[Norman Ball]

Well Janice...

I take responsibility for sending you down the PTT rabbit hole. As Brian pointed out I was referring to the TPP and transposed the acronym. I spent 15 years in the telecommunications industry and will spare you a toe-to-toe debate on tariffs and deregulation. So my apologies for opening up a false trail and your tireless research as a result.

You insist on characterizing Inside Russia as a propaganda site when it originate perhaps 20% of its own content, and performs little more than a 'Drudge-like' wire editor function for the rest. The quality of the content is uneven, granted, but broadly gathered. Caveat emptor is the rule for any entity that troubles itself to deliver news to your doorstep. Media assets are not valued at billions of dollars for their agnostic aspirations. Media influences. Go back and read your Adorno and Marcuse. No, I'm only kidding because you will crack the books. You're a marvel of fastidiousness. Or to paraphrase Adorno, it is not simply that mass media has the potential to deceive, but that it deceives as a matter of course.

A very brief word on conspiracy. When the owners of 50% of America's weath, all 400 of them, can comfortably be seated within a small auditorium, society has permitted the requisite scale to exist for conspiracies to be hatched, or can we at least say the alignment of interests is so compelling that potential for abuse looms large? These people share similar tax strategies, estate planning, security concerns, schooling. So in a number of 'benign' social contexts they have every reason to talk amongst themselves and further leverage their interests; this without even broaching nefarious world domination plans. Undue wealth concentration is an accident waiting to happen if it hasn't happened already.

I am a late-arriving Christian which means I am an eschatologist. History is purposeful, directed and ends rather cinematically. You might say the Judeo-Christian God is the ultimate eschatologist. There are secular eschatoligies too, Workers' Paradises and the like. So we may yet share something in common besides our good looks.