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20170301

Welcome To The Real World

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The French were all exited thinking Hollywood really, really dug Isabelle Huppert in her role in “Elle,”and that she was going to win the Oscar for best actress—they are so cute.

LOL

Welcome to the real world, suckers!!!

And what is the real world? The real world is whatever Hollywood says the real world is.

Or what the media tells you it is.

Or the political establishment and their cohorts (MSNBC, Fox News, John Steward, John Oliver, the Washington Post, The New Yorker, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera). Their name is Legion.

That said, I have no opinion whatsoever regarding who should have won best actress (considering I haven’t seen any of the movies nominated for best actress, this year, or for that matter, any, hardly at all, of the movies nominated in any category.)

I am sure Emma Stone was very good in “La La Land"—if Hollywood says so, it must be true.

Anyway, and without further ado, here is the list of the winners:



And...

Best Documentary, Short Subject
“Extremis”
”4.1 Miles”
”Joe’s Violin”
”Watani: My Homeland”
”The White Helmets”

Very predictably, The White Helmets won the Oscar in the short documentary category despite the film being denounced by some of its detractors of being a "contrived infomercial".



Welcome to the real world!

The White Helmets, by the way, is the group to which we owe the Mahmoud Raslan's propagandistic exploitation photograph of “the boy in the ambulance” from Aleppo, circulated to intensify the drumbeat for direct U.S. military involvement in Syria.

The photograph famously (or infamously) made the rounds of main stream media worldwide, including, for those of us who watch TV-5 Monde, on well-meaning but politically naive French talk shows such as On n'est pas couché, the now overly simplistic (ever since Aymeric Caron ceased to be one of the polemicists on the program) night-show, hosted by Laurent Ruquier,



The nice thing about Hollywood and the Oscar, or talk-shows like On n'est pas couché, is that they are a useful gauge of the toxicity of mainstream propaganda.

The same thing goes for the papers. Take the Washington Post for instance, if I am curious about, say, what the next CIA's taking point might be for the day, all I have to do is read the column of David Ignatius, who will faithfully publish whatever his CIA sources tell him.

But then again, no one ever accused Davis Ignatius of being politically innocent. Or is he, now? And could he maybe just possibly be—Ah, what was that term again?—a "useful idiot"?



As a rule of thumb, the more naive the medium (Hollywood, a columnist or the host of a talk show), the better.

The way I look at it, if political propaganda were an intoxicating gas, well then, Laurent Ruqier would have to be the idiomatic canary in the coal mine.

Regardez comme il est beau:



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