[BBC] More people are turning away from news, describing it as depressing, relentless and boring, a global study suggests.
Almost four in 10 (39%) people worldwide said they sometimes or often actively avoid the news, compared with 29% in 2017, according to the report by Oxford University's Reuters Institute.
Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East may have contributed to people's desire to switch off the news, the report's authors said.
It said that news avoidance is now at record high levels.
There is also the problem that the mainstream/traditional media services lie in thr service of their Progressive worldview. But the key, from the journalists’ perspective, must be that decreased profits will lead to another massive wave of layoffs and consolidations — and the coding and blogging jobs were filled by the previous wave of the suddenly unemployed.
#1
News is also focused on the extreme to scare and sell time or columns. They're a victim of their own constant fear mongering as emotional exhaustion sets in. See - boy who cried wolf. Thousands of years and basic human behavior hasn't changed.
[AsiaTimes] Maximilian Krah was the Alternative for Germany’s lead candidate for European Parliament, and is one of the most controversial and charismatic personalities in German politics. The AfD (Alternative fur Deutschland) took 16% of German votes in the June 9 election, more than any party in Germany’s present governing coalition, and is expected to poll first in three state elections in September. Born in 1977, Krah left the Christian Democrats in 2016 and was first elected to the European Parliament in 2019. He spoke to Asia Times Editor Uwe Parpart and Deputy Editor David Goldman on June 13. Below is a lightly edited transcript of their discussion.
Q: Maximilian Krah, that was a significant victory — an earthquake, even. It has set off and continues to set off shockwaves. How did it happen? Specifically, what did German voters, your voters, vote for and against?
A: The game changer was the young people. The youngsters made the difference. We saw a 12% increase among voters younger than 24. The left allowed 16- and 17-year-olds to vote, thinking they would support leftist candidates. However, within that group, aged 16 to 24, we gained 12%. We are now the strongest political force among the under-24 demographic, with a total of 17%. This is the game changer because it shows that the future is ours, provided we don’t make mistakes again. We could have done much better if we had adopted more of Donald Trump’s style. During the campaign, I was a victim of some intelligence attacks.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
06/17/2024 00:00 ||
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[American Thinker] People of a certain age will remember the name "Donald Segretti." In the 1972 re-election campaign of President Richard Nixon, this youthful campaign aide made the phrase "dirty tricks" part of the American political lexicon. Segretti’s mischief included sending embarrassing letters under the names of Nixon’s political rivals. Although his dirty tricks had little or no effect on the election’s outcome, Segretti served four and a half months in prison.
With Segretti’s four and a half months as a baseline, the 51-plus dirty tricksters who conspired successfully to get Joe Biden elected president in 2020 would seem to deserve no less. Confident to a fault about the Democrat control of the media, 51 intel officials signed on to the most flagrant disinformation campaign in anyone’s memory. "I think there needs to be an investigation into every single one of them," said Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.), and that investigation deserves a special counsel.
More deserving of prison time than the 51 were the Biden apparatchiks who set the plot in motion. On October 14, 2020, when they saw the New York Post headline "Smoking-Gun Email Reveals How Hunter Biden Introduced Ukrainian Businessman to VP Dad," they were ready to roll. They had known since December 2019 that this story might drop. That was when Mac Isaac alerted the FBI to a laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned at his computer repair shop in Delaware.
Fearing that the story might break at any time, operatives within the FBI reached out to Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms well before the 2020 election and warned them of a potential Russian pre-election "hack and dump" operation. If done with ill intent, these operatives deserve prison time as well.
On the day the Post story broke, representatives from the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force met with Facebook execs. As would later be confirmed at a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing, the FBI knew that the laptop was, in fact, Hunter Biden’s.
Facebook founder — and future un-indicted co-conspirator — Mark Zuckerberg did not need to have his arm twisted. He and his wife, Priscilla Chan, had already invested $300 million, in CNN’s words, toward "enhancing access to voting in the United States." CNN failed to add that the Zuckerbucks enhanced access almost exclusively in Democrat districts.
With a little prodding from the FBI, Facebook promptly "deamplified" the Post story, dramatically reducing its circulation. On the same day the story broke, the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force also leaned on Twitter. The Twitter people needed little persuasion — some 98 percent of their political donations went to Democrats. They were all in for Biden, and Twitter blocked not only the Post story, but also the Post itself.
