HP McLovincraft

The Grim Future of Establishment Journalism

When the failures of legacy journalism during the pandemic period are analysed, as may eventually happen, the concentration will probably be on the failure to expose relevant facts. While obviously important, that is not the main lesson that should be taken out of the debacle. If disinterested journalism is to have any future – and at the moment it is all but extinct – then there has to be something more than just the recording of facts, or the eliciting of different points of view.

So great has been the intensity of the propaganda and the censorship of alleged “misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information” that it is no longer possible for journalists to rely on a degree of reasonableness in the audience. The civic ground has been poisoned, including by journalists themselves. It will remain unusable for a long time.

In one sense, the problem is an old one. To work in a newsroom is to be exposed to intense and continuous dishonesty. The dissimulation comes in various forms: spin, outright lying, misleading but true facts, half-truths, quarter-truths, lack of context, sly exaggeration, selective amnesia, deceptive jargon, false statistics, sleazy personal attacks. After about a year any journalist with reasonable powers of observation will notice that they are working in a forest of lies.

There is no legal obligation for people talking to the media to tell the truth; it is not a court of law. But decent journalists attempt to counter the mendacity. Although they are always outgunned, they put up a fight in an attempt to present as much truth as possible.

That fight has all but disappeared. In the last three years legacy journalists have given up resisting. As the French philosopher Alain Soral quipped, there are only two types of journos left: prostitutes and unemployed (I am happy to report that on that scale my virtue is almost intact).

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Pro-Mask Crusader Trish Greenhalgh Plumbs New Depths of Distortion

Pro-mask crusader Professor Trish Greenhalgh recently plumbed new depths of distortion and misinformation in her relentless mission to force humankind to hide their faces behind strips of cloth or plastic. In a nine-minute interview with Rachel Burden on BBC Radio 5 Live on January 4th 2023, Greenhalgh (Professor of Primary Health Care Sciences at the University of Oxford) starkly revealed much that is awry with the official wear-a-mask narrative. Indeed, the untruths were so blatant that the official ‘fact checkers’ intervened.

To convey the flavour of Greenhalgh’s warped take on the science of masks in reducing viral transmission, here is a transcript of part of the interview:

Rachel Burden: What is the evidence that masks reduce spread, because this is a thing that a lot of our listeners have a real problem with?

Trish Greenhalgh: It’s got to reduce spread, hasn’t it… there’s absolutely no doubt that the virus can’t get through the holes in the mask.

RB: Can you point to scientific data to show this?

TG: Yes, absolutely… there are many studies that show if people are wearing a mask, if I’m wearing a mask and you’re wearing a mask, the chance of me passing on the virus to you goes down dramatically to about 2% of what it was if neither of us was wearing a mask. So the idea that masks don’t work is a sort of meme; it’s disinformation. … Over time, [mask wearing] is going to bring the virus under control very quickly.

If you go back to when we introduced mask mandates first – I think it was back in June/July 2020 – cases were going up very, very rapidly and then the mask mandate brought them under control, oh, within weeks, within a couple of weeks.

RB: Did it? Was it just the mask mandate? Was it not other factors at play?

TG: Of course it was other factors at play. This is a mathematical thing… you have to feed all that data into a computer… the science is really clear… [If you’re wearing a mask] you’re much less likely to catch the virus from the air.

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USAID Has Given $110,000 to Non-Profit With Alleged Links to Terror Groups

American taxpayer money might have been given to terrorist groups through a non-profit, according to a letter released on Friday from Congressman and Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Michael McCaul (R-Texas).

The House Foreign Affairs Committee’s (HFAC) Chairman wrote a letter (pdf) to the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) administrator, Samantha Power, expressing his concerns about the latter awarding a grant of $110,000 to a non-profit with alleged ties to terrorism.

McCaul expressed concerns over “credible” and “longstanding, detailed allegations” that the non-profit Helping Hand for Relief and Development (HHRD) was not properly reviewed for its alleged ties to terrorist groups, terror financiers, and extremist groups.

The Foreign Affairs Committee had given information on the matter to USAID from May 2022, but USAID’s response at that time was not addressing the allegations against the grantee, according to McCaul.

