Posted on 03/18/2026 8:19:05 AM PDT by moviefan8
he USS Gerald Ford is headed for service repairs in Crete days after experiencing an hourslong fire while deployed in the Red Sea for service in the Iran war.
The aircraft carrier will spend over a week in port at the Naval Support Activity Souda Bay for repairs, according to the U.S. Naval Institute. The ship's move from the Middle East comes after a fire that started in the laundry area on Thursday reportedly burned through part of the ship's sleeping quarters and lasted about 30 hours before it was extinguished.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
In 2021 they got away with it.
They lied about Covids mortality rate. Given as 20% initially, turns out to be .2%, or 1/100th what was claimed.
They lied about the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness.
They lied about the origin of the virus, Wuhan.
They lied about gain of function testing and said we don’t engage in that.
They lied about the effectiveness of masks and social distancing, pretending that a 50 nm virus can be filtered out by a mask that can’t filter anything smaller than 200 - 500 nm.
They pushed for vaccine mandates and sold that as some great idea despite violating people’s basic rights and their privacy, not giving no concern to what they re doing to people.
Yeah sure, things are really different today.
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You once had literally thousands of local newspapers (all the way through the early 80s), and the Internet was free in the early 90s. But today, in the age of government censorship, far greater government secrecy (government transparency rolled back post 2001), and collusion with the media and social media on certain topics, with social media in the hands of two or three people where one person alone controls over 50% of what people see and hear, and the MSM is really just 6 major media conglomerates that control ~90% of what people see or hear on TV, you no longer have a free media.
The era of major media all merging began in the mid 80s: https://teachdemocracy.org/online-lesson/media-mergers-and-the-public-interest/#:~:text=In%20the%201980s%2C%20President%20Ronald,a%20wave%20of%20media%20mergers.
What you have in the US is 200+ channels on TV but really just a few people that have the reigns in their hands, and when they decide to take a certain direction on an issue or during the elections, you’ll see near all the media follow the lead.
For example, Mark Zuckerberg in reality is motivated by the threat of government applying the Sherman Act against him and the Trump administration in their first term really did go down that road full force. (((ALL))) of today’s Meta went vehemently and overwhelmingly anti-Trump in the Biden-Trump elections and guess where the majority of Americans get their “news” from today? Social Media.
Sure, Big Media a whole lot of lying. So did Big Government. But New Media enabled us to counter the lies. Without New Media, nobody would have known that we were being lied to about the Wuhanic Plague.
In the 1970s, they would have gotten away with it, as they did with the "Swine Flu" swindle. I know, because I WAS THERE.
I'm not saying the situation today is perfect. It's not. And maybe it was better ten or twenty years ago. That's arguable. But the 1960s, '70s, and '80s were not some golden age of media transparency. Far from it. 2026 is better than 1976.
LOL,
Unless they deplatform you, ban you from a social media site, shadow ban you, or delete your posts because they don’t like what you’re saying.
I get what you’re saying.
You are right, to a degree. We can chat and share our ideas here on Covid while that nonsense was going on. The insurrection, even just calling it that was another such BS topic (it was a protest). The elections of 2020 were questionable and yet another topic where the MSM and big tech played a huge role in burying it. With Ukraine, our government, MSM and big tech allowed Ukrainian state propaganda to flood the US (still to this day) all while our government censors the other side (Over 40 Russian based media outlets are blocked, as is much of the Russian government and all you see is a small portion of what they actually produce) but with Ukraine you get FLOODED with this:
FR only reaches a small and niche audience of likeminded folks and it’s not what will pop up first when you do a Google search on a topic, nor is it plastered on the Yahoo, MSN, etc. homepage. The big guys and government control the horn.
Do you realize, Russia made NATO expansion THE key issue already all the way back in 1990? It was a REQUIREMENT for German reunification! They have consistently, repeatedly, stated that they do not want NATO expanding Eastward and we did it anyway. They complained when the central European states joined and they tripped a fuse when the Baltic states were admitted in 2004. After which they began rearming and in 2008 when we attempted to bring the Republic of Georgia into NATO they stopped us, with force. Their equivalent of a secretary of state has talked about, their President has talked about it (Yeltsin, Putin, Medvedev), it’s an issue in their media that is discussed at length over YEARS. And in October 2021 when Biden decided to give the green light for Ukraine to join NATO it was hardly even mentioned in our MSM, how can that be? Do you really think the ABSENCE of this topic in our media was an accident?
When this war started, if you ask the average American, they literally could not even give you Russia’s point of contention. The way it was presented is as if Russia is merely doing a land grab. All you heard was unsolicited qualifying remarks such as “unprovoked” and “war of aggression.” What do you think that did to perceptions?
Yes, you and I can voice our opinions about Covid in this dark little corner of the WWW called the FR, but even this post between you and I might get read by 4 people, but when Google changes their rankings to push certain stories down and others up, it makes MILLIONS read what they want.
Seems like the ship is a dump.
This is one of the things I’ve always loved about FR on just about any topic, but especially about military matters, you will always have high quality responses like yours that really inform people like me who don’t have your experience. Thank you for your service and for your post.
My civilian career was maintenance mechanic with strong HVAC and Electrical back ground. I worked in a healthcare center which was on a 50 acre complex consisting of 5 story 200 bed nursing home, a retirement community and subdivision. One of my responsibilities was cleaning the dryers lint filters every night. Lint flash fires are pretty common especially in gas dryers due to flames from the pilot lights.
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