Shades of Things to Come 2

Propaganda: News and Newspapers

It doesn’t seem to matter what certain protected businesses do, they know they can count on a bailout. For example: General Motors (GM). Like certain other manufacturers, it produced millions upon millions of junk cars. It was willful in its disdain for the consumer. But it skated clear, dumped a bunch of obligations, and poked its ugly head up again, thanks to government. It is legally a different company, but with mostly the same old idiots at the helm, so what’s changed?

The once-important newspaper business is struggling in ingenious ways to survive, and will seek “government relief,” like the automakers, but is ultimately doomed. A media that would rather go out of business than tell the truth.

So that, at least, is good news. It is good to see that newspapers and most print magazines will go the way of the dodo, except for giveaways (and even those seem to be waning — I’m seeing fewer and fewer littering the streets and floors of the train and bus). The car magazines will especially find it rough, what with the move to autonomous cars, homogenization of cars, waning interest… It is all just part of normal business life cycles, though, of course, all businesses that go through the death part of the cycle do so kicking and screaming. They’re so tenacious, it’s a surprise we don’t see horse-drawn buggy makers mewling for handouts because cars are becoming so popular.

They’re showing signs of hurt. All the major papers are showing circulation fall impressively year-to-year. NYT is looking to lease out several floors of its New York City office building to raise money.

What will likely happen is that these organizations will troll around and buy up promising Internet sites with many readers — the same sites they’re trying to discredit by labeling “fake news,” to have a continued outlet for their propaganda.

Another old trick is to loosen the shackles a bit and report honestly once in a while to try to recover their readership by signaling their truthy virtue. And of course, appealing to prurient interests with salacious tales always perks up the buying public.

The big scary is down the road: They will claim to be vital public interests. And out come the grovelling hands for the big bailouts. Once one gets away with it, it’ll go across the board. NYC, LA, San Fran, Chicago, Toronto, Dallas, Montreal, Vegas, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, Seattle, all the cities with over a million in population, and more. Despite the inevitable bailouts, or because of them, they’ll have no incentive to report truth and real news, so they’ll continue in the same way they already are: as blatant propaganda, so in the long run, they’ll have to fail anyway, perhaps living on only as an online presence in most cases. They also may become cheap enough that they are purchased for a vanity project, by a religious organization or corporate entity.

But those big presses have a lot of overhead, so they’ll mostly have to go. It’s nice to hope that they will soon be dismantled, sold for scrap. And the world will breathe a sigh of relief.

Latest Scoop: I should have known they were already ahead of me: The corporation owning the Vancouver rags already has been nosing around for bailouts. Why can’t individuals or smaller companies go to government then, and say, “I’m a little short on my investment, give me a couple million to tide me over?”

Why the Hate?

A simple online search reveals the many lies told by official news sources — there are even top ten lists of the biggest frauds. If a witness lies on the stand in a trail, the jury is instructed that it may disregard all of the testimony from that witness. Why doesn’t that apply to “official news?”

Or they ignore stories, sins of omission as well as sins of commission. It’s difficult to understand what people get out of the news anyway, since there is seldom any background, nor follow-up to stories. This makes “news,” not information, but titillation. I’m in favor of the odd titill, but you can’t make it a steady diet.

Look: Hinckley, who shot Reagan, the U.S. president, was buddies with the Bush family; Bush Sr.’s son Neil was about to have dinner with Hinckley’s brother the same day Reagan was shot. George Bush Sr. was, of course, the VP at the time. The papers covered this briefly and then the story disappeared, with no follow-up! And if that doesn’t worry you, you worry me! It’s like a UFO landing on Trafalgar Square and Klattu coming out, and the papers running with, “Tourists Still Visiting Trafalgar,” and not a further peep.

Since it is profitable to lie, and there is no profit in the truth, the lie has become institutionalized. A long and complex process has been applied, to centralize and monopolize the news, and make it feasible to turn it into pure nonsense and propaganda, something that could never happen in a “free market” system. Through constant repetition, almost everyone has been brainwashed and bamboozled into a false view of reality.

Monopoly Control

It’s an open secret that so-called “news”papers are almost all owned by one of six companies, and garner their information from two sources: Thompson-Reuters (Reuters) and Associated Press (AP). Besides that, newspaper honchos are owners of AP, and probably Reuters, too, so it’s all intertwined. For example, Michael Golden of the New York Times Co. (NYT) is on the board of directors of AP. There’s no “independent” aspect; it’s all a crony setup.

Now, they say there are two sources, but, were that true, would not the two diverge, disagree or conflict in some cases? Never happened. It’s blatant that even the “two sources” baloney is a fairy tale. If you’re going to lie and keep your story straight, you have one single source for all “news.”