The Epoch Times reached out to USAID for comments.

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Taxpayers to Cover Andrew Cuomo’s Defense in Sexual Harassment Lawsuit

Taxpayers will be left footing the bill to defend disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in his sexual harassment lawsuit.

Nearly a dozen women have accused Cuomo of sexual harassment, leading to his resignation in August 2021.

Cuomo was sued by a State Trooper last year, who alleges that he hit on her, kissed her, and “placed the palm of his hand on her belly button and slid it across her waist to her right hip.”

According to a report from the New York Post, “the former governor claimed the sex harassment accusations were made while he was governor — entitling him to a state-funded defense.”

A lawyer with the Attorney General, Andrew Amer, said they had denied the taxpayer-funded defense because “all of the conduct was to serve [Cuomo’s] own self-interest.”

“These are not allegations where the conduct occurred while they were off duty. These are work place allegations,” Cuomo’s lawyer argued.

On Friday, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Shlomo Hagler sided with Cuomo.

“This court grants the petition and requires that there be a defense,” Hagler said.

“[Cuomo’s] view is that everything he did was within the scope of his employment and he was just acting as the governor … when addressing trooper 1 in a friendly manner,” Hagler continued. “Did he go over the line? That is not clear cut.”

The judge said that since Cuomo has denied the allegations and claimed that he was acting appropriately as the governor, a taxpayer-funded defense can’t be denied.

“The allegations are quite disturbing,” Hagler said. “They should not be tolerated in the work place, if true.”

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The Biggest Cocaine Boom in History

Just as the impact of slavery in the southern US extended deeply into the “free” states of the north — such as slave labor providing raw inputs for northern industries — the international drug trade has had a broad impact on local economies around the world in recent decades.

The biggest cocaine boom in history has its origins outside towns like La Dorada, Colombia, Matthew Bristow reports here. Cattle ranches and fish farms give way to endless fields of coca, the pale green shrub used for making the drug.

“We’re living in the golden age of cocaine,” said Toby Muse, the author of the 2020 book Kilo: Inside the Deadliest Cocaine Cartels, who has been reporting on the Colombian drug trade for more than two decades. “Cocaine is reaching corners of the planet that have never seen it before, because there is so much.”

Satellite photos show that the amount of Colombian land planted with coca rose to a record of more than 200,000 hectares (500,000 acres) last year, more than five times what it was when the infamous Pablo Escobar was gunned down in 1993. All that supply is flooding markets around the world, bringing violence, corruption and huge profits with it.

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Twitter Moderators Knew the ‘Russian Bots’ List Was Fake: Twitter Files

Twitter content moderators knew that a “Russian bots list” used by mainstream media to discredit unwelcome political viewpoints was fake, but ultimately remained silent on it due to fears of bad press, according to newly unveiled internal email exchanges.

Independent journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday released the latest installment of revelations dubbed the “Twitter Files.” This new batch of internal communications involved the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), a nonprofit organization that studies strategies to counter campaigns to “undermine democratic processes” across the world.

ASD also created and maintains “Hamilton 68,” a dashboard that tracks, among other things, 600 Twitter accounts alleged to be Russian government-controlled bots. This online tool received positive mainstream media coverage, including from Politico, The Washington Post, and CNN.

In screenshots of emails shared by Taibbi, Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth appeared to have dismissed Hamilton 68’s list of Russian bots as untrustworthy.

In a January 2018 email, Roth lamented Hamilton 68’s accusing an organically trending political hashtag of being driven by Russian bots. He also talked about potentially calling out such behavior.

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Rare Discovery Of Roman Dodecahedron Fragment Adds To Archaeological Mystery

A chance find by an amateur metal detectorist has added to a long-running mystery of archaeology, as a fragment of an Ancient Roman dodecahedron has been found in the small town of Kortessem, in Belgium.

The piece, originally part of a dodecahedron measuring 5-6 centimeters (2–2.36 inches) in size, shows signs of having been repaired in the past, with local archaeologists at the Flanders Heritage Agency suggesting that it may have been broken in some kind of ancient ritual.

