The BS Filter

Let’s talk about the attempted US coup and about what might happen next. We also talk about Brisbane’s “snap lockdown”, how to handle a pandemic properly, and why we don’t have absolute freedom of speech. The post BFTN 83 – The Diet Coup appeared first on The BS Filter.

On this episode we discuss recent news, including Trump’s phone call to the Secretary of State of Georgia, conspiracy theories surrounding reporting of COVID deaths, Assange’s extradition hearing, Biden’s likely approach to Cuba, and how to put poison in someone’s underpants. <div class="whooshkaa-widget-player" data-episode-id="776447" data-theme="dark" data-visual="true" data-height="190" data-enable-volume="true"> </div The post BFTN 82 – Quasimodo appeared first on The BS Filter.

What will the GOP look like after January 20? I see four main scenarios. Trump remains as the leader and it’s business as usual. Trump retires from the position gracefully and they search for new leadership. Trump is pushed out. Trump sets up his own political party. Let’s talk about what might happen. Meanwhile: Trump intervening with SCOTUS Mike Pence – The Decider Hunter Biden investigation Iran assassination The UN commission reclassifies cannabis Meanwhile in Australia – the cops are going nuts busting marijuana importers and dealers In Colorado – legal since 2014 – weed brings in about 1% of the state’s budget The post BFTN 81 – The GOP After Trump appeared first on The BS Filter.

Cam and Ray talking about the US election, the Australian government’s illegal activities, the Murdoch enquiry, US hate crimes, mass shootings and Trump’s desire to bomb Iran. The Video: The post BFTN 80 – Message In A Podcast appeared first on The BS Filter.

Hunter Biden’s laptop; The American Insurgency; US COVID – Red or Blue?; OPCW cover-up; Fake Green billionaires; Bolivia decides; and the CIA get attacked in Australia… by Russians? The post BFTN 79 – Hunter Biden appeared first on The BS Filter.

Eddie Van Halen is playing with Jimi in Elysium tonight. In other stories, we talk about the “debate”, Trump and covid, mutually exacerbating catastrophes, Middle East “peace” and scenarios that could lead to a new US Civil War. The post BFTN 78 – RIP EVH appeared first on The BS Filter.

The Australian government is trying to force Facebook and Google to pay Australia news organisations free money; compare the narrative around Aussie journalists in China versus Assange; No, the CDC did *not* say only 6% of people died from COVID; Senate Report about Trump and Russia contains nothing new; who put the Novichok poison in Navalny’s tea? and how?; the Khashoggi trial concludes but what’s happening with the US lawsuit against KSA? The post BFTN 77 – NOVICHOK appeared first on The BS Filter.

My old mate Donnie Maclurcan is the CEO of the Post Growth Institute and Affiliate Professor of Economics at Southern Oregon University. He’s one of the smartest and nicest guys I know. I invited him on to chat about his views on the current state of the United States, where he has lived for the past 8 years. We talk about whether or not it’s possible to save the US before it collapses and what comes after capitalism. The post BFTN 76 – Post Growth appeared first on The BS Filter.

Or is it just failing? Today we break down some of the various definitions of a “failed state” and try to work out how the USA rates against them. And why it matters, even to non-Americans. The post BFTN 75 – Is The USA a Failed State? appeared first on The BS Filter.

Sean from St Paul joins me for a chat about protests, riots, police brutality and why he has a huge SPQR tatt across his chest. The post BFTN 74 – Riots #4 – Sean appeared first on The BS Filter.

Andrew Hout has a degree in history and lives just outside of Columbus in Ohio. We talk about why Americans are so angry and entitled. The post BFTN 73 – Riots #3 – Andrew appeared first on The BS Filter.

The world’s best travel photographer, Gary Arndt (site) has seen more of the world than most of us ever will. He joins me from his home in Minneapolis to talk about the protests, riots, America and how it is different from the rest of the world. The post BFTN 72 – Riots #2 – Gary appeared first on The BS Filter.

I want to focus for a few weeks on the current US protests and riots which started with the death by cop of George Floyd. I’ve invited a number of American friends and fans who live in riot hotspots to come on and share with me their experiences and views on how the country can move forwards. But I’m starting the miniseries with my favourite American – my wife, Chrissy Dunaway Reilly. She has lived in Australia for nearly eleven years and has a fairly rare perspective on what it’s like to be an American living in a Western country that is similar in many ways – and yet different. And why she no longer wants to return to the country of her birth. The post BFTN 71 – Riots #1 – Chrissy appeared first on The BS Filter.

Mike Snyder, long-time podcast listener, security professional and self-confessed libertarian, Fox News watcher and conspiracy theorist, joined us for a two hour chat today about his fears around the coming of the One World Government, the New World Order, Covid conspiracies, and many other fun topics. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post BFTN 70 – New World Order appeared first on The BS Filter.

On this episode, we get into the conspiracies about 5G and the coronavirus – which may have started with Dr. Kris Van Kerckhoven (a Mormon) – then got connected to the new £20 note in the UK – then disgraced American physician, Thomas Cowan, talked about it at a pseudo-science conference – then there was the correlation is causation theory. More interesting to me is the role 5G is playing in geopolitics. Why Controlling 5G Could Mean Controlling the World – and how, for the first time in a long time, the United States is not the leader in a major technological sector that will underpin future innovation. It’s been called a “geopolitical turning point”. Then we get into the science – despite many hundreds of studies over the past half century, we have never been able to prove any of these non-ionising waves can cause cancer — and this applies to 5G radiation too. Who can we trust when it comes to the science around non-ionizing radiation? How about the ICNIRP? Certainly NOT these Fox Nation hosts. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post BFTN 69 – 5G Conspiracies Part 2 appeared first on The BS Filter.

There are a lot of conspiracy theories going around about 5G – it gives you cancer, autism, changes your DNA, and gives you coronavirus! So in this episode, we look into the 5G conspiracies as well as the technology itself and the geopolitical battles going on around it. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post BFTN 68 – 5G Conspiracies Part 1 appeared first on The BS Filter.

There are a lot of conspiracy theories going around about the idea that China withheld information about COVID-19 from the global community and punished their own whistleblowers. Today we look at the evidence to support those theories (or lack thereof). At times like of crisis like this, even more than usual, it’s important to have a fact-based mindset and not take the easy route into confirmation bias. But if I *was* going to point the finger at anyone for the virus, it would be THIS guy. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post BFTN 67 – China COVID Conspiracies appeared first on The BS Filter.

HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. On BS 65 (24 March) we predicted there could be 20,000 – 50,000 American deaths within the next few weeks. The Trump Administration are now estimating 100 – 240,000. —- This guy – Guo Wengai – is claiming that China’s virus death toll is still rising, they are hiding it, and burning bodies in mobile mass incinerators. What you need to know is that he apparently fled to the United States in late 2014 after learning he was going to be arrested after allegations against him including bribing, kidnapping, money laundering, fraud and rape. He is a member of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. The US is gearing up for a war (cold, hot or hybrid) with China and is going to be inventing propaganda to justify it, in the same way they did in the war against Saddam. Do you remember when a young girl got up in the UN in 1990 and said Iraqi soldiers were going through hospitals and throwing babies out of humidicribs? Nariyah? The world was shocked. We found out only many years later that she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States and that the entire thing was invented by the PR firm Hill & Knowlton who were paid millions of dollars by Kuwait to help get the US involved in a war with Iraq. —- Last week a Venezuelan defector is caught trying to smuggle a shipment of US weapons into VZ to assassinate Maduro. The next day the USG indicts Maduro on drug smuggling charges. Coincidence? It’s all about OIL. OPEC and Russia (and COVID) are driving oil prices down so low that American shale producers could go bankrupt. Guess which country has lots of oil? Venezuela. —— Where’s the money coming from? Oz Gov has announced $189 billion in aid. Where is it coming from? Remember 9 months ago when Scott Morrison said the Coalition will not engage in “unfunded empathy”? In the last week he’s announced $190 billion in unfunded empathy. I wonder what changed his mind? Never again let our politicians tell us “we can’t afford it”. Frog shit. You can make money appear by magic whenever you need to. It’s all part of Modern Monetary Theory. —- In the NYT on 22 January, James G. Hodge Jr., director of the Center for Public Health Law and Policy at Arizona State University, said the Chinese shutdown in Wuhan would “almost certainly lead to human rights violations and would be patently unconstitutional in the United States.” But here we are. We always choose to give up our rights if the trade-off seems worthwhile. Sometimes we aren’t even given a choice. So much for the illusion of democracy. —- Joe Biden & Tara Reade – The Story We Must Not Mention Ukraine Joe has been accused of sexually molesting a staffer, Tara Reade, back in 1993. But despite #metoo, the mainstream media won’t touch the story. We have to wonder what’s going on. Is it because her story has no legs? Isn’t that we’ve always said about such claims? I thought the new standard was to always err on the side of taking claims such as these seriously? The post BFTN 66 – Unfunded Empathy appeared first on The BS Filter.

Lots of information, disinformation and misinformation going around – People are scared Hard to know what value we can add? – Are we just making more noise? The first thing I want to talk about it Philosophy Block theory of the universe Atoms are effectively immortal Your “life” is an illusionNo more real than the characters in a comic book It’s just a story you tell yourself – Change the story As for the virus and the panic be careful of the sources you turn to Like we said in the vaccination series: – Who do you trust and why? For something like this, I turn to Bill Gates and the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford Chrissy likes Zubin Damania, MD, ZDOGGMD on YouTube.Choose your sources carefully. – Keep in mind that the media is all about drama and sells attention for a living Then Look at the data yourself https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OSsrvgAMtXuRoPISDB5nXbGKJbeTSVIZZBx03YplKxs/edit#gid=0When it comes to the big question – am I going to die – well the answer is YESEveryone is going to die. Eventually. As for COVID, there are three ratios we need to be aware of. – I keep reading in the media that the coronavirus’s death rate was an estimated 3.4% Case Fatality Rate, Infected Fatality Rate and Mortality Rate. CFR – is the number of reported deaths per number of reported cases IFR is how many people who are infected with the virus, including those who don’t develop symptoms, will die. MR is how many people out of the entire population will die from the virus. Let’s say the population consists of 1,000 people; 500 get infected. 100 of these people have the disease, and 3 of those die from the disease. In this case, the mortality rate for the disease is 3 in 1000 = 0.003The case fatality rate is 3 in 100 = 0.03 – The infection fatality rate is 3 in 500 = .006 One problem with COVID is that Between countries, case Fatality rates vary significantly, and over time, which suggests considerable uncertainty over the exact case fatality rates. https://www.cebm.net/global-covid-19-case-fatality-rates/ Ranging from 0.30% in Austria to 12.50% in San Marino, the tiny country in the middle of northern ItalyItaly’s has had a lot of deaths. But on 20 March, Scientific Adviser to Italy’s Minister of Health advised that all those who die in hospitals with Coronavirus will be included in the death numbers.  Apparently most of them died from other pre-existing problems – but as they happened to be infected with COVID, they were classified as COVID fatalities. “The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus.They were also all much older than, say, the cases in China“The age of our patients in hospitals is substantially older – the median is 67, while in China it was 46,” Prof Ricciardi says. https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/120443722/coronavirus-is-covid19-really-the-cause-of-all-the-fatalities-in-italy – Comparison with Swine Flu The overall case fatality rate as of 16 July 2009 (10 weeks after the first international alert) with pandemic H1N1 influenza varied from 0.1% to 5.1% depending on the country. The WHO reported in 2019 that swine flu ended up with a fatality rate of 0.02%. (CEBM)Diamond Princess:Only 712 out of the 3,711 (~20%) passengers and crew (average age 58) on the Diamond Princess have tested positive for the virus. Around half were asymptomatic. Only 8 (~1% – corrected) have died.IFR 8 / 712 = 0.01 And they were old. A third of the passengers were 70-79. About 6% were over 80. In Australia, only 6% of our pop is 70-79, about 2% of our pop is over 80. Australian population by ageSo the average age of the ship was far older.All deaths occurred in patients > 70. No one under 70 died. Source: https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/severity/diamond_cruise_cfr_estimates.html One analysis is that 2 million Americans are already infected. An infection takes around 23-24 days to resolve. The first 5-6 days the patient doesn’t show any symptoms. It takes an average of 5 days between the onset of symptoms and hospitalization. Finally it takes about 2 weeks between hospitalization and death (about 10 days in ICU).On March 19th, the U.S. reported a total of 205 deaths. That figure was 85 on March 16th and 47 on March 13th. This means the number of deaths doubles about every 3 days. This also means that the number of infections is doubling every 3 days If the IFR is 1%, that means for every death there are 100 infections. The number of infected people doubles every 3 days.If there were 205 deaths on March 19, it means that three weeks before that – Feb 29 – there were 100 times as many infections. 20,500 infectionsWhich has been doubling every three days. So unless the lockdown have helped, there should be 2.5-5.5 million infecte

On this week’s show: Assange’s trial is a farce. The US pulls out of Afghanistan. Coronavirus. “Sodomite” is a bad word. No fraud in Bolivian election. And don’t forget to pick up your tickets to Marketing The Messiah! HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post BFTN 64 – The Greatest Threat appeared first on The BS Filter.

