Blaming Russia For The Internet "Sewer"

Authored by Robert Parry via ConsortiumNews.com,

As the Russia-gate hysteria spirals down from the implausible to the absurd, almost every bad thing is blamed on the Russians, even how they turned the previously pristine Internet into a "sewer"...

With the U.S. government offering tens of millions of dollars to combat Russian “propaganda and disinformation,” it’s perhaps not surprising that we see “researchers” such as Jonathan Albright of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University making the absurd accusation that the Russians have “basically turned [the Internet] into a sewer.”

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier outside the Kremlin wall in Moscow, Dec. 6, 2016. (Photo by Robert Parry)

I’ve been operating on the Internet since 1995 and I can assure you that the Internet has always been “a sewer” - in that it has been home to crazy conspiracy theories, ugly personal insults, click-bait tabloid “news,” and pretty much every vile prejudice you can think of. Whatever some Russians may or may not have done in buying $100,000 in ads on Facebook (compared to its $27 billion in annual revenue) or opening 201 Twitter accounts (out of Twitter’s 328 million monthly users), the Russians are not responsible for the sewage coursing through the Internet.

Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans and pretty much every other segment of the world’s population didn’t need Russian help to turn the Internet into an informational “sewer.” But, of course, fairness and proportionality have no place in today’s Russia-gate frenzy.

After all, your “non-governmental organization” or your scholarly “think tank” is not likely to get a piece of the $160 million that the U.S. government authorized last December to counter primarily Russian “propaganda and disinformation” if you explain that the Russians are at most responsible for a tiny trickle of “sewage” compared to the vast rivers of “sewage” coming from many other sources.

If you put the Russia-gate controversy in context, you also are not likely to have your “research” cited by The Washington Post as Albright did on Thursday because he supposedly found some links at the home-décor/fashion site Pinterest to a few articles that derived from a few of the 470 Facebook accounts and pages that Facebook suspects of having a link to Russia and shut them down. (To put that 470 number into perspective, Facebook has about two billion monthly users.)

Albright’s full quote about the Russians allegedly exploiting various social media platforms on the Internet was: “They’ve gone to every possible medium and basically turned it into a sewer.”

But let’s look at the facts. According to Facebook, the suspected “Russian-linked” accounts purchased $100,000 in ads from 2015 to 2017 (compared to Facebook’s annual revenue of about $27 billion), with only 44 percent of those ads appearing before the 2016 election and many having little or nothing to do with politics, which is curious if the Kremlin’s goal was to help elect Donald Trump and defeat Hillary Clinton.

Even former Clinton political strategist Mark Penn has acknowledged the absurdity of thinking that such piddling amounts could have any impact on a $2.4 billion presidential campaign, plus all the billions of dollars worth of free-media attention to the conventions, debates, etc. Based on what’s known about the Facebook ads, Penn calculated that “the actual electioneering [in battleground states] amounts to about $6,500.”

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Monday, Penn added, “I have 40 years of experience in politics, and this Russian ad buy mostly after the election anyway, simply does not add up to a carefully targeted campaign to move voters. It takes tens of millions of dollars to deliver meaningful messages to the contested portion of the electorate.”

Puppies and Pokemon

And, then there is the curious content. According to The New York Times, one of these “Russian-linked” Facebook groups was dedicated to photos of “adorable puppies.” Of course, the Times tried hard to detect some sinister motive behind the “puppies” page.

The New York Times building in Manhattan. (Photo credit: Robert Parry)

Similarly, CNN went wild over its own “discovery” that one of the “Russian-linked” pages offered Amazon gift cards to people who found “Pokémon Go” sites near scenes where police shot unarmed black men - if you would name the Pokémon after the victims.

“It’s unclear what the people behind the contest hoped to accomplish, though it may have been to remind people living near places where these incidents had taken place of what had happened and to upset or anger them,” CNN mused, adding:

 

“CNN has not found any evidence that any Pokémon Go users attempted to enter the contest, or whether any of the Amazon Gift Cards that were promised were ever awarded — or, indeed, whether the people who designed the contest ever had any intention of awarding the prizes.”