At a House Judiciary Committee hearing, former disgraced FBI general counsel-turned Twitter exec James Baker was asked about his role in silencing the Post. To virtually every salient question regarding the laptop, Baker pleaded — in vintage Watergate fashion — memory loss.
"You were entrusted with the highest level of power at Twitter, but when you were faced with the New York Post story, instead of allowing people to judge the information for themselves, you rushed to find a reason why the American people shouldn’t see it," said committee chair James Comer. "You did this because you were terrified of Joe Biden not winning the election in 2020."
A May 10, 2023 report by the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government filled in the details. The plot was hatched on October 17, 2020, when Biden campaign adviser — now secretary of state — Antony Blinken contacted Michael Morell. Morell had served as acting director of the CIA under Obama. At Blinken’s request, Morell began assembling the draft of a statement that would dismiss this epic October surprise as more of the same old Russian disinformation. At the very least, Blinken should resign immediately.
Morell had a motive. He was in the running for the post of CIA director. Needing a Biden win to secure it, Morell went to work lining up co-conspirators. "Thereafter," reads the subcommittee report, "Morell contacted several former intelligence officials to help write the statement, solicit cosigners, and help with media outreach." On October 19, Morell emailed Nick Shapiro, his former deputy chief of staff, asking him to place the statement in major publications.
"On background," Shapiro was to tell reporters that Morell, in talking to Russian intel experts, "was struck by the fact that all of them thought Russia is involved here." In truth, Morell had talked to no Russian intel experts before organizing the draft.
Politico bit first, running a story on October 19 under the bold headline "Hunter Biden Story Is Russian Disinfo, Dozens of Former Intel Officials Say." As Morell testified to the House subcommittee, one major purpose of the statement was "to help Vice President Biden in the debate."
In an October 19, 2020 email, Morell told former CIA director John Brennan he wanted to "give the [Biden] campaign, particularly during the debate on Thursday, a talking point to push back on Trump on this issue."
During the October 23 debate, when Trump played the laptop card, Biden countered with the Russia card as planned. "Look, there are fifty former National Intelligence folks who said that what this, he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan," said a well rehearsed Biden. "They have said that this has all the characteristics — four — five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except him, his, and his good friend Rudy Giuliani."
In an estimate more conservative than many, Trump pollster John McLaughlin found that 4.6 percent of Biden voters would not have voted for Biden if they had known about the contents of Hunter’s laptop. Even if those people had simply not voted, their absence at the polls would have handed several swing states to Trump.
Kept purposefully in the dark, too many Americans chose to believe Biden and his co-conspirators. "On November 3, 2020, the American people went to the polls to elect the president of the United States with the false impression that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation," the House subcommittee concluded three years too late. "The American people cannot get back the 2020 election."
They cannot get the election back, but they can get justice. If prison seems an extreme remedy for the conspirators, it pays to remember that 40 government officials were indicted or imprisoned for Watergate.
#4
If they intend to leverage the clearances for a fraud to the detriment of the American people who they are supposed to be serving, their clearances ought to be revoked. The clearances are our property in reality.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
06/17/2024 8:13 Comments ||
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#7
As a minimum they should be stripped of any classified access and banned from any direct or indirect contract work with the government.
It seems there really are six ways from Sunday that they can screw us so there are those of us who believe that should happen to the entire intel community.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
06/17/2024 11:17 Comments ||
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#8
Treason - we've a proven cure for it. Nothing less will satisfy.
Posted by: Rex Mundi ||
06/17/2024 12:45 Comments ||
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#10
Put them in glass jars down here in Houston. Put in a water supply and let them bake in the sun. Make it so you can watch the price of treason in real time.
[Kunsler] CLUSTERFUCK NATION — BLOGJune 14, 2024
Sick Of and Done With
"Biden is not well. Everyone knows this even those who support him...the difference is they don’t care and that’s the most frightening aspect of this situation." — Edward Dowd
They’re kidding, right? That "Joe Biden" is capable of being president? Not just for another four-year term, but right here and now? This has got to be the most pitiful case of national gaslighting since 218-AD when the Romans installed 14-year-old Heliogabalus to front for their empire. Like "JB," he reigned for four years (before the praetorian guard offed him). The Danish historian of ancient Rome, Barthold Niebuhr, said of him: ". . . [He] had nothing at all to make up for his vices, which are of such a kind that it is too disgusting even to allude to them."