The Purpose

The papers are there to lead you down dead ends, lie and obfuscate, but it isn’t usually in a blatant way, or it didn’t seem to be before. A few tricks:

• reveal something they want concealed but leaks out, after the fact, and take credit for the revelation
• reveal part of the truth, and follow that down fruitless paths
• distract: talk about horrors in other countries, or past irrelevancies
• titillate with sexual references or violence, or other “human interest” cranks, crocks, skanks and pranks
• make people think they are well informed, to suppress curiosity, and not listen to other people telling truth
• make something appear overly complicated, or overly simple
• make up or set up stories altogether, like when Hearst and Pulitzer dragged the U.S. into the Spanish-American war with their yellow journalism
• set up “controversy,” showing “both sides of the story,” (that is, provide a defense for an indefensible position, a way of muddying the waters when a favored person or group is caught with pants down)
• “leak” by telling a few truths to lessen the potential shock if something big does manage to leak and escape their control, so they can pretend to be perfectly honest, occasionally
• use Fear Porn to scare people into inaction, complacency or frustration

Once you have set up control of the press, you can use it to influence other industries, do favors for government, push society in a particular direction, push your agenda or political candidate. It’s a vast array of mischief at your disposal, so it’s no surprise it’s come to this. When its influence wanes, you’ll see that they’ll seek to control the alternative sources of news, hence, an increasing push to control the Internet, politically, as they work hard to suppress the truthful information there.

I Have to Wonder

Have the papers always been this bad, and we just haven’t noticed?

The Telegraph, a big Brit newspaper had, “in tact” for “intact” on its website in a recent article, and “encryted,” for “encrypted.” So these Bozos can’t even run a spell checker on their pathetic attempts at news? They can’t even do their alleged jobs at a minimal standard.

Anyway, the article was about the WannaCry hostageware. I was trying to find some details on how people got infected by it. Did they open an attachment? (Which doesn’t mean “open,” exactly, but run, it automatically.) Did they open a website and click something there? That is the meat of the issue. It shouldn’t have to be explained, again and again, to the so-called “explainers.”

What specific machine makes/brands, architecture and operating systems were these infected machines running? What was the consequence — what happened on the machines when the “WannaCry” virus program was run?

It’s appalling how outright stupid every source on the web that talks about this topic is. I’m talking about even the sites that are devoted purely to computing/IT topics! Not one of them that I found, among about 10-20 I scanned, provided the basic information necessary to be valid and useful! Not one concrete, descriptive example of the virus’s effects or example of damage control was given.

It isn’t news if they just say, “Some people got infected by ransomware,” tell a few tales out of school, and leave it at that. It’s not even good gossip.

Apparently, this was an NSA-produced virus. Yes, the government created it, by their own admission, according to various stories, as part of a “hacking toolset.” But it doesn’t admit to “releasing it.” It blames that on some “hackers,” who got into its servers. Ridiculous. And more ridiculous, those who believe that line. Even if it were true, the NSA was willfully negligent in not informing Microsoft of the exploit. But of course Microslop (heh-heh) and the NSA work hand-in-hand.

It may even be “fake news,” and the virus did not even exist, but merely served to get people to panic and run software like Windows updates, “virus protectors,” and the like, and infect themselves that way. You can just see the way they’ll spin it to themselves, too, “Oh, I installed all the protection and updates, but I was just too late, and it got me, before I managed to act!”

I’ve warned against Windows in the past, and once more, people are played for fools and suckers for using that piece of trash.

Of course, these people are the same ones that will have their “anti-virus software” all up to date, and get infected anyway, and still not see the light, that it’s all a big scam.

Reminds me of the time at a company where we all got the “Love Letter” script in an email. The title of the mail was, “ILOVEYOU,” and of course everyone in the office clicked on the attachment in it, “LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.txt.vbs,” and it promptly brought the server — and company — down temporarily. This was just a simple script file .VBS attachment (on a Microsoft system, of course), but it did a number on thousands of businesses. VBS stands for Visual Basic Script, and it can run commands on a computer within Windows or Internet Explorer (actually through another program that executes the commands).

It was good in a way. I printed the script and it was useful to identify the tricks they used to make your machine delete important files and the like. Certainly it made it very easy to potentially set up blocks against that kind of behavior.

Hilariously, a message was sent around, after the fact, to not click on unknown email attachments, no doubt sent by one of the people who blindly clicked on it. Actually, this was a problem with the server/network people. Even back then, they should have been able to implement a patch that disallowed people from running scripts in attachments. It’s silly to try to say, “Don’t do that!” when it flies in the face of a routine operation. We click on things left and right, willy-nilly, and nothing bad usually happens. Or, we may be in a hurry. We don’t take time to ponder and philosophize over every minor routine action we take. And the system was restored from backup, so, hopefully some good came of it if that point of attack was addressed.

Another thing fake news is doing, which shows it is utterly insane, is running back to the old fall guy, North Korea, again, now blaming it for the virus! Nice to have your “go-tos,” along with Russia and, sometimes, the People’s Republic of China.

But yeah, that “newspaper” could have provided an informative story like the one you just read. So could the supposed “Computer Information Today” news sites. They expose themselves and they aren’t just incompetent, but fully malicious.