So, these dastardly Russians are exploiting “adorable puppies” and want to “remind people” about unarmed victims of police violence, clearly a masterful strategy to undermine American democracy or – according to the original Russia-gate narrative – to elect Donald Trump.

A New York Times article on Wednesday acknowledged another inconvenient truth that unintentionally added more perspective to the Russia-gate hysteria.

It turns out that some of the mainstream media’s favorite “fact-checking” organizations are home to Google ads that look like news items and lead readers to phony sites dressed up to resemble People, Vogue or other legitimate content providers.

“None of the stories were true,” the Times reported. “Yet as recently as late last week, they were being promoted with prominent ads served by Google on PolitiFact and Snopes, fact-checking sites created precisely to dispel such falsehoods.”

There is obvious irony in PolitiFact and Snopes profiting off “fake news” by taking money for these Google ads. But this reality also underscores the larger reality that fabricated news articles – whether peddling lies about Melania Trump or a hot new celebrity or outlandish Russian plots – are driven principally by the profit motive.

The Truth About Fake News

Occasionally, the U.S. mainstream media even acknowledges that fact. For instance, last November, The New York Times, which was then flogging the Russia-linked “fake news” theme, ran a relatively responsible article about a leading “fake news” Web site that the Times tracked down. It turned out to be an entrepreneurial effort by an unemployed Georgian student using a Web site in Tbilisi to make some money by promoting pro-Trump stories, whether true or not.

Hillary Clinton at the Code 2017 conference on May 31, 2017

The owner of the Web site, 22-year-old Beqa Latsabidse, said he had initially tried to push stories favorable to Hillary Clinton but that proved unprofitable so he switched to publishing anti-Clinton and pro-Trump articles, including made-up stories. In other words, the Times found no Russian connection.

The Times article on Wednesday revealed the additional problem of  Google ads placed on mainstream Internet sites leading readers to bogus news sites to get clicks and thus advertising dollars. And, it turns out that PolitiFact and Snopes were at least unwittingly profiting off these entrepreneurial ventures by running their ads. Again, there was no claim here of Russian “links.” It was all about good ole American greed.

But the even larger Internet problem is that many “reputable” news sites, such as AOL, lure readers into clicking on some sensationalistic or misleading headline, which takes readers to a story that is often tabloid trash or an extreme exaggeration of what the headline promised.

This reality about the Internet should be the larger context in which the Russia-gate story plays out, the miniscule nature of this Russian “meddling” even if these “suspected … links to Russia” – as the Times initially described the 470 Facebook pages – turn out to be true.

But there are no lucrative grants going to “researchers” who would put the trickle of alleged Russian “sewage” into the context of the vast flow of Internet “sewage” that is even flowing through the esteemed “fact-checking” sites of PolitiFact and Snopes.

There are also higher newspaper sales and better TV ratings if the mainstream media keeps turning up new angles on Russia-gate, even as some of the old ones fall away as inconsequential or meaningless (such as the Senate Intelligence Committee dismissing earlier controversies over Sen. Jeff Sessions’s brief meeting with the Russian ambassador at the Mayflower Hotel and minor changes in the Republican platform).

Saying ‘False’ Is ‘True’

And, there is the issue of who decides what’s true. PolitiFact continues to defend its false claim that Hillary Clinton was speaking the truth when – in referencing leaked Democratic emails last October – she claimed that the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies “have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin, and they are designed to influence our election.”

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (right) talks with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office, with John Brennan and other national security aides present. (Photo credit: Office of Director of National Intelligence)

That claim was always untrue because a reference to a consensus of the 17 intelligence agencies suggests a National Intelligence Estimate or similar product that seeks the judgments of the entire intelligence community. No NIE or community-wide study was ever done on this topic.

Only later – in January 2017 – did a small subset of the intelligence community, what Director of National Intelligence James Clapper described as “hand-picked” analystsfrom three agencies – the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation – issue an “assessment” blaming the Russians while acknowledging a lack of actual evidence.

