Earthquake Update, The New "Fake News" Meme Growing As Lies And Distortions Continue

Earthquake, tsunamis… and even a METEORITE! Video footage captures powerful 7.4-magnitude tremor near Fukushima and flaming objects in the sky above Japan

Dramatic video has captured a meteorite burning across the sky just hours after a huge 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck Japan sending a tsunami cascading inland and up a river.

The footage shows a flaming object trailing across the evening sky while the country was still assessing the damage from the tremor. 

Alarms rang out in towns across Fukushima prefecture - where the 2011 earthquake wreaked havoc - and further along Japan's eastern coastline.

Around an hour later, a tsunami flowed inland and up the Suna'oshi River in Tagajo - a city devastated in the 2011 earthquake - almost bursting its banks. 

Video taken by a 16-year-old known as Asuka then showed a mysterious burning light crossing the night sky.

Train station signs rattled, buildings rocked and high-pitched sirens pierced the air on what had otherwise been a peaceful morning when the quake hit. 

Another video - recorded at 6am local time - showed boards at a Tokyo train station rocking violently from side-to-side as the earthquake struck.

Passengers are heard panicking while others calmly make their way out of the station in Akihabara district as the ground shakes.

Television footage showed ships moving out to sea from harbours as tsunami warnings wailed after alerts of waves of up to 3 metres were issued.

Another video, taken by British expat Paul Ferguson, shows the moment the tsunami alerts started ringing out.

Mr Ferguson, who lives in Mito, Ibraraki prefecture, said he was woken up by the huge sirens just moments after the 7.3 quake struck just before 6am local time. 

When It Comes To Fake News, The U.S. Government Is The Biggest Culprit

Let’s talk about fake news stories, shall we?

There’s the garden variety fake news that is not really “news” so much as it is titillating, tabloid-worthy material peddled by anyone with a Twitter account, a Facebook page and an active imagination. These stories run the gamut from the ridiculous and the obviously click-baity to the satirical and politically manipulative.

Anyone with an ounce of sense and access to the Internet should be able to ferret out the truth and lies in these stories with some basic research. That these stories flourish is largely owing to the general gullibility, laziness and media illiteracy of the general public, which through its learned compliance rarely questions, challenges or confronts.

Then there’s the more devious kind of news stories circulated by one of the biggest propagators of fake news: the U.S. government.

In the midst of the media’s sudden headline-blaring apoplexy over fake news, you won’t hear much about the government’s role in producing, planting and peddling propaganda-driven fake news—often with the help of the corporate news media—because that’s not how the game works.

Why?

Because the powers-that-be don’t want us skeptical of the government’s message or its corporate accomplices in the mainstream media. They don’t want us to be more discerning when it comes to what information we digest online. They just want us to be leery of independent or alternative news sources while trusting them—and their corporate colleagues—to vet the news for us.

Indeed, the New York Times has suggested that Facebook and Google appoint themselves the arbiters of truth on the internet in order to screen out what is blatantly false, spam or click-baity.

Not only would this establish a dangerous precedent for all-out censorship by corporate entities known for colluding with the government but it’s also a slick sleight-of-hand maneuver that diverts attention from what we should really be talking about: the fact that the government has grown dangerously out-of-control, all the while the so-called mainstream news media, which is supposed to act as a bulwark against government propaganda, has instead become the mouthpiece of the world’s largest corporation—the U.S. government.

As veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, who along with Bob Woodward blew the lid off the Watergate scandal, reported in his expansive 1977 Rolling Stone piece, “The CIA and the Media”:

“More than 400 American journalists … in the past twenty?five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency... There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services... Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters... In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.”

Bernstein is referring to Operation Mockingbird, a CIA campaign started in the 1950s to plant intelligence reports among reporters at more than 25 major newspapers and wire agencies, who would then regurgitate them for a public oblivious to the fact that they were being fed government propaganda.

In some instances, as Bernstein shows, members of the media also served as extensions of the surveillance state, with reporters actually carrying out assignments for the CIA.

Executives with CBS, the New York Times and Time magazine also worked closely with the CIA to vet the news. Bernstein writes: “Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps?Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald?Tribune.”

For example, in August 1964, the nation’s leading newspapers—including the Washington Post and New York Times—echoed Lyndon Johnson’s claim that North Vietnam had launched a second round of attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. No such attacks had taken place, and yet the damage was done. As Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon report for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, “By reporting official claims as absolute truths, American journalism opened the floodgates for the bloody Vietnam War.”

If it was happening then, you can bet it’s still happening today, only it’s been reclassified, renamed and hidden behind layers of government secrecy, obfuscation and spin.

In its article, “How the American government is trying to control what you think,” the Washington Post points out“Government agencies historically have made a habit of crossing the blurry line between informing the public and propagandizing.”

Mainstream Media Crashed — The Scapegoat is 'Fake News' - Tales from out there

A new campaign had to be launched.

Suddenly, on cue, it was: Hillary Clinton lost because “fake news” about her had been spread around during the campaign.

Fake news sites. That was the reason. These “fake sites” had to be punished. Somehow. They had to be defamed. Blocked. Censored.

Here is an excerpt from a list of “fake news” sites suggested by one professor. 

The list is circulating widely on the Web:

• Project Veritas; 
• Infowars; 
• Breitbart; 
• Coast To Coast AM; 
• Natural News; 
• Zero Hedge; 
• The Daily Sheeple; 
• Activist Post; 
• 21st Century Wire.

