Coupons, Crosswords, and Fish Wrap

It's a pretty safe bet they lie about everything.

I can't even get started these days on a mainstream article or TV news clip without playing the Where's Waldo, 'spot-the-lie' game. Are you that way too? After covid, or I should say, while the covid plandemic rages on, how can one take anything from the mainstream seriously? If you’ve waded through the covid mire and now have your Rowdy Roddy Piper glasses on, how can you not assume they are lying?

At a recent farmer's market in Missoula, my libertarian friend Rick was out on the corner with his signs, engaging the public, challenging the official narratives. Mike, a Missoula local, wasn't buying it.

Missoula Mike and Ancap Rick, in cordial debate, as it ought to be

“You don't believe that the corona virus has created a deadly pandemic?” said Mike to Rick.

“No.”

“And so you don't believe in the vaccine?”

“Absolutely not.”

This didn't surprise Mike; he knew Montana was full of crazy conspiracy theorists and he probably judged by the anti-New-Normal placard that he would be engaging one when he approached Rick. The conversation interested me and I joined in to find out why Mike thought as he did.

“Where do you get your news?” I asked.

“I listen to NPR. I read the New York Times. I watch MSNBC.”

“What sort of internet-only resources do you go to?”

Mike drew a blank at that one. He looked like he might be in his retired years and could have been one to still trust the MSM, his only information source. I tried to help him out, imagining what someone of his political persuasion might access. I named a couple sources on the left that were pretty well-known, but non-mainstream. He didn't follow any of them, not even Amy Goodman.

I think there are plenty of lefties who are afraid to look into Matt Taibbi, Glen Greenwald, Aaron Mate, Jimmy Dore, etc. Admittedly imperfect, these are some of the heretics from the left that good-think liberals dare not follow. My cousin John considers himself a Seattle liberal, but with the caveat that he understands “most people around here are nuts.” In other words, too liberal. But John also doesn't access any of the above-named bad-think liberals. Before TDS and Covid mania set in, John actually recommended James Kunstler to me. I read Kunstler and found much I agreed with, and thought this would be an excellent way to find some common ground with a Seattlite. But Kunstler, however liberal he may be, can smell the stench of a corrupt medical system, a corrupt election system, corrupt corporations and the looming fascist state, and too often says it like it is and therefore is unacceptable to the goodthink crowd. John hasn't read Kunstler for years. "Kunstler is crazy!"

As we discussed the credibility of the MSM on covid, I asked Missoula Mike how in the world he could trust the government and media on anything after their blatant lying on the Iraq war in particular, and every other of our middle-eastern war adventures. He granted that the media supports a corrupt system and I was right, they lied us into a terrible war, but the “respected institutions” of research and education are the ones that inform us about covid, and so it would be silly to doubt that narrative. I should have but didn't get into how these respected institutions are all corrupted by money from the big pharma corporations that profit from the pandemic, and therefore take the same line as the government, the media, and everyone else pushing the jabs.

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Down at my mom’s old-folks home in Olympia, on the first floor, the local papers are delivered and set on a table where residents have to come and get it. It's best to get down early and grab your copy of the the Olympian or the Seattle Times, because apparently some folks forget they're not subscribed anymore and others seem to assume the paper comes courtesy of Palisades Retirement Home. Mom gets the Olympian; it's cheap and more local than the Times and she doesn't read the news anyway. Here is my mom's pile of pages cut out from the local paper.

I guess the Dulcolax goes hand in hand with the fried chicken, burgers and pizza.

- the rest she tosses after a quick glance at the headlines. She loves coupons and Friday's fun page has her favorite puzzles, so she keeps up with the subscription.

I passed the newspaper table our first morning here and glanced at the the top stories in the Times and the Olympian.

Always skeptical from the get go, I sensed there was plenty of baloney in both stories after a cursory skim through the first couple paragraphs of each. That's all it takes, usually- a cursory skim. It's like listening to NPR's morning edition; once you are ANW (aware not woke) it only takes a second of listening to that annoying 'pleasant' voice and the lies and propaganda are easy to spot.