Talking about the Iowa caucus (Shadow, ACRONYM, Buttgieg, etc) and the new evidence of the CIA spying on US allies since the end of WWII. And don’t forget to pick up your tickets to Marketing The Messiah! HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post BFTN 63 – Friends Don’t Spy On Friends appeared first on The BS Filter.

John Pabon from strategic advisory firm Fulcrum Strategic Advisors joins me to give his perspective on China – business, political and social. John’s an American who currently lives in Melbourne, and spent the last ten years living in Shanghai. We talk about the ol’ Communism v Capitalism debate, the treatment of the Uyghurs, working conditions in factories, IP theft, and how most Chinese view their government. And don’t forget to pick up a new copy of my book, The Psychopath Epidemic, if you haven’t already! The post BFTN 6.5 – China part 5 appeared first on The BS Filter.

Alan MacLeod joins me again to discuss the latest news about Venezuela and Iran. Alan is a member of the Glasgow University Media Group. He is author of “Bad News From Venezuela: 20 Years of Fake News and Misreporting.” His latest book, Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, was published by Routledge in May 2019. Follow him on Twitter: @AlanRMacLeod And don’t forget to pick up a new copy of my book, The Psychopath Epidemic, if you haven’t already! HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post BFTN 62 – Venezuela and Iran Update appeared first on The BS Filter.

We talk about Australia’s bushfires and America’s assassination of Soleimani. And my book, The Psychopath Epidemic, is finally out! HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post BFTN 61 – Fires and Assassinations appeared first on The BS Filter.

The oligarchs have worked out the model for getting people to vote for “killer clowns”. The Democrats gave Trump $738 billion to buy weapons. And America is using AGM-114R9X Hellfire drones to terrorize the world. George Monbiot on the killer clowns. Media Bias Chart Hellfire drones Trust No-one Manovich on why fake news isn’t the problem The Democrats give Trump a $738 billion Xmas present HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post BFTN 60 – Killer Clowns & Terror Drones appeared first on The BS Filter.

Colonel Huge Banzer ruled Bolivia with military support until 1978, when Siles won the election – but Banzer declared the election invalid. The same thing happened in 1979. And again in 1980. But this time General Luis García Meza grabbed the reins of power in the bloody coup. Finally in 1985, Paz was elected President again, for the fourth and final time – and immediately lurched to the Right, firing 30,000 miners from the government payroll, suppressing unions and raiding opposition meetings. In 1989, Jaime Paz Zamora became President. He’d been a Marxist in the 1970s and the victim of an assassination attempt in 1980. But in 1989 he signed an accord with Banzar and lurched to the Right. Banzar was President again in 1997, declared martial law, arrested protest leaders and shut down the media. Finally, in 2002, a poor, uneducated farmer and union leader, Evo Morales, ran for the Presidency, coming third, despite the US ambassador warning Bolivians that they would be punished if Morales won. Then, in the general election of December 2005, Morales did win, becoming the first indigenous President in a country where 62% of the population identified as indigenous. The US, of course, were furious and immediately tried to get him thrown out. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post BFTN 59 – Bolivia 3 appeared first on The BS Filter.

We pick up our series on the political history of Bolivia in 1943 with the government of Major Gualberto Villarroel López, which ended in violence and his assassination a few years later. The country continued to have coup after coup. In 1967, Che Guevara tried to start a revolution in the country, which ended up with his execution by the CIA. Outrage at Che’s execution lead to a leftist coup in Bolivia under General Juan José Torres – but that was overthrown when Henry Kissinger urged the CIA to “crank up an operation, post-haste.” This resulted a new right-wing military coup, lead by Colonel Hugo Banzer. Torres was arrested, tortured and executed as part of Operation Condor, the U.S.-supported campaign of political repression by South American right-wing dictators, and which ran during the Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and the Reagan administrations, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 60,000 people. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post BFTN 58 – Bolivia 2 appeared first on The BS Filter.

Alan MacLeod joins me to discuss the propaganda model and how it applies to media bias on the coverage of Bolivia, Venezuela, Corbyn, Ukrainegate and Russiagate.  Alan is a member of the Glasgow University Media Group. He is author of “Bad News From Venezuela: 20 Years of Fake News and Misreporting.” His latest book, Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, was published by Routledge in May 2019. Follow him on Twitter: @AlanRMacLeod The post BFTN 57 – Alan MacLeod on Media Bias appeared first on The BS Filter.

What’s happening in Bolivia? President Evo Morales was recently the subject of a coup, and has fled to Mexico. In order to provide some perspective on the current events, we take a detailed look at the political history of Bolivia – a poor country that has survived an endless number of military coups, often supported and financed by the CIA. The post BFTN 56 – Bolivia 1 appeared first on The BS Filter.

Americans were SHOCKED to discover that Russia had interfered in their 2016 Presidential elections. How dare they interfere with the democratic process of a sovereign nation! Of course, those same Americans probably have no idea that their own country has, according to the research done by my guest today, done the same thing over 80 times since the end of WWII. And this number doesn’t even include the number of times the CIA has overthrown governments by supporting coups or regime change. Today I interview Dov H. Levin Ph.D, Assistant Professor, Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Hong Kong about his research on what he calls his Partisan Electoral Intervention by the Great Powers dataset (PEIG). It shows how many times the USA and USSR/Russia intervened in foreign elections in the years 1946 – 2000. The post BFTN 55 – Intervening In Foreign Elections appeared first on The BS Filter.

It’s gloating time in the West with the suicide of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. On today’s show we examine the history of ISIS and how the United States and their allies created the conditions for ISIS and then proceeded to fund and arm it. We look at the media’s near complete lack of skepticism and analysis regarding ISIS and Trump’s claims as they dance on al-Baghdadi’s grave. Meanwhile, some studies suggest the US has lead to the death of an estimated 20 million people since the end of WWII, which makes ISIS’ body count seem like kindergarten. We also cover the massive protests in Lebanon and Chile and ask why they aren’t getting the same kind of media coverage as similar, but less brutal, protests in Hong Kong and Venezuela. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post BFTN 54 – Schadenfreude appeared first on The BS Filter.

This week we have more on the Biden business in the Ukraine including some background on the Euromaidan uprising, the role of energy supply in the regime change and Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and the role of the United States (via USAID) in the overthrow of Yanukovych. As evidence for the latter, we play the leaked phone call between Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the United States Department of State, and U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, on January 28, 2014 where they discuss who the US is going to install as the new Ukrainian Prime Minister. We also play another leaked phone call from around the same time, between Estonia’s Foreign Minister Urmas Paet and E.U. Foreign Policy Chief Cathy Ashton, where they discuss who was responsible for the violence during the uprising. At the beginning of the show I play a short clip from Unauthorized Disclosure podcast 36, featuring guest Matt Taibbi where they talk about how propaganda works in the USA right now. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post BFTN 53 – Regime Change In Ukraine appeared first on The BS Filter.

