The Bullshit Filter

Talking about the Iowa caucus (Shadow, ACRONYM, Buttgieg, etc) and the new evidence the CIA spying on US allies since the end of WWII. The post BFTN 63 - Friends Don't Spy On Friends appeared first on The BS Filter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Pabon from strategic advisory firm Fulcrum22 joins me to give his perspective on China - business, political and social. John's an American who currently lives in Melbourne, and spent the last ten years living in Shanghai. We talk about the ol' Communism v Capitalism debate, the treatment of the Uyghurs, working conditions in factories, IP theft, and how most Chinese view their government. Th...

Alan MacLeod joins me again to discuss the latest news about Venezuela and Iran. The post BFTN 62 - Venezuela and Iran Update appeared first on The BS Filter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We talk about Australia's bushfires and America's assassination of Soleimani. The post BFTN 61 - Fires and Assassinations appeared first on The BS Filter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The oligarchs have worked out the model for getting people to vote for "killer clowns". The Democrats gave Trump $738 billion to buy weapons. And America is using AGM-114R9X Hellfire drones to terrorize the world. George Monbiot on the killer clowns. Media Bias Chart Hellfire drones Trust No-one Manovich on why fake news isn't the [...] The post BFTN 60 - Killer Clowns & Terror Drones appeared fir...

Finally, in 2002, a poor, uneducated farmer and union leader, Evo Morales, ran for the Presidency, coming third, despite the US ambassador warning Bolivians that they would be punished if Morales won. Then, in the general election of December 2005, Morales won, becoming the first indigenous President in a country where 62% of the population identified as indigenous. The US, of course, were furious...

We pick up our series on the political history of Bolivia in 1943 with the government of Major Gualberto Villarroel López, which ended in violence and his assassination a few years later. The country continued to have coup after coup. In 1967, Che Guevara tried to start a revolution in the country, which ended up with his execution by the CIA. The post BFTN 58 - Bolivia 2 appeared first on The BS...

Alan MacLeod joins me to discuss the propaganda model and how it applies to media bias on the coverage of Bolivia, Venezuela, Corbyn, Ukrainegate and Russiagate. Alan is a member of the Glasgow University Media Group. He is author of "Bad News From Venezuela: 20 Years of Fake News and Misreporting." His latest book, Propaganda [...] The post BFTN 57 - Alan MacLeod on Media Bias appeared first on T...

President Evo Morales was recently the subject of a coup, and has fled to Mexico. In order to provide some perspective on the current events, we take a detailed look at the political history of Bolivia - a poor country that has survived an endless number of military coups, often supported and financed by the CIA. The post BFTN 56 - Bolivia 1 appeared first on The BS Filter. Learn more about your a...

Americans were SHOCKED to discover that Russia had interfered in their 2016 Presidential elections. How dare they interfere with the democratic process of a sovereign nation! Of course, those same Americans probably have no idea that their own country has, according to the research done by my guest today, done the same thing over 80 [...] The post BFTN 55 - Intervening In Foreign Elections appeare...

It's gloating time in the West with the suicide of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. On today's show we examine the history of ISIS and how the United States and their allies created the conditions for ISIS and then proceeded to fund and arm it. We look at the media's near complete lack of skepticism [...] The post BFTN 54 - Schadenfreude appeared first on The BS Filter. Learn more about your ad c...

This week we have more on the Biden business in the Ukraine including some background on the Euromaidan uprising, the role of energy supply in the regime change and Russia's annexation of Crimea, and the role of the United States (via USAID) in the overthrow of Yanukovych. As evidence for the latter, we play the [...] The post BFTN 53 - Regime Change In Ukraine appeared first on The BS Filter. Lea...

A lot of people have asked us, in our great and unmatched wisdom, to explain what's going on with Syria, Trump, Turkey and the Kurds. The post BFTN 52 - Trump & The Kurds appeared first on The BS Filter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We try to go a little deeper on the Trump-Ukraine-Biden story than most of the media coverage. Apart from Trump and Joe Biden, we talk about the roles that Viktor Shokin, Mykola Zlochevsky, Viktor Yanukovich, Petro Poroshenko, Dmytro Firtash, Volodymyr Zelensky and Yuriy Lutsenko have in this story, along with American players Hunter Biden, Devon [...] The post BFTN 51 - Biden & Burisma appeared f...

