IN REMEMBRANCE: “Journalist Michael Hastings, 33, Dies in Car Crash” / Rachel Maddow
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Category Archives: News
MUSIC-ALTERNATIVE: Zach Sobiech / “Clouds” / 2012
Zach Sobiech was a 17-year-old who passed away on 05.20.2013. He was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer that takes the lives of a large percent of its childhood victims. Given only months to live, Zach turned to music to say goodbye.
My Last Days: Zach Sobiech “Clouds” Celebrity Music Video
My Last Days: Meet Zach Sobiech
PLUTOCRACY: “Conservatives: The New Taliban” / Thom Hartmann
The Republican Taliban has offered its budget. Taliban, you say? Really?
How does the Taliban work? They keep people stupid. Women are witches. Jews are another species. Westerners are degenerate. Only the “wise and powerful” Taliban leaders know what the Koran really says, because they’re the only ones who can read, write, or tell everybody else what’s real.
There was a time when the Muslim world was enlightened. They invented the writing and math that we use today. They were the center of the world for science. But then, in some places, the Taliban took over.
And don’t for a minute think that it’s really all about religion. Religion is just used to manipulate the useful idiots. It’s really about money, power, and control. And that can only be held by thugs like the Taliban when the people are kept poor and stupid.
Here in America, there’s a new Taliban rising. They fetishize guns, just like the Afghan Taliban. They fear women and education. They want to keep the people stupid and in chains.
They’re the plutocrats and the billionaires who rose to power on the heels of Reagan’s trickle-down economics. And now, what’s trickling down to us is their stupidity.
REACTIONISM: “Glenda Jackson Launches Tirade Against Thatcher in Tribute Debate” / The New Statesman
h/t: The New Statesman
INTELLECTUALISM: “The Treason of the Intellectuals” / Chris Hedges
The rewriting of history by the power elite was painfully evident as the nation marked the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Some claimed they had opposed the war when they had not. Others among “Bush’s useful idiots” argued that they had merely acted in good faith on the information available; if they had known then what they know now, they assured us, they would have acted differently. This, of course, is false.
[…]
The critique that I and other opponents of war delivered, no matter how well grounded in fact and experience, turned us into objects of scorn by a liberal elite that cravenly wanted to demonstrate its own “patriotism” and “realism” about national security. The liberal class fueled a rabid, irrational hatred of all war critics. Many of us received death threats and lost our jobs, for me one at The New York Times. These liberal warmongers, 10 years later, remain both clueless about their moral bankruptcy and cloyingly sanctimonious. They have the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocents on their hands.
The power elite, especially the liberal elite, has always been willing to sacrifice integrity and truth for power, personal advancement, foundation grants, awards, tenured professorships, columns, book contracts, television appearances, generous lecture fees and social status. They know what they need to say. They know which ideology they have to serve. They know what lies must be told—the biggest being that they take moral stances on issues that aren’t safe and anodyne. They have been at this game a long time. And they will, should their careers require it, happily sell us out again.
[…]
Julien Benda argued in his 1927 book “The Treason of Intellectuals”—“La Trahison des Clercs”—that it is only when we are not in pursuit of practical aims or material advantages that we can serve as a conscience and a corrective. Those who transfer their allegiance to the practical aims of power and material advantage emasculate themselves intellectually and morally.
[…]
“The desire to tell the truth,” wrote Paul Baran, the brilliant Marxist economist and author of “The Political Economy of Growth,” is “only one condition for being an intellectual. The other is courage, readiness to carry on rational inquiry to wherever it may lead … to withstand … comfortable and lucrative conformity.”
CORPORATE MEDIA: “The Day That TV News Died” / Chris Hedges
I am not sure exactly when the death of television news took place. The descent was gradual—a slide into the tawdry, the trivial and the inane, into the charade on cable news channels such as Fox and MSNBC in which hosts hold up corporate political puppets to laud or ridicule, and treat celebrity foibles as legitimate news. But if I had to pick a date when commercial television decided amassing corporate money and providing entertainment were its central mission, when it consciously chose to become a carnival act, it would probably be Feb. 25, 2003, when MSNBC took Phil Donahue off the air because of his opposition to the calls for war in Iraq.
Donahue and Bill Moyers, the last honest men on national television, were the only two major TV news personalities who presented the viewpoints of those of us who challenged the rush to war in Iraq. General Electric and Microsoft—MSNBC’s founders and defense contractors that went on to make tremendous profits from the war—were not about to tolerate a dissenting voice. Donahue was fired, and at PBS Moyers was subjected to tremendous pressure. An internal MSNBC memo leaked to the press stated that Donahue was hurting the image of the network. He would be a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war,” the memo read. Donahue never returned to the airwaves.
[…]
Television news celebrities are in the business of sales, not journalism. They peddle the ideology of the corporate state. And too many of us are buying.
The lie of omission is still a lie.
Related articles
- Phil Donahue on His 2003 Firing from MSNBC, When Liberal Network Couldn’t Tolerate Antiwar Voices (aislec.wordpress.com)
- Phil Donahue: Chris Matthews Was ‘Threatened’ By Me (huffingtonpost.com)
POLITY IDIOCY: “Are Americans Too Stupid For Democracy?” / Joshua Holland
[…]
Widespread ignorance of objective reality poses a genuine threat to democracy. The people of the United States have ignorance in abundance.
The way representative democracy is supposed to work is pretty simple: you protect the fundamental rights of the minority (so it doesn’t become two wolfs and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner), and then the majority of citizens, acting in their own rational self-interest, elect representatives who will pursue the greatest good for the greatest number of citizens.
That’s the theory, but “rational” is a key word in that formulation. What happens when lots of citizens don’t have a solid grasp of what’s going on in the real world?
Consider some examples that are especially relevant to our current political scene.
– People Don’t Recognize Their Lack of Competence, Can’t Judge the Competence of Politicians
– Politicians Think Their Constituents Are Much Further to the Right Than Polls Suggest
– The Wealthy Think the Wealthy Should Pay More Taxes, But They Don’t Think They’re Wealthy
– Americans Like Sweden’s Distribution of Wealth, and Think They Already Have
– Government Spending Has Decreased Under Obama, But Nobody Knows It
– The Deficit Has Been Stabilized and Is Shrinking, But Only 6 Percent of Americans Know It
– Foreign Aid Is Pocket Change
– So, Should We Just Give Up On Democracy?
SUPREME COURT BIGOT: “Voting Rights Act” / Bob Englehart
The white-wing reactionary troll Antonin Gregory Scalia is a fucking racist bigot!
h/t: Truthdig.com
Related articles
- Is Antonin Scalia the Vilest Person in Washington? (alternet.org)
- Rachel Maddow: Antonin Scalia ‘a troll’ (politico.com)
REASON & LOGIC: “Marco Rubio’s Climate Change Response to State of the Union ‘Pitiful,’ ‘Dangerous'” / Al Gore
CHRISTIAN BIGOTRY: “Would You Say This Man Is Lashing Out At Folks For Being Religious?” / CO State Senator Pat Steadman (D)
h/t MoveOn.org
Always Question Authority 