A lot of people have asked us, in our great and unmatched wisdom, to explain what’s going on with Syria, Trump, Turkey and the Kurds. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post BFTN 52 – Trump & The Kurds appeared first on The BS Filter.

We try to go a little deeper on the Trump-Ukraine-Biden story than most of the media coverage. Apart from Trump and Joe Biden, we talk about the roles that Viktor Shokin, Mykola Zlochevsky, Viktor Yanukovich, Petro Poroshenko, Dmytro Firtash, Volodymyr Zelensky and Yuriy Lutsenko have in this story, along with American players Hunter Biden, Devon Archer and former CIA official, Cofer Black. The post BFTN 51 – Biden & Burisma appeared first on The BS Filter.

In this final episode of our China series, we talk about: How China might weaponize its holdings of more than $1.1 trillion worth of U.S. Treasuries, aka the “nuclear option”The risk of China starting a currency war with the USChina’s current position on IP protectionAnd we finish with a little more discussion about China’s theory on the “Socialist market economy” and Deng Xiaoping Theory HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post 6.4 China’s Economy – Part 4 appeared first on The BS Filter.

There’s been lots of talk in the media about Trump’s trade war with China. One aspect about it that I find interesting is that I never see any talk, in this context, about the fact that China is a Communist country – a Communist country that seems to be a major economic threat to the USA, the world’s leading Capitalist country. Didn’t the West win the Cold War? So over the next few episodes we’re going to be trying to understand what’s going on with China’s economy. Are they Communists? Capitalist? Or something different entirely?  HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post 6.3 China’s Economy – Part 3 appeared first on The BS Filter.

There’s been lots of talk in the media about Trump’s trade war with China. One aspect about it that I find interesting is that I never see any talk, in this context, about the fact that China is a Communist country – a Communist country that seems to be a major economic threat to the USA, the world’s leading Capitalist country. Didn’t the West win the Cold War? So over the next few episodes we’re going to be trying to understand what’s going on with China’s economy. Are they Communists? Capitalist? Or something different entirely?  HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post 6.2 China’s Economy – Part 2 appeared first on The BS Filter.

There’s been lots of talk in the media about Trump’s trade war with China. One aspect about it that I find interesting is that I never see any talk, in this context, about the fact that China is a Communist country – a Communist country that seems to be a major economic threat to the USA, the world’s leading Capitalist country. Didn’t the West win the Cold War? So over the next few episodes we’re going to be trying to understand what’s going on with China’s economy. Are they Communists? Capitalist? Or something different entirely?  HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post 6.1 China’s Economy – Part 1 appeared first on The BS Filter.

The plan this week was to interview Alan MacLeod about his new excellent book “Propaganda in the Information Age” but he missed the call, so we talked about it without him instead. We’ll get him on next week for a follow up. The book is an internet-era update on Herman and Chomsky’s 1988 classic “Manufacturing Consent”, and the new book opens with an interview Alan did with Noam recently. I recommend reading both the original and the new book if you want to better understand how corporate propaganda works in Western democracies. On this episode we talk about the Chomsky & Herman’s “five filters” and I break down a few recent stories in the US media. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post BFTN 50 – The Propaganda Model appeared first on The BS Filter.

We finish our mini-biography on the new Prime Minister of the UK, Boris Johnson, aka “BoJo”, or, as I like to call him, “The Big BJ”.  In Ray’s absence, I’m joined again by my good friend Trevor Bell from the The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post BFTN 49 – Boris Part 2 appeared first on The BS Filter.

On this episode I’m joined by Brisbane’s #1 podcaster, the fabulous Trevor Bell, co-host of The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove (“a weekly podcast which takes a look at news, political events, culture, ethics and the transformations taking place in our society”), who is standing in for Papa Bear who is on vacation…. AGAIN. And we are doing a mini-biography on the United Kingdom’s new Prime Minister – Boris Johnson. Maybe not interesting to people inside the UK, but to the rest of us, he’s somebody we need to understand. In many ways he’s in the same mold as Trump – a buffoonish clown who has mastered the art of saying stupid things to get free media and yet it hasn’t hindered his political career. They were also both born with silver spoons in their mouths and have had a fairly easy life, coasting on a highway of old boy networks, sporting multiple marriages and high profile extramarital affairs. And yet they are unlike in many ways. Boris is an Oxford-educated, articulate history buff who has written multiple books on subjects including Ancient Rome and Churchill. Trump, on the other hand, according to people inside the White House, can’t read a memo or teleprompter without pharmaceutical assistance. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post BFTN 48 – Boris Part 1 appeared first on The BS Filter.

