Wednesday Coffee
Wednesday Coffee
(Photo: Anja Rubik by Terry Richardson for Paris Vogue) Good morning, Wednesday! What a week so far! Spain is close to civil war and Brussels just buries its head in the sand (sort of reminds us of Chamberlain and Hitler back in the good old days before Europe exploded and which would eventually cost more than 20,000,000 European lives).
Meanwhile in the US, the media continues to tell us pretty white lies about there being only one shooter in the Las Vegas massacre. Shades of the Kennedy Assassination! Or that the FBI has not got a single clue what prompted a 64-year old to go on the rampage, despite the fact that ISIS has publicly claimed responsibility.
Or what about the hypothesis that the alleged shooter was killed before the shooting even took place and that the real shooters got away? I mean, if a 64 year old is going to go on a killing spree and is prepared to forfeit his life, why does he need to install cameras both in his hotel room and in the hotel corridor? Or why did he think he needed an arsenal of 23 guns if it was just one person involved?
The entire story that MSM is selling is not just improbable, it is laughable. But we have come to expect this, haven’t we. As Lenin once wrote, ” It is, of course, much easier to shout, abuse and howl than it is to explain.”
I also suggest you take a look at the film ‘Arlington Road’ starring Jeff Bridges and Tim Burton about a group of home grown extremists…who set up an innocent man to take the fall for a terrorist act that kills dozens of people.
Until the FBI comes up with a better little white lie, I prefer Hollywood fiction.
ChessBase: Judge, Jury and Executioner
ChessBase’s editor-in-chief Friedel might be guilty of a lot of things, but you will never be able to accuse Friedel of telling the whole truth! ChessBase has a well established reputation for biased and colored reporting.
Case in point is the recent scandal involving Canadian grandmaster Anton Kovalyov at the World Cup in Tbilsis. ChessBase’s original article was a shameless whitewash of the tournament organizers’ actions that prompted the Canadian to leave the tournament and flee the country immediately.
Not once in this article is there any mention of what really transpired. There was not a single reference to the word ‘gypsy’. Had Kovalyov not posted on his FaceBook page, then not a single ChessBase reader would have known any better.
True, ChessBase later reproduced the Kovalyov statement — but only as an addendum (or a footnote) to its original article! ChessBase did not even try to re-work the article so that it could be more balanced and especially more factually relevant.
Fast forward to this week…
Not willing to move on and admit an obvious error of judgement, Friedel this past Sunday threw more oil into the flames with yet another biased article on the Kovalyov affair.
There is not an ounce of objectivity in this new article, and to label this vaudeville theatre a ‘report’ borders on the absurd. There is absolutely no input from Kovalyov at all. The article suggests that there would soon be , but it is already Wednesday and still no Kovalyov input!
But this is what ChessBase is all about…often it is not informative, nor entertaining nor is it in the least bit funny. ChessBase is becoming synonymous with a type of journalism that is SAD to see.