Reading List: January 6, 2017

Friday.

At The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald hits The Washington Post again for the paper’s propensity to believing the most obvious of red herrings as long as they involve Russia.

While these debacles are embarrassing for the paper, they are also richly rewarding. That’s because journalists — including those at the Post — aggressively hype and promote the original, sensationalistic false stories, ensuring that they go viral, generating massive traffic for the Post (the paper’s executive editor, Marty Baron, recently boasted about how profitable the paper has become).

After spreading the falsehoods far and wide, raising fear levels and manipulating U.S. political discourse in the process (both Russia stories were widely hyped on cable news), journalists who spread the false claims subsequently note the retraction or corrections only in the most muted way possible, and often not at all. As a result, only a tiny fraction of people who were exposed to the original false story end up learning of the retractions.

Green Party 2016 Vice Presidential candidate Ajamu Baraka argues at Black Agenda Report that while Trump absolutely is a fascist, so is Obama.

In the face of the Neo-McCarthyism represented by this legislation and the many other repressive moves of the Obama administration to curtail speech and control information — from the increased surveillance of the public to the use of the espionage act to prosecute journalists and whistleblowers — one would reasonably assume that forces on the left would vigorously oppose the normalization of authoritarianism, especially in this period of heightened concerns about neo-fascism.

Unfortunately, the petit-bourgeois “latte left” along with their liberal allies have been in full collaboration with the state for the past eight years, with the predictable result that no such alarm was issued, nor has any critique or even debate been forthcoming.

On a hopeful note, Maddie Stone reports at Gizmodo that NASA plans to visit the Asteroid Belt object Psyche, a metallic world.

Measuring just 130 miles (210 kilometers) in diameter, the giant hunk of space ore known as 16 Psyche is located in our solar system’s main asteroid belt, three times further from the sun than Earth is. It’s believed to be the stripped core of a small planet destroyed in the very early days of our solar system. Visiting a world like Psyche could offer scientists a chance to learn more about the mysterious interiors of terrestrial planets, including Earth’s — which is one of the reasons NASA has decided to push forward with this somewhat offbeat mission.

So we can know what we’ll look like when we’re gone.