very dynamic, interesting field out there. And so this is my business is to be very deep into the information system on the web and understand what’s going on. I see it happen all over the place. One of the areas, for instance, that I track very closely is energy and energy policy and where it’s going. And there was this term that came out awhile ago where the United States is now energy independent. Now, I tracked that all the way back, and I’m pretty sure I can locate the month it was launched. It came out as a block of collateral. It hit op-eds all over the newspapers, and it was meant to achieve a certain design. And if I was gonna guess it came from the American Petroleum Institute or possibly a lobbying firm that they had put on their behalf. But they did a very good job of pushing it all across a variety of places. One of the things that they do, as well, is they set up websites and they promote certain things. So, I’ve watched this happen as a function of corporate policy
And so some of these websites that are on your list raise my alarm bells as fronts that are put out there spread disinformation on purpose, to achieve the opposite aim. It’s very complex sometimes, what’s actually happening. But the role of corporate fingers in shaping media is really strong, and friends of mine who are journalists say they will get collateral packages from Old Monsanto that help them understand how they can write stuff. But when you see the exact paragraphs that are in the collateral show up in article after article, allegedly by independent journalists, you get a sense of what’s happening here. Right?
Melissa Zimdars: Yeah. I completely agree.
Chris Martenson: There’s a degree of subtlety to what’s happening.
Melissa Zimdars: It’s blurring.
Chris Martenson: It’s blurring. Did you say –
Melissa Zimdars: Yeah, Well, I think part of the problem is with declining budgets in newsrooms, you have evidence that a local new station will play in full a video news release or a press release or like you’re saying, full paragraphs are lifted. There’s also a term in communication, or a theory, called information laundering. And so it’s when information might originate from a corporate source like you’re identifying, or it could be a hate group and it’s packaged and sort of filtered through multiple layers to just appear as if it’s neutral information. And then you can see the way that this is picked up and circulated throughout mainstream journalism.
And so, I think part of the reason we’re debating fake news and thinking about all these different kinds of news is because they really do stem, I think like you’re saying, from some of the worst practices that we do have in contemporary journalism. I mean, there is definitely a lot that needs to change and become more transparent in how we relay information to the public.
Chris Martenson: Well, I’m glad to hear that, not just as another example, everything that we do at Peak Prosperity, it has to be data, the data has to be sourced and we have to consider that the source is reliable. So, I won’t talk about energy without having all the databases myself.
I interview widely, and one of the people, groups, I interviewed had been actually measuring the degree of Roundup that shows up as trace residues in our foods. And, oops, guess what? They’re much higher than anybody thought and EPA doesn’t actually look at this stuff. And there’s this whole scandal that we could go down around that. But one of the ways this group was being targeted by, presumably, Monsanto, or somebody like them, was they were labeled, oh, a conspiracy group. Even though it’s hard data. Here’s some data. It comes from a reputable app. Here’s our sources. Here’s how we did it, with double blind, the whole nine yards, right? It was science, but they got targeted. And so I’m allergic to the idea of conspiracy because it’s a very loaded, emotional term. It carries – it’s kind of the modern version of calling somebody a witch, I think. Because I see the emotional response. It shuts down the rest of the conversation.
I was looking through your list. There’s a hundred and seventy-three out of seven hundred seventy plus that are listed as conspiracy. So, one of my questions then is how does a site get on your list like that? How would it get there and labeled?
Melissa Zimdars: Yeah. So, firstly, I do think you offer a very fair critique on conspiracy. For example, Watergate originated as a conspiracy, right? And it turned out to be a very true situation. And people who originally pushing it and following it were thought to be just really cynical and skeptical of what was happening. So, yeah, I think that’s very fair. And the way that sites get on the list is mostly through various suggestions. I originally made a list that contained almost two hundred sites. And that was from – I saw a random list circulating online. And I went through all of those websites on the list that I collected individually to determine are they active? Do I agree with this rational? So some of it was cultivated from other lists, trying to put it together in a master document. But the rest were from emails, people suggesting through various tech online social spaces; yeah, it’s sort of generating from everywhere.
I also am an avid reader of news from across the spectrum and from mainstream sources, so I was paying attention even to other websites or to stories that were being played in the media or by political sites. And I would analyze those, add them or reject them. So it’s mostly – the information is largely crowd-sourced. And then I, or if one of my active librarian volunteers is around, we will analyze it, and then hopefully someone else will analyze it again to determine whether or not we agree with that analysis.
So it’s – does that make sense? It’s crowd-sourced but then analyzed or removed as with the case with Peak Prosperity when I determined it to be beyond the scope of the project.