Roman dodecahedra are something of a puzzle: more than 100 such artifacts have been found throughout Europe over the past few centuries, each of them meticulously cast in these perfect 12-sided polyhedra. Each face of the bronze dodecahedra has a small hole through the center, though no hole is the same size as another, and each vertex is decorated with a tiny bauble – though apart from that, the little doodads seem to have no distinctive markings at all.

We can infer that they must have been important, at least to some of their owners, since several have been found among coin hoards and – the new example notwithstanding – hardly any show signs of the kind of wear and tear you might expect over nearly two millennia of history.

And yet the simple fact is that nobody knows what Roman dodecahedra were actually used for. In fact, if it wasn’t for the fact that hundreds of them have been discovered, you’d never know they existed at all, since no record of them has ever been found in contemporary art or writing.

That hasn’t stopped people from theorizing. Perhaps the mysterious little objects were used as rangefinders or angle measurers, people have suggested, or maybe the Romans used them for astronomical predictions to aid in agriculture. Since the advent of YouTube, the idea that the dodecahedra were used as knitting aids has proved particularly popular – but since even knitting needles aren’t known in the historical record until a good few centuries later, that hypothesis is likely not true.

Instead, archaeologists at the Flanders Heritage Agency favor a more esoteric explanation. “There is increasing evidence that dodecahedrons may not have been practical objects, such as measuring instruments,” the statement says. “The known specimens are too different in dimensions and details for that.”

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The Mass Media Used To Publish Perspectives On Ukraine That They Would Never Publish Today

The other day I stumbled across a 2014 opinion piece in The Guardian titled “It’s not Russia that’s pushed Ukraine to the brink of war” by Seumas Milne, who the following year would go on to become the Labour Party’s Executive Director of Strategy and Communications under Jeremy Corbyn.

I bring this up because the perspectives you’ll find in that article are jarring in how severely they deviate from anything you’ll see published in the mainstream press about Ukraine in 2023. It places the brunt of the blame for the violence and tensions in that nation at that time squarely at Washington’s feet, opening with a warning that the “threat of war in Ukraine is growing” and saying there’s an “unelected government in Kiev,” and it only gets naughtier from there.

I strongly recommend reading the article in full if you want some perspective in just how dramatically the mass media has clamped down on dissenting ideas about Ukraine and Russia, beginning with the frenzied stoking of Russia hysteria in 2016 and exploding exponentially with the Russian invasion last year. I doubt there’s a single paragraph which could get published in any mainstream outlet in the media environment of today.

Milne writes about how “the Ukrainian president was replaced by a US-selected administration, in an entirely unconstitutional takeover,” and about “the role of the fascistic right on the streets and in the new Ukrainian regime.” He says that “Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to join Russia,” and that “you don’t hear much about the Ukrainian government’s veneration of wartime Nazi collaborators and pogromists, or the arson attacks on the homes and offices of elected communist leaders, or the integration of the extreme Right Sector into the national guard, while the anti-semitism and white supremacism of the government’s ultra-nationalists is assiduously played down.” He says that “after two decades of eastward Nato expansion, this crisis was triggered by the west’s attempt to pull Ukraine decisively into its orbit and defence structure.”

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Drug-Testing Company Used in Child Custody Cases Investigated for Fraud

Averhealth, a drug testing company used by courts around the country to decide whether people go to jail or parents retain custody of their children, was under investigation by the Department of Justice (DOJ) for fraud in 2022, according to emails reviewed by VICE News.

Averhealth runs millions of drug tests a year, working with courts and government agencies in 34 states. The DOJ was looking into the company as early as June 2021, according to emails between the DOJ and Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services, (MDHHS), one of the state agencies that contracted with Averhealth. The investigation was still active as of March 2022. The probe led Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services to stop doing business with Averhealth, according to an internal email at the department.

The DOJ investigation gathered information about court testimony, given by Averhealth’s former lab director Sarah Riley in 2021, that up to 30 percent of the results reported to the state of Michigan’s child welfare agency were wrong, both false positives or false negatives. As VICE News previously reported, Riley testified Averhealth was botching the quality controls that ensure lab instruments are properly calibrated. The company denies those claims.

The DOJ would not comment on the investigation, including whether it was concluded or ongoing. Neither would Averhealth.

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