MB Civic

Lambert at Naked Capitalism (scroll down) ..

So, about that official narrative and whether you should trust it. In a word, no. Especially you should not trust it when the nice folks from our organs of state security are involved, for the good and sufficient reason that they have a track record of manufacturing the raw materials of narrative — we might call these “events” — to suit their purposes … [quoting Mother Jones study: FBI terrorist] “Sting operations resulted in prosecutions against 158 defendants. Of that total, 49 defendants participated in plots led by an agent provocateur—an FBI operative instigating terrorist action” … I retain, perhaps naively, the idea that truth is important[]. We are enmeshed in a fabulously complex system of bullshit and lies, and it’s not possible to combat that system with lies of our own, or bullshit, no matter how good we may be at it; we simply don’t have the budget, or the institutions .. But the truth, at least for “the news,” seems quite difficult to discern. Events are manufactured by state or corporate actors; our famously free press promotes narratives that have at best a discounted relation with reality []. We ourselves, digerati, crowd-source ourselves into witch hunts or go down the Conspiracy Theory rabbit hole .. Leaving aside the human tragedy, in historic terms, the Boston Marathon bombing was not the Battle of the Somme, the Blitz, or the IRA bombings in London. Somewhere in their withered, austere souls, the powers that be must know this, and sense the shoddiness of their performance

.. read more