Friday 29th of March 2024

the media and their think-tanks handlers...

handlers
Most consumers are unaware off the mainstream media’s dirty little secret. Think tanks are increasingly taking advantage of tight news budgets to influence the press agenda in favour of their sponsors.

Decades ago, these outfits generally operated as policy advisories. Although, some were comfortably enumerated ‘retirement homes’ for distinguished public servants or intellectuals. However, in modern times, they have become indistinguishable from lobbying firms. With the budgets to match.

On the Russia (and broader Eastern European) beat, think tank influence is becoming increasingly dangerous and malign. And it’s leading to a crisis in journalistic standards which nobody wants to acknowledge.

Two cases this week highlight the malaise.

Right now, Hungary and Ukraine are embroiled in a standoff regarding the rights of ethnic Hungarians in the latter country. The disagreement is entirely local, with roots in the 20th century carving-up of Budapest’s territory after it found itself on the losing side in both World Wars. As a result, lands were dispersed into other nations – former Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union.

There are tensions, to varying degrees, between Hungary and pretty much all the successor states housing its lost diaspora. Especially since nationalist Viktor Orban started handing out passports to compatriots stranded on foreign soil.

Until recently, most of the focus was on disagreements with Slovakia, but now attention has switched to Ukraine.

Let’s be clear. This is a mess of Kiev’s making. In a bid to appease “patriotic” fundamentalists, it began moves towards restrictive language laws, which has especially alienated the small band of Hungarian speakers on its western frontier.

Predictably, Budapest rushed in to defend its “people,”and now we have a nasty little imbroglio with headbangers on both sides entrenched.

One thing it’s not about is Russia. But Western media, egged on by think tank “experts,” keeps banging this drum. And here is a case in point this week.

The Los Angeles Times sent a correspondent to Uzhgorod, a Ukrainian border city. And rather than merely report from the ground, the writer spends a huge amount of the article referring to Russia and intimating that Orban is operating in lock-step with Moscow. Which is laughable to anybody who understands the Hungarian PM’s political methods. And which reeks of disinformation.

And who is used to “back up” these assertions? Only one Peter Kreko, “director of the Political Capital Institute, a Budapest think tank,” who is concerned Orban’s moves “help Russia hamper Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic integration.”

Now, isn’t that a weird sort of thing for a Hungarian analyst to be worrying about? Well, it wouldn’t be if the LA Times were transparent and disclosed Kreko’s funding. You see, here’s who bankrolls the “Political Capital Institute, a Budapest think tank.”

  • Institute of Modern Russia (plaything of disgraced former 90’s oligarch and Putin opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky)

  • National Endowment For Democracy (a US neoconservative outlet dedicated to “regime change” and promoting a pro-US outlook in Eastern Europe, whose chair has dubbed Ukraine “the big prize”)

  • Open Society (George Soros, who needs no introduction)

And here are some of the “most important international and domestic professional partners” of the Political Capital Institute:

  • Atlantic Council (NATO’s propaganda wing)

  • European Values (a Soros-funded Prague lobby group which smeared hundreds of European public figures as “useful idiots” for appearing on RT. Including Jeremy Corbyn and Stephen Fry).

  • German Marshall Fund of the United States (proprietors of the infamous ‘Hamilton 68’ dashboard)

Thus, the agendas at play are pretty clear here. Yet, the LA Times keeps its readers ignorant of Kreko’s paymasters. Which is especially interesting when you see RT, almost always, referred to as “the Kremlin-funded Russia Today,” or some version thereof, when described in Western media. And this is fine, because it’s true, but when the same rules don’t apply across the board, the bias is obvious.

The second case comes courtesy of “the Rupert Murdoch controlled Times of London” (see what I did there?) This week, it alleged around 75,000 Russians in London alone are Kremlin informants. All based on an “investigation” by the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), a neoconservative pressure group which seems to have successfully mounted a reverse takeover of the once venerable paper. With its leader writer, for instance, being a founding signatory of the concern.

Anyway, HJS, apparently based on a mere 16 interviews, with unnamed sources, concluded that “between a quarter and a half of Russian expats were, or have been informants.” And the Times splashed it.  

However, it “clarified,” with comment from an anonymous “dissident,” how, in reality, “it was about half.” So, only the 32,500 odd ‘agents’ in London then. Which, if true, would means the walls of the Russian Embassy would have to be made from elastic to house the amount of handlers required to keep tabs on their information sources.

