B5 Systems

And now, for the rest of the story

Last week, the main stream media lost its collective mind (yet again) when they created a narrative that Erik Prince was bringing Blackwater (the PMC) back because President Trump announced a withdrawl of US military forces from Syria and signalled a desire to pull out of Afghanistan combined with a teaser full-page ad in the latest issue of Recoil magazine. They were just sure that US troops would be replaced with mercenaries in the employ of former Navy SEAL and Blackwater founder, Erik Prince. “We Are Coming” was the proof they offered the public.

But as more ads begin to appear in firearms magazines, it’s quite apparent that the speculation is what refer to in the business as “fake news.”

What the press doesn’t know is that Erik Prince may have sold Blackwater years ago, but he retained ownership of the name and associated trademarks. We first encountered Blackwater Ammunition during IWA, back in March. Maybe it’s availability in the US is something new, but the brand’s existence isn’t exactly news.

I often ponder. If the MSM gets so much wrong that I know about, what are they misleading me on in subject areas where I have no visibility?

49 Responses to “And now, for the rest of the story”

  1. jellydonut says:

    The media is wrong on everything except for the most plainly obvious, and in those cases they are often deliberately wrong because they have an agenda.

    The notion of a paid journalist, someone with zero expertise in anything whatsoever, being paid to tell the rest of us everything about the world, is a 20th century creation, and history will remember them as an odd 20th century phenomenon. Newspapers are basically all shambling corpses at this point, and only boomers watch TV any more.

    • Yawnz says:

      Except “the media” isn’t limited to newspapers and TV, hasn’t been for some time. There is zero functional difference between newspaper, a TV news channel, and a media website, so claiming that “only boomers watch TV anymore” isn’t relevant at all to the issue.

      Newspapers and TV news aren’t “going away” per se, they’re just shifting to a far more prolific medium, that of the Internet. No need to wait all day for a team of “journalists” to cobble together a piece and print out thousands of copies or for a camera crew and anchors to film a show when all you have to do is get some harpy or fuckboy to type up some garbage and then have it disseminated instantly to a much larger audience. To add to it, you can throw money at ISPs and ban competing and/or dissenting views and edit photos, videos, and documents far more effectively than you could with old media.

      • jellydonut says:

        The internet isn’t making any money for journalism. The move to the internet is not some sort of panacea, it is in fact the death of ‘professional’ journalism, because it has made people realize that you don’t need a fancy name and a URL to lie on the internet.

        • Yawnz says:

          Bullshit it isn’t. How do you think media companies who aren’t in print or on TV are surviving? If it “isn’t making any money for journalism”, why do you think more and more media outlets are moving to the Internet in the first place?

          “Professional journalism” died long before the Internet and lying never required a fancy name or URL before, or even the Internet itself. All you needed was someone saying the opposite and a way to get the opposing message to the general public. Media has always been a game of who could reach more people the fastest.

          No one claimed that the Internet was a miracle drug, but it is objectively superior to both print and television because you can reach far more people far faster. The “paid journalist” concept will continue because it is an idea so purposefully ambiguous. I could be paid $0.50 to write some dumpster fire story and still be a “paid journalist”.

  2. Richard says:

    Interesting. Would you be able to provide a link or two for the msm news articles talking about this conspiracy? I’ve only been able to find articles from fringe internet based resources and, of course, RT.

  3. Strike-Hold says:

    In the immortal words of Mark Twain:

    “A man who doesn’t read the newspaper is uninformed. A man who does is misinformed.”

  4. Lasse says:

    Anyone who has ever printed anything in a mag knows that there are something called lead times and you can’t get the an ad in a mag the following day..

  5. Marcus says:

    The lowest rated and least respected vocation is “journalism”. Dental surgery gets rated higher, and the media proves every day why that is so. They are nothing but a dishonest cheerleading operation for a single, despotic point of view and serve as the Media Division for the Left Wing. Bless their hearts.

