Digging through a Mountain of Bullshit
Russiagate dissected, government by panic, sushi terrorism
If you believe to this day that Donald Trump was somehow under the influence of Russia while he was President and that the Russians helped him win the 2016 presidential election, you could not be more wrong. But I can hardly blame you for it. It simply isn’t your fault. After all, I personally do know some professional journalists who write about these matters and who still believe these things!
The fault lies with the corporate news media, which, for years, thought it had the biggest story since Watergate before it, when in fact, it had been hoodwinked by a laughable conspiracy theory cooked up by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Russiagate turned out to be complete bullshit, but this fact was then wholly ignored by the same media outlets that had so erred in their reporting on it for years. Instead of apologising and seeking their audiences’ forgiveness, like they did when they fell for obvious government propaganda and championed the invasion of Iraq, this time, journalists decided to just sweep their failures under the rug. This has led to an unprecedented decline in audiences and loss of trust for the corporate media and a migration of readers to places like Substack right here.
How could this disaster of modern journalism, the worst mistreatment of a story at scale that I can remember in the last three decades, have happened? In a book-length article of 24,000 words in the august Columbia Journalism Review, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author and veteran investigative reporter Jeff Gerth takes this whole mess apart in detail. His investigation, compiled over the better part of two years, is a masterpiece of epic proportions. I spent most of the last two days reading it while furiously taking notes. And it was well worth the time.
You can read about how this piece came about in a short interview in Matt Taibbi’s Racket and there is also a podcast episode from CJR’s The Kicker where Gerth talks about some behind the scenes of the piece:
I spent a significant part of the rest of yesterday installing a new power supply into my PC to combat issues with it shutting off randomly that I’ve been experiencing. I upgraded from a 650 W to an 850 W power supply because I suspect that at certain peaks, my PC was drawing too much power for the former PSU to handle and that’s why it shut off. Now, despite both PSUs being of the fully modular kind, I had to change a ton of cabling due to the configuration of the new PSU — because of the now ubiquitous supply shortages everywhere, I wasn’t able to order a bigger power supply from the same manufacturer as my old one. So that was a pain in the ass. But I hope it was worth it and these issues will now be solved. Right now, it’s still too early to tell for sure.
Be A
Actualfraid of this Balloonly, speaking of Matt Taibbi and Racket — which is the new name of his blockbuster Substack publication previously known as TK News — he published another interesting story this week. In his take on the Chinese spy balloon, he ties the episode in with what he identifies as a new mode of government our leaders seem to almost universally have switched to: government by panic.
Now take a hypothetical. Say you’re a member of the American political establishment after the 2016 election of Donald Trump. You’re staring at four years as part of a government-in-exile and need a new message to solve your belief problem. What’s your answer?
My hypothesis is such people never bothered to find one. Instead, they declared a state of emergency.
What emergency? Doesn’t matter. Russian interference was a good startup disaster, but you can keep changing them. The important thing is the pattern. One, declare a crisis. Two, spread panic. Three, take emergency measures. If you do this over and over, you end up with permanent crisis, permanent panic, permanent emergency rule. So long as new crises keep evoking unconscious fear and anxiety, the legitimacy of the political establishment is continuously justified.
This rings very true to me. And it does explain neatly why stupid-ass things like that fucking balloon are suddenly taking over the news cycle.
A Chinese balloon of unknown aetiology drifted into American airspace, and wigs flipped from coast to coast. The episode ended in Kubrickian spoof, with one unsmiling official after another lining up to declare victory over a balloon. And nobody thought it was odd.
The Chinese airship was declared a “spy balloon” on the Internet instantaneously. Hype and fear built all weekend until finally, in a story I initially thought was a joke, the United States military shot the thing down off the coast of South Carolina with an F-22 Raptor jet launched from Langley Air Force in Virginia.
The comedy factor is off the charts. The F-22 is one of the most expensive weapons ever built, costing taxpayers $334 million per plane, with a program tab of more than $60 billion. The jet has the radar signature of a hummingbird, screams upward at 62,000 feet a minute, and is generally so super-awesome that we’ve banned its export, not wanting the Japanese or the Saudis or even the Australians to possess our secret Promethean fire.
