There’s another good question to ask corresponding to the one in my blog post title: how many times does a pattern have to be repeated before it stops looking like just a coincidence and instead looks like something resulting from a prepackaged set of talking points assembled as part of a larger coordinated propaganda effort? Continue reading
Author Archives: Russell Cook
City and County of Honolulu v. Sunoco LP et al.
Politicians in Hawaii were threatening to sue Big Energy companies last November for damages from the effects of man-caused global warming. As seen in their press release last week, March 9th, they finally delivered on it. Poor timing for those City/County officials, since the Coronavirus news is overrunning all other news now, but far more important is their poor judgement and lack of due diligence regarding their politically suicidal decision to jump on the bandwagon of the nine other boilerplate global warming lawsuits, which are being handled by the Sher Edling law firm. Continue reading
The Interchangeable Hood Ornaments of the leaked “Victory will be achieved …” / “Reposition global warming” Memos
It’s a propagandist’s dream to see reporters repeat blatantly false stories about supposedly devastating leaked industry documents revealing hidden corruption, even when the reporters get basic details of the docs wrong — so long as neither the reporters nor anybody else questions those basic details. It’s a propagandist’s nightmare when too many storytellers describing the revelations can’t keep the overall story straight, whereupon the revelations cease to resemble a bombshell story and instead increasingly look like an orchestrated propaganda disinformation effort. Continue reading
Pt 4: Greenpeace People, for their API Memos Scans before they were Against Them
A major indicator that authoritative narratives are in need of tough, objective scrutiny is when important details within the narratives start disappearing. Evert Wesker – to borrow a line made famous by U.S. Senator John Kerry – was ‘for Shell before he was against Shell,’ similar to the way Greenpeace people favored their links to their own scan copies of the notorious American Petroleum Institute’s (API’s) “Victory Will Be Achieved …” memos before they seemingly turned against them. Since my Part 3 in this series concerned Wesker’s role in linking to the API memos, let’s start with another problem I spotted with his specific narrative. Continue reading
Pt. 3: Victory Will Be Achieved when …
… narratives about ‘Big Coal & Oil paying skeptic climate scientist shills to spread disinformation‘ are purged of all distracting details which prompts the public to take their eyes off the basic thrust of the accusation. If enviro-activists want to convince everyone that skeptic scientist villains have zero credibility after being caught working within ‘fossil fuel industry disinformation campaigns,’ that’s the ultimate victory they must achieve, because they begin to look like sinister villains themselves if cancerous credibility holes are found in various parts of the accusation. Continue reading
Joke: “Why did the Greenpeace USA Executive Director cross the Road?”
To get more cash for his agenda. No joke, actually. Continue reading
The Late Jim Lehrer, and the Lost Opportunity … or not just yet.
Long-time PBS NewsHour anchor Jim Lehrer died this past Thursday, lauded far and wide as substantive reporter who always had ‘a sober approach to the news.’ Many repeated parts of his famous nine tenets of old-school journalism. Fox News stated his 9th one, “I am not in the entertainment business” and NBC News led with Lehrer’s adage about the perils of news reporters committing the sin of believing in their own superficial publicity: “it’s not about us.” As a long-time viewer of the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour from some time in the late 1970s all the way up to Jim Lehrer’s retirement as its anchor, I get the impression he was very sincere about that last advice to his colleagues. While he’d humbly appreciate the many kind words about him now, he’d quite likely also suggest that an old-school tough reporter-style examination of his career wouldn’t be out of order, either. I wish an objective reporter could have approached him directly regarding my own personal brief interaction with him years ago, but that’s a lost opportunity now. It isn’t lost overall yet, however, when it comes to news reporting by others about the collective global warming story.
Back in 2011, I sent an 1100-word snail mail (full text here) directly to Jim Lehrer, first praising him for his advocacy of fair and balanced reporting over his long career, and then inquiring about the NewsHour’s appearance of egregiously biased reporting of the global warming issue. I received a two sentence reply, a cherished letter which also contains something that prompts a perplexing question:
Reposition Graduate Degrees as Theory rather than Fact
Want to see something troubling? In today’s post I offer a pile of screencaptures which collectively prompt two basic questions: How many masters and doctorate degrees should be revoked out there because the degree recipients presented faulty, unsupported evidence for the idea that the fossil fuel industry orchestrated sinister disinformation campaigns to undercut the certainty of man-caused global warming in collusion with skeptic climate scientists? How much wider is this overall problem within the university system, where thesis writers and thesis evaluators fail to do elemental due diligence on authoritative assertions and accusations within those papers? Continue reading
Making Climate Denialism Illegal
Similar to the suggestion at the end of my prior blog post on Psychological Projection, the title of this post is another Texas-sized arrow pointing out where a form of criminal speech may actually be found — but there’s a bit of an ironic twist to this. First, however, let’s see where the wild suggestion to criminalize ‘climate denial’ comes from, and what justification the person has for proposing that. Continue reading
Psychological Projection
For those of you living in Rio Linda, or Port St Lucie, or you are part of the mainstream media, this means accusing someone of doing exactly what you are doing. I’m certainly not the only person using those words lately to to describe an increasingly troublesome problem with the far-left. They’re being widely used in political analysis, as more of the general public discovers the way people in the far-left political spectrum hurl dubious accusations concerning a variety of controversial social issues. FNC’s Tucker Carlson frequently speaks of it (here, here, etc); a very recent Washington Post headline embodied the ongoing post-2016 election sentiment to comical proportions; a news outlet president essentially states what his own channel does, according to an insider whistle blower; a prominent news anchor essentially telegraphed what his own news program reports as gospel truth. Who is routinely caught uttering apparently coordinated talking points, though?? Oops. Twice. Three times. …. this could go on for hours regarding controversial social issues.
Then there’s the specific global warming issue, where I can add a bit more setup before hammering my point home …. Continue reading