Chris Martenson: Well, sure. I’ll tell you, the – some of my process concern shows up – I was just interviewing a gentleman named J. Edward Griffin. He wrote a book called Creature from Jekyll Island, It’s a seven hundred seventy page tome, well researched, about the origin of the Federal Reserve. It’s in its fifth edition. He’s received exactly zero pieces of pushback from anybody saying, “Here’s where you got this wrong. This fact isn’t right. Here’s where the story's wrong.” And it tells a very credible tale of how the Federal Reserve came to be, which was somewhat of a conspiracy, as it were. And it’s all a matter of record at this point. Nothing controversial about what happened between the years 1910 and 1913 when it was finally passed as a bill.
However, you go to his Wikipedia page and the word conspiracy – he’s a noted American conspiracy theorist. Conspiracy. Conspiracy. Conspiracy. And that’s how he’s categorized and he found out that a couple of Wiki editors we trying to say, “Hey, that’s a label. Can you back that up?” and other Wiki editors said, “If you push on this too hard we’re gonna get you fired, that we’re keeping these labels.”
So, this is a label that I’ve seen used, and it gets applied in increasing numbers, I discovered, when the content is objectionable to somebody who holds some sort of power. That happens a lot. And there’s obvious things that I think if we’re gonna say that conspiracy is a – also applies to things where people have really unformed opinions like, “I think the leaves turn earlier this year because radio waves are coming from Moscow,” or something, right. There’s that. But there are people who have deeply researched stuff. They get branded, as well.
And so one of the sites on your list is the site oftwominds.com, which is run by Charles Hugh Smith. He’s a well-known contributor to our audience and there’s literally nothing I know about all of Charles body of work, which I know very well, is even remotely conspiracy oriented. He’s a nice – he’s the nicest guy you ever want to meet. He’s an author. He lives in Berkeley. Dozens of thoughtful, well-researched books. I’m interested. How did – how would his site have gotten on there and labeled, given that – I can’t – I know his work really well.
Melissa Zimdars: Yeah. So for that particular website – because I’ve analyzed almost a thousand at this point – I would have to dig through my files and footnotes and see why it was labeled that way, or if I was the primary labeler, or if one of the librarian volunteers was a primary labeler. But I do agree with your point about critical thought sometimes being labeled conspiracy erroneously. And I think there is a fine line between holding corporations and governments and institutions in power in check and in questioning and in being healthily skeptical of what’s happening. And so, I do agree. And I will definitely double-check that website if you are flagging it to me as being inaccurately errored.
Chris Martenson: And I’ll tell you why this matters a lot to me personally, is because my Ph.D. is in a science. It’s in toxicology, neurotoxicology is my background. Did a lot of basic research, post-doc, the whole nine yards. And so, one of the statements that I learned that was really scarily accurate was the statement by the physicist, Niels Bohr, which is, “Science advances one funeral at a time,” meaning those that hold entrenched beliefs often are blockages to advancing ourselves and our culture. And so, to the extent that powerful people can simply block legitimate inquiry that’s there to advance us, right, even though it may harm certain entrenched interests, I think we have to preserve that carefully. I think that the open spirit of really challenging authority, is essential, because we need accountability at all levels, and that’s been something that has been just been dreadfully lacking. The utter lack of accountability, for instance, under Eric Holder's Department of Justice with zero prosecutions for people who committed overt banking felonies, time after time after time.
That lack of accountability, I fear, elicits such a saying, these are unapproved sites – my concern is that somebody in power will think that that’s a great idea, not because it’s a great idea necessarily, but because they can find a way to use it to advance their interests and stifle the legitimate inquiry. Do you worry about that angle on this at all?
Melissa Zimdars: Well, I mean, I, firstly, completely agree with you in terms of a lack of transparency. I’ve spoken out against – and I even explicitly say on original google doc that I do not agree with any attempts to block information or to prevent it from showing up, because even outright fake news is a protected form of speech, of course within certain legal confines as determined by dockets of case law. But that doesn’t mean that it should be censored, right? That the government should step in and shut it down. I’ve never, ever believed anything like that. Because I agree that critical thought and often alternative ways of thinking about the world and challenging sedimented beliefs is how we advance as a society, as a country, as a world. And so, I agree. And that’s why I was very disheartened when a lot of the original take-up of my resources just labeled it a fake news list. And I remember speaking to reporters and being like, “Please do not use fake news list in the headline.” And they would be like, “Well, now I don’t really know what to call it because ‘Professor Makes Media Literacy Document with Sources Ranging from Credible to Fake Goes Viral’ isn’t really a snappy headline that’s gonna generate advertising revenue in a crowded market.