  6. Chris says:

    This is known as the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. One of my favorite heuristics. As described my Michael Crichton:

    “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
    In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

    • rick says:

      interesting. so basically after KNOWing that the article you have expertise with is BS, you assume the rest of the articles are OK.

  7. Smithjd says:

    I’ve read that in the days of the USSR, with their sole, state news source “Pravda”, people would say “There is no truth in the news, and no news in the truth.”

    Sadly, we are at that moment in the west with countless “news” outlets publishing their “stories”.

    • Kirk says:

      That’s incomplete, to be honest:

      As the names of the main Communist newspaper and the main Soviet newspaper, Pravda and Izvestia, meant “the truth” and “the news” respectively, a popular saying was “there’s no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestia”.

      Citation:

      https://www.nytimes.com/1987/05/12/opinion/the-editorial-notebook-dear-pravda.html?pagewanted=1

      What’s sad to observe is that our own media aren’t much better, and never have been. It’s just that the slant is less obvious, and the control much more diffuse. Where the Soviets had the Communist Party to run the party line, we have an entire diffused class of traitor “intellectuals” running the show into the ground, and the mass media is a major part of that whole phenomenon. The inmates grabbed control of the asylum, a long time ago, and now we’re having to live with the consequences.

  8. Dellis says:

    Sadly, even Fox news gets little air time in our houshold now, I only like to watch, oddly, Kennedy on Fox Business, Cavuto and Gutfeld.

    Other than that I just listen to local morning talk radio.

    Too much TV has become filled with personal opinions, made up crap and “gotcha moments” where the words “racist” and “sexist” have become so common place they have lost their impact, their effect to describe true instances of those words.

    • SamHill says:

      Agree, Dellis. Fox has been in decline. I think it is because they were or wanted to be bought by Disney. Of course Fox, as a whole, was never really “right wing” as many think, it was just far to the right of all the other main stream news that are very far left.

      I check one America news for headlines, and keep up with a couple guys on youtube. Other than that, worrying about these stories is pretty much as useful as watching a fiction movie, mediocre entertainment, at best.

      • Kirk says:

        Fox has never been “conservative”, other than in a marketing sense. You sit down and actually watch the news they chose to show, and the issues they highlight, and that’s blindingly obvious. At best, Fox represents a center-left view, and that’s about it. Some commentators verge on the edges of being conservative, but the reality is, they are just mouthing the words.

        You want the truth, you have to go looking at the stories they don’t report; most of the lies of the media are lies of omission, the failure to tell the whole story, or not cover it at all. Fox is as bad as the rest, and the fact that the left hates them as much as it does is a delicious joke; the reality is, Fox is completely at ease with 90% of their agenda, and merely represents a marketing ploy by the Murdoch’s: They want you to think they’re conservative, while sliding a thoroughly left-wing slant down your throat, tasting of honey all the while.

        We haven’t had a truly conservative mass media outlet in this country in my lifetime, and I doubt we ever will again. Well, maybe after the next major cultural collapse, when the current set of assholes has finally discredited themselves utterly… Which is something I’ve been expecting for years, but still hasn’t happened. It is truly astonishing how obvious things are, and yet the average person still buys this BS like Fox being somehow “conservative”. You keep telling yourself that, and when you finally wake up, if you ever do, you’ll be exquisitely embarrassed to recognize that the cognitive dissonance you should have felt observing this took that long to manifest itself in your mind.

        Fox. Conservative. It is truly to laugh, and laugh hard…

        • Ed says:

          Check out OAN (One America News), it is reporting all day long, even international, they have their own produced commercials centered around the U.S. Constitution and history about our country. The only two shows on in the PM are Ledger and Tipping Point. They are the only two commentators on the entire programming. Very refreshing.

          • Dellis says:

            Thanks Ed, I will look into that.

            I find Prager a great listen, even though he is not news per say (along with Levin) but I find his insight informative.

