Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Fox News, Trump’s Ministry of Propaganda

How prepared are President Donald Trump’s adversaries to deal with the reality of a lavishly produced state media operation? This, the most-watched cable news network, functions in its fealty to Trump like a real-world Ministry of Truth from George Orwell’s 1984, where bureaucrats “rectify” the historical record to conform to Big Brother’s decrees.

I am referring, of course, to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. Having unsuccessfully tried to sell itself as “Fair and Balanced,” Fox News debuted a new brand in March 2018: “Real News. Real Honest Opinion.” Network executives apparently chose this slogan to differentiate themselves from “fake news” outlets—and, no doubt, to dog-whistle a pledge of allegiance to their commander-in-chief, who since being sworn into office has decried fake news in at least 630 tweets (as of Dec. 4, 2019).

Sean Hannity, the host of Fox’s weeknight flagship Hannity, regularly rails against the “media mob” and its “fake news,” terms he has used on more than 100 of his shows since Feb. 20, 2019. On Feb. 21, 2019, for example, he said, “The mainstream media, they devour, you know, any story that just fits their radical, extreme extension of the Democratic socialist party agenda. If it advances the narrative that Donald Trump is evil and his supporters are bad and America is scary and racist and sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, the media mob will shift into full gear without ... any kind of investigation.”

It seems Hannity and Trump have studied the texts of the 20th century’s master of indoctrination, who wrote in his 1925 autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf, “The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly—it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”

Over and over, indeed. With its fantastical reporting on Ukraine, Fox News is doing just that. Evidence overwhelmingly indicates that Trump refused to release military aid to Ukraine unless President Volodymyr Zelensky publicly opened a corruption investigation into the Bidens and into allegations (for which there is no credible evidence) that Ukrainian actors interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Hillary Clinton.

In the topsy-turvy world of Fox News, this bribe attempt is “fake news” spread by the “media mob”—while the “real news,” Fox would have you believe, is the invented story of Ukrainian election interference.

At Fox, where Hannity et al. make a nightly ritual of burying the truth in “memory holes” and spinning a new version of reality, the spirit of 1984 is alive and well.

The ascendancy of this Trumpist propaganda mill, more blatant in its contempt for the truth than even the pro-war corporate press in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, should give progressives pause. For nearly a quarter of American adults, Fox News is the sole cable news source. It behooves us to soberly assess how our prospects for liberty, equality and solidarity are dependent on the existence of an independent, critical press.

Here at In These Times, we are excavating those “memory holes”—but we can only keep digging if we first fill the holes in our own budget. We must raise an additional $52,000 before Dec. 31, 2019 to keep from falling short.

Fox News relies on corporate sponsors. At In These Times, we are proud to rely on readers like you. Please, consider our fundraising appeals. A strong and independent press has never been needed more than it is today. We are all in this together.

The Discourse Strikes Back

Computer, delete “Star Wars.”

Mozilla is switching to #matrix! Great news for both projects :D

https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/synchronous-messaging-at-mozilla-the-decision/50620

The Anatomy of a Public Health Crisis

An LA councimlan wants to pin the outbreak on the city’s homeless – but that just blames a vulnerable group for systemic issues.

What Is Joe Biden Thinking When He Uses Words like Malarkey?

Joe Biden’s age has become a major issue in the 2020 presidential campaign. Partly this is because he has been showing signs of early dementia while he talks. But it’s also the fact that he uses outdated expressions. Recently the Internet went crazy when he showed off his new campaign bus with its new “no […]

Over 267 million Facebook users reportedly had data exposed online
https://www.engadget.com/2019/12/19/facebook-data-exposed-online/ #privacy #security #libremone #bigtech

Holy Shit, Reportedly
https://gizmodo.com/holy-shit-reportedly-1840537332 #privacy #security #librem5 #bigtech

This is just wrong...

US government is entitled to all Snowden book proceeds, judge rules | Ars Technica
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/12/us-government-is-entitled-to-all-snowden-book-proceeds-judge-rules/

The California DOJ has cut off ICE deportation officers from access to the state's law enforcement network—after ICE refused to sign an agreement that its officers wouldn't use the system for immigration enforcement operations. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/12/california-doj-cuts-ice-deportation-officers-state-law-enforcement-database

Paper-based test could diagnose Lyme disease at early stages

After a day hiking in the forest, the last thing a person wants to discover is a tick burrowing into their skin. Days after plucking off the bloodsucking insect, the hiker might develop a rash resembling a bull's-eye, a tell-tale sign of Lyme disease. Yet not everybody who contracts Lyme disease gets the rash. Now, researchers have devised a blood test that quickly and sensitively diagnoses the disease at early stages.

Can't impeach a president for dropping bombs on brown people, locking up and trying children, hitting turbo on filling the air with carbon or slashing food stamps when wages are stagnant. Or, you know, being a literal rapist.

But you can impeach a president over some shit about Ukraine and Hunter Biden.

This is such unmitigated nerd shit. This is ruling class solidarity nonsense. This is kayfabe. This has nothing to do with me.