Lately, even the news media has begun to report "Joe Biden’s" senile mishaps. On Thursday at an outdoor photo op during the G7 meet-up in Italy, the ol’ dawg just wandered off from the assembled pack of world leaders until Italy’s PM Giorgia Meloni went and reeled him back in.
Earlier in the week at a Juneteenth party, they rolled him out on the White House lawn like a cigar-store Indian where he stood utterly frozen while all around him boogalooed and clapped to the music of jubilee.
Do you think that folks are starting to notice? Even many mind-fucked Democrat Party regulars who have been just fine with the controlled demolition of our country under this human door-stop of a president are murmuring ominously that the scam has become too obvious. Not Rachel Maddow, though. America’s Woke lunatic-in-chief reigning on MSNBC warned this week that the return of Trump would lead to her (and millions of her fans) getting jammed into "concentration camps."
Maybe you’ve already noticed that Rachel Maddow lives in a concentration camp of-the-mind located inside her own batshit-crazy skull. Dunno about you, but for the first time in a life lived through many decades of purportedly rational post-war Modernity, I’ve developed a sympathetic view of how come people in earlier eras resorted to burning witches. They are obdurate public nuisances. Their "magic" lately is the ability to provoke a mass formation psychosis, an actual "threat to our democracy" or, more precisely, to our republic. Maddow, the proudly out-front lesbian non-breeder is living proof that renouncing motherhood is a predictor of Cluster-B personality disorder — the condition that defines the "progressive" Wokery of these times.
I’m a little sorry to go all quasi-supernatural with you about this, but we are truly faced with the fact that the devastation in sexual relations and failures of family formation in recent decades has produced a very particular form of anomie in Western Civ’s female population — and the dynamic has badly deranged increasingly feminized men, too. Covid-19 was basically a Munchausen-by-proxy event, which ChatGPT describes accordingly:
No, Biden didn’t poop himself. I don’t think. But, it was no less embarrassing.
As you know, Joe Biden bailed on the G7 Summit early so that he could attend his latest star-studded fundraiser in Los Angeles. The event brought in $28 million for the Biden campaign—a far cry from the $54 million Trump raised in the first 24 hours after the sham verdict in his New York City trial.
Oh yeah, and Trump’s donations came largely from small donors, not rich celebrities and deep-pocketed donors.
But, I digress.
Biden’s fundraiserproved that Joe Biden not only needs Hollywood celebrities to raise cash, but that he needs Barack Obama on hand to help talk policy for their in-house conversation. But, Obama also had to play the role of Biden’s handler, as Biden had another incident where he froze on stage. It was so bad that Obama had to grab hold of him to get him moving.
#5
Joe’s degraded mental state was not a bug; it was a feature for those controlling the presidency. Now it is too obvious. Everyone can see it. The deniers are exposed as well like the ballot counters taping up the windows with cardboard.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
06/17/2024 8:20 Comments ||
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#6
A medical control problem the left did not anticipate.
Baraq, your little puppet isn't performing very well these days.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
06/17/2024 12:05 Comments ||
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#9
"Barack Obama himself even came out of the woodwork to lead the cheerleading among the stars in LA. And when the time came, he took the dazed, vacantly grinning “President Joe Biden” gently by the elbow and assisted him in shuffling offstage, demonstrating to the whole world how things really work in the United States of America." Kunstler Today.
#4
There are already Religious Observant battalions in the IDF. Some of the members of these battalions are (or were) Haredi.
A major problem the IDF has with Haredi recruits (and there are increasing numbers of these) is their general knowledge, mechanical skills, language skills are sometimes pretty low.
Posted by: Lord Garth ||
06/17/2024 19:07 Comments ||
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#5
When all you study is religious fodder, your technological and other skills atrophy. See: Islamic Cannon Fodder
Posted by: Frank G ||
06/17/2024 19:22 Comments ||
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#6
When I visited Israel about 13 years ago, the guide said that the Haredi got an exception from military service. They wanted to spend all their time studying the Torah. Because there were enough of them, they were able to form a large enough voting bloc that the other parties needed them to form a governing coalition.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
06/17/2024 20:12 Comments ||
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[IsraelTimes] NATO in talks on deploying more nukes, citing threat from Russia and China; Iran steps up its uranium enrichment while Saudis eye civilian nuclear program.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
