Month: August 2019

Looking for some fake news to advance a fake leftist narrative? Consult a celebrity.

Here’s the New York Post:

Celebrities trying to bring attention to the Amazon blazes in Brazil are spreading misleading snapshots like wildfire on social media.

The raging fires have prompted a handful of celebs such as Portuguese soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo and Oscar-winning actor Leonardo DiCaprio to raise awareness in the form of outdated or inaccurate images.

In a Thursday post, Ronaldo called on his 80 million Twitter followers to “help save our planet” along with a photo from a part of Brazil more than 2,000 miles from the rainforest.

The photo, which was published by the Baltimore Sun showed blazes torch the Taim Ecological Station in the Rio Grade do Sul state back in 2013, according to the newspaper.

And while we’re at it, here’s the New York Times.

The jarring photographs of flames tearing through the Amazon have captured attention around the world, but they may not always be what they seem.

The fires have prompted global calls for a boycott of Brazil, whose far-right president has cut back on protection of wild lands, but many of the images widely shared online by politicians, celebrities and others depict events from different places and even eras.

When you’ve got the Post and Times agreeing on something, you know it’s gotta be bad.

And not to be left out, there’s also CNN:

But photos on social media are conflating the current crisis with previous fires.

One such photo — one of the most-shared photos on social media — shows a lush forest with a massive wall of smoke billowing from a fire.

Musical artist and actor Jaden Smith shared the image on his Instagram, where it garnered over a million likes. YouTube celebrity Logan Paul shared the image on Twitter, too.

To what can we attribute this strange phenomenon of falsely painting a difficult, but well-known situation related to weather conditions, into a crisis catastrophe? After all, wildfires are a common thing in highly forested and big brushland areas of the world during drought. Just ask California, Spain, or Australia.

 

 

Two, bad photos are great for false leftist ‘narrative’ promotion. Remember all the fake photos of President Trump’s "caged" children, dating from illegal migrant detention centers during the Obama era? Remember the crying children and how those situations were misrepresented in a bid to paint the Border Patrol as the bad guy? Well, they worked, so the message is out that fake photos are even better than real ones for promoting fake narratives, given this age of Twitter sharing.

 

Perhaps if inherently ridiculous celebrities hadn’t gotten involved, the press might not have noticed. Fortunately, they did. It’s hard to say if the clowns spreading the fake news will get away with this fakery now, but I wouldn’t bet ‘no.’  One can only hope that the fakesters with agendas are going to keep getting exposed and called out. It’s possible the media is getting a little tired of fake news.

 

 

Looking for some fake news to advance a fake leftist narrative? Consult a celebrity.

Here’s the New York Post:

Celebrities trying to bring attention to the Amazon blazes in Brazil are spreading misleading snapshots like wildfire on social media.

The raging fires have prompted a handful of celebs such as Portuguese soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo and Oscar-winning actor Leonardo DiCaprio to raise awareness in the form of outdated or inaccurate images.

In a Thursday post, Ronaldo called on his 80 million Twitter followers to “help save our planet” along with a photo from a part of Brazil more than 2,000 miles from the rainforest.

The photo, which was published by the Baltimore Sun showed blazes torch the Taim Ecological Station in the Rio Grade do Sul state back in 2013, according to the newspaper.

And while we’re at it, here’s the New York Times.

The jarring photographs of flames tearing through the Amazon have captured attention around the world, but they may not always be what they seem.

The fires have prompted global calls for a boycott of Brazil, whose far-right president has cut back on protection of wild lands, but many of the images widely shared online by politicians, celebrities and others depict events from different places and even eras.

When you’ve got the Post and Times agreeing on something, you know it’s gotta be bad.

And not to be left out, there’s also CNN:

But photos on social media are conflating the current crisis with previous fires.

One such photo — one of the most-shared photos on social media — shows a lush forest with a massive wall of smoke billowing from a fire.

Musical artist and actor Jaden Smith shared the image on his Instagram, where it garnered over a million likes. YouTube celebrity Logan Paul shared the image on Twitter, too.

To what can we attribute this strange phenomenon of falsely painting a difficult, but well-known situation related to weather conditions, into a crisis catastrophe? After all, wildfires are a common thing in highly forested and big brushland areas of the world during drought. Just ask California, Spain, or Australia.

 

 

Two, bad photos are great for false leftist ‘narrative’ promotion. Remember all the fake photos of President Trump’s "caged" children, dating from illegal migrant detention centers during the Obama era? Remember the crying children and how those situations were misrepresented in a bid to paint the Border Patrol as the bad guy? Well, they worked, so the message is out that fake photos are even better than real ones for promoting fake narratives, given this age of Twitter sharing.

 

Perhaps if inherently ridiculous celebrities hadn’t gotten involved, the press might not have noticed. Fortunately, they did. It’s hard to say if the clowns spreading the fake news will get away with this fakery now, but I wouldn’t bet ‘no.’  One can only hope that the fakesters with agendas are going to keep getting exposed and called out. It’s possible the media is getting a little tired of fake news.

 

 

David North, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and noted scholar on immigration and its influence on domestic policies, said at the National Press Club this week that a government program cooked up during the George W. Bush administration and put into place through a federal regulation encourages U.S. businesses to hire foreign instead of citizen college graduates.

North also said at the panel discussion, hosted by CIS, that millions of dollars a year is diverted from helping Americans to benefiting F-1 student visa holders and the American companies that hire them.

The students, North said, get to work for one year or more at an American business, and the business that hires them gets a discount under the Optional Practical Training (OPT) protocol that allows them not to pay certain payroll taxes for their non-immigrant, non-citizen employees.

“You shouldn’t take money from America’s elderly, give it to fat cat corporations so that they can discriminate against Americans,” North said. “I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”

Colleges and universities are also eager to accept foreign students because of the money their enrollment brings in, both as students and alumni.

At any given time, experts estimate that more than one million students from foreign countries are studying in the United States.

North wrote about OTP for CIS in 2015:

The program that converts foreign college graduates back to foreign students by a wave of a bureaucratic wand had these negative impacts on residents of the United States:

• It denied American workers more than 430,000 jobs during the years 2009-2013; and

• It removed $4 billion from the Social Security and Medicare trust funds.

In 2017, CIS explained how OPT works in reality:

OPT is an example of the administrative state run amok. Instead of law coming from Congress, we have law coming from bureaucrats working hand-in-hand with lobbyists. OPT also illustrates the slippery-slope problem of regulation. Work on student visas started innocently as an integral part of a course of study to give foreign students an experience not available in their home country, but eventually was transformed into a full-blown guestworker program whose stated purpose is to provide labor to American business.

In practice today that means, North said, jobs are taken away from hundreds of thousands of American college grads.

North wrote in 2015:

‘Optional Practical Training’ is a misleading name for the program as there is no training involved; this is simply another foreign worker program hiding behind student visas. The OPT notion is that the foreign students will work in the field they studied; this is rarely, if ever, enforced as the designated cops on this beat are the colleges from which the alien students graduated.

Two others on the panel, Dan Cadman, a fellow at CIS and retired INS / ICE official, and Jessica Vaughan, director of Policy Studies at CIS, also said the large population of foreign students poses a challenge to U.S. intelligence because it is difficult to keep tabs on so many people in one of the most open settings in U.S. society — college campuses.

This scenario can create a “perfect place in which people engaged in espionage or people who are of malintent can conceal themselves without any real serious possibility they’re not going to be detected,” Cadman said.

One of the 911 terrorists entered the United States on a student visa.

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