On this week’s news show we look the recent headlines concerning Iran – their arrest of 17 CIA spies, and the seizure of oil tankers by both the British and the Iranians. Who and what should we believe? Iran detains 17 citizens accused of spying for the CIAIran Executes Defense Ministry Staffer Over Spying for CIA People want us to talk about Brexit but it’s more like a series, not something we could tackle in an hour.  Although we should talk about Boris Johnson becoming the new British PM.  Maybe with Trevor Bell next week.  Iran is still in the news.  Oil tankers being seized by both the British and Iran  Detained 17 Iranian citizens they accuse of spying for the CIA  Is it true? What does it mean?  How would they detect these people? Iran claims “Defendants serving their sentences in prison mentioning tempting promises of CIA officers including emigration to USA, a proper job in America, and money,” Others were already in possession of visas and were reportedly pressured to spy for the US in order to have them renewed. Iran claimed that the 17 spies did not know each other, but all had been trained independently in clandestine tradecraft. The training allegedly included setting up and using secret communications systems, as well as carrying out dead drops without being detected. Dead drops utilised containers made to resemble rocks, which were located in the Iranian countryside and elsewhere in the Middle East, according to Iranian officials. Some of the assets communicated with their handlers while attending science conferences throughout Europe, Africa and Asia. All of the above are standard methods of the espionage trade. Losing 17 assets in one big sweep sounds fantastical. If it is true, it would mark one of the biggest intelligence-collection disasters in the CIA’s 72-year history. Furthermore, given that — as the Iranians themselves have said — the 17 alleged spies did not know each other. It would have taken a massive amount of counter-intelligence resources to detect, build cases and apprehend 17 separate foreign assets. What is more likely to have happened is that the Iranians detected a small number of CIA spies — possibly no more than two — and then slowly extended their counter-intelligence investigation to incorporate those two individuals’ close associates, personal friends, or even relatives. Donald Trump denied it on Twitter. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said: “The Iranian regime has a long history of lying … I would take with a significant grain of salt any Iranian assertion about actions they’ve taken.” Says the guy who’s country claimed Saddam had WMD.  Says the guy who was the Director of the CIA in 2017/18.  And probably authorised the recruitment of spies in Iran at the time.  According to Al Jazeera‘s Dorsa Jabbari, reporting from Tehran, said Iranian authorities also released a documentary which they said “shows to which extent these people went to try and exchange information with their CIA operatives outside the country”. Contains photos and documents according to American ABC News. What is more worrying for the CIA is that the Iranians appear to have visually identified a number of CIA case officers, whose job is to recruit and handle foreign assets. These are official-cover diplomatic personnel who are stationed in countries such as Austria, India, Turkey and Zimbabwe. But the Iranians claim that these diplomats are in fact official-cover CIA personnel and have now publicised their names and faces. At one point during Monday’s television program, a blonde Caucasian woman is seen advising an unidentified man about how to avoid surveillance by Iranian intelligence officers in the United Arab Emirates. She is heard speaking Farsi with an unmistakable American accent. If the Iranians are right, it means that the mysterious Farsi-speaking woman, along with several other individuals, will need to be recalled back to Washington as soon as possible. It also means that their overseas careers are now at an end, since foreign counter-intelligence services know that they are in fact not diplomats, but intelligence officers. One suggestion is that Iran might use the threat of a death sentence against these spies as a bargaining chip with the US But if they are all Iranian citizens, why would the US care?  This isn’t the first time in recent history that Iran has claimed to have arrested US spies.  In April, Iran said it uncovered 290 CIA spies both inside and outside the country over the past years. In June they hanged a former staff member of the Defense Ministry’s aerospace division, Seyyed Jamal Haji-Zavareh, on charges of spying for the CIA. He supposedly “explicitly confessed to spying” in return for money “documents and espionage devices were found at his house.” His wife was also sentenced to 15 years in prison for her

How do these shell companies get used? We provide some examples. We also talk about the fallout of the Panama Papers, Operation Car Wash, the murder of Maltese journalist Daphne Galizia, why Americans didn’t show up in the Panama Papers as much as we might have expected, and how some of the world’s largest banks used Mossack Fonseca to profit from “arms dealers, bag men for Third World dictators, traffickers in blood diamonds and other international outlaws”. Follow Cameron on Facebook | Instagram | Twitter Follow Ray on Facebook. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post Bullshit 5.3 – The Panama Papers (part 3) appeared first on The BS Filter.

After more than a year of analysis, the first news stories were published on April 3, 2016, by SZ and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). Some 4.8 million leaked files were emails, 3 million were database entries, 2.2 million PDFs, 1.2 million images, 320,000 text files, and 2242 files in other formats. Edward Snowden described the release in a Twitter message as the “biggest leak in the history of data journalism”. Some of the earliest stories reported on involved Siemens’ secret $500 million South American slush fund, and billions of dollars of transactions involving Sergei Roldugin, Russian virtuoso cellist… who happens to be the best friend of Vladimir Putin. Roldugin was also recently implicated in a massive money laundering scheme involving Troika Dialog, Russia’s largest investment bank. worth $9 billion US dollars, known as the “Troika Laundromat”. When the German journalists working for SZ started to dig into the leaks, they tried to contact Mozzfon for comment.  Instead they were contact by Burson-Marsteller, the PR / crisis control firm based in NY, now known as Burson Cohn & Wolfe. Another early SZ story was about a major German bank, Commerzbank, who was involved in laundering hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars out of Iran, Sudan and Myanmar, against US sanctions, via Mossfon shell companies. This episode is for Silver subscribers and above. A short clip from the show. Follow Cameron on Facebook | Instagram | Twitter Follow Ray on Facebook. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The post Bullshit 5.2 – The Panama Papers (part 2) appeared first on The BS Filter.

In 2015, journalist Bastian Obermayer from the Süddeutsche Zeitung , a Southern German Newspaper, was approached online by an anonymous source.  He or she provided him with a database from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. They are the Panama Papers. Named in the leak were 12 current or former world leaders, 128 other public officials and politicians, and hundreds of celebrities, businessmen and other wealthy individuals of over 200 countries. They made it clear how the world’s elite hides their wealth from the people, avoids paying taxes, and launders their money. Today we start a series about money laundering, offshore shell companies, and how they work. Full shownotes below. A short clip from the show. Follow Cameron on Facebook | Instagram | Twitter Follow Ray on Facebook. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. Setting up offshore companies isn’t itself illegal.  People set them up because they want to hide something – from the taxman, their ex-wife, their former business partner or the prying eyes of the public. But they are often used for illegal purposes.  Experience shows that it is usually individuals whose business depends on anonymity who favour the anonymity that shell companies provide. These include gunrunners, people traffickers, drug smugglers and other criminals, as well as investors who do not wish to reveal their true identities and their true intentions, senior politicians who’d like to spirit their wealth abroad (perhaps because they have accumulated it dishonestly) and companies looking to funnel bribes. The list could go on and on. The most obvious use of offshore financial centers is to avoid taxes. Oxfam blamed tax havens in its 2016 annual report on income inequality for much of the widening gap between rich and poor. “Tax havens are at the core of a global system that allows large corporations and wealthy individuals to avoid paying their fair share,” International Monetary Fund (IMF) researchers estimated in July 2015 that profit shifting by multinational companies costs developing countries around US$213 billion a year, almost two percent of their national income. This is usually how it works. Contact is made with a firm like Mossack Fonseca via an intermediary – for example a bank, a lawyer or an asset manager. These are Mossack Fonseca’s actual ‘clients’: they order the product, they handle communications and they pay the bills. The product is mainly an off-the-peg offshore company. Mossfon offered firms in some twenty jurisdictions, most frequently in the British Virgin Islands and Panama, but also in the Bahamas, Bermuda, Samoa, Uruguay, Hong Kong, the US tax havens of Nevada, Wyoming and Delaware and, more recently, Florida and the Netherlands. The newest name is that of the emirate of Ras Al-Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates. The companies are sold from nearly fifty offices worldwide or from Mossfon’s headquarters in the centre of Panama City. Mossack Fonseca isn’t the only provider of shell companies headquartered in Panama. Other major players are also based there, for instance the law firm Morgan y Morgan, probably Mossfon’s great competitor. It is no coincidence that offshore providers have clustered together in this small Latin American state of all places. Panama has always been an extremely dependent country. Having long been a poor province of Colombia, the country gained its independence in 1903 partly because American bankers and industrialists managed to persuade the then US president Theodore Roosevelt to support Panamanian separatists. US lobbies hoped to make money from the Panama Canal, which was under construction at the time. Roosevelt sent troops to occupy parts of the newly independent state and make it clear to Colombia that it could kiss goodbye to its former province. A nation was created by the grace of the United States and the US flag did indeed fly over the Panama Canal Zone, where big business was to be done. Thousands of American soldiers protected the sovereignty that the Panamanian government granted to the USA in 1903 and which was only returned to Panama in 1999. The lucrative business with shell companies is based on a law that came into force on 26 February 1927. This law – Law 32 – guarantees the secrecy of estates, money transfers and, most importantly, company owners, and offers so-called ‘sociedades anónimas’ exemption from taxation. This name sounds more mysterious than it actually is, because an ‘anonymous society’ is actually nothing more than a public limited company. The secrecy afforded by Law 32 has changed very little to this day, with the exception of the odd – largely cosmetic – reform driven by efforts to have Panama deleted from a number of black and grey li