  9. Alpha2 says:

    Journalism used to be a very respectable career filled with honesty, integrity and the desire to get it right. Anymore it seems that the majority just throw out the first thing that comes to mind without due diligence and research creating the most sensational story they can come up with to grab headlines. I know there are some out there that still put in a lot of effort and immerse their lives in telling the story of others but it is far far and few in between.

    • Kirk says:

      Oh, bullshit. When, specifically, was this “Golden Age of Journalistic Integrity and Honesty” you fantasize about?

      Was it during the Yellow Journalism phase, back in the 1890s, when Hearst agitated for war with Spain? Was it during the interminable years of pre-Civil War lies? Maybe during WWI, when official propaganda ruled the roost? How about during the whole run-up to WWII, when dear old Adolf was the man of the hour, along with his other totalitarian co-conspirators like FDR? Time had Hitler as ‘effing “Man of the Year”, ferchrissakes…

      These bastards have always been mendacious liars, and the lie that they were ever “fair and balanced” is the biggest one they’ve ever told. It’s just that you weren’t paying attention, my friend, that that claim is even vaguely credible. The media opens its collective mouth; it lies. That’s what they are, that’s what they produce.

      • Alpha2 says:

        So all media and journalists are war time puppets that disseminate propaganda, that is your argument…cuzz yeah that is all that they have ever reported on, war? Your comments are limited to one subject.

        • Kirk says:

          My comments are limited to nothing. Every media source I’ve ever had the time to cross-check, has produced the same conclusion: They’re mostly bullshit, written by uninformed hacks that are as dumb as rocks. Doesn’t matter if it’s the local small-town paper reporting on the city council, or the NYT, they have all been mendacious liars–And, on the outside of it all, if you can’t tell for sure, the safest assumption is that they’re lying, and that the reality of any given situation they report is essentially unknowable, because you can’t even rely on being able to tell their bias. It’d be one thing if the lies and malfeasance were consistent, but they can’t even manage that. One day the reporter tells the story from a standpoint benefiting party A; the next, it’s party B, and when you go to talk to the reporter directly, what you find out is that they fundamentally don’t understand the entire issue, and are basically just parroting whatever the last person they talked to said, or what their editor told them to write.

          I’ve been paying attention to these guys since I was a teenager reading two-three newspapers a day, back when those were still a real “thing”. Took me awhile to pick up on it, but the basic fact is that they’re all a bunch of unreliable, inconsistent liars. Hell, go back to the 1980s, and compare articles written from the same AP or UPI source story; one paper emphasizes one slant on the story, and the other papers in the same market will all basically either echo that slant or try to refute it, using the same AP wire story, all the while having done precisely zero “reporting” of their own, or even attempting to verify from other sources.

          I can remember having the AP source in front of me, that our journalism teacher came up with from his contacts at the local paper, and then comparing that to what was published in the major regional newspapers. Every variant of the story was cut-and-pasted from the original AP wire story, one slant showing the obvious idiocy of a Reagan policy, another supporting it, and a third just reporting the facts while leaving out most of the context and interpretation. What was funniest was to learn that the original AP story had been entirely made up by a reporter that wasn’t even on the scene, and had been working from a draft of the speech Reagan was giving, which in no way resembled the one he actually gave…

          They’ve always been lying hacks. You go back and look at the actual history, and that’s about all it’s ever been. If you rely upon the news media for anything other than the bare facts of a given event, like that it happened at all? You’re delusionally naive. Past the fact of the event, like “There was a tsunami that hit Japan…”, you’re basically just getting entertainment–Especially once they start reporting “human interest” and interpretations of “what it all means”. There are more reporters like Steven Glass and this latest German asshole Claas Relotius than any of us would dare imagine. The amazing thing is how petty some of the shit they lie about–Locally, one of the reporters whose beat is the city council meeting was found to have never actually attended like nine-tenths of those meetings, and was getting the notes from a politically-motivated “friend” on the city staff. Turns out, a bunch of stuff that was voted on and done by the city council was never reported on at all, and most of the voters had no idea at all what the city had been up to. Paper got called out on it, and the reporter still works there… Big lies or small ones, they all tell them.