In other words, the Jan. 6 “assessment” was comparable to the “stovepiped” intelligence that influenced many of the mistaken judgments of President George W. Bush’s administration. In “stovepiped” intelligence, a selected group of analysts is closeted away and develops judgments without the benefit of other experts who might offer contradictory evidence or question the groupthink.

So, in many ways, Clinton’s statement was the opposite of true both when she said it in 2016 and later in 2017 when she repeated it in direct reference to the Jan. 6 assessment. If PolitiFact really cared about facts, it would have corrected its earlier claim that Clinton was telling the truth, but the fact-checking organization wouldn’t budge — even after The New York Times and The Associated Press ran corrections.

In this context, PolitiFact showed its contempt even for conclusive evidence – testimony from former DNI Clapper (corroborated by former CIA Director John Brennan) that the 17-agency claim was false. Instead, PolitiFact was determined to protect Clinton’s false statement from being described for what it was: false.

Of course, maybe PolitiFact is suffering from the arrogance of its elite status as an arbiter of truth with its position on Google’s First Draft coalition, a collection of mainstream news outlets and fact-checkers which gets to decide what information is true and what is not true — for algorithms that then will exclude or downplay what’s deemed “false.”

So, if PolitiFact says something is true – even if it’s false – it becomes “true.” Thus, it’s perhaps not entirely ironic that PolitiFact would collect money from Google ads placed on its site by advertisers of fake news.

NATO "Concerned By Russia's Military Buildup Close To Our Borders"

Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The Secretary-General of NATO said this on October 9th, speaking in NATO member Romania, right across the Black Sea from Russia’s region of Crimea (which had always been part of Russia except for the brief period 1954-2014, when the Soviet dictator arbitrarily transferred Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 — i.e., the Soviet dictator had made Crimea ‘Ukrainian’, and only in 2014 was a plebiscite actually held there in order to determine what the people there wanted, and more than 90% chose to be restored to the Russian Government). He said, on October 9th, that NATO is “concerned by Russia’s military buildup close to our borders”, but NATO actually had expanded up to Russia’s borders; in no way had Russia expanded up to NATO’s borders. NATO’s leader was importantly misrepresenting history, there.

In fact, Romania, itself, used to be a member of the former Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact military alliance of nations, which had been set up by the Soviet Union in response to America’s having established in 1949 its NATO military alliance with Western European nations. After the Cold War ended, on Russia’s side, in 1991, and has been secretly continued by the U.S. Government and its allies right up to the present time, Romania became a member of the NATO anti-Russian alliance in 2004, under George W. Bush’s Administration. But Bush’s father, President George Herbert Walker Bush, had, as the U.S. President, established, in 1990, the foundation for what NATO now is doing in Romania, against Russia — even though Russia had, in fact, ended the Cold War on its side, in 1991.

When the Cold War ended in 1991, it was on the basis of the promise by the Soviet Union that the U.S.S.R. would end, and would become its component separate independent states (one of which was Russia), and end its communism, and end its Warsaw Pact military alliance with nations adjoining the Soviet Union - that all of this would happen if the United States and its NATO allies would not expand NATO, and that especially NATO would not move “one inch to the east” (i.e., toward Russia) by adding, to the NATO military alliance, any of the nations (such as Romania) which had been in the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact, nor especially any nations that had been a part of the former Soviet Union itself (such as Ukraine). The U.S. Government wants to bring Ukraine into NATO, to become its 29th member-nation. But Ukraine is not yet a member, and NATO therefore doesn’t yet have any legitimate business there, at all. NATO isn’t, and can’t yet be, ‘defending’ Ukraine — no matter how much NATO might possibly want to go to war against Russia.

For NATO to be alleging to be “concerned by Russia’s military buildup close to our borders” is amazing, since NATO is militarily building up not only “close to” Russia’s borders, but right on Russia’s borders (such as in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) and is now seeking to add Ukraine as a member, but already has other formerly Russia-allied nations: Poland, East Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, and, this year, Montenegro - and is attempting to draw in the few remaining ones, but especially Ukraine, which it claims to be ‘defending’.

