Fake News Fake Out

Fake News Fake Out

And the Ohio State (not) shooter

Conspiracy Theorist

By Mark Luedtke

Publication date: 121316

An attacker at Ohio State recently hospitalized eleven people. I wish the victims well. None have died, thank goodness. I’m sure you read the story, but it’s informative to recall every mainstream media outlet reported the term active shooter in its headline. The only problem was the attacker didn’t use a gun. He used a car and knife.

Media apologists will note Ohio State used the term active shooter in its warning, but that misses the point. The tail doesn’t wag the dog. Ohio State used the wrong term because the media has been banging the drums for gun control for decades. The only bad people on campus the media wants us to know about are attackers who use guns. We have no term that includes attackers who don’t use guns. The media doesn’t want us to know they exist because it undermines their push for gun control. If Ohio State had reported an active knifer on campus, the media would have buried the story. As it was, the mis-reporting sparked the usual irresponsible calls for gun control from the usual irresponsible leftists.

Politicization of the media permeates every story. If an attack story can be twisted to promote gun control, run it. If not, bury it. The same is true for every story. Global warming is an obvious example. The avalanche of fake polar bear stories comes to mind.

We saw it all during the election. When Hillary Clinton was exposed for selling government favors in return for contributions to her Clinton Foundation personal slush fund including from foreign governments, the media cared nothing for conflicts of interest. After Trump won, his supposed business conflicts became the biggest story of the post-election. When Clinton was busted for mishandling state secrets to the point of allowing foreign governments access to them, mishandling state secrets was not a problem. Now that Trump is considering appointing Gen. David Petraeus to a cabinet position and he once mishandled state secrets, it’s high treason.

The mis-reporting of news in order to advance a political agenda is done three ways. Sometimes the news is fake, such as stories about Saddam Hussein’s stockpiles of chemical weapons and his mobile chemical weapons factories. Sometimes only parts of a story are reported, often exaggerated. Stories about the war in Syria never mention the US is really fighting Syrian forces while aiding and abetting ISIS. Finally, many stories are ignored completely. For example, bureaucrats just enacted a new rule allowing any judge to sign a warrant to spy on any person in the US. Jurisdiction will no longer matter. This will legalize all FBI spying since there’s always a judge somewhere who will sign a warrant. Try finding that story in the news. Mis-reporting is so rampant that cases are easy to miss.

But the American people are waking up. Trust in media recently hit an all time low with only 32 percent of Americans trusting it. Having lost the election, establishment rulers and cronies hang on by their fingernails, and they’re scared. Panicking, they’ve called for help from the big guns to move the spotlight from the fake news they report to censorship of news they don’t like which others report. The New York Times leads the charge.

“Over the last week, two of the world’s biggest internet companies have faced mounting criticism over how fake news on their sites may have influenced the presidential election’s outcome. On Monday, those companies responded by making it clear that they would not tolerate such misinformation by taking pointed aim at fake news sites’ revenue sources,” it reported. “Google kicked off the action on Monday afternoon when the Silicon Valley search giant said it would ban websites that peddle fake news from using its online advertising service. Hours later, Facebook, the social network, updated the language in its Facebook Audience Network policy, which already says it will not display ads in sites that show misleading or illegal content, to include fake news sites.”

This is a good reminder giant corporations, while nominally owned, are ultimately owned by the government. Profits stay private, but government controls them. Rulers ordered Google and Facebook to censor information on their behalf, and in order to keep their government-protected profits, their nominal owners agreed.

In a similar vein, The Washington Post posted a McCarthyite blacklist of websites including the Drudge Report and LewRockwell.com.

The establishment’s censorship effort will backfire, and it will be fun to watch.

Originally published in the Dayton City Paper.

Match Made in Heaven

Match Made in Heaven

Catholic Priests to preach global warming gospel

Conspiracy Theorist

By Mark Luedtke

Publication date: 122016

The great global warming fraud has always been a religion. Nobody disputes that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that, in a simplistic model, adding CO2 causes Earth’s atmosphere to hold slightly more heat and therefore slightly warm up. But Earth’s climate is not simplistic.

The bone of contention between honest global warming alarmists and skeptics is what impact climate feedbacks have. Alarmists claim positive feedbacks magnify the greenhouse effect by three times, but there is no evidence to support this claim. On the other hand, there’s overwhelming evidence of negative feedbacks. Many have been discovered, but more importantly, Earth’s past climate history proves the feedbacks are negative. If they weren’t the planet would have experienced runaway heating long ago during periods of high atmospheric CO2, and we wouldn’t exist.

Yet alarmists take the 3x multiplier as a matter of faith, religiously.

Now the Catholic Church is joining in. Marshall Connolly writes at Catholic Online, “The [Church’s] new guidelines suggest that in the future, priests will also have a good grasp of the global climate change problem and will share this with their congregation.”

This article is full of the standard lies promoted by global warming frauds. It claims the fossil fuel industry funds nearly all skeptics. I wish that was true. I’d love to be funded by Big Oil, but I’m not. Neither are the most prominent skeptics including Anthony Watts who hosts the most popular skeptic website, wattsupwiththat.com. Note to Big Oil: please send me a check.

It also claims “The Earth's temperatures are spiking faster that at any time in history.” Ridiculous. There are times in Earth’s past when temperatures were much higher than today, even within man’s very short history.

The article also claims the Church’s preaching about global warming isn’t political, but it can’t be anything but political because we’re told the solution to global warming is draconian theft and oppression by government coercion. That’s why the global warming religion has attracted so many frauds. This article could easily have been written by the high priest of the great global warming fraud himself, Al Gore.

