Kremlin Ties Russian Plants to Thaad&Mir Putin.

Orange is the new Black Market.

The predictable Lavrovian Response of salivating at the mere  mention of the President's name in any context whatsoever with Russia, as called out as mass hysteria by Matt Taibbi in The Rolling Stone, was in full Orlando Bloom yesterday, cementing the transmogrification of headfake News into The Trumpan Show/Reality TV version of "The Apprehensiveness", wherein the world holds its  collective breath waiting for the Man Who Fell to Earth from Versailles to shout "You're Fired" to another bevy of tomahawk missiles, while inside scalpers sell tickets to the Firing Line to make a few extra Buckleys on the side.

As he once again made America grate, The Spicer Girls went into overdrive about Presidential leaks that didn't occur in a motel room this time, while Presidential spokespersons demonstrated their unique abilities of carrying their McMaster's water. They've poured kitty litter into Schrödinger's box, causing the same effect as pouring sand into a Think Tank, slowing down the Perpetual Notion Machine so much that they can't tell whether it's empty or full, but the reek it's creating tends to make me think it's the latter.

But what do I know? The things that interest me are so different. For example, in the prologue to Andrew Feinstein's The Shadow World (Inside the Global Arms Trade), he sites the 75million Pound gift (grift)of an Airbus to Prince Bandar by the British arms company BAE, and this morning I read that Afghanistan has minerals worth $89billion, for which the US has already spent at least $1 trillion in war-mongering to assure access (Take the OIL, we shoulda just taken the oil), to not oil this time, but  other minerals and rare earth elements. It is the same calculus as the arms sales, only in reverse: Instead of the smaller amount represented by the Airbus for access to resources worth a thousand times more than the gift, the resources, this time in Afghanistan, are worth a thousand times less than the amount invested in their eventual confiscation. What this makes obvious, and to my way of thinking would make a great News Story, is that those who stand to profit from the attainment of these resources aren't investing their own money, but are risking what used to be referred to as the Nation's treasure, ie the resources the nation has accrued through the effort of ALL of its citizens, yet the profit from which will flow only to those on the White House's (and Congress's) short list.

As citizens get the Dickens beaten out of them, "our" President's turned the White House into Bleak House, while showing us why his wife's called The Tail of Two Cities and he plays The Donbey and Son-in-Law in Washington, parading around like Pickwick, creating pandemonium wherever he goes, despite pumping up his acolytes with diaphanous promises to fulfill America's Great Expectations from a pile of coal dust dumped by Our Mutual Friends, the transnational corporations, but delivering nothing more than Hard Times while he brags about being David Cop-a-Feel by giving Olive a twist in her most  private of parts.

While we instead eat up the news cycle with the circumlocutions and daily antics of everyone's favorite Barnum & Bailey sideshow attraction, there is no air left to discuss, for example, what the real intent of the cyber attack over the weekend portends. Like the Melissa attack of yesteryear, it purposely showed its hand when it needn't have, and the real question is what signal, what veiled threat, what shadow attack, lurks behind the amateurish hack that the ransomware charade represented?

Like the news itself, the signal gets buried in the noise, and, like throwing out the Bibi with the Ba'ath water, the message in the bot'll never be understood, as everyone's too busy deciphering the Oracle to notice the fact that what's being kept close to the vest'll verge on the trump card being played unremarked by those who should be heeding it.

Instead, acting as an ally to those it disparages, the media enshrouds facts in a haze of its own, one impervious to even their own kleg lights. You only know there's something there because you know there can be no such noxious smoke without an underlying fire. We're privy only to a blur of soot and smoke, now confusedly scudding one way, now another way, now aspiring to the stratosphere, now murkily creeping along the ground, as the blasts of hot air rise and fall, or change their direction: a dense formless jumble, with streaks of crosslight in it that show nothing but more masses of obscuring darkness: Cloaktown is the news media, suggestive of itself while not a speck of truth can be discerned.

The financial crisis and the myopic mentality that pervaded the nation and most of the OECD countries should have alerted us to the omnipotent ability of the News to completely hoodwink a public it is supposedly serving into believing the pablum they ladle out in dollops of drollery while themselves rollicking with the same rich and powerful we're told "Freedom" of the press (freedom to lie to your face, freedom to ignore what is right in from of their eyes, freedom to paint the most atrocious perfidy in colors of red white and blueblood) protects us from.

The wonder is that there's a there there at all anymore. It's been ruined to such an extent that it's amazing how it has borne so many shocks. Created so many pseudo-celebs, haranguing reports, newsworthy dog rescues, while, by catering to the desires of advertisers, it has, like hospitals, education, and housing, become another example of the ongoing destruction of value wrought by Cowboy Capitalism on the very institutions that the vast majority of people hold most dear, and need most desperately. Because the News is now one of the prime examples of the same devastated wreck left in Kamikaze Kapitalism's all-consuming wake.

As Cindi Lauper, of all people, wisely intoned, "Money ... Money changes everything." And she did not necessarily mean for the better. Nor the bettor, which the more than 700 TRILLion dollars in derivatives shows is what the economy has, not devolved into, but been purposely engineered into. I may wish the Market forces be with you, but they are far more often than not ranged against you in this new "Everything's a sucker's bet" economy, wherein our leader is the President and founder of Grift You, yet, as per their usual no's for news, there is nary a word of what that portends for the future of our Why Ma Wiipublic.