Iran stands accused by the US of attacking two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman. But should we accept the US’s claims at face value? Or is there more to the story? Here’s a short clip from the show. Full shownotes below. Please Note: our weekly news shows are currently available to Silver subscribers and above.  Follow Cameron on Facebook | Instagram | Twitter Follow Ray on Facebook. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. On June 13, 2019, two oil tankers were attacked near the Strait of Hormuz while transiting the Gulf of Oman. The Strait of Hormuz is a tiny strip of water that lies between Iran to the north and the United Arab Emirates to the south.  It’s like a narrow S bend before you get from the Gulf of Oman into the Persian Gulf.  A third of the world’s liquefied natural gas and almost 20% of total global oil consumption passes through the strait. As of 2011, an average of 14 tankers per day passed out of the Persian Gulf through the Strait carrying 17 million barrels of crude oil. To traverse the Strait, ships pass through the territorial waters of Iran and Oman. They are allowed transit via the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea Alexander listeners will remember the Gulf of Oman as the place where Alexander marched his men through The Gedrosian Desert  The the Straits of Hormuz are where his admiral Nearchus nearly starved to death because there were no water or food drops while he was exploring the coastline while Alexander was making plans to invade Arabia It’s where Dubai is. The Japanese Kokuka Courageous and Norwegian Front Altair were attacked, allegedly with limpet mines or flying objects, causing fire damage to both ships. American and Iranian military personnel responded to the attacks and were involved in rescuing crew members from the ships. The attacks took place on the same day that Ayatollah Khamenei met with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe in Iran. Abe was acting as an intermediary between Donald Trump and Khamenei. Almost immediately, the US, Saudi and UK government blamed Iran.  The background is that on May 8, 2018, the United States withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran the US has been imposing increasingly restrictive sanctions on Iran for over a year now, and has managed to dramatically decrease Iranian oil exports and coerce unwilling nations to abide by these sanctions using the threat of secondary sanctions. This was a deal made back in 2015 between the UN Security Council, Germany, and the EU with Iran.  Iran agreed to eliminate its stockpile of medium-enriched uranium, cut its stockpile of low-enriched uranium by 98%, and reduce by about two-thirds the number of its gas centrifuges for 13 years. And not to build any new heavy-water facilities for the same period of time. They also agreed to let the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will have regular access to all Iranian nuclear facilities to monitor their progress.  In return, Iran would receive relief from U.S., European Union, and United Nations Security Council nuclear-related sanctions. In May 2019 the IAEA certified that Iran was abiding by the main terms of the deal, but that hasn’t stopped Trump and Bolton from treating Iran like the guy who just walked into the office with dog shit on his shoe.  Also in May 2019 there was the first Gulf of Oman incident Four ships were damaged in that incident, including two Saudi Arabian registered oil tankers, a Norwegian registered oil tanker, and an Emirati registered bunkering ship. The US blamed Iran for those attacks as well.  But an international investigation, led by the United Arab Emirates, didn’t find name any culprit.  They did suggest the damage was caused by limpet mines planted by divers using “fast boats”.  A limpet mine is a type of naval mine attached to a target by magnets. So named because of its superficial similarity to the limpet, a type of sea snail that clings tightly to rocks or other hard surfaces. That’s also my nickname for Ray.  He’s my little limpet.  clings tightly to my hard surfaces  Whenever tensions with the US have increased, Iranian officials have threatened to close the Straits of Hormuz.  in the logic of “If we can’t sell our oil, neither can the Gulf states!”. Can it legally do that?  Well yes and no.  The Iranian gov is a signatory to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. So it’s committed to avoid any action that would violate the convention. However, at the time that Iran signed the convention it announced that it would only recognize the “right of transit passage” for countries that had also joined the

Australian journalists are under attack for publishing stories on domestic spying and our military. What kind of protections should we have in place for whistleblowers and journalists in a democracy? That’s what today’s show is about. Full shownotes below. Please Note: our weekly news shows are currently available to Silver subscribers and above. But this week we’re making an exception. This show is free. Follow Cameron on Facebook | Instagram | Twitter Follow Ray on Facebook. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. The Australian Attacks On Journalism In Western democracies we’re seeing a pretty scary crackdown on journalism  Assange and Wikileaks are under attack by the USA And in Australia over the last week we’ve seen several raids by the Federal Police on journalists and publishers  These raids have been broadcast around the world and Australia’s government is under enormous criticism CNN’s chief media reporter Brian Stelter: “We almost never see this in a democratic country like Australia,” he said. “Something very troubling (is) happening on multiple fronts in Australia.” Reporters Without Borders said the images of AFP officers entering the ABC headquarters in Sydney on Wednesday was more like a scene from an authoritarian country, rather than a democracy. Here at home, Rebecca Ananian-Welsh, a Senior Lecturer, TC Beirne School of Law, The University of Queensland, called the raids “a clear threat to democracy” Even the right wing Institute of Public Affairs called the raids “Disgraceful” Even our own former Human Rights Commissioner has called Australia the most repressive of the Western democracies.  Of course, the government say it’s all above board The opposition party condemned the raids – even though they helped introduce the laws that make it possible.  Most of these police actions are related to whistleblowers and the publishing of state secrets Some people think it’s okay for police and governments to prosecute whistleblowers and people who publish state secrets Other people think those parties should be protected I want to dig into these and other stories and see if we can work out what’s going on and think about the ethics of the situation  Let’s talk about Australia  And let’s start with News Corp raid  On Tuesday 4 June, federal police raided the home of News Corp Australia journalist Annika Smethurst investigating the publication of a leaked plan to allow government spying on Australians. AFP officers raided her home as she was preparing to go to work, with a warrant to search her home, her phone and her computer. They spent 7 hours going through every drawer, including her underwear, every page of every book, inside DVD covers, under her bed – everything.  Now the first thing that’s surprising about this is that it’s News Corp  And the incumbent Australian government was pretty much put into power by News Corp  And was returned to power by them in our most recent election on Saturday 18 May 2019 two and half weeks before the raid on Smethurst’s house The cause of the raid was a story from April 2018 – over a year before the raid – where Smethurst reported that the heads of the defence and home affairs ministries had discussed new powers to allow the Australian Signals Directorate to spy on Australian citizens for the first time. Spies would be allowed to secretly access emails, bank accounts and text messages with approval from the defence and home affairs ministers. Who is ASD? The Australian government agency responsible for foreign signals intelligence, cyber warfare, and information security. What is signals intelligence? Signals intelligence (SIGINT) is intelligence-gathering by interception of signals, Includes communications between people (communications intelligence—abbreviated to COMINT) and electronic signals not directly used in communication (electronic intelligence—abbreviated to ELINT). ASD is part of the Australian Intelligence Community. And ASD’s role within UKUSA Agreement (Five Eyes) is to monitor SIGINT in South and East Asia. Australia joined the UKUSA Agreement in 1948, a multilateral agreement for cooperation in signals intelligence between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The alliance is also known as the Five Eyes. Other countries, known as “third parties”, such as West Germany, the Philippines, and several Nordic countries also joined the UKUSA community. As the Agreement was a secret treaty, its existence was not even disclosed to the Australian Prime Minister until 1973, when Gough Whitlam insisted on seeing it. The ex