Few in the US care about global warming. The lack of interest drives the frauds nuts, but we should care because if the frauds get their way, they’ll destroy our economy. They’re already doing so in Europe. Watts exposes, “‘Britain has been gulled by false assurances that decarbonising our economy would be costless into signing up to a stupendous bill of over £300 billion up to 2030,’ said Peter Lilley MP, the study’s author and one of the few Members of Parliament who voted against the Act back in 2008.”

Watts continues, “The report, which is based entirely on official figures, exposes the mischievous attempts by ministers to try and disguise the true cost to households.”

The report notes “Rising costs [will be] borne disproportionately by the less well off, the elderly and the vulnerable.”

In the US a cadre of leftist state Attorneys General conspired to sue Exxon by claiming it buried research proving global warming. That conspiracy backfired on them when a Federal judge in Texas ordered them to be deposed.

Economist and historian Thomas DiLorenzo explains why the global warming frauds are so dangerous.

“The way to resurrect ‘the honorable title of socialism’ after the worldwide collapse of socialism in the late 1980s, wrote prominent socialist economist Robert Heilbroner in the Sept. 10, 1990 New Yorker, is to generate public hysteria about what Heilbroner called ‘the ecological burden that economic growth is placing on the environment,’” DiLorenzo explained. “He provided a recipe for the destruction of capitalism and the resurrection of socialist central planning: ‘Capitalism must be monitored, regulated, and contained to such a degree that it would be difficult to call the final order capitalism.’ All under the guise of ‘easing the ecological burden,’ wink, wink.”

The frauds have largely achieved that goal. The Church has aligned itself with evil people promoting an evil agenda.

Fortunately, the election of Donald Trump put the brakes on the movement. The EPA has already reversed its decision to effectively ban coal. Trump claims he will cut NASA’s global warming bureaucracy. Frauds fear he may undo the corruption they’ve done to temperature record data to make it appear warmer today compared to the past than it really is. They’re apoplectic over his choice of skeptics to head his EPA transition team and to head the EPA itself.

Global warming frauds are feeling the chill.

Originally published in the Dayton City Paper.

Breaking the Internet

Breaking the Internet

Blame NSA’s Internet of Things

Conspiracy Theorist

By Mark Luedtke

Publication date: 121316

In the year or two leading up to 9/11, anybody who paid attention realized America would soon suffer a devastating terrorist attack. Expert after expert warned us it would happen. Books were written about it. Tom Clancy’s “Debt of Honor”, which featured an airliner flown into the Capitol, came out in 1994. The chatter, so to speak, was off the charts. Yet the rulers who claim to protect us did nothing, then, after the attacks, they claimed ignorance. They told us nobody could have predicted 9/11 although pretty much every expert had.

Fast forward to today. “Someone is learning how to take down the Internet,” recently wrote internet security guru Bruce Schneier. “Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet. These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down.”

The attacks being used are called distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS). This means numerous computers are employed at the same time to access an internet server. The server is overwhelmed by the access requests, effectively cutting it off from the internet.

In the old days, a hacker team had to hack thousands of computers to mount an effective DDoS. It was hard and dangerous, so the attacks were rare. But that was before the Internet of Things (IoT).

You’ve probably heard of the IoT. It’s the idiotic concept that every device in your home should be connected to the internet. Your car, refrigerator, microwave, door locks, camera, thermostat, and even light bulbs and tea kettles should all include computers with internet access. This idea has been sold to the unwitting public as good for saving energy and giving consumers remote control over their houses.

That’s not what the IoT is about. It wasn’t dreamed up by a business to make money because turning your car and house over to hackers is a stupid idea. The IoT was dreamed up by the NSA to allow it to spy on every aspect of your life. NSA wants your car connected to the internet so it can not only track you, but it can take control of your car whenever it wants. NSA wants your door locks to be controlled by the internet so it can unlock your doors when it wants. If you’re critical of the government, NSA agents can take control of every aspect of your life. They’ll get away with it by claiming they’re fighting terrorism.

So far the public hasn’t caught on because they like seeing Kristen Bell talk about her refrigerator that has cameras inside.

There is no security on IoT devices by design. Slashdot explains, “The state of security around IoT, the chip or sensor-equipped devices connected to each other over the Internet, is deeply concerning. Just in the past few months, we have seen several instances of these devices getting hacked. We have also seen things such as Shodan, a search engine for the Internet of Things that can allow someone to browse vulnerable webcams. Many people continue to overlook the significance and potential consequences of their ‘smart’ devices getting compromised. Someone recently asked, ‘So what if my coffee maker gets hacked? What are criminals going to do? Burn my coffee?’ They can do a lot more than burn your coffee. You see these devices are connected to your Wi-Fi network, which gives them the ability to interact with other gadgets connected to the same network. When attackers manage to access one of these devices, it's only a matter of time before they own your entire network.”

The NSA made it simple for hackers to take control of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of IoT computers, and that code was recently leaked to the public. The result has been a series of bigger and nastier DDoS attacks.

Some might wonder why the government doesn’t do something to stop this. For the same reason it didn’t do anything to stop 9/11. Our rulers benefit from terrorist attacks. Bureaucrats get bigger budgets. The military-industrial complex gets perpetual war. Rulers and their cronies get richer.

After the coming devastating DDoS attack, the governments will take over the national internets, NSA will gain more power and money, and our rulers and their cronies will get even richer again.

Originally published in the Dayton City Paper.