The Warsaw Pact was formed six years after the NATO alliance was, and only after repeated failures by the Soviet Union to be allowed into NATO. The Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was, additionally, but only vaguely, promised, in 1990, that if the Cold War would ‘end’, then Russia, now to become an independent nation, would be considered ‘again’ for possible admission into NATO, but this vaguely presented bait turned out not to be honored in reality, once the deal was done. During the years after 1991, NATO boldly and blatantly violated the “move not one inch to the east” agreement with Gorbachev, and took on 13 new members — all of which lands had previously been either inside the Soviet Union, or else inside the Warsaw Pact — so that NATO increased from its then-existing 16 nations, to become today’s 29 nations, all of which 13 additional nations had previously been allied with Russia; and, so, NATO is now not only near Russia’s borders, such as in Romania, but right on Russia’s very borders in other nations, and the U.S. is, even now installing an anti-missile system to annihilate Russia’s retaliatory missiles in the event that the U.S. regime decides to launch a blitz first-strike nuclear attack against Russia to eliminate Russia’s retaliatory nuclear arsenals either on the ground or in the air and thus finally conquer NATO’s eternal target: Russia.

NATO repeatedly accuses Russia of aggression for defending itself against American, and other NATO, aggressions, such as U.S. President Barack Obama’s carefully engineered coup that started being planned in 2011 and was finally perpetrated in 2014 to take over Ukraine’s Government to turn anti-Russian this country, Ukraine, which has the longest of all European borders with Russia. The U.S. regime wants Ukraine in NATO, but other NATO members don’t yet allow it (and maybe never will).

However, American and other NATO ‘news’media, lie about this entire matter, and present NATO as being purely a ‘defensive’ organization, instead of what it actually is: a major component in the U.S. dictatorship’s effort ultimately to checkmate Russia or else to kill Russians entirely and take over their natural resources to be controlled by U.S. and other international corporations. NATO is an international mega-criminal gang, which enormously increases the likelihood of World War III, but which also is enormously profitable for its ultimate backers, Lockheed Martin and other NATO weapons-makers, whose controlling ownership also happens to own and control, and to advertise their other corporations’ products and services in, the ’news’ media in those nations. Media-profits are thus connected — both directly and indirectly — to that military-industrial complex, which needs invasions, even if it doesn’t actually need to conquer Russia or any other country. But perpetual war for perpetual ‘peace’ is the most essential thing of all for NATO (and, since nuclear weaponry is the most expensive type of all, the anti-Russian agenda is especiallyimportant to NATO, even without Russia’s natural resources). That’s what actually is behind NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s speech on October 9th near Russia’s border, in which he alleged, “Our deployments are a direct response to Russia’s aggressive actions in Ukraine,” and, “We are concerned by Russia’s military build-up close to our borders.” He said there, “We do not want to isolate Russia. NATO does not want a new Cold War. Our actions are designed to prevent, not provoke conflict.” (Even Hitler had said, prior to the start of WW II, that he was merely ‘defending’ Germany, against other countries.) He knows, as well as anyone possibly can, that, on the U.S. regime’s side, the Cold War never stopped, and that it has escalated sharply and re-invigorated NATO itself, with the Obama-regime’s takeover of Ukraine, and he knows that the ‘aggression’ which NATO and the U.S. regime blame against Russia, constitute actually Russia’s defensive actions which necessarily result from Obama’s Ukrainian coup on Russia’s very doorstep — a coup which was even documented on recordings, such as here and here (and many other key moments) (and the key background for which coup has, by now, also been documented, going all the way back to 2011, when the planning for organizing Obama’s coup was already begun in 2011 inside the U.S. State Department), and which therefore cannot even be denied (except in the persistently lying U.S.-NATO team’s ‘news’media).

It’s all a big ‘jobs program’ for the U.S. and other extremely corrupt-at-the-top nations - the U.S. aristocracy and its vassal-aristocracies in Europe and elsewhere, and their lying ‘news’media, who can’t deny the evidence, and so they simply ignore the evidence, and they instead stenographically ‘report’ the U.S. Government’s lies as ‘truths’, much the same as had happened prior to the U.S. Government’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, only on a much larger scale now.