So, I do agree. But here’s where I’ll say why I still I have this resource, this list, out there is because I think all of these forms of information should exist, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t apply a critical lens to them in trying to understand them. So, it’s just another layer of checking and balancing, I guess, how information circulates. And so I don’t think every aspect of this that we have is perfect – not just talking about me but various fact-checking organizations or whatever. But I do think that it’s an important sort of part of the debate over being critical, over alternative sources of information and holding journalists accountable, as well as producers of partisan information. Does that make sense, hopefully?
Chris Martenson: It does. And so you mentioned sort of the legal edge of this. So hypothetical question. Let’s imagine a big name site on the list, maybe Drudge Report or Zero Hedge or something. They break a story. It’s using unnamed sources. It turned out it provided utterly bogus information, but that then was used and caused actual quantifiable harm, deaths, destruction, things like that. The story leads to harm. Should that site be trusted again? Or shut down? Or face consequences? Or is there anything here where you’re saying that you’re promoting an idea of how we might as a society begin to deal with sites that cause harm like that?
Melissa Zimdars: Yeah. I feel like I hope smarter people than me can figure out the best way to handle that, because of course, we can see examples. Turn back the clock to the beginning of our U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan and looking at all the errors of reporting across media and we’ve seen many high-profile instances of this happening, and that can have major consequences. We can also see – I know you like the term conspiracy, but across a group of websites online propagating the Pizza Gate conspiracy lead to someone bringing a gun into an actual pizza shop. So, should those websites be held accountable? Should people who tweet alleged evidence that Newsweek was engaging in trying to rig the election because they produced a Hillary Clinton cover as President and Donald Trump to be the first on the newsstands? I don’t know.
So, at what point do we keep everyone accountable for the information they circulate? And I honestly don’t have the best answer for that.
Chris Martenson: Well, my own accountability is that if you lose my trust, it’s very hard to get it back. And I’m glad you brought up the early Iraq stuff, because in my mind always is the “Aluminum Tube Story,” by Judith Miller ran on September 8, 2002, and that one was entitled “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for Avon Parts”. Now, it turned out to have been completely bogus information, supplied by Scooter Libby to Judith Miller. He was kept anonymous, of course. It was then used to justify a war against Iraq that turned out to be entirely based on lies and deception. Lies that were easily editorially catchable. Those particular aluminum tubes – your editor calls somebody up and knows something like, “Oh no, totally wrong size for a centrifuge.” That’s easy. But these were somehow overlooked. Purposely a war was sold. I lost trust in The New York Times and I will never regain from that. So, but that’s me. Is that an appropriate response, you think?
Melissa Zimdars: I think if that is – for you, maybe it is. For me, I think in other ways, they have regained my trust. I think say that only because I feel like the only way to ultimately trust what I'm consuming is to read as widely as possible. And so, no, I don’t think anyone should get all of their news from The New York Times nor Fox News, nor Politico or whatever, or National Review. I even read The Cato Institute information on their website. And no one should go to any one of those places. But I think in media literacy circles they call it triangulation. And so if you are reading multiple stories about these topics, hopefully you can get a sense of the way that there – they may be differently framed by different sources. And hopefully, you can get a fuller understanding of that picture.
And so, I won’t write off The New York Times even though I’m often disappointed in mistakes that they make or The Washington Post, and on and on and on. Just as I’m disappointed in sometimes local news stories that get it really, really wrong. But again, I feel like we have to – part of the functioning of our democracy is being able to trust skeptically. Right? So, not to believe everything in a foolish way but to have enough trust that you are willing to consider it one part of a larger and more complex story.
Chris Martenson: Well, certainly, I think that we’re raised and trained to trust authority. The person at the front of the classroom in the beginning, and so on. And I think it’s healthy to begin to understand, of course, of course. Everybody has their own motivations. Everything is biased, of course. Stuff I produce. We all have our lenses and frames we look through and that colors how we gather information and how we choose to frame it in the presenting. That’s just part of it. Learning to parse through that is important. It sounds exhausting, but it’s actually necessary, I think. And I agree.
I don’t trust any one source and I’ll be clear. I don’t trust The New York Times on their political reporting. I think far too many times, more times than I care to count, they proved to be just a conduit for talking points from the entrenched power structure for political stuff. I really trust their environmental reporting. I really trust – there’s certain areas. But it takes sophistication to get there. And so, beyond spending as much time being a news junkie as I am, how can somebody – or you, apparently – how can somebody go about beginning to go about beginning to cultivate that same awareness?
Melissa Zimdars: Yeah. I think some of it is also weirdly just very simple. So, it’s not about being a news junkie, but I think reading past the headline, very simple things like that, a lot of people increasingly do not do. So, we tend to share information without actually engaging with it or reading it. And so, very simply, if we actually were at least reading what we’re sharing through social media where so much information is circulated and found, I think that would go a long way to perhaps stymy some information that is unreliable.
