In the footnote to National Donut Day 2015, I told my readers to stay tuned for "my weekly gas price post with bonus coverage of the OPEC meeting, a special cyberwar report covering China, Russia, and The Sith Jihad, and the monthly meta." While I took care of the first with Gas up in some neighborhoods as OPEC decides to keep pumping, I have so much material for the second that I decided to split it up into three parts, beginning with the online operations of ISIS AKA The Sith Jihad. I begin with a 21st Century example of "loose lips sink ships" as CNN reports 'Moron' posts selfie, gives away ISIS location.
Social media revealed the location of an ISIS compound. Gen. Hawk Carlisle explains what happened next.As Rick Perry would say, "Oops."
Follow over the jump for two more videos from CNN on The Sith Jihad's use of social media.
The next video mentions the above incident and contrasts it with The Sith Jihad's use of technology for recruitment in ISIS releases new video in English.
CNN's Barbara Starr reports that ISIS released a new video in perfect English, trying to recruit new members in the U.S.CNN continues describing The Sith Jihad's efforts online with Surge in ISIS using social media for recruitment.
There has been a surge in homegrown ISIS extremism driven by recruitment through social media. CNN's Deborah Feyerick reports.So far, this has worked out as well for the recruits in the U.S. as the fellow posting the selfie of the Sith Jihad headquarters--not well at all. Still, this is an area of concern; one of these days, they might recruit someone competent.
Stay tuned for the Sunday entertainment entry. The reports on Chinese and Russian cyber-warfare, along with the monthly meta, will have to wait.
If only we could believe anything the PentaCNN says. Starting with the "babies thrown out of incubators in Kuwait City" tale spouted by a "female war refugee" who was actually the daughter of a Kuwaiti lobbyist, to all the lies surrounding Iraq Attaq II, the Merkin mass meeja has earned infamy from being an eager propaganda tool. ISIS is a mob of savage primitive head-choppers; the War Machine is a legion of savage high-tech bomb-droppers. Death wins wherever either goes.
ReplyDeleteAnd as for that building in the selfie, it looks halfway blown to crap before it was allegedly located and levelled. Does the rah-rah bomb blast graphic from the CNN snippet have any basis in reality, or is it merely some artist's imagining using a building blueprint architecture design program?
Screw both sides here. They'll keep fighting until the last civilian dies. Peak Oil and The Collapse can't happen fast enough to these fuggers.
This is why I found CBC useful during the first Gulf War. It had just enough of a different perspective from the US TV news that I felt better informed. I don't get CBC now (DirecTV doesn't carry the local CBC outlet) but I do get BBC America and Al Jazeera America.
DeleteBack when I was living in Canada and still owned a television (I let the Xwife take it with her when she buggered off to San Francisco in 2012; no great loss re: the X or the TV) I used to watch RTTV, the Russian channel. It's in English. It was obviously biased in a pro-Putin position whenever it came to anything affecting Russia, and wore its anti-Americanism on its sleeve. That made it easy to see through the spin and spite. Sometimes a scoundrel gets at the truth, though. RT's critiques of the American financial system were better than I'd see on the U.S. corporate channels. We paid extra for the enhanced news package, so there was a lot to choose from, including all the major American networks. BBC World was good for about half an hour at a time but al-Jazeera English was too slow-paced for my taste.
DeleteI agree with you on CBC -- it was a credible, straight-down-the-middle news source. Peter Mansbridge is like the Canuck Cronkite. Cronkanuck? Canunkrite? The Canadian commercial channels, like all the newspapers there (except the one liberal one in Toronto) were slacklustre. All owned by right-wing corporations! Most Americans have the impression that Canada is leftist, but I found it to be centre-right. Albeit in a VERY polite way.
Down here, ABC ("A" standing for Australian) is like the CBC, only I like the local accent better. There's a government-run network called SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) that focuses on foreign material. Much of the day, it runs hour-long newscasts from various countries in their languages -- Turkish, Indonesian, Greek, German, etc. The PBS Newshour is the American contribution, but that's so lickspittle I could rarely bear to watch the first time I immigrated here. Later in the evening there are good docos (Strine slang for documentaries) and unusual foreign movies.
Trivia fact -- did you know that on over-the-air broadcast TV in Oz, they show nudity (later at night on some channels such as SBS) and say "shit" right out loud? And yet the nation does not explode in a great ball of fire! Imagine if that happened in the U.S., where a flash of Janet Jackson's nipple caused a national nervous breakdown! (But that didn't stop the cable news channels from replaying the pixellated version of it over and over for the next three months.)
I watched Russia Today online until the Ukraine crisis erupted last year, at which time I couldn't take their point of view, which became even more pro-Putin and anti-American, any longer. Several of the entries in this blog were built around RT clips, including Free and Equal debate tonight, where I observed " Russia Today loves to broadcast dissenting American voices, including tinfoil hat wearer Alex Jones. This event is right up their alley." The sequel was Johnson and Stein in final third party presidential debate on Russia Today. In that one, I wrote of Jill Stein and Gary Johnson, "I have this feeling the two candidates will agree as much on an anti-interventionist foreign policy just as much as Obama and Romney agreed on an interventionist one. Russia Today couldn't ask for a better pair of candidates." Finally, I contrasted how CNN and RT covered the same event in CNN and Russia Today cover the March Against Monsanto. Click on the link and see for yourself.
DeleteI can sum up the difference between the US and Australia in one sentence--America was founded by the Pilgrims while Australia was founded by the prisoners. No wonder Australians have more fun.