In this final episode of our China series, we talk about: How China might weaponize its holdings of more than $1.1 trillion worth of U.S. Treasuries, aka the "nuclear option" The risk of China starting a currency war with the US China's current position on IP protection And we finish with a little more discussion [...] The post 6.4 China's Economy - Part 4 appeared first on The BS Filter. Learn mo...

There's been lots of talk in the media about Trump's trade war with China. One aspect about it that I find interesting is that I never see any talk, in this context, about the fact that China is a Communist country - a Communist country that seems to be a major economic threat to the USA, [...] The post 6.3 China's Economy - Part 3 appeared first on The BS Filter. Learn more about your ad choices....

There's been lots of talk in the media about Trump's trade war with China. One aspect about it that I find interesting is that I never see any talk, in this context, about the fact that China is a Communist country - a Communist country that seems to be a major economic threat to the USA, [...] The post 6.2 China's Economy - Part 2 appeared first on The BS Filter. Learn more about your ad choices....

There's been lots of talk in the media about Trump's trade war with China. One aspect about it that I find interesting is that I never see any talk, in this context, about the fact that China is a Communist country - a Communist country that seems to be a major economic threat to the USA, [...] The post 6.1 China's Economy - Part 1 appeared first on The BS Filter. Learn more about your ad choices....

The plan this week was to interview Alan MacLeod about his new excellent book "Propaganda in the Information Age" but he missed the call, so we talked about it without him instead. We'll get him on next week for a follow up. The book is an internet-era update on Herman and Chomsky's 1988 classic "Manufacturing [...] The post BFTN 50 - The Propaganda Model appeared first on The BS Filter. Learn mor...

We finish our mini-biography on the new Prime Minister of the UK, Boris Johnson, aka "BoJo", or, as I like to call him, "The Big BJ". In Ray's absence, I'm joined again by my good friend Trevor Bell from the The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove. The post BFTN 49 - Boris Part 2 appeared first on The BS Filter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode I'm joined by Brisbane's #1 podcaster, the fabulous Trevor Bell, co-host of The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove ("a weekly podcast which takes a look at news, political events, culture, ethics and the transformations taking place in our society"), who is standing in for Papa Bear who is on vacation.... AGAIN. [...] The post BFTN 48 - Boris Part 1 appeared first on The BS Filter. Lea...

On this week's news show we look the recent headlines concerning Iran - their arrest of 17 CIA spies, and the seizure of oil tankers by both the British and the Iranians. Who and what should we believe? Iran detains 17 citizens accused of spying for the CIA Iran Executes Defense Ministry Staffer Over Spying [...] The post BFTN 47 - CIA Spies in Iran appeared first on The BS Filter. Learn more abou...

How do these shell companies get used? We provide some examples. We also talk about the fallout of the Panama Papers, Operation Car Wash, the murder of Maltese journalist Daphne Galizia, why Americans didn't show up in the Panama Papers as much as we might have expected, and how some of the world's largest banks [...] The post Bullshit 5.3 - The Panama Papers (part 3) appeared first on The BS Filt...

After more than a year of analysis, the first news stories were published on April 3, 2016, by SZ and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). Some 4.8 million leaked files were emails, 3 million were database entries, 2.2 million PDFs, 1.2 million images, 320,000 text files, and 2242 files in other formats. Edward [...] The post Bullshit 5.2 - The Panama Papers (part 2) a...

In 2015, journalist Bastian Obermayer from the Süddeutsche Zeitung , a Southern German Newspaper, was approached online by an anonymous source. He or she provided him with a database from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. They are the Panama Papers. Named in the leak were 12 current or former world leaders, 128 other public officials and politicians, [...] The post Bullshit 5.1 - The Panama Pap...