    • LGonSoldierSystem says:

      This all reminds me of The Wire. Showing the faults in crime, criminal justice, the courts, politics, school systems, and journalism.

  10. Joe says:

    Will they offer stickers?

  11. Tazman66gt says:

    What I’ve always loved is the “unnamed sources” that the media uses. It’s shorthand for, we are making shit up but we need it to sound like it’s real.

  12. Aaron says:

    Eric I disagree. Prince had that photo posted on instagram to gain some type of reaction.

    • Dellis says:

      And?

      All marketing is geared, designed towards “getting a reaction”. If it doesn’t then the marketing has failed.

      Good marketing gets people to talk about it, such as we are here. Positive, negative…if it gets people talking it’s pretty safe to say the marketing worked.

      • Lasse says:

        If he was interested in having the truth out there, he would have made a statement the second anyone thought that PMCs were taking over Syria. Journalists are supposed to find sources and present the story that the sources tell, but if the sources aren’t even willing to put the facts out there, are they any better than the journalists the majority here seems to hate?

        Most media today (regardless of political views) are based around clicks. So a shocking headline will get you more clicks than a plain one. This is why so many of the Russian IRA sites or those kids in Macedonia that wrote fantasy fiction about the election even bothered with it.

  13. Iggy says:

    Not all media is bullshit, but most is.
    Not all private contractor groups are scum, but Eric Prince is.

    • Ed says:

      …and you know that how? ever work for him? Did you serve with him? You sound just like the aforementioned “journalist” discussed above.

    • SSD says:

      If you’re going to talk shit about the guy, at least spell his name right.

  14. El Terryble says:

    95% of the “media” is just the propaganda department for the Democrat Party and the Marxist-Progressive movement. If American’s had known that Iran funded, harbored, and facilitated the transfer of 8 to 10 of the 9/11 hijacker’s from Lebanon, through Iran to Afghanistan and back, in conjunction with high level Hezbollah operatives, one of them named Imad Mughniyah, and that Prince Bandar bin Sultan’s (the former Saudi Ambassador to the US) unlisted phone number was found on the Rolodex of al Qaeda operative named Abu Zaibida, in the month’s and year’s after 9/11, instead of subjecting the American People to how barabaric America is because we water boarded two people and the meat pies at Gitmo weren’t Halal for the first year of it’s opening, the War on Terror might have progressed quite differently.

    https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2018/08/analysis-2-wanted-al-qaeda-leaders-operate-in-iran.php

    https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2018/09/state-department-iran-allows-al-qaeda-to-operate-its-core-facilitation-pipeline.php

    https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2018/08/08/the-al-qaeda-iran-connection/

    • El Terryble says:

      Also, they’ve been lying to us for a long time, and not lying to us about Cuban and KGB involvement in the Kennedy assassination to prevent nuclear conflict, but for rather selfish and nefarious reasons.

      http://thefederalist.com/2018/09/18/need-know-intelligence-agencies-covered-1996-crash-twa-800/

    • El Terryble says:

      Fun fact: The Bolsheviks got their start in the media business by seizing control of the Socialist Democratic Party of Russia’s newspaper’s editorial board. In fact, that is how their named is derived. “Bolshevik” means majority in Russian, and even though they were a minority of members in the SDPR, they were the majority of the Party’s mouthpiece, and they used that platform to seize operating control from those they termed the “minority”, otherwise known as the Mensheviks.

  15. TominVa says:

    I searched for Blackwater and We Are Coming. Closest link to MSM is Military Times and the remaining links are more obscure.

    “…what are they [MSM] misleading me on in subject areas where I have no visibility?”

    Mislead? This is a worrisome post and reminds me of the USA Today discussion post Vegas shooting we had a while back.

    As I said then, no news organization gets it right all the time. And they are businesses struggling to survive as people have the option of getting off in the chicken little echo chamber of their choice. A little sensationalism is understandable and forgivable. The following I think are still good choices for your news feed. To improve the odds of encountering solid reporting, lean towards their print issue contents vice online only.