I also think it’s up to journalists, for publishers of news information, to do their due diligence to try to prevent some of these mistakes that we are talking about. I do think it’s up to technologies – not to filter or shut down information, but when a very clearly fake news website shows up as a number one google news item – we’re talking about a website that still has WordPress in the domain and has no authors and it’s existed for only two weeks, that might be a problem. So, I think it’s a multi-layered issue and I think the best thing that individual can do is – even if they’re not reading all the time is just to read widely, expose yourself to different points of view and alternative points of view, and just be open to being challenged and debated. Too often when we’re challenged we just dig in further into those beliefs instead of being humble and having an open mind.
Chris Martenson: I totally agree with that. And I’ll just add one last thing to that list is I am completely allergic to any article from anybody that cites unnamed sources. It became de rigueur about 15 years ago. I don’t understand why, but now it’s just how people operate. I don’t trust any of that stuff now. Because again, it could be a political group. It could be a corporation. It could be an ex-general with a very deep interest in Raytheon's next quarter. I don’t know what’s going on. So these things are a real problem for me, but it seems to be something that I would love for us to challenge and push back and say, “Hey. No. We’re not gonna read this article. Unnamed sources. Not good. What else you got?”
Melissa Zimdars: Yeah. Or to definitely approach that as perhaps a story in its nascent form to not read too much into what something like that might indicate or mean.
Chris Martenson: Right. And I do interview widely, and so another group that I spend time with people who are ex-military, particularly special forces. And they say flat out their personal experience and what they read about in the newspaper couldn't be further apart. So there’s always a level of re-packaging that happens over here. So, particularly when it comes to geopolitics I got both eyes mostly closed. And I tilt my head sideways when I read this stuff. Very hard to figure out what actually happening. So, today, if I'm reading about Syria, I have to read Pravda, I have to read Haaretz. I have to read stuff coming out of Iraq, as well as Europe, as well as the U.S., and they all disagree wildly.
Melissa Zimdars: But I think you raise a good point about even stepping outside of information originating outside of the United States. So sometimes it’s important to see what is the lens that is separate from us? How do we understand information the way it’s being reported from quote, unquote, the outside?
Chris Martenson: Very good. Very good. So, all very reasonable. What are your plans for the list now? What happens with it from here, do you think?
Melissa Zimdars: Honestly, I'm not 100 percent sure because it really became sort of a secondary area of my sort of scholarly interests. But one thing I actually think – you bring up transparency and challenging the list, and that’s actually where I would want to improve it. And so, you bring up about bias and I'm very self-reflective about my own self-bias and creating it. And I have to think twice. Am I seeing a liberal website and not recognizing the ways in which it’s flawed as easily as I do others?
And so, my goal would be to specifically have people that identify across the political spectrum. Also more involved so it’s less about me and more about a range of people with analytical skills coming together to talk about these sources. I would also like to match sort of what I think with a transparent sort of crowd-sourced label or multiple labels where people could up or down vote whether agree or suggest other labels just to see how much does this match. Does the aggregate support what I’ve come up with? Does it differ? And what does that mean? So, to make those labels, this kind of analysis, even more transparent than I’ve tried to so far.
Chris Martenson: Well, excellent. I’m a big student of history so ever since I saw that picture of Abraham Lincoln that said, “You can’t believe everything you read on the internet,” I’ve been much more cautious.
Melissa Zimdars: I agree.
Chris Martenson: I raise that as a joke. That’s what I do with my kids though. There’s obviously false stuff and it just floods across Facebook with people just tagging stuff and putting stuff on there that’s completely wildly inappropriate. But you know what? Learning how to be – have discrimination abilities, discernment abilities, out to really understand, to develop that level – I won’t call it cynicism, but certain jadedness, but it’s important to understand everybody’s got an angle. And that’s not a bad thing. But understanding that is the first layer of maturity in saying, “Oh. They’re telling me this. Why?” Those are good questions to ask. Always.
Melissa Zimdars: Yup. I agree.
Chris Martenson: All right. Well, thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us today. Please tell people how they can follow your work as it progresses or interact with the list if they wanted to help you curate it.
Melissa Zimdars: Yeah. So if you go to opensources.co there’s a get help page where you can log in and basically, you can suggest updates, or questions if you notice an error, etcetera, so that’s really the easiest way to sort of create feedback. Otherwise, I guess this all happened so quickly I don’t have a great way for people to track what I do. I do have a researchgate account. I’m on Twitter as Mishmc, M-I-S-H-M-C. You can follow me there, too.
Chris Martenson: All right. Well, Melissa. Thank you so much for your time today.
