In the News Media There Are Grownups Collecting Paychecks For Pretending To Be Stupid

     What do I think about chemical weapons allegedly used by Assad's forces against innocent children?  It sounds like Assad must be an idiot; it sounds like Secretary of Defense Mattis must've been lying last February when he admitted there was no evidence that Assad, in April 2017, used Sarin on Syrian civilians.  The result of that chemical weapons use a year ago caused Donald Trump to fire fifty-nine Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian airbase, enriching himself in the process since he owns Raytheon stock, Raytheon being the manufacturer of Tomahawks.  Capitalism, deception, and murder combined.
     Trump also received a boost in his popularity rating and mainstream news media people praised his missile strike.  Fareed Zakaria, a supposedly even-handed and sober voice on geopolitical matters, called Trump "presidential."  In this century that started with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney running America like a business concerned mostly with committing acts of profitable mayhem, being "presidential" means launching a missile strike for dubious reasons against a government that didn't do the thing it's accused of doing.
     This should be familiar to anyone old enough to remember the run-up to the Iraq War.  Saddam Hussein supposedly had weapons of mass destruction, except that he didn't.  Prisoners were tortured to supply false information then presented to the United Nations by the lying Secretary of State Colin Powell.  The Bush Administration made up the story and then moved backwards to make plausible-seeming facts fit, as MI-6, the British spy agency, discovered but didn't report to the world at the time, thank you very much you fucking English assholes.
     Theresa May, Britain's current Prime Minister, is convinced, with no evidence, that a Russian national and his daughter, poisoned in Salisbury, England, with some kind of nerve agent, are the victims of Vladimir Putin.  The alleged nerve agent, Novichok, is of Russian make, supposed to be ten times more lethal than VX, yet whoever tried to kill the Russian former spy apparently botched the job badly, for he and his daughter survived.  They're going into protective custody, intelligence agencies keeping an eye on them to make sure nothing happens further.  In my view, it seems most likely that the CIA or MI-6 or both staged this attempted assassination to put the blame on Putin at a time when anti-Russia hysteria grips the Western World.
     The chlorine gas attack in a rebel-controlled enclave (rebels in Syria, many of them supported by the U.S., have chemical weapons) fits the same pattern of jumping to conclusions and pushing a very familiar narrative in order to bring about conflict for the sake of satisfying the interests of warmongers.
     Most news media people are marching in step on both the poisoning in England and the chlorine gas attack allegedly committed by Assad.  Donald Trump, just a week ago, announced his wish to withdraw American troops from Syria.  Voila, a gas attack followed.  A year ago, the same desire to disengage from Syria as ISIS was losing lots of ground was followed by a Sarin attack, with, like this time, no legitimate evidence presented that Assad did these crimes.  What's going on?  Are news media people idiots because they can't see through these lies?  Such lies lead to warfare, to pain, to disruption and destruction, to evil men and women profiting from misery and death.  Is Rachel Maddow unable to see through this?  Tucker Carlson on Fox News (amazingly, yes) delivered a withering commentary on Syria, the latest chemical attack, America's relation to all this.  His entire commentary was sound, intelligent, and the product of someone using his brain to analyze a by-now familiar situation; a familiar con job played out in Iraq twice, Afghanistan, Libya, used successfully against Noriega in Panama.  Whenever the U.S. gets worked up over something in another country, it never acknowledges its own roles played in these messes.  9/11 would not have happened if the United States had stayed clear of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
     Maybe I'm wrong in thinking that Assad didn't gas his own people last Saturday.  Maybe he is an evil nutcase who makes weird irrational decisions that run against his own chances of success in a long war.  I feel confident though that I'm right in thinking that governments and news agencies lie all the fucking time and that the U.S. intelligence community has a strong grip on this country's affairs; that their key trait is deception, that they began infiltrating conventional U.S. news media decades ago; that truth is a weapon against these motherfuckers--that's why whistleblowers like Private Manning was locked up for seven years because he dared to prove that members of the U.S. military machine slaughter civilians and get off on it.
     Go ahead and believe the latest news commentary about Assad's alleged gas attack, but also realize that if you do believe that you might need to get your head examined.

                                                                             Vic Neptune