As IF Times

link:  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14393987/usaid-programs-republicans-drag-queen-ecuador.html

Well whaddya know? The veil has been lifted and to the surprise of almost no one, it’s been revealed that practically the entirety of the US media, if not media globally, has been funded by only one source: USAID.

For those paying attention through the years, it wasn’t a complete shock since often, the narrative espoused by all media outlets was practically word for word exactly the same on any given issue.  It was Pravda on a global scale. At the very least, the workforce at USAID was certainly on a global scale, numbering over 10,000 workers.

According to the Columbia Journalism Review, USAID supported 6,200 journalists, 707 news outlets and 279 media sector civil society organizations in 30 different countries. It’s revealed that USAID has been a major sponsor of fake news.

For perspective, USAID began as a humanitarian organization targeting humane causes.  It has grotesquely morphed into the main funding source for a pot pourri of bizarre causes and directed towards preposterous ends. As noted, it employs 10,000 workers to help spread American goodwill.

According to documents retrieved by Trump’s financial sleuth, Elon Musk via the DOGE initiative, a short list of beneficiaries include:

$7.9 million to teach Sri Lankan journalists how to avoid “binary-gendered language”,  $2 million for sex changes and LGBT activism in Guatemala, $1.1 million to an Armenian LGBT group, $1.5 million to promote LGBT advocacy in Jamaica, $2 million to promote LGBT equality through entrepreneurship in Latin America, $3.9 million for LGBT causes in the Western Balkans, $5.5 million for LGBT activism in Uganda, $6 million for advancing LGBT issues in priority countries around the world, and $6.3 million for men who have sex with men in South Africa.

Apart from this, USAID has funded $25 million for Deloitte to promote “green transportation” in Georgia, $6 million to transform digital spaces to reflect feminist democratic principles, $1.3 million to Arab and Jewish photographers, and $8.3 million for “USAID Education: Equity and Inclusion”

It has also funded over $4.5 million to combat disinformation in Kazakhstan. That one is amusingly ironic.  Here’s a good one: $520 million to teach people in Africa about climate change.  Why wouldn’t it have been cheaper to send Greta Thunberg for a whirlwind tour?

And yet, these are peanuts compared to the amounts distributed to media outlets.  As we can imagine, attributing an accurate figure on the amounts spent on media is difficult, but the number of at least $268 million dollars has been offered by the same Columbia Journalism Review.   The number is likely much higher since this has been going on for years if not decades.

Heretofore respected outlets such as the New York Times and Reuters were revealed to have been beneficiaries of large sums of USAID money.  Thus, people have been deluded about the veracity of a story if it was carried by these formerly venerable outlets.  The most recent example of propaganda as news was the universal support of vaccines and masks for the Covid campaign. It turns out that they were fronting for Big Pharma.

This is important because, despite all that’s happened, people still think the NY Times and Reuters are real news. It turns out, the reportage was essentially marketing scripts with the intent of shaping opinions, not providing news.

How do we know that news outlets such as Reuters were involved in large scale social deception?  Well, for one thing, the name of the USAID file of the 9 million dollar grant given to Reuters was named “Large Scale Social Deception”

As we know, people are maddeningly naïve and they will believe anything if it’s repeated often enough…and by enough media outlets.

Thus, the entire concept of a free and independent media has been a charade. Thankfully, technology has undermined their influence on people’s news consumption, because now, X is the de facto medium of record.  Though you must still navigate through a virtual firehose of opinions and facts, at the very least, there’s an unfiltered presentation of data for the discerning mind to assess. You are no longer a victim of the official narrative.  It gives people comfort that the reality that they observe is not the same as what they are told to believe.  Information is now bottom up rather than top down.

link More than half of U.S. Latinos favor same-sex marriage: survey | Reuters.

Seems that everything is done by polls these days, especially when it comes to election time.  Everyone wants to slice off a bit of demographic to imply significance from some bit of esoterica.  The standard technique is to isolate some segment of society and then make conclusions about their preferences as it pertains to the larger group.   This kind of segmentation has a lot to do with the messages being conveyed by the various political groups who would pander to whomever is likely to give the most votes.

An Internet search fails to find even an estimate of the number of polling firms operating in the U.S., but we are all familiar with the big name ones: Gallup, Rasmussen, etc.  There are also the newspaper  related polls such as the New York Times, Washington Post and Reuters to name a few.  Suffice to say though, if you want an opinion about something, someone will provide it for a fee.

The ubiquity of polling has created a political environment in which factions are pitted against each other in order to secure votes, which of course encourages polling to measure the temperature of any identified demographic, which brings us into a vicious cycle.  If you are catering to left handed people, the right handed people get disenfranchised and resentment between the two factions will escalate.   When people bemoan the polarization of the political process, this is ground zero of the cause.   Instead of saying anything substantive, politicians will employ strategies to rope in the desired demo as articulated by poll results.

The particular sample in the link above purports to show the proclivities of 26 million people via a sample of 1760.  The conclusion is that more than half of U.S. Latinos favor same-sex marriage.  I don’t know about you, but I think that this is not only a leap of logic, it’s a 3 day train ride of logic based on a sample of 1760 Latinos.  I would treat this conclusion with as much skepticism as if a sample of college men in San Francisco implied that 60% of college guys everywhere harbored homo-erotic fantasies involving Brad Pitt.   Angelina maybe.  To imply that all persons of an ethnic slice are likely to hold homogeneous opinions is naive at best, racist at worst.  I’m not convinced that all Chinese, all Germans or all Italians can be pegged by a sample of 1760 of them.

The real danger here is that in today’s attention deficit society, nobody reads the body of the polls.  They read the headline and ka-bing, it’s now a fact.  This is reminiscent of the early days of television advertising when marketers could say pretty much anything they wanted.  It was not uncommon to hear that “4 out of 5 doctors preferred Parliament cigarettes” or that “4 out of 5 Dentists choose Crest”.  Bottom line is, polling is as much marketing as science.  My poll of 5 people confirms this.