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media and media people

Zucker’s Scold

Donald Trump, Kingsman meme

It was in bad taste.

The “meme” — an altered video — depicted extreme, murderous violence. But it was not “weaponized” as  incitement to real violence; it was, instead, “memeticized” contempt against the meme’s “victims,” the full panoply of media outlets along with a few iconic politicians.

The video was very popular over the weekend on social media. It took the church massacre scene from the first Kingsman movie, but with President Trump’s head placed over Colin Firth’s visage, crudely in “meme” fashion, and a few other heads put over other actors’, and the logos of major news outlets superimposed over most of the movie’s victims’ heads.

Cartoonish, yes, but done with élan.

Brooke Baldwin, however, is a paid agent of billionaire president of CNN, Jeff Zucker, and she has her marching orders, as revealed this week by a Project Veritas scoop. So she lit into the president in high moral dudgeon: “Mr. President, why is it taking you so long to condemn this video? You tweet all the time. I don’t want to hear from your press secretary … who says you strongly condemn the video … I want to hear from YOU.”

What Ms. Baldwin and her boss don’t get is that a growing swath of the American populace does not want to hear from a news reporter scolding demands that the president “condemn” things he had nothing to do with.

Trump didn’t make the meme, after all, nor had it made for him. 

Brooke Baldwin’s effrontery shows why someone might make a meme like the one in question. 

Not because you deserve to be killed, Ms. Baldwin, but because you deserve derision.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Donald Trump, Kingsman meme

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It’s Aliens!

Assange, King, alien, media, news,

Why does corporate media report what it reports? 

And neglect what it neglects? 

From an article, yesterday, by Caitlin Johnstone, “Julian Assange is Reportedly Gravely Ill, and Hardly Anyone’s Talking About It,” we learn that Mr. Assange is too ill to speak. Since the U.S. Government has indicted him for espionage, you might think that this would be big news in America. 

From major sources: crickets.

A few days earlier, friends noted that the Martin Luther King story, brewing in Great Britain, has received little notice on this side of the pond. New revelations about FBI spying on the much-​honored civil rights leader, and also about the information gleaned from that spying, that is Reverend King’s alleged profligate sexual misconduct, sure seem like big stories. 

But you know what is being seriously covered? 

UFOs.

Yes, the subject that was pooh-​poohed and pilloried by major media sources for decades has recently been getting major coverage from the likes of the New York Times and the Washington Post and CNN and Fox News.

In the Post we are instructed that a “UFO is not necessarily an alien from another planet,” but by the end of that same Tuesday think piece, we read that we might have to consider that very bizarre possibility.

So, why is mainstream media mum about Assange and MLK but now so enthusiastic about UFOs? 

Could it be because the Assange and King stories do not make our government look good, while the UFO story is part of a major plan* of “controlled disclosure”?

Of course, it might be just another round of disinformation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Dr. Hal Puthoff, in a lecture available on Vimeo, explains the plan in the course of discussing his work for the Department of Defense’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, as well as the more recent work of the To the Stars Academy, which has apparently organized the current media blitz.

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Assange, King, alien, media, news,

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Accountability media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies responsibility

War on Page A‑10

war, news, newspapers, defense, spending, Iraq, bombs, drones, soldiers

War was once big news. Now? Not so much.

Which may be a function of the never-​ending War on Terror, no end in sight in Afghanistan and an Iraq War that is officially over … except for the fighting.

Last October, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein busied fact-​checkers by claiming the U.S. was “bombing seven countries.” True, declared PolitiFact: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.

Yemen is better known after January’s raid that killed Navy SEAL Ryan Owens, wounded three other SEALs, and killed 14 to 25 Yemeni civilians, including children. Last week, during President Trump’s speech to Congress, Owens’s widow, Carryn, received a thunderous ovation.

But, as I argued at Townhall, “Ryan Owens and his widow and her three now fatherless children deserve more than applause.“ How about thoughtful policies and a Congress that holds the executive branch accountable?

Invading Iraq was a mistake. So was President Obama’s swerve over to destabilize Libya.

“We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves,” President Lyndon Johnson once said … right before he sent more American soldiers to Vietnam.

Consider that U.S. Special Forces were deployed to 70 percent of the world’s nations in 2016. And, in recent weeks, President Trump asked for a $54 billion increase in military spending, and we have learned of Pentagon plans to seek a “significant increase in U.S. participation” against ISIS.

We owe it to those in uniform to ask tough questions, including: Is what we’re doing really worth a single American life?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

Further reading:

Reason: Is the Military Really “Depleted” After Years of Record-​High Spending?

The Atlantic: Fighting Terrorism With a Credit Card

The National Interest: America Is Never (Ever, Ever) Ending the War on Terror

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