As IF Times

Source: Winner of CNNs Journalist of the Year Award Admits He Faked Stories

A story like this should be on the front pages of all of the news outlets worldwide.  Instead, it has been tucked away in the back pages among announcements of black Friday sales.  To some, it may not rise to the level of the fraud of  Lance Armstrong winning races with the aid of equine medication, or labelling regular yogurt as non fat.

But in fact, it’s much worse.  For some reason, journalists residually have the respect of many people because of their notional role of reporting the truth.   These days, that notion is as quaint as separately gendered washrooms. The precipitous decline of respect for those in the ‘journalism’ racket has been like the action of the Dow Jones this December.  For almost a decade on this site, we’ve pointed out some of the fanciful stories that circulate in the news sphere attempting to be passed off as truth.  The Global Warming charade still has legs even as more and more objective scientists have backed away from the very premise and the associated predictions.

But you can get away with propagating untruths if the claims are vague and difficult to disprove, much like the tenets of religions.  Now however, they are so bold as to try casting doubt on immutable facts.  For instance the very basic notion that males and females are biologically determined is countered by the premise that gender is in fact individually determined in our heads.  Apparently, we’ve gotten it wrong since Eve said to Adam, “Hey take a bit of this.”  Intelligent, sane people past the age of 10 can readily scoff at the idea of feelings based gender identity, but those impressionable children under the age of 10 are susceptible to believe the looney tripe if they are thus told by their teachers.

Taking this same dynamic to the adult world, if ‘respectable’ news sources repeatedly push a narrative upon people, those who don’t make the effort to critically assess the narrative are drawn into the circle of delusion.  It’s the modern equivalent of the phenomeon of the 1960’s where if it was on TV, it must be true.  Perhaps people were more easily fooled then because of the lack of alternate sources of information. Such is not the case today of course.  Intelligent people can access many different sources to corroborate what they observe with their own lyin’ eyes.  It will be clear if someone is an unhinged idiot.  Fill in the name of MSNBC personality here.

Over the past 2 years, the most conspicuous target of fake news is anything and everything to do with Donald Trump.  It’s as if a massive virus of delusion infected the majority of those in the media business. From the amount of sprinkles on his dessert to frolicking with Russian hookers, no aspect of Trump’s life was too picayune for fake and snarky reporting.  Very highly respected reporter Sharyl Atkinson, herself the target of spying from the Obama administration, even compiled a list of Trump fake news in the Trump era.

The fact that this ‘celebrated’ journalist, Claas Relotius, has admitted fabricating stories for years should be a huge wake up call for the naïve masses.  After all, if this celebrated guy is spinning stuff out of whole cloth, what about the other run of the mill reporters, journalists and pundits?  Naturally the outlet that awarded Claas Relotius the distinguished honor, CNN, is itself the font of the fake news business, so it barely budges the needle on the shock meter for informed people.   Unfortunately, the influence of fake news percolates into public policy as politicians milk public sentiment.  So even if you were aware of the truth behind absurd policies, you’d still be subject to the insanity of them.

There will always be Al Gore types that will run with fake narratives to enrich themselves.  There will be wars that don’t need to be fought, enemies that aren’t real and truths that are buried.  Fake news is not just harmless story telling.  Fake news is a profitable business and we are all its unwitting  customers.

Source: David Attenborough Tells UN ‘Collapse of Civilisation’ Imminent

One of the more amusing characters of the first Iraq war was the official state propogandist for the Saddam Hussein regime named Muhammed Saeed El-Sahhaf, affectionately known as “Baghdad Bob” by the western media.  His notoriety came from his blatantly false assertions which were humorously laid bare by observable fact.  This propaganda minister’s job was to broadcast statements proving Iraq’s military superiority even as American bombers could be seen shelling the buildings right behind him on TV broadcasts.  Here are some of the more famous pronouncements of El-Sahhaf, collected by the website thoughtco:

“There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!”

“My feelings, as usual, we will slaughter them all.”

“Our initial assessment is that they will all die.”

“No I am not scared and neither should you be!”

“We will welcome them with bullets and shoes.”

“They’re not even [within] 100 miles [of Baghdad]. They are not in any place. They hold no place in Iraq. This is an illusion … they are trying to sell to the others an illusion.”

and,

“Faltering forces of infidels cannot just enter a country of 26 million people and lay besiege to them! They are the ones who will find themselves under siege. Therefore, in reality, whatever this miserable Rumsfeld has been saying, he was talking about his own forces. Now even the American command is under siege.”

“Washington has thrown their soldiers on the fire.”

“They fled. The American louts fled. Indeed, concerning the fighting waged by the heroes of the Arab Socialist Baath Party yesterday, one amazing thing really is the cowardice of the American soldiers. we had not anticipated this.”

Of course this was all amusing then and even more so two decades later. We can forgive El-Sahhaf for his utterances because he was convinced to do so, either by money or the point of a gun.

In his place, the modern Bagdad Bobs are the comical nutters preaching  the Global warming charade. El-Sahhaf’s utterances stopped when the US soldiers finally zip tied him and sent him off to Gitmo.  Unfortunately, there is no such merciful end in sight to the constant barrage of bleats from the  Albert Gore and Richard Attenborough types as shown in the linked article.

No amount of cold winters, record snows, flat sea levels and exploding penguin numbers can dislodge them from their ideological and irrational pedestal.  As some have noted, when Al Gore first sounded the alarm on Global Warming’s effects on the world’s polar bear population, there were 6000 of them left.  Now, 20 years later, there’s only 30,000.

Attenborough, for his part, is prescient enough to predict the very end of man, of civilization and the earth itself if we don’t move some tax money around to some poor nations. He knows this because as the voice of BBC documentaries, he’s an expert on this stuff.  In this same vein, we wait for Dr. McDreamy to find a cure for cancer and male pattern baldness.  Such Chicken Littles as Gore and Attenborough say that the end is ‘imminent’ which is about as useful as predicting the Cleveland Brown’s Super Bowl appearance.

The spurious logic of their arguments are so blatant, they could have been uttered by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. While it may sound like an elegantly simple solution, ie: just throw money at it, the fact is, there is little historical record of money ever successfully solving the problems of poor nations.  We recall from the ’60’s and ’70’s the plaintive pleas for money to help starving kids in Africa.  Who knows how many hundreds of millions of dollars went to humanitarian aid there over the decades?  Here we are, decades later, they are still starving.  The only difference is that some government officials of these poor nations became awfully rich.

Now, they’ve changed the strategy.  Instead of playing on people’s sense of charity, which admittedly can be unpredictable, the new gig is to play on people’s fears by invoking certain Armageddon or worse.  It’s now a better idea to force the money from them.  By transferring 100 billion dollars a year from western nations to poor nations, assuming it gets out of the hands of the dictators running them, this would save the earth.  The leap of logic there is so great, you’d need plane tickets to cover the gap.

Even as the passage of time has uncovered more and more reputable science people backpeddling on the entire fraud of climate change, there remains a vocal contingent doing what Baghdad Bob did for Iraq during the war of 1991.  Oddly, the most vocal people still peddling the snake oil of Global warming are….entertainers and lawyers.  Bagdad Bob must be doing consulting these days.