So, these ugly facts are not reported in the NATO press, because they’re true - their truth is why they’re not allowed to be broadcast and publicly debated. Their being true is blocking those ‘democracies’ from allowing their respective publics to know anything about any of this.

We are, thus, all living in the type of situation that the allegorical novel 1984 described; but the means by which it operates, in reality, turn out to be far more sophisticated than in the fictional version.

Welcome, then, to 2017’s version of 1984 — it’s the updated version, in which, NATO is “concerned by Russia’s military buildup close to our borders.”

Seattle Set To Become First City To Offer "Safe Spaces" For Heroin Use

Modeled after similar programs in Europe, Australia and Canada, Seattle is on track to become the first city in the United States where heroin addicts can legally shoot up at a supervised healthcare facility.  The controversial program is intended to reduce the number of overdose deaths by bringing users out of the alleys and into "safe places" where overdoses can be treated immediately, all at taxpayer expense, of course.  This new concept goes one step beyond needle exchange programs that exist in other cities intended to decrease the spread of disease through dirty needles.

The goal of the program, as Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse points out, is to reduce the occurrence of ancillary diseases such as HIV that result from heroin use and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to treat.  Per The Washington Examiner:

Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health, said not taking action to reduce the spread of those diseases would be irresponsible from a public health perspective. Cutting even one HIV infection would save $379,668 in lifetime costs, according to NIDA data.

King County spends $1.2 million annually on its needle exchange program, allowing the program to essentially pay for itself if three infections are prevented per year. Cutting infections by 1 percent in King County would save more than $70 million in HIV-related medical costs, the county"s website states.

As CNN noted, "safe injection centers" have been around in Vancouver since at least 2013.  But, despite claims they save hundreds of lives each year, actual data from the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General would suggest that drug overdose deaths have skyrocketed since that time...unpossible.

Of course, such programs are not without their critics as one Washington State Senator says "toleration is not compassionate, it is a signal of defeat."

Republican state Sen. Mark Miloscia proposed a bill to ban secure injection zones in Washington, and the bill is sitting in committee in the Senate.

"Toleration is not compassionate, it is a signal of defeat. We cannot give up on drug users. In the end, these sites will only distract us from getting resources into real, medically proven treatment options," Miloscia said.

John P. Walters, director of drug control policy in George W. Bush"s administration, agreed the only safe approach to heroin is not to take it.

"Supporting addicts" heroin use maintains their disease, administering the poison that causes their illness and diminishes their lives. A government-approved place for unlimited heroin injection creates the conditions for never-ending addiction and gives government a drug dealer"s power over the addicted," Walters wrote in an op-ed. "We do not protect addicts by reviving them from overdose death only to return them to death"s front door, perpetuating the self-destructive cycle of addiction."

Meanwhile, to our complete lack of surprise, the progressive, snowflake haven of San Francisco is also in the midst of implementing their own "safe injection facilities" (SIFs) which they estimate could save taxpayers millions.

Supervised injection facilities (SIFs) have been shown to reduce infection, prevent overdose deaths, and increase treatment uptake. The United States is in the midst of an opioid epidemic, yet no sanctioned SIF currently operates in the United States. We estimate the economic costs and benefits of establishing a potential SIF in San Francisco using mathematical models that combine local public health data with previous research on the effects of existing SIFs. We consider potential savings from five outcomes: averted HIV and hepatitis C virus (HCV) infections, reduced skin and soft tissue infection (SSTI), averted overdose deaths, and increased medication-assisted treatment (MAT) uptake. We find that each dollar spent on a SIF would generate US$2.33 in savings, for total annual net savings of US$3.5 million for a single 13-booth SIF. Our analysis suggests that a SIF in San Francisco would not only be a cost-effective intervention but also a significant boost to the public health system.