    The Economist. Probably the best news weekly in the world.
    NY Times. The best national paper we have.
    Christian Science Monitor. They restrict their religion to the back page. Very objective reporting.
    Associated Press. Good app. Pretty darn objective.
    The New Yorker. Some of the best long form journalism out there.
    Your Local Paper. Do you know what’s going on in your own back yard? A lot of folks don’t.

    Happy New Year!

    • SSD says:

      CBS even picked it up.

      • TominVA says:

        Ok I found it. It didn’t pop for me on Google, so I went to the CBS News website.

        The MSM is pretty reliable. They don’t always get it right – they never have – but they’re generally pretty reliable.

        So I take it your a Non-MSM guy? If you wouldn’t mind sharing: what’s your news feed? What sites, mags, papers do you go to?

        • SSD says:

          I don’t trust much anymore. I read multiple sites and look for original sources.

          And no, the MSM doesn’t get much right these days. They have become clickbait. What they aren’t making up, they parrot from others, that’s why I look for original sources to see what was actually said or done.

        • Ed says:

          Are you effing kidding me Tom??? The NY Times and New Yorker? What kind of cucked are you?? Pfft.

          • TominVA says:

            What’s wrong with the NYT?

            The New Yorker? I don’t read it for the fiction or to keep up with the theater scene – not that there’s anything wrong with that. In fact, I really don’t read it much at all, but when I have the time, it does deliver some pretty outstanding reportage. Give it a shot.

            • Ed says:

              Sorry Tom, I’m not into Prog-lib propaganda. If I owned any caged birds, then the NYT might come in handy as cage liner. That’s all they are good for!

              • TominVA says:

                Ok. So, what do you read?

                • Ed says:

                  See below and read El Terryble’s comments. He covers a few of the sources I check in on once in a while. 100% agree with him on learning and knowing history. Not BS indoctrination that has been taking place in the US last 30-25yrs. I f you’re not aware of it then enjoy the “Matrix” you live in!

  16. El Terryble says:

    The NYT, AP, and New Yorker are Left Wing propaganda. The NYT, despite being owned by a Jewish family, hid evidence of the Holocaust to protect FDR and the Soviets. Their lies go back as far as the Ukrainian Terror Famine of 1930-32, where NYT “journalists” covered for Stalin as he perpetrated genocide… Try the Federalist, PJ Media, Frontpage Magazine, or the non-editorial section of the WSJ. Long War Journal is great info on Islamic terrorism.

    • El Terryble says:

      Victor Davis Hanson’s Private Paper’s website has great contemporary analysis from probably one of the most the most acclaimed Military and
      Classical Historians, as well as cultural critic, alive. His book, “Carnage and Culture” is a must read for understanding the Western way of War.

      • El Terryble says:

        To be well versed in military theory and history one should read Hanson, John Keegan, Martin Van Creveld, or B.H. Liddell Hart to begin with. Paul Johnson’s “the History of the American People” is epic, and you can’t do wrong with Bernard Lewis on Middle Eastern History, or Richard Pipes for Soviet and Russian History, a book every American should read that has a direct bearing on our lives today and in the short-term future is Dr. M. Pillsbury’s “The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower”

  17. El Terryble says:

    People should read books to be able to adequately assess current events. Sadly, even the publication industry has been hijacked by the Marxist-Progressive Left, but reading books of substantial volume and merit is absolutely essential to form an adequate knowledge of the world. The news cycle is geared to emotionally entrap you, like sports or professional wrestling. If you have a well versed understanding of History, Political Philosophy (there’s no such thing as political science), Economics, and develop an inquisitive nature to keep learning, you will be well served in not just analyzing current events, but in whatever pursuit you take in life. I recently read that the father of modern Deconstructionist thought, Jacques Derrida, which is basically just a form of cultural Marxism, spent most of his classes teaching the Bible, because in order to understand Western civilization, and deconstruct meaning and interpretation from it, you had to know the Bible.