It's pretty amazing how politicians across the political spectrum blame problems of their own making on "Russia." They must think we are total idiots. Glenn Greenwald explains four incidents this week alone.
Matt Taibbi, writing at Racket News:
Open records investigations suggest the same academic researchers responsible for the infamous Alfa Server hoax were likely also the government's initial source that Russia did the "DNC Hack." The same Clinton-campaign-connected researchers who helped generate an infamous fake news story were likely the U.S. government’s source for the initial announcement that Russians hacked the Demcratic National Committee, according to documents produced across years of Open Records requests and congressional letters...
Dismissed, the Alfa fiasco added to a growing pile of elaborate media fakes, one that came to include the Steele dossier, the so-called “Project Birmingham” stunt in which a company called New Knowledge assigned fake Russian Twitter accounts to Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore, and the “Hamilton 68” site funded by the German Marshall Fund which used a bogus tracking tool to make figures like Republican congressman Devin Nunes appear tied to “Russian bots.”
Thanks to years of those Freedom of Information filings, it seems clear now the government was relying upon many of the same people associated with these known fake news schemes when it identified Russia as the source of the DNC-DCCC “cyberattacks.”
Coleman Hughes gave a thoughtful talk on color blindness at TED, but TED has been reluctant to let its viewers see the talk. Coleman describes the problem at The Free Press. Here's an excerpt:
Like any young writer, I am well aware that an invitation to speak at TED can be a career-changing opportunity. So you can imagine how thrilled I was when I was invited to appear at this year’s annual conference. What I could not have imagined from an organization whose tagline is “ideas worth spreading” is that it would attempt to suppress my own.As an independent podcaster and author, I count myself among the lucky few who can make a living doing what they truly love to do. Nothing about my experience with TED could change that. The reason this story matters is not because I was treated poorly, but because it helps explain how organizations can be captured by an ideological minority that bends even the people at the very top to its will. In that, the story of TED is the story of so many crucial and once-trustworthy institutions in American life.
Dr. Robert Malone's description of Scott Gottlieb, the political opportunist who wrote (in 2021): "The CIA May Be More Useful Than the CDC in Next Epidemic." The title to Malone's article: "Scott Gottlieb's Role in Creating a New Intelligence OfficeFDA commissioner, Investment fund manger, Pfizer Board of Director member, CIA advisor and Corporate Media Shill." An Excerpt:
[Gottlieb's] ascendency from an otherwise undistinguished internal medicine resident with a background in economics to highly lauded FDA commissioner at age 44 is quite remarkable. Even more remarkable has been his successful strong advocacy and lobbying in corporate media for the CIA to assume a dominant role in public health during the COVIDcrisis- despite never having an official government position involving CIA, DIA or other elements of the intelligence community. The depth of his involvement with the agency is unknown, but his advocacy for the interests of the CIA, Pfizer and the vaccine industry during the time of COVID have been consistent throughout the “pandemic.” . . .What we do know is that the CIA and the five eyes intelligence alliance were deeply involved in almost every aspect of western nation mismanagement of the COVIDcrisis, from the engineering of the virus to the ensuing global harmonized propaganda, psyops and censorship campaigns.
If only those who cheer on new U.S. imperialist wars would consider our deplorable track record. Consider the following excerpt from a recent article by Chris Hedges. The title of his article: "Humanitarian Imperialism Created the Libyan NightmareNATO’s military intervention in Libya in 2011, which overthrew the regime of Muammar Gaddafi, resulted in a chaotic and murderous failed state. Libyans pay a horrific price for this catastrophe."
“We came, we saw, he died,” Hillary Clinton famously quipped when Muammar Gaddafi, after seven months of U.S. and NATO bombing, was overthrown in 2011 and killed by a mob who sodomized him with a bayonet. But Gaddafi would not be the only one to die. . . .
The chaos that followed Western intervention saw weapons from the country’s arsenals flood the black market, with many snatched up by groups such as the Islamic State. Civil society ceased to function. Journalists captured images of migrants from Nigeria, Senegal and Eritrea being beaten and sold as slaves to work in fields or on construction sites. Libya’s infrastructure, including its electrical grids, aquifers, oil fields and dams, fell into disrepair....
Western regime-change, carried out in the name of human rights under the doctrine of R2P (Responsibility to Protect), destroyed Libya - as it did Iraq - as a unified and stable nation. The flood victims are part of the tens of thousands of Libyan dead resulting from our “humanitarian intervention,” which rendered disaster relief non-existent. We bear responsibility for Libya’s prolonged suffering. But once we wreak havoc on a country in the name of saving its persecuted — regardless of whether they are being persecuted or not — we forget they exist.
Karl Popper in “The Open Society and Its Enemies” warned against utopian engineering, massive social transformations, almost always implanted by force, and led by those who believe they are endowed with a revealed truth. These utopian engineers carry out the wholesale destruction of systems, institutions and social and cultural structures in a vain effort to achieve their vision. In the process, they dismantle the self-correcting mechanisms of incremental and piecemeal reform that are impediments to that grand vision. History is replete with murderous utopian social engineering — the Jacobins, the communists, the fascists and now, in our own age, the globalists, or neoliberal imperialists.
Libya, like Iraq and Afghanistan, fell victim to the self-delusions peddled by humanitarian interventionists — Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Ben Rhodes, Samantha Power and Susan Rice. The Obama administration armed and backed an insurgent force that they believed would do the bidding of the U.S. Obama in a recent post urged people to support aid agencies to alleviate the suffering of the people of Libya, a plea that ignited an understandable backlash on social media."