Time traveling, feeding, Facebooking and Telegraphing the most terroristic, malnourished, fact-checked and libelous fakeries in the week’s fake news.
Trump magic
Not all fake news is a blatant falsehood. There are other, subtler tactics that can be employed to make a factual story create a false impression and thereby become fake news. CNN showed an example of it this week with a story about U.S. weapons and military secrets sold to Saudi Arabia that ended up in the hands of al-Qaida- and Iran-linked fighters in Yemen.
This, of course, is not new. It’s the same policy the U.S. employed to implement regime change in Libya and in the attempt to boot Bashar al-Assad out of Syria. The mainstream media never told you this, of course. But ISIS is a creation of the U.S. intelligence services. It was funded, equipped and trained by the U.S. military and CIA and by American Middle East allies Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Israel, as documents obtained by Judicial Watch in 2012 revealed. The war in Yemen is just another extension of it.
The CNN article runs on for a couple of thousand words. It describes in great detail the various terror-linked organizations operating in the region, as well as the sophisticated weaponry found in the hands of these terror organizations working under the Saudi-led coalition. The weapons include everything from TOW anti-tank missiles to expensive Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles. But it’s 36 paragraphs in before we learn that the weapons were delivered in 2014 and 2015.
So, the weapons were moved to Saudi Arabia and UAE under the Barack Obama administration. Despite that fact, Obama’s name doesn’t appear anywhere in the article. Curiously (not really), Donald Trump’s name appears four times.
Granted, Trump has also enabled Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners to continue the war in Yemen that has killed tens of thousands of people, including thousands of children. America’s largest export is military hardware, and Trump certainly loves trade.
But to cast the Yemen war as Trump’s doing is, at best disingenuous. He’s just continued the policy implemented by Obama — and directed by the globalists in the Council on Foreign Relations and the military-industrial complex.
The CNN article is what I’d call fake news. And it’s being used by lying Democrats to sling more arrows at Trump, who has stated — to much consternation from the war party — that he wants to get the U.S. out of the endless wars.
Quoted in the story is Democrat Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut, who told CNN, the investigation was a “bombshell” that should serve as a wake-up call to “get us out of the war in Yemen that has gone horribly wrong.” We would agree with that wholeheartedly.
But Murphy later linked to the article in a tweet:
Either Murphy is being disingenuous, or President Trump has a secret magic time-travel machine.
Universal health care
The United Kingdom boasts universal health care, meaning everyone in the country has access to health services. It’s touted as a model to emulate by the resident socialists and communists in our country’s Democrat party.
Unfortunately, the results of universal health care leave a lot to be desired.
Research shows that regional variations in life expectancy exist. Translated, this means that some people are afforded care that isn’t available to others. In other words, some Brits are more equal than others — a common trait in socialist systems.
“We are facing a national emergency as widening health inequalities blight the land,” said Jonathan Ashworth MP (member of parliament), and the Labour Party’s “shadow health and social care secretary” in a statement.
Ashworth was responding to a new report that shows a rise in Britain of “Victorian-era” diseases like scarlet fever malnutrition, whooping cough and gout.
“It’s very concerning that these conditions, associated with a bygone era, seem to be on the resurgence,” said Helen Donovan, professional lead for public health at the Royal College of Nursing, in a statement.
The aforementioned Ashworth thinks he knows why the “Dickensian diseases” are on the rise in the Britain.
“The damning truth is austerity is making our society sicker,” he said. “It means the poor die younger.”
And Donovan, a so-called “independent expert,” also blames the rise in diseases partly on spending cuts.
“There are many reasons behind this but one thing that cannot be ignored is the effect of sustained cuts to local authority public health budgets which have caused the services that screen, prevent and protect against illness, and promote good hygiene, to be scaled back,” she said.
And it’s there we find the fake news.
No amount of spending on “services that screen, prevent and protect against illness, and promote good hygiene” would prevent the “Dickensian diseases” like scarlet fever, malnutrition, whooping cough and gout. These are not diseases caused by poor hygiene. Nor are they diseases that can cured or prevented by chemical prescriptions and vaccinations.
These are diseases of poor diet. And even kids that have available to them all the food they can eat can still be — and likely are, if they eat a standard western diet —suffering from malnutrition caused by a poor diet. Poor diets cause reduced immunity.
Scarlet fever and whooping cough are bacterial infections. A healthy immune system will prevent them. Gout is a diet-caused disease. Diets heavy in acidic sweetened soft drinks (especially those sweetened with fructose corn syrup), alcohol, meat and seafoods can lead to gout. Most human ailments can be traced to poor diets. One of Bob Livingston’s common refrains is that most people today suffer from full belly starvation.
Only proper nutrition will stem the rise of “Dickensian diseases,” not profligate spending on the mainstream medical system for vaccinations, screenings and prescription drugs.
Facebook losing “fact-checkers”
Two of the organizations Facebook has contracted with to fact-check articles shared on the social media network have severed ties with the company.
The Associated Press and Snopes both confirmed to BBC that they are no longer checking articles. The AP said it was in “ongoing conversations” about working for the firm in the future. Snopes founder David Mikkelson and company head of operations Vinny Green blogged that they may also return to working with Facebook one day.
Neither AP nor Snopes were specific about why they had broken with Facebook. But last year the Guardian published a report that suggested fact-checking firms were frustrated with Facebook over its lack of transparency, according to the BBC.
Also from the BBC:
Let’s recap. Facebook is concerned that people share articles on its platform that the official information gatekeepers claim are fake, so it hires what is essentially a state-run media organization — the AP, which is a known spreader of fake news and other disinformation — and a left-wing ‘fact-checking’ organization that flags as fake any news not regurgitated by the mainstream media and everything to the right of Mother Jones, to monitor it for fake news. But it doesn’t like what the “fact-checkers” flag as fake news and the “fact-checkers” don’t like it that Facebook doesn’t like their fact-checking.
But never fear. Facebook says it’s committed to “Fighting misinformation takes a multi-pronged approach from across the industry” with “34 fact-checking partners around the world who fact-check content in 16 languages, and we plan to expand the programme this year by adding new partners and languages.”
Somehow that’s not very comforting, given Facebook’s history of censoring conservative news sites.
More troubles for the Daily Telegraph
The British publication Daily Telegraph just can’t seem to get out the soup. Last week in this space we told you that the Telegraph had paid Melania Trump a “substantial” amount in damages after it published a made-up article about her life. It also wrote a follow-up article retracting everything in the original article.
Now author and Newsweek reporter Nina Burleigh is threatening to sue the publication over the retraction. That’s because the Telegraph’s article was based in large part on Burleigh’s book, Golden Handcuffs: The Secret History of Trump’s Women.
As the New York Post reports, following publication of the retraction article the Telegraph received a claim letter from Burleigh’s lawyers that says:
Your apology traduces Ms. Burleigh’s reputation as a competent journalist … In fact, it is [the Telegraph’s] apology that is false.
According to The Post, the letter claims the story was taken down because Charles Harder, the attorney who represented former wrestler Hulk Hogan in his suit against Gawker, is representing the first lady. Harder is known as the “go-to Hollywood lawyer” for privacy rights claims. He and Hogan bankrupted Gawker in the invasion of privacy suit over the gossip website’s publication of a sex tape that featured Hogan. Gawker was subsequently bought by Univision.
Burleigh’s lawyers want (a) an apology; (b) payment for the article, which apparently was withheld; (c) unspecified compensation for damage to Burleigh’s reputation; and (d) payment of all legal costs, reports HotAir.com.
— Jay Baker