So all this time the cure for drug abuse was just offering up more drugs...if only such progressive thought prevailed in the 80"s we could have avoided so many deaths in the "war on drugs" and simultaneously enriched drug dealers even more...could have been a win-win really.

Kushner Family Tells Rich Chinese: Invest $500,000 and Immigrate to the United States

By EconMatters

I was debating whether to put this post on our sister site Asia Pop Culture, but decided EconMatters.com seems a more appropriate place.  

Washington Post journalists attended the last Saturday presentation at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Beijing saw and heard the pitch to the rich Chinese -- They could obtain EB-5 investor visas to the U.S. if they invested at least $500,000 into one of the Kushner family’s development projects.

The presentation was reportedly delivered by Nicole Kushner Meyer, sister of Jared Kushner. As you know, Jared Kushner is the presidential adviser and son-in-law, husband of Ivana Trump.

Now what is EB-5 visa exactly? Wikipedia explains that the EB-5 visa provides a method of obtaining a green card for foreign nationals who can invest from $500,000 to one million dollars in a "new commercial enterprise" in the United States. The program has been criticized as akin to “U.S. citizenship for sale,” and it has come under scrutiny after a series of fraud and scandals.

According to the Post, the tagline on a brochure for the event:

“Invest $500,000 and immigrate to the United States.”

The New York Times reported that during the presentation, there was a slide describing Donald Trump as a "key decision maker" about the future of the EB-5 program.  So the potential investors were then advised to "invest sooner rather than later in case visa rules change under the Trump administration."

“Invest early, and you will invest under the old rules,” one speaker said.

A slide displaying President Trump as the key decision maker in the EB-5 program (graphic source: New York Times)

The highlight of the event was Meyer, a principal for the company, who was described in promotional materials as Jared Kushner"s sister.  Meyer told the audience of about 100 wealthy Chinese investors that the project "means a lot to me and my entire family."

The Post said it well in a nutshell:

".....the session Saturday demonstrated that the [Kushner] company is perceived as enjoying close ties to the Trump administration. Ethics laws prohibit government officials from profiting personally from their public-sector work."

Can this be any more obvious a ploy to cash in and take advantage of the Kushner family new proximity to power?

I"m not a legal and ethics expert....  But since Jared Kushner has indicated that he has divested from the family business, the loophole of the so-called Ethics Law could be that Jared"s sister is not exactly a "government official"?  So if the sister"s company benefits, it will not be on Jared?  I"m pretty sure the money will eventually find Jared.....

Anyway, I guess we will wait to see how the spin doctors will find a way out of this "incredibly stupid and highly inappropriate" mess as described by Richard Painter, the former chief White House ethics lawyer in President George W. Bush’s administration.  Well that is how the rich gets richer, and ........  

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Victim of Obama Administration Surveillance Order, James Rosen, Discusses His Experiences, says Trump Wiretape 'Plausible'

Back in 2013, Fox News journalist, James Rosen, was named a "criminal co-conspirator" and "flight risk" by then AG Holder -- which led to a series of events that made Holden later regret doing it. With Holden"s explicit direction, the DOJ secretly accessed all of Rosen"s gmails, contacts, and surveilled of more than 20 phone lines connected to him, including his mother"s phone in Staten Island, NY.

The Washington Post"s Dana Milbank wrote a piece on the ordeal, saying "The Rosen affair is as flagrant an assault on civil liberties as anything done by George W. Bush’s administration, and it uses technology to silence critics in a way Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of. To treat a reporter as a criminal for doing his job — seeking out information the government doesn’t want made public — deprives Americans of the First Amendment freedom on which all other constitutional rights are based."

Here is Rosen recounting his affair and opining on the plausibility of Trump being a target of the Obama administration too -- which he affirmed in the positive, "in the age of Snowden."

Suggesting that Obama never ordered surveillance on an American citizen is somewhat ridiculous, when in fact we know of very public instances, like Rosen, when it has been done. Considering Obama"s non-stop panning of Fox New during his terms, some find it hard to believe that he wasn"t directly informed about the Rosen spying.

Content originally generated at iBankCoin.com