The idea that this celebrated super-weapon got its first air-to-air victory shooting down a fucking balloon is as perfect a demonstration of the pitiful mindset of modern American leaders as could be conceived. That it apparently happened before we were even sure it was a spy craft, just before supposed diplomatic talks with China, and while more sophisticated Chinese satellites zoomed over us in space made this an even more damning satirical bullseye.
If you start looking at the news with an eye towards figuring out if it was reported in the first place to stoke some kind of panic or other within the populace, a lot of it suddenly makes a hell of a lot more sense.
I’m not talking about some overarching conspiracy here. I think these kinds of narratives are being seeded from all sides of the political aisle and, to some extend, probably also by corporate interests. In the end, this new state of panic is simply the new modus operandi of political actors. It’s simply the new way of doing business. It’s how the masses are governed and made to by products now.
Sushi Terrorism Threatens Japan
Sometimes, it’s hard to decide, though. For example: Is sushi terrorism part of someone’s plot to create panic in the Japanese populace or is it just people being idiots on social media? Let’s be honest: there’s a lot of that too, these days.
Conveyor belt sushi, where assorted dishes rotate past customers, has been a staple feature of Japan's restaurant scene since the 1950s, one that it has successfully exported around the world. But in recent weeks TikTok videos of pranksters licking sushi and putting it back on the belt — variously dubbed “sushi terrorism” or “saliva terrorism” — have gone viral, sparking debates about hygiene standards and the future of the conveyor belt concept. Sushiro, one of the biggest sushi chains in Japan has considered pursuing legal action against those who were caught pulling tricks at restaurants.
At least one sushi restaurant chain announced it will remove its conveyor belt as others are devising mitigating strategies, Unseen Japan reported. Hamazushi said that it will scrap the conveyor concept — replacing rotating belts with a "straight lane" to zipline diners their items.
Another chain, Kura Sushi, said it would start placing covers on dishes and use containers with chips that can monitor how long an item has sat on the conveyor belt and when a customer has put an item back, according to Unseen Japan.
Why would people do this kind of thing? This way of serving sushi has worked for 70 years and we go and fuck it up now? For some cheap likes? I mean, I’m really trying not to be the old man yelling at clouds over here but how the hell can anyone argue we are actually making progress as a society with shit like this going on everywhere?
Is Darktide in Trouble?
I’ve been playing Warhammer 40,000: Darktide since it came out and have been enjoying it so much, it has even made me get my 40K models from the basement. It’s definitely the best 40K game in years. It’s hilarious, visceral and gets the blood pumping. A great way to relieve some stress after a long work day!
But it seems some people, especially veteran Vermintide players, are quite disappointed with the game. Which has prompted the developers to respond with an open letter.
Over the next few months, our sole focus is to address the feedback that many of you have. In particular, we will focus on delivering a complete crafting system, a more rewarding progression loop, and continue to work on game stability and performance optimization.
This also means that we will delay our seasonal content rollout and the Xbox Series X|S launch. We will also suspend the upcoming releases of premium cosmetics. We just couldn’t continue down this path, knowing that we have not addressed many feedback areas in the game today.
I’ve been enjoying the game very much as is, but then, I’ve never played Vermintide, so I don’t have the context there. The game does currently stand at “mostly negative” recent and “mixed” all-time reviews on Steam, which is a pretty bad record. One particular player review sums it up as follows:
Had enough. Darktide is 2 months old as of this review. It has not received the significant updates it deserves, the fixes it desperately needs or any of the attention that a live service demands.
The gist for most people seems to be that the game has great core gameplay, but is held back by most — if not all — design decisions surrounding it. The developers keep patching the game, but many disappointed players it seems to be too little, too late right now. It’s a shame, really. Especially since, as a co-op game, this product stands or falls by how active the daily player base is.
On My Desk Today
After having worked through the CJR’s Russiagate coverage in detail, I am now preparing a podcast episode on it, which I am planning to record and release tomorrow. I was originally aiming at today, but some other stuff has already come up that I need to take care of first, so that seems doubtful. I am also working on one or two other stories that I can’t talk about right now and will have to file my weekly newspaper column tonight as well.