Should we believe South Korean news reports about North Korean executions? Should we believe reports about marijuana-related illness and deaths? Should we believe American reports about Iran’s nuclear ambitions? Here’s a short clip from today’s episode. Full shownotes below. *Please Note: our weekly news shows are currently available to Silver subscribers and above.  Follow Cameron on Facebook | Instagram | Twitter Follow Ray on Facebook. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. North Korea executions & South Korean Scandals SMH 31 May: North Korea has executed its nuclear envoy to the United States as well as four Foreign Ministry officials who carried out negotiations for the Hanoi summit with US President Donald Trump in February, holding them responsible for its collapse, according to a South Korean newspaper, Chosun Ilbo.  Kim Hyok-chol was executed at Mirim Airport in Pyongyang, along with four Foreign Ministry executives, in March after they were all charged with spying for the United States, the Chosun Ilbo reported, citing an unidentified North Korean source. “He was accused of spying for the United States for poorly reporting on the negotiations without properly grasping US intentions,” the source was quoted as saying. The Chosun Ilbo also reported that Kim Yong Chol, a top North Korean nuclear negotiator, had been sentenced to hard labor and ideological reeducation. Kim Yong Chol had been one of the most visible members of the North Korean negotiating team, even meeting with Trump at the White House. The newspaper cited a single unnamed source “who knows about North Korea.” However, a few days later, Kim Yong-chol was photographed accompanying Kim Jong-un to a Sunday art performance. maybe the photograph was photoshopped?  maybe he was pulled out of the labour camp for a photo op? but why?  or maybe the source is full of shit or maybe the newspaper made it up to make Kim look crazy And then…. yesterday  The North Korean diplomat who South Korea’s largest newspaper said had been executed by firing squad is alive and in state custody, according to several sources familiar with the situation. Not the first time this has happened.  According to WaPo: In 2013, South Korea’s intelligence service was the first to report the execution of Kim Jong Un’s uncle, Jang Song Thaek, who had been purged from the leadership ranks. Subsequent media reports — now believed to be false — said that he was killed by being fed to pack of wild dogs. The Chosun Ilbo newspaper — which also had Friday’s purported scoop — reported in 2013 that Hyon Song Wol, a North Korean artist it described as Kim Jong Un’s “ex-girlfriend,” had been executed in public over accusations that she and other performers had sold pornographic videos. At least part of that story later proved to be demonstratively untrue: Hyon made a two-day visit to Seoul in January 2018, very much alive. Chosun Ilbo has been arounds since 1920.  Originally set up to fight against Japanese occupation of Korea  CEO is Mr Bang Sang-hoon His son was until recently CEO of Chosun TV.  until his 10 year old daughter told her chauffeur she wanted to get him fired and wished he would die because he asked her to sit down in the car.  And he WAS fired.  But a recording of her abusing him was leaked and the son resigned from the TV station.  The Korea Herald published the recording.  Bang Sang-Hoon has also been named in the death of SoutH Korean actress Jang Ja-yeon She was a big TV star who committed suicide in 2009.  The investigation into her death was corrupt and a new investigation was opened in 2019 An alleged suicide note left by Jang describes how she was beaten by her agent, and forced to entertain and have sex with a string of VIPs, including directors, media executives and CEOs Including Mr Bang Sang-hoon Former police chief said the paper put huge pressure on him not to investigate Part of the Burning Sun scandal Broke this year  Burning Sun is a nightclub in Gangam Sex scandal involved several celebrities, including Korean idols in popular K-pop groups, and police officials The allegations of sex crimes involved added to the country’s “epidemic” of what is called molka, a Korean word for the online distribution of unconsented sex videos taken of women club’s alleged involvement in prostitution, drug trafficking and police corruption Seungri of the band Big Bang, “Kings of K-pop”, one of the club’s executive directors, subsequently resigned from the entertainment industry, after being charged with sex bribery. The scandal quickly encompassed allegations of rape and spy

