Pravda and Izvestia

[D5CAV]

Back in the antediluvian age when I served the Empire as a Centurion in Germania, RR said "Tear down this wall!"

In those days, there was a radio station called "Radio Free Europe" that would broadcast "uncensored" news to those countries in the old "Warsaw Pact".

At the time, the two MSM platforms in Russia (USSR at the time) were Pravda and Izvestia. "Pravda" means "Truth" in Russian, and "Izvestia" means "News" in Russian. The joke among the Eastern-block dissidents I met in Germania was "There is no truth in Pravda, and there is no news in Izvestia". Of course, you couldn't find copies of the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NYT, or Daily Mail in Moscow. They were censored.

30 years later, it is USA that censors any "non-conformist" news sources (either by us.gov or by us.gov approved corporate censors), and it is US MSM platforms that are devoid of "Izvestia" or "Pravda".

At least we can still get a some sources owned in Singapore like TDB: https://www.thedailybell.com/all-articl ... all-along/

1. Hunter Biden Laptop Story Was True All Along

In the months before the 2020 presidential election, The New York Post broke a story about a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden containing evidence of corruption.

In response, most media outlets ran headlines like this one from Huffington Post: “More Than 50 Former Intel Officials Say Hunter Biden Smear Smells Like Russia.”

Twitter suspended the New York Post’s account for two weeks for spreading misinformation. It also blocked any user from sharing the Post’s articles about the laptop.

Facebook announced it would use its algorithm to bury the story.

At the time, The New York Times wrote, “The laptop prompted concerns about Russian disinformation because the intelligence community has warned for months about Russian attempts to influence the election, including by spreading disinformation about the Biden family.”

2. US Does Have Bio-Weapons Labs in Ukraine, as announced by US Embassy in Ukraine: https://ua.usembassy.gov/u-s-ukraine-pa ... l-threats/

Here in Ukraine, the U.S. Department of Defense’s Biological Threat Reduction Program works with the Ukrainian Government to consolidate and secure pathogens and toxins of security concern in Ukrainian government facilities, while allowing for peaceful research and vaccine development. We also work with our Ukrainian partners to ensure Ukraine can detect and report outbreaks caused by dangerous pathogens before they pose security or stability threats.

Translated as: Yes, we have a few Bio-Weapons Labs, but those are only for good things that we approve of. Nothing to see here. Move along...

3. The Actual Terrorist Biden Appointed to the Burean of Land Management: https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/07/ne ... terrorism/

As President Joe Biden’s pick to lead the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Tracy Stone-Manning, faced controversy for her involvement with a 1989 Idaho tree spiking case last summer, NBC’s Josh Lederman sought comment from the Interior Department whether the administration stood by its nominee for the preeminent land agency.

Nikita Khrushchev was right after all:

We will feed you small doses of socialism until you will finally wake up and find you already have Communism

"Izvestia" and "Pravda" indeed...

[D5CAV]

More censorship: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the- ... hedges?s=r

This past weekend, celebrated journalist and author Chris Hedges woke up to find six years of episodes of his Russia Today show On Contact vanished from the show’s account on YouTube. Though almost none of the shows referenced Russia or Vladimir Putin directly, and the few that did tended to be unflattering, his association with Russian state media was enough to erase hundreds of interviews about topics ranging from Julian Assange’s imprisonment to censorship to police brutality to American war crimes in the Middle East.

He used to be part of the MSM "club" until he went "off-leash":

...through 2002, when he won the Pulitzer Prize as part of a team for Exploratory Reporting, he defined mainstream respectability and excellence in journalism. He might have had it easy, spending the latter part of his career on the Thomas Friedman/David Brooks Memorial Gravy Train of overpaid lectures, University trusteeships, and fellowships at obscure think-tanks, if he’d just kept his mouth shut.

Not only was he part of the MSM, he was also fairly "woke":

He didn’t. One of the few frontline American reporters who spoke Arabic, Hedges knew instantly the Iraq war would be a disaster and said so at every opportunity. He was booed offstage at a commencement address at Rockford College in 2003 by a crowd chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A!,” and hustled off campus so fast that the school wouldn’t let him grab his jacket on the way out. For those who haven’t seen it, the video of that scene is a remarkable museum piece of Bush-era war mania:

What's really telling is he's denouncing Putin on Russia Today:

Hedges denounced Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as a “criminal act of aggression” after it began, and believes that if RT had been allowed to stay on YouTube, he — along with similarly critical former RT contributors like Jesse Ventura — wouldn’t have been permitted by the Kremlin to stay on air. On the other hand, seeing an American company vaporize six years of interviews having nothing to do with Russia shows space for voices like his continues to shrink in the West. In this sense he represents a kind of person we’ll be seeing more of in the future, caught between a censorship rock and a hard place, an outcast in domestic and foreign media systems.

Yet he gets censored in the US!

Strange days.

[D5CAV]

Another one gets censored: https://consortiumnews.com/2022/04/21/p ... ve-affair/

Pepe Escobar is cancelled from Twitter

This month, several of us – Scott Ritter, myself, ASB Military News, among others – were canceled from Twitter. The – unstated – reason: we were debunking the officially approved narrative of the Russia/NATO/Ukraine war.

The four minions of the "Beast". He only left out YouTube, run by the partner of one of Google's founders.

Cancel culture is inbuilt in the techno-feudalist project: conform to the hegemonic narrative, or else. In my own case regarding Twitter and Facebook – two of the guardians of the internet, alongside Google — I knew a day of reckoning was inevitable, because like other countless users I had previously been dispatched to those notorious “jails”.

At least he is not in real jail

Of course becoming a target of cancel culture – twice – does not even remotely compare to the fate of Julian Assange, imprisoned for over three years in Belmarsh under the most appalling circumstances, and about to be dispatched for “judgment” in the American gulag for the crime of committing journalism. Yet the same “logic” applies: journalism that does not conform to the hegemonic narrative must be taken down.

If judged by the same standards as Assange, Bernstein and Woodward would still be in jail. However, they were tools of the deep state to take down RN, so no harm, no foul.

Yeah, Facebook was an In-Q-Tel investment. In-Q-Tel is CIA's VC arm. That should tell you something.

Every silicon fragment in the valley connects Facebook as a direct extension of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s LifeLog project, a Pentagon attempt to “build a database tracking a person’s entire existence.” Facebook launched its website exactly on the same day – Feb. 4, 2004 – that DARPA and the Pentagon shuttered LifeLog.

No explanation by DARPA was ever provided. The MIT’s David Karger, at the time, remarked, “I am sure that such research will continue to be funded under some other title. I can’t imagine DARPA ‘dropping out’ of such a key research area.”

Of course a smokin’ gun directly connecting Facebook to DARPA will never be allowed to surface. But occasionally some key players speak out, such as Douglas Gage, none other than LifeLog’s conceptualizer: “Facebook is the real face of pseudo-LifeLog at this point (…) We have ended up providing the same kind of detailed personal information to advertisers and data brokers and without arousing the kind of opposition that LifeLog provoked.”

If any of you are still on F###book, get off now

So Facebook has absolutely nothing to do with journalism. Not to mention pontificating over a journalist’s work, or assuming it’s entitled to cancel him or her. Facebook is an “ecosystem” built to sell private data at a huge profit, offering a public service as a private enterprise, but most of all sharing the accumulated data of its billions of users with the U.S. national security state.