Weekday Reading #1


Morning News, Francis Luis Mora, 1912

The News is being Nudged

Is the news still news when it is being nudged by the UK government’s behavioural scientists?

Sky announced this week that behaviour change on climate can be driven by TV. It released a video which opened with the lines, “We cannot understate the urgency. But faced with issues of such enormity, what role can we play?”

It’s not actually a question, they have already decided their role. Sky announced that it was collaborating with the “independent Behavioural Insights Team”. That sounds more palatable than collaborating with the government doesn’t it? But the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) is one third owned by the Cabinet Office and appears to be on permanent tenure at Downing Street. Can a company which is one third owned by the government be fairly described as “independent”?

Stupid and Evil in Equal Measure

A big problem, is how to understand this. As a rule, I am open to all plausible theories, and I find many conspiratorial approaches to the Corona phenomenon to be spiritually or metaphorically accurate, even if I disagree with their details. By and large, though, I’ve resisted interpretations that detect a specific, malevolent plan behind these events. I’ve preferred to see this cascade of unrelenting, self-imposed destruction as the fruit of bureaucratic incompetence and elite stupidity. Many disagree with me, including friends like Sandpiper, who are not content with leaving the whole stage to failure. At the link you’ll find an abstract formulation of this view, which is particularly attractive, because it does not require that we accept any particular theory, but merely a model of what is happening. Sandpiper posits an “inner conspiracy” and an “outer conspiracy.” The outer conspiracy is “the way the agenda is sold … what the True Believers actually think they are doing.” The “inner conspiracy,” meanwhile, “is the small circle of people … who created the vision for their own benefit, because they have political goals they want to achieve.”

Four Competing Regime Systems: On statecraft in the USA, China, Russia, and France (h/t: JC)

The world in 2021 is a very, very different place from the heady days of the Clinton Era, when the USA was free to stamp its signature anywhere it pleased. The Russians were dealing with their own economic collapse after seeing the USSR fall apart, the Chinese were still only producing junk in mass quantities for the global market, and even allies like Japan, who some felt in the previous decade were becoming too strong an economic power globally, began to stagnate. America had an open road towards building out a new world order.

Rather than engage in a chronological reporting as to what has happened since (I’ll spare you from reading what you already know), the intention of this piece is to sketch out the relevant, competing systems that are falling into place in a world that many seem to think indicates a declining America, and a world in which many yearn for multi-polarity.

i see we have now reached the “mandatory public signaling of outgroup exclusion” part of the pandemic

masks, perhaps the most useless yet degrading of the covid interventions, are now to be mandated by OSHA for ONLY the unvaxxed in workplaces.

Audit: Wisconsin Could Have Counted Enough Illegal Votes To Tip The 2020 Election To Biden

For instance, Wisconsin Statute 6.87(9) provides that “if a municipal clerk receives an absentee ballot with an improperly completed certificate or with no certificate, the clerk may return the ballot to the elector, inside the sealed envelope when an envelope is received, together with a new envelope if necessary, whenever time permits the elector to correct the defect and return the ballot.”

In direct violation of this law, WEC issued guidance to clerks in 2016 that allowed clerks to “cure” such incorrect information on ballot certificates themselves. The Legislative Audit Bureau (LAB) did not investigate the number of certificates that clerks cured, but still found a significant number of incomplete ballots that, according to state law, should not have been counted.


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Miss Anthropist
Miss Anthropist
November 5, 2021 5:34 pm

It will get worse before it gets better.

calli
calli
November 5, 2021 5:45 pm

masks, perhaps the most useless yet degrading of the covid interventions, are now to be mandated by OSHA for ONLY the unvaxxed in workplaces.

It had to happen. Utterly predictable.

Evil is so uncreative, it just repeats the same tired old tropes.

Roger
Roger
November 5, 2021 6:27 pm

Iirc, that millionaire Communist bint who’s been advising Johnson on lockdowns is part of this group; manipulation of public behaviours via media messaging is her specialty. Along with manipulation of politicians, apparently.

MatrixTransform
November 5, 2021 7:51 pm

let me know if this sort of post is a welcome addition

like/thumb/heart/+

Perfidious Albino
Perfidious Albino
November 5, 2021 8:09 pm

The BIT have an office in Sydney and have been advising the Andrews Regime. One of the ‘success’ case studies on their website is an engagement from VIC CHO Sutton pushing Gardisil a few years back.

One of their international board is an ‘ex’ Obama adviser also.

The recent book ‘A State of Fear’ by Laura Dodsworth goes into some detail on the background and current activities of the BIT. Recommended reading.

Bruce of Newcastle
Bruce of Newcastle
November 5, 2021 9:26 pm

The News is being Nudged

Almost nothing on the MSM is believable now. The Murdoch kiddies announced recently that Fox and the Australian outlets would now spout the IPCC rubbish, despite the real world data showing it is indeed rubbish.

And the stuff on Covid is nearly as unbelievable, especially once you access the actual data.

They’re exploiting the ignorance of the people, with potent emotional hooks. This can’t end well.

Rabz
November 5, 2021 9:36 pm

Read one, two and four.

Very depressing, all of them, yet there is still hope.

Otherwise we’re into a new dark ages of the most absurd totalitarianism in human history.

Thankfully, the worst excesses of which I won’t be around to enjoy the pleasures of existing in.

To paraphrase the Heston in the first POTA, “you f*cking idiots – you destroyed it all”

Angus Black
Angus Black
November 6, 2021 8:44 am

Excellent choice of artwork. I’d give that prime wall space.

Alistair Crooks
Alistair Crooks
November 6, 2021 8:57 am

And in response to a question at the conference – Do reporters actually believe what the (fake news) they are reporting? – American journalist, Sharyl Attkisson, responded :

… As I said, we (the media) have hired these propagandists – they’ve found ways to be hired in our newsrooms … so they don’t think it’s a mistake, and even if they know they’re wrong , and even if they get caught after the fact, having disseminated false information, they are not embarrassed because they still accomplished their goal. If they are not journalists, they are not trying to tell the truth necessarily, they are trying to put forth a narrative. And if they succeeded at that, even if the narrative isn’t true, they have still done their job the way they hoped to do it.
Slanted Journalism and the 2020 Election

Its all about the narrative – not the news

  1. Why did they change the dates? Late November probably better as the delays are mostly confined to afternoon storms. By…

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