Free speech? Bill of Rights? Never heard of it.

Obama put in his two cents: 
“Because in an age where there’s so much active misinformation and it’s packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television… If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect.”
Excuse me. “We won’t know what to protect?” Meaning what to favor, what to promote, what to lie about? Meaning only some speech is free?

Obama is way, way behind the curve. Thousands of websites and blogs have been exposing major media as fake for years. I started nomorefakenews.com in 2001.

If Google, Facebook, and Twitter keep expanding their censorship of “disfavored messages,” they’re going to pay a price. More and more users will go elsewhere.

The facade of the major media is getting thinner. You can see a glow of rage and resentment behind it. They’re desperately looking for revenge on the millions and millions of people who are deserting them and laughing at them.

They presumed too much. They presumed they had us in the palm of their hand. We were their property. We were transfixed by their authority.

All that is going away. Bye, bye.

The big shift is accelerating. Independent media are in the ascendance. Understand that. Recognize it.

The impossible is happening.

Fake news sites? Please. The major media are the biggest fakes the world has ever seen. Their anchors and star reporters are bloviating cranks. They’re dinner-theater actors.

The Mainstream Media has been caught faking news countless times, which had serious consequences worldwide:

1. CNN caught producing fake news during the Gulf War
2. CNN caught producing fake news during the Syrian conflict
3. CNN caught producing fake news during Sandy Hook and Boston Marathon "Bombing"
4. Former CNN journalist: "CNN is paid by foreign and domestic government agencies for specific content"
5. FOX News - and all other news agencies - are 'corporate persons' and can LEGALLY LIE their viewers
6. New York Times openly admits MSM stories are scripted by the White House
7. MSM censored/ignored a shocking admission of highest level Turkish false flag against Syria, which would have triggered a war between the two nations
8. 4 Examples of Mainstream Media Fabricating News to Push for War
9. BBC Journalist Comes Clean: 'Believe Nothing You Read Or Watch'

Major media news for America is still basically manufactured in New York and Washington — plus occasional outbursts from Hollywood creatures who bemoan the decline of inclusive liberalism, as they expand their gun-toting security staffs and dig deeper bunkers. 

The New York-Washington axis exists in a self-serving bubble, which has now taken serious punctures. The delusional attacks against “fake sites” underlines how out of touch these elites are with the rest of the country.

Independent media outlets are winning. They won’t be stopped.

When the people who now head the tech giants were growing up, they were heralding the Internet as a new era of free information-exchange. 

But now that they find themselves working with the government in the Surveillance State, they’re fronting for censorship. 

In fact, they’re showing they were never for freedom. That was a pose all along. They were, from the beginning, agents of repression. They can try to stop independent media now, but they will fail.

The Nuclear Option - Anatomy of a Smear: Before There Was Bork, There Was Sessions 

It all began with Jeff Sessions from Alabama. Even before they coined a term for it — Borking — they did it to Jeff Sessions, a decent man with a stellar legal reputation as a fearless and tough but fair federal prosecutor down South.

In 1986, President Reagan nominated Jefferson Beauregard Sessions to the federal bench. The son of a general store keeper, Mr. Sessions was highly regarded for his intellect and devotion to the Constitution. The American Bar Association deemed him “qualified” for the post.

But then he came to Washington and met the United States Senate for confirmation hearings.

God help any good citizen whoever meets such a terrifying fate.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy — 17 years removed from leaving Mary Jo Kopechne to die her watery death on Chappaquiddick Island — smelled injustice. Liberal special interest groups in Washington had hatched a plan for Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee to begin smearing Republican nominees to the federal bench.

And, like panting lapdogs after a grungy tennis ball, Democrats fetched with great enthusiasm.

Jefferson. Beauregard. Sessions. From Alabama with a soft Southern accent. Or was it “Secessions?” Must be a racist.

With only the flimsiest of accusations and innuendos from suspect testimony, Mr. Sessions was duly smeared in the worst way he could imagine. He was accused of harboring racist prejudices against blacks. He was willing to pervert justice and shred the Constitution in order to advance this twisted worldview.

Jeff Sessions was “a throwback to a shameful era,” declared Mr. Kennedy, a man curiously unfamiliar with the concept of shame.

Mr. Sessions was blindsided. He had never encountered such absurd allegations. He had always been a slave to the law. The guiding principle of his sterling career had always been defending and supporting the Constitution.

But in this world, none of that mattered. All they needed were accusations. The most vile accusations imaginable.

Even worse for Mr. Sessions was that his fate did not rest in his own hands. Or in the hands of a jury of his peers who are good people. His honor and reputation lay in the hands of people like Ted Kennedy. And Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Senators such as Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.

Hearing the dog whistle of racism and always on the hunt for opportunities to display his “independent streak,” Mr. Specter delivered the fatal blow. Even though Republicans controlled the Senate and the committee, they killed President Reagan’s nomination.

The precedent was set.

For the liberal special interest groups in Washington, it was a perfect victory. They had successfully politicized the one thing in America that was supposed to be sacred, that was supposed to be above politics: the rule of law.

They were doing exactly what white segregationists had done in the South decades earlier with Jim Crow laws.

They had twisted the rule of law to the point that rule of law was meaningless. The truth irrelevant. Nothing would be above racial, partisan politics.