Lies of Omission

How the MSM leads and misleads by burying the lede...

(H/T @cartoonmovement)

“Keep in mind, the news media are not independent; they are a sort of bulletin board and public relations firm for the ruling class-the people who run things. Those who decide what news you will or will not hear are paid by, and tolerated purely at the whim of, those who hold economic power. If the parent corporation doesn't want you to know something, it won't be on the news. Period. Or, at the very least, it will be slanted to suit them, and then rarely followed up.”

~ George Carlin (1937-2008)

Joel Bowman, with today’s Note From the End of the World: Maleny, Australia...

We’re headed up to Australia Zoo today, where we hope to show dear daughter some of the country’s weird and oddly adapted fauna. Of course, dear readers needn’t travel all the way Down Under to catch a glimpse of oddities in the natural world. Just pick up a copy of your daily newspaper...

For the latest updates from the End of the World (and a hearty belly-laugh) we turn to the bonafide numbskulls over in the mainstream press. 

Here’s one hyperventilating headline from globalist rag, The Financial Times:

Sky-high inflation forces Argentina to circulate first 10,000-peso notes

New bills worth $11 aim to help population avoid having to carry bricks of cash

As the crack coverage goes on to explain (apparently to all the FT readers currently flunking 3rd grade math)...

“The new notes, worth $11 at the country’s official exchange rate, are five times more valuable than the previous largest note, of 2,000 pesos — which began circulating last year and remains relatively rare — and 10 times more valuable than the more common 1,000-peso note.”

Hold on to your hat, dear reader! Stop the presses! Let’s just get this straight... 

10 x 1,000 = 10,000... and 5 x 2,000 = 10,000. 

Whoa! Penetrating insights from the pinko sheets! And here we didn’t think such pedestrian arithmetic needed to be taught to anyone outside woke university courses where, as we all know, “2+2 = white supremacy.”

Carry the Zero

Apparently the senior editors at the FT don’t think very much of their readership’s abacus acumen. Then again, they don’t think much of their BS detectors, either. Here’s the following paragraph:

Cash payments remain popular in Argentina, where many retailers prefer to receive funds immediately amid chronic economic instability, and others operate off the books. Residents are forced to carry large wads of bills to make small payments, and backpacks of them to make larger ones.

Wait, wait... don’t tell us. Even larger payments require (six over nine... carry the zero... divide by sin cos tan...) still larger bags? 

As anyone who has ever transacted in cash knows – regardless of whether it’s in US Greenbacks, Canadian Loonies, Vietnamese Dong or some other filthy fiat fold – the preference for cold hard cash owes largely to privacy...that, and Argentina’s real national sport, avoiding rapacious taxes. 

A friend once did the (actually complicated) math a few years back and worked out that, in order to be fully compliant with Argentina’s notoriously sinuous tax code, a business would end up paying something like 130% of their topline revenue to The State. That’s a loss you can’t make up on volume, no matter how many Keynesian economics classes you’ve taken. 

Of course, to the global elites and their lobotomized lackeys in the lamestream press, cash is automatically bad because privacy is something “for we, not for thee.” 

Vile Deeds

Thus do the shadowy, supranational figures advocating Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) adhere to a strict “guilty until proven innocent” doctrine when it comes to private transactions between voluntary individuals. To hear their justifications for such panoptic governmental invigilation, one would think there was never a lawn-mowing job that wasn’t a front for an international arms deal... a lemonade stand that wasn’t a meth lab in masquerade... a give-a-penny, take-a-penny jar that didn’t warrant a midnight raid from Interpol.

The same sainted public servants who obstruct efforts to audit the Fed... who routinely obfuscate investigations into their own dubious dealings... who operate in the dark and murky depths of the swamp... and who jail journalists who dare bring their vile deeds into the disinfecting light of public discourse... also claim the right to surveil and monitor your behavior at each and every turn. 

Remember when the former head of the IMF’s China division (and regular FT contributor), Eswar Prasad, said the quiet part out loud at the World Economic Forum in China just last year: 

“You can have programmability, units of central bank digital currency with expiry dates. You could have, as I argue in my book, a potentially better and some people might say a darker world, where the government decides that units of central bank money can be used to purchase some things, but not other things that it deems less desirable...like, say, ammunition, or drugs, or pornography, or something of this sort...”

“...or vehicles with internal combustion engines,” Prasad might have added, “or airline tickets that breech your carbon quota... or donations to opposing political parties... or contributions to other ‘less desirable’ causes, like the Canadian truckers, or the French farmers, or Substack newsletters that spread mis- or disinformation about the government, or vaccines, or covid lockdowns, or even CBDCs themselves...”

Burying the Lede

It’s not until much later in the piece, wa-a-a-ay down in the 9th paragraph, or what our American friends might call “the bottom of the 9th,” where we discover the actual news accidentally slipping past the FT’s editorial guard:

“Argentina’s monthly inflation rate peaked at 26 per cent in December, and has since fallen to 11 per cent, as of March. Milei has said the April rate, which will be published next week, could be in single digits.” 

That president Javier Milei should draw criticism from globalist shills is hardly surprising. Dear readers will recall that El Señor is following an unorthodox playbook down on the Pampas, one that involves such out-of-the-box policies as outlawing seigniorage to fund government boondoggles (and jailing politicians found to be violating said law), running real life budget surpluses (he’s returned back-to-back-to-back monthly surpluses since coming to office) and lassoing runaway inflation, as the FT grimacingly grumbles, above. 

Might these and other free market principles catch on? Might voters be found to support them? Might “uncommon sense” be allowed to drop the negating prefix? 

An X (née Twitter) poll by World of Statistics a couple of days ago drew over 100,000 responses from more than 900,000 views. Of course, the results were not filtered by CNN, or the FT or any of the newswires...which makes them all the more interesting. 

(H/T @stats_feed)

If democracy depended on voters, and not vote counters, the global elites might actually have some cause for concern here. We shall see.

Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

P.S. We are grateful here at Notes for the generous support of our members, who value independent writing and are happy to be part of the pushback against the mainstream media’s mono-messaging.

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