Should I be so automatically skeptical? You could say that the flip side of “Don't believe everything you read,” is “Don't automatically assume everything you read is a lie,” but I wonder if it's not more practical to begin that way with our Luegenpress.

Just as it's probably sensible to pay some heed to truisms, as they are mostly true, and consider stereotypes, as they generally stem from some truth, and research censored conspiracy theories, as the PTB wouldn't have to ban them if they were untrue and easily refutable, so it is with having a healthy skepticism about the press. Mark Twain was right - they lie all the time. And if they can and do lie about the biggest things, (Corona, War, Elections) they can and probably do lie about almost everything, (except for the weather and baseball scores, as I've said before).

This, by the way, reminds me of an Alex Jones interview with Jesse Ventura, whom I recall saying something along the lines of: 

The Seattle Times story was about the Washington State legislature following California's lead and deciding to make the sale of new, gasoline-powered cars illegal by 2035. The top story in the Olympian was about a deadly shooting involving the cops and a 'crazy' man.

Article 1, banning gas cars: I don't have the articles in front of me and it's been a few days so don't quote me but the lie of course isn't in the basic fact of a legislature voting on a new bill. Like the box scores, the reporter got it right; how could she not? Dem tally/Repub tally/total votes, etc. Easy. But the lie here, in my opinion, is basing this story on false premises. The lie is the automatic assumption that it's a done deal and indisputable that

1. increased CO2 will cause catastrophic increases in temperature

2. there are no positives to increased CO2

3. man-made CO2 accounts for the most significant rises in in total CO2

4. banning gasoline engines is a good way to reduce CO2

We all are familiar with the concept of planned obsolescence and many of us have heard of the forbidden-for-market light bulb that still burns after a hundred years, etc. Have you heard about the gasoline engine (or was it diesel?) that VW developed in the 80s, that had all the power of a regular engine and got something like 250 or more MPG? If such a product was squashed, like that proverbial lightbulb, then there is a lie imbedded in the Times article (see point 4 above), because there is no way that Teslas are going to use less resources and use less carbon emissions in powering up their batteries than a gasoline or diesel engine that gets over 200mpg. I ought to interview Eric Peters on this one: The Car That Almost Was

The article in the Olympian had to do with a recent altercation where the victim was gunned down by the police. Here is what happened, based on my recollection of the 5 or 6 paragraphs I read:

A crazy man is making a scene. He goes into a Starbucks and is disruptive and yells at the staff. He locks himself in the bathroom. The police are called. He leaves the bathroom and runs into the street. The police follow. He walks into traffic. The police try to talk him out of the street. Instead he approaches the police in a threatening manner. They blow him away. The police claim he had a knife. Some eyewitnesses say there was no knife or other weapon. The point of this article, as indicated by the title, was that a knife was finally found, and therefore the cops were proven justified by the supposed existence of a knife. But is it conclusive that the man was armed with and threatening the police with a knife? There was no reporting on where it was found, when it was found, who found it, why it wasn't found from the start, whether it was open or not, etc. Just that it was found and therefore gave police justification to use deadly force.

For a guy who's been reading police brutality articles (especially on LRC) for years, this sounds like a fishy story.

Now, the man indeed may have been carrying a knife and waving it around in a threatening manner. I guess it could also be true that the police did not locate the knife immediately and only found it later after another search of the area (though that sounds strange as you would expect the shooting to have occurred while the knife was in his hand, and therefore the threatening weapon would be right there on location). The point is, one needs to be skeptical. My mom's thinking seemed to be, “This is a bad man. He's mean and dangerous and yucky and the police are good and uphold truth and justice. They were right to blow him away.”

I, conversely, almost automatically assumed that it’s not unlikely that the police would plant evidence on the scene, as they are quite prepared to do such a thing in a fix like this. Do they want another Michael Gentle-Giant Brown, Ferguson episode, right here in Olympia? The similarities in these two incidents are striking.

I suppose both of us need to be careful about knee-jerk assumptions, but I'm going to stick to my assumption that, just like politicians, the MSM always lie. It's a prudent starting point.