Using Roleplaying To Imagine Life Under a Green New Deal—Dungeons & Dragons Style

DES MOINES, IOWA—“Who in this room has played Dungeons & Dragons?” asks Cat Rocketship, an organizer with the progressive advocacy group Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (CCI), of a room of more than three dozen activists. They were envisioning the future under a Green New Deal during an experimental workshop Nov. 16, 2019, at the Central Library in downtown Des Moines.

Rocketship was introducing a small-group activity, imagining new social roles in a 2030 society that has taken significant steps toward environmental and economic justice. Instead of wizards and clerics (per Dungeons & Dragons), proposed roles ranged from the familiar, like community planners, to the more creative, such as memory stewards to record and preserve stories about their communities.

The workshop was led by Alex O’Keefe, creative director of the youth-led climate organization Sunrise Movement, and members of CCI. Roughly a quarter of attendees traveled from other states to discuss a “Green New Deal for Iowa and rural America.”

“In Michigan, there is a very big divide between urban and suburban communities and rural communities,” said Maria Ibarra-Frayre, 29, deputy director of working-class organizing group We the People Michigan, who traveled from Detroit. “There is very little overlay or relationship-building between those communities.”

Participants were given notebooks (with covers fashioned from recycled posters promoting a past CCI event) to record their thoughts throughout a series of collaborative brainstorming sessions. They wrote letters to their 2009 selves amid the Great Recession, then letters to their 2030 selves imagining equitable rural communities. Ideas for the future included affordable loans for beginning farmers, more robust local food distribution markets, and guaranteed union jobs to plant prairie land, build electric rail and enhance rural internet access.

At day’s end, organizers collected the notebooks for delivery to a group of animators who will create a short video to galvanize support for a Green New Deal. It will be released in mid-January ahead of the Iowa caucuses February 3.

As a model, the workshop opened with an animated short, A Message From the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, illustrated by Molly Crabapple, produced by The Intercept and narrated by the congresswoman. In the video, Ocasio-Cortez imagines the United States after Medicare for All (described as “the most popular social program in American history”), a federal jobs guarantee and nationwide high-speed rail, to help envision an inclusive, environmentally friendly, progressive future.

The idea appealed to Larry Ginter, a 79-year-old retired family farmer from Rhodes, a rural community of about 300 people in central Iowa where he grew up. He recounted how the New Deal revitalized his hometown.

“You couldn’t explain how great everything was,” Ginter recalled. The community thrived until the early 1950s, when commodity price floors declined as part of the dismantling of the New Deal. Where Rhodes once supported two gas stations, five churches and a public school, he said, today it has no gas stations or schools and one active church.

Ginter said he was enthused about the younger generation’s ambitious climate efforts, but apprehensive about the dystopian future they might inherit.

“My fear is that our government and a lot of people won’t buy into the idea that we need … real structural change to get things going on here” to fend off climate catastrophe, he tells In These Times. “If we don’t get a handle on this, we’re going to see things that we never dreamed of.”

Already, Iowa farmers have felt the effects of a changing climate, with record rainfall threatening crop yields and delaying the harvest season. Meanwhile, the corporate agricultural lobby, led by groups like the Iowa Farm Bureau, continues to dominate policymaking in a state where hogs outnumber humans more than sevenfold. This factory farming continues to pollute the water with cancer-causing nitrates, which ultimately flow into the Gulf of Mexico, depleting oxygen for marine life.

And with the completion in 2017 of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which cuts 343 miles across the state under extensive spans of farmland and the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, Iowans face the increased potential of crude oil leaks. That’s what inspired Dawson Davenport, 39, a member of the Meskwaki Settlement about 60 miles northeast of Des Moines, to attend the workshop. He wants to encourage others to spread climate activism across Native communities.

Workshop organizers struck a hopeful tone despite grim environmental and political realities. The contrast between a utopian and dystopian future was a recurring motif: We face both scarcity and plenty, isolation and connection, division and solidarity.

Before the workshop’s conclusion, facilitators discussed what their next steps might be, including participation in a national climate strike in December and committing to caucus in Iowa for a presidential candidate who supports the Green New Deal.

“The New Deal is a source of inspiration, but we’re going to do it a lot better this time,” says Shawn Sebastian, a CCI organizer who helped facilitate the day’s events. “Our Green New Deal is going to include black people, include Latinx people, include domestic workers, include farm laborers. We’re going to [put] climate and racial justice at the center.”

Squid Pro Quo

Trump goes full galaxy brain.

The Way Out

Dispatches from post-Soviet Russia.

Lawn-mowing reduction can help #wildlife, says study | #Environment | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/19/lawn-mowing-reduction-can-help-wildlife-says-study

#Gardens #Horticulture #Biodiversity #Conservation

How A Canadian Oil Company Strategized To Stall Climate Action For Decades
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/imperial-oil-climate-change_ca_5df405c0e4b047e8889d3713 #climatechange #climatecrisis

Chemical compound found in essential oils improves wound healing

Researchers have discovered that a chemical compound found in essential oils improves the healing process in mice when it is topically applied to a skin wound.

Solar power from 'the dark side' unlocked by a new formula

Most of today's solar panels capture sunlight and convert it to electricity only from the side facing the sky. If the dark underside of a solar panel could also convert sunlight reflected off the ground, even more electricity might be generated.