NYT headline 2023-03-07: "Intelligence Suggests Pro-Ukrainian Group Sabotaged Pipelines, U.S. Officials Say"
"New intelligence reporting amounts to the first significant known lead about who was responsible for the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines that carried natural gas from Russia to Europe."
Full disclosure: I don't subscribe to the NYT, but they got my address and keep stuffing my inbox with teasers. Like the above. Most go to the junk folder by reflex. But this one seems to concern a story Sy Hersh kind of blew wide open just the other day.
I failed to click on the clickbait to "learn more" about the pro-Ukrainian group that should now be making the rounds for doing what Washington wanted so badly done. I mean, wanted done so badly. So badly wanted. Hard to tell which, come to that. Not that it matters.
Let's suppose for a minute that it's all true. They have the pro-Ukrainians, they have DNA on the pipe fragments, an operation that according to Sy Hersh required the cooperation of at least two navies was actually pulled off by a Ukranian Rambo. All unbeknownst, mind you, to "intelligence," until now.
So what? Information doen't work that way anymore, it's not what generates the big bucks. It no longer has to be true, or even plausible, as long as it does what will make the nut. And that's merely to attract attention, because it's all for sale, including the attention itself.
It's sort of gratifying that they still consider Hersh that much of a threat to their narrative. It's right about the time you might expect the Paper of Record to come out with a line like this, about ten minutes after his story, on media life-support (i.e., left on the fire-stairs without so much as a blanket), flatlined. After dismissing Hersh dismissively and disdaining him disdainfully for reporting the obvious in such detail as to make it undeniable, sources be damned, this latest denial sure is plausible.
Maybe plausible deniability seemed a little more urgent after Taibbi and Kirn got to talking the other night in a kind of private conversation with millions of listeners, probably including not just the NYT but the rest of the morass of acronymic agencies we never heard of. Walter Kirn made a brilliant offhand comment about how the media function just like the fed.
Operating like the Fed means, certain institutions are first in line for handouts, much like Wells Fargo. Wait-what, weren't they caught red-handed robbing their own customers, more than once? But let lying dogs sleep.
These privileged institutions get regular injections from the Fed so they can loan our money back to us. Something like that; it's blindingly obtuse. Now read "Fed" as "GEC" (Global Engagement Center, still federal) and it all makes sense.
These few media distributors, just like Wells Fargo in the money business, can do whatever they like with the stuff Washington passes to them. Or, they might want (and conflicted political interests might want them) to sit on a story, and as we know after reading Jeff Gerth's Columbia Review of Journalism piece last week, that certainly happened.
By the way, for some extra entertainment, read Mother Jones' attempted rebuttal. The nag popup says "Don't let an algorithm decide what news you see." Which seems to be exactly what that august magazine was revealed to have been doing.
In the light of the weird machinations of the Alliance for Securing Democracy's "Hamilton 68" project to become the sole "source" for the media "Russiagate" frenzy, we can see how the old liberal/conservative, left/right, dem/GOP lines have all been Gerrymandered into chaos by now. For example, have a peek at the Federalist, of all things, for a good synopsis of the Twitter Files revelations.
American poltics is nothing but a barroom brawl. And we needed to pay attention to what was going on over by the till, in the confusion. Too late now. It won't stop. They never take their eyes off the till. They play the percentages (media, Washington, take your pick). The percentage of people who understand that the media are in the business of lying to get attention (measured, in Fox Snooze's case in ratings, as Rupert Murdoch just explained, and for the NYT in online subscriptions). Murdoch understands that and said so ("...it's green") rigiht out in front of, um. Right, the press. Oh, well, nevermind.
That percentage of astute readers and viewers is probably substantial. But of those, the percentage who will respond to these calculated outrages with indignation, the percentage is infinitesimal. It does not matter anymore what they print. Just like fiat currency. As Kirn said, it's "fiat information."
I'm guessing, as evidenced by the clickbait they now send me more than once every single day, that the NYT is shrinking. And still guessing, I'd guess fiat information doesn't actually work exactly like fiat currency. A dollar is still currency, but what passes for information now is in hyperinflation. It's like white refined sugar to the brain, devoid of and displacing vital nutrients. Then there is the problem of addiction with refined sugar, and perhaps this metaphor is not overstretched in that aspect as well.
It might be interesting to see where this airware floats to, in the network of outlets that feed off the feed from the gatekeepers. But it won't matter to the world, or the war, or anything else. Pipeline gone, plausible deniability, next? That didn't work when Hersh exposed the My Lai Massacre. But it works now.
Whatever changed, it wasn't truth. I figure it was our relationship to truth. What makes a story a story nowadays isn't the information in it. What puts legs under it is the size of the instant virtualized audience it picks up as it ripples out across the network frog-pond from the big lilypad. Ribbit. Ribbit. Ka-ching! The sound of your now-virtualized eyeballs changing hands. But nobody cares what you were looking at, much less what you saw. They've already been to the bank.
We might be mildly curious who floated this latest "sabotage" dirigible. They probably needn't have bothered, judging from the overwhelming media non-response to Sy Hersh's clear case for Washington's hand on the plunger. Taibbi and Kirn are a little more difficult to handle given the massive trove of source material, but as long as the brawl can be sustained, nothing will come of it. Julian Assange is still buried in a miserable hole, on what amounts to a misdemeanor charge, potentially carrying a couple of life sentences in the US. What does the NYT care? They've already been given that story, too. Julian's fate is a market commodity, to be traded by some formula of gain and loss. Our loss, and Julian's.
At the moment, this peculiar historical moment, any story, with any amount of solid evidence, and any number of echoes from the highest rooftops, is managed the same way: by dumping the signal into the noise. This is not a clever strategy by perfidious shadow-government operators, Russion trolls, or lizards from outer space. It is structural. It's built-in.
The transformation of communication systems into giant networks that run on the refined white sugar of screen-attention has changed the balance of human relationships. It comes down to corporate "shareholder value." In this context, content has no value unless lots of people respond, not by thoughtful and considered action, but solely by clicking on it. Because that's what moves the money. There are still relevant and robust forms of authentic communication, but they are crowded out of the public discourse, their political and social effectiveness capped.
The all-consuming juggernaut rolls on. Nuclear war will start when it becomes the hottest commodity in this strange new economy. Nobody wants that, but nobody is in charge now. This giant cash cow is driving. Answering with its chat-bot the eternal question of whether a dog has the Buddha Nature.