Look, it’s hardly a secret that standards at the Times are low. After all, the main foreign affairs columnist, Edward Lucas, is literally funded by US weapons manufacturers.

No, this is not a joke. Lucas is employed as a lobbyist at CEPA, a Washington and Warsaw-based outfit, which promotes the arms manufacturer's agenda in Central and Eastern Europe. Namely, the likes of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, FireEye, and Bell Helicopters.

Of course, The Times doesn’t make this conflict of interests clear to its readers. Another example of how the ‘think tank’ tail is wagging the mainstream media dog these days.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/443540-think-tanks-media-disinformation/

 

Bryan MacDonald is an Irish journalist based in Russia.

on the couch potato...

on the couch...

Always underscoring the need to take comfort in our humanity in the face of such frustrating conflict, Peterson charmingly advises us in his book 12 Rules for Life to seek out a stray animal and pet it: "And maybe when you are going for a walk and your head is spinning a cat will show up and if you pay attention to it then you will get a reminder for just fifteen seconds that the wonder of Being might make up for the ineradicable suffering that accompanies it. Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street."

Unmistakably the words of a monster.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201811091069673366-humanities-hijacked-...

 

Gus is a "feminist", but if I had my ways I would shoot all the cats in the street... I am a monster as far as cats are concerned, because the sweet local moggies are bird killers — from the blue wrens to the peace doves. It's not their fault, of course, and this is why I don't boot the ginger furball from across the street. These aloof animals also behave like NATO troops in my small veggie patch, where they piss and poop, digging up the parsnips. So I have no respect for cat "owners". They don't own a companion but a creature that for the greatest part of its life is hypocritically bludgeing off you, making up as if you were important to them. You're not. ... And cats cannot be useful like a guide dog and unlike dogs, they only have one eye brow... and they're not native to Australia. Like rabits, foxes, prickly pear and cane toads, cats are pests.

See also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/29098

supporting the terrorists in china...

On 13 November 2018, Western Governments launched, a campaign in the UN Council of Human Rights in support of Chinese Islamists, some of whom had been preventively interned in brain washing/mind-set adjusting camps.

2010 – 2011 saw the start of the Nato Operations aimed at putting the Muslim Brotherhood into power in all Arab States. The People’s China – just like some Western countries — facilitated the departure of its Islamists to the Middle East. China thought quite wrongly that this would have washed out all jihadi intoxicants from its system. Slowly, it understood that the remedy was worse than the evil. The Islamists that left to fight in Libya and Syria served as models for new recruits on their own soil. There then followed a number of attacks, in Muslim regions as well as others.

Up till now, Muslims living in Xijiang benefitted from a number of exceptions to the general law. For example, they were permitted to have several children whereas the Chinese were only authorized to have one.

In the past, the CIA backed the separatist aspirations of the “Ouigour” Chinese against the “Hans” Chinese. The CIA precedent for this position: the support it gave Chechen separatists against ethnic Russians. Today, the CIA supports the jihadists. This is a totally novel move but it is targeted at the same objective: weakening Beijing and Moscow.

After the 19th Congress of the Communist Party in October 2017, China incapable of absorbing Islam into its corpus, started to consider that jihadism cannot be dissociated from Islam itself. Several supporters of the Islamic policy have been arrested and forced to submit to brainwashing/re-education. How many? We can’t say: according to the sources, anything from 10 000 to 1 000 000.

The Communist Party has just requested all its members to take an oath that they will not practice the halal regime. Today, some Muslim traditions are prohibited by law.

A Turkish Speaking Chinese community of 18 000 persons of at least 5000 combatants, is currently set up in Idleb (Syria). It benefits from the support of the Secret Service of Turkey, a member of Nato. Syria and Russia have accepted not to attack them for now, fearing that a part of them will be repatriated. We also signal the arrival of a number of Chinese jihadists in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand but also in the Philippines, where it considered that the problem had been sorted out.

Translation 
Anoosha Boralessa

 

Read more:

http://www.voltairenet.org/article203975.html

 

See also: the mafias that run the world...

fake russians...

A $100,000 Democrat psyop to fake Russian interference in an Alabama election was brushed aside by the US media as nonconsequential. But the alleged Russian operation of similar cost is treated as a Pearl Harbor-like attack.

The controversial social media operation, launched to undermine Republican candidate for Senate Roy Moore, was exposed by the New York Times this week.

The newspaper said it was an experiment which had little if any consequence on the outcome of the 2017 vote, which Democrat Doug Jones won by a less than 2-percent margin.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/usa/447171-democrats-false-flag-alabama-russians/