Is the United States waging a war on journalism? Can we trust the OPCW reports on Syria’s chemical war attacks?Does the Pentagon produce fake terrorist propaganda films? Here’s a short clip from today’s show. Full shownotes below. *Please Note: our weekly news shows are currently available to Silver subscribers and above. Follow Cameron on Facebook | Instagram | Twitter Follow Ray on Facebook. HOW TO LISTENIf you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. U.S. charges WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with espionage The Trump administration has now announced 17 charges against Assange under the Espionage Act of 1917, threatening him with 170 years in prison. The indictment paves the way for criminalizing opposition to war. According to Tor Ekeland, a Brooklyn lawyer, who represents people accused of computer crimes in federal and state courts nationally, writing in Wired: The Espionage Act has a long history of being used to silence political dissent. We saw that recently on the Cold War show, when FDR’s administration tried to use it against Harry Bridges. in 1942, in the middle of World War II, after the Chicago Tribune published a front-page story titled “Navy Had Word of Jap Plan to Strike at Sea.” which implied that the U.S. military had cracked Japan’s secret naval code – which in fact it had. FDR demanded that Espionage Act charges be brought against the reporter, the managing editor and the Tribune itself. But a grand jury refused to issue indictments. In 1972 the U.S. government tried to stop The New York Times and The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Department of Defense study on the Vietnam War. In its well-known decision, the Supreme Court held that preventing the publication violated the First Amendment. Less known is the fact that a majority of the justices also thought that the newspapers could be prosecuted and possibly punished for the publication, even if stopping the publication was unconstitutional. The Freedom of the Press Association has called the charges against Assange “a fundamental threat to press freedom in the 21st century” Freedom of the Press Foundation Executive Director Trevor Timm issued the following statement: Put simply, these unprecedented charges against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are the most significant and terrifying threat to the First Amendment in the 21st century. The Trump administration is moving to explicitly criminalize national security journalism, and if this prosecution proceeds, dozens of reporters at the New York Times, Washington Post and elsewhere would also be in danger. The ability of the press to publish facts the government would prefer remain secret is both critical to an informed public and a fundamental right. This decision by the Justice Department is a massive and unprecedented escalation in Trump’s war on journalism, and it’s no exaggeration to say the First Amendment itself is at risk. Anyone who cares about press freedom should immediately and wholeheartedly condemn these charges. During the Obama administration, the Department of Justice brought charges against eight people accused of leaking to the media — Thomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz, Stephen Kim, Chelsea Manning, Donald Sachtleben, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou and Edward Snowden. And it’s not just Assange. A couple of weeks ago, cops in San Francisco raided the home of Bryan Carmody, a freelance journalist. With their guns out, they put Carmody in cuffs and confiscated thousands of dollars of computer and recording equipment. He stayed in handcuffs for six hours before being released, as authorities searched his house and attempted to interrogate him under the guise of a leak investigation. Weeks earlier, Carmody had sold a story — based on a leaked police report, video footage, and a few interviews — about the death of a local public defender to TV stations. Back to Assange. The crazy thing about this the reach of the United States. The UK is co-operating. As is Ecuador. And Sweden. Not to mention the Australian government, which has done zero to protect its citizen, a publisher. How is the United States able to organise an AUSTRALIAN publisher and journalist to be evicted from his asylum in an Ecuadorian embassy, and who is now currently in a British prison, based on Espionage charges? Of course, these charges may violate the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits the government from “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” But does the US constitution protect an Australian citizen? Does the US Espionage Act apply to foreigners? Nothing in Assange’s indictment turns on any distinction between WikiLeaks and the mainstream press. The current charge would be equally applicable to “real” journali

We wrap up our antivax mini-series by looking at another antivax claim: “All vaccines contain a number of toxic poisons and chemicals that are linked to serious neurological damage”. We talk about Robert Kennedy Jr, thimerosal, and the difference between methyl vs ethyl mercury. Full shownotes below. *Please Note: our weekly news shows are currently available to Silver subscribers and above. Follow Cameron on Facebook | Instagram | Twitter Follow Ray on Facebook. HOW TO LISTENIf you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and REGISTER NOW for one of our premium accounts. Antivax Claim #5: All vaccines contain a number of toxic poisons and chemicals that are linked to serious neurological damage including aluminum, thimerosal (methyl mercury), antibiotics, monosodium glutamate (MSG) and formaldehyde. Other dangerous substances found in vaccines include antifreeze, lead, cadmium, glycerine, acetone, and yeast proteins. Let’s start this one by going back to something I said in the previous point. Governments want people to be healthy, working, earning money, driving the economy. Does it therefore make sense for them to knowingly allow vaccines to make people sick? Where is the upside in that? Thimerosal is a big one that I’ve read in a lot of antivax literature. Robert Kennedy Jr is an advocate against it. Son of Bobby Kennedy. Lawyer. Activist. Doesn’t believe Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone shooter. Says his father was “fairly convinced” that others besides Oswald were involved in his brother’s assassination and privately believed the Warren Commission report was a “shoddy piece of craftsmanship.” Critical of U.S. foreign policy Sounds like a decent human being. Also a licensed master falconer Currently married to actress Cheryl Hines, who played Larry David’s wife on Curb Your Enthusiasm. His second wife hung herself after their divorce in 2010. In 2005 he wrote an article about thimerosal which was published in Rolling Stone and Salon. It claimed that thimerosal-containing vaccines caused autism, as well as that government health agencies have “colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks of thimerosal from the public. It copped a lot of criticism from the scientific community and both Rolling Stone and Salon eventually amended the story with corrections. Salon ended up taking the article down in 2011. He’s also written a book about it. Thimerosal is a preservative that was removed from vaccines beginning in 1999. Preservatives prevent microbial growth. A preservative is required in multi-dose vials of vaccines. Thimerosal was developed as an anti-microbial agent shortly after World War I. It was soon discovered that it has great anti-microbial properties and was well tolerated when injected into rabbits or rats even at high doses. This made it superior to anything else available at the time. Bacterial contamination was a serious problem for vaccines in the first half of the 20th century. Thimerosal in tiny doses, well below safety limits, proved to be an effective agent for preventing contamination. It contains mercury. And mercury is very bad for you. But mercury isn’t mercury. methyl mercury is the one that’s bad for you. Thimerosal is ethyl mercury. Different form. according to studies done in the UK, referenced by the WHO, the pharmacokinetics – that is, the way drugs move around the body – of ethyl and methyl mercury are quite different. In particular, the half-life of ethyl mercury is short (less than 1 week) compared with that of methyl mercury (1.5 months). so exposure to ethyl mercury in blood is relatively brief. Ethyl mercury is actively excreted via the gut, whereas methyl mercury accumulates in the body. “A robust body of peer-reviewed scientific studies conducted in the U.S. and other countries support the safety of thimerosal-containing vaccines.” Now the FDA also told us that fat was bad for us and sugar was good for us. I did read a study that said thimerosal was injected into mice and they showed signs of depression. Just didn’t want to get out of bed, watched reality TV, listened to Radiohead, voted for Trump. But these mice were getting 20 TIMES the amount recommended for humans: Our results indicate that higher dose of neonatal thimerosal-mercury (20× higher than that used in human) is capable of inducing long-lasting substantial dysregulation of neurodevelopment, synaptic function, and endocrine system, which could be the causal involvements of autistic-like behavior in mice. Another study concluded: Considered together the present results do not indicate pervasive developmental neurotoxicity following vaccine-level thimerosal injections in mice, and provide little if any support for the hypothesis that thimerosal exposure contributes to the etiology of neurodevelopme