Here’s How to Screw the Rich
Interesting points from TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington:
Tax the rich. Those bastards.
I get why people who aren’t rich hate those that are. No one really cares what they have, they only care what they have relative to others. When there is inequality, and there always is, even the hyper intelligent call for a redistribution of wealth. It’s an enduring longing for us as a species, and no evidence to the contrary will convince people it just doesn’t work in any large group.
What I really didn’t understand until recently though is why so many rich Americans seem to loathe their richness as much as everyone else does. Many in Silicon Valley want to tax the rich into the middle class and let government spend and spend and spend. The super rich tech elite flock to Obama, joining in the call to screw the rich as loudly as all the rest.
Then I figured it out. As I wrote then, the super rich won’t mind at all if we “tax the rich” as it’s currently defined. That’s because people who are super rich don’t really pay taxes…
New York Times Scorns The Occupy Wall Street Protests
Photo: David Shankbone (CC)
Peeved by the mainstream media “blackout” of the Occupy Wall Street protest? Worse than those who have ignored it is the New York Times, which ran a steaming turd of an article (titled “Gunning for Wall Street, With Faulty Aim”). The takeaway is more or less that the protesters have no legitimate grievances, and the piece concludes with a wise middle-aged Wall Street trader lampooning the activists for owning Apple laptops. (The protesters favor higher taxation of the super-rich, yet they also own computers! What hypocrites!) Their coverage:
By late morning on Wednesday, Occupy Wall Street, a noble but fractured and airy movement of rightly frustrated young people, had a default ambassador in a half-naked woman who called herself Zuni Tikka. A blonde with a marked likeness to Joni Mitchell and a seemingly even stronger wish to burrow through the space-time continuum and hunker down in 1968, Ms.…
Prescription Drug Use Now Kills More People Than Traffic Accidents
Photo: 51fifty (CC)
Via the Inquisitr:
In 1979 the U.S. Government began tracking drug-related deaths and for the first time those deaths have surpassed the number of traffic fatalities on an annual basis. The most recent statistics which were taken in 2009 shows that 37,485 people died in traffic related accidents while 36,284 people died from drug related activities in a one year period.
Surprisingly the main culprit of those deaths were not street illegal drugs but rather prescription options including Xanax, OxyContin and the main culprit Vicodin which killed more people than cocaine and heroin combined.
Speaking to the Los Angeles Times a Santa Barbara sheriff said: “The problem is right here under our noses in our medicine cabinets.”
The study also revealed that traffic related fatalities have actually fallen by a third since the 1970s even as the number of drivers using American roadways continues to increase, while drug related deaths have doubled in…
Best Tabloid Headline Ever?
I have to congratulate Gavon Laessig at Buzzfeed for bringing this to the world’s attention. Really quite extraordinary what the headline writers at the British tabloids are capable of!
Get ready to feel guilty after you stop laughing. Percy Foster was a 3-foot-6-inch dwarf who starred in the UK porno “Hi-Ho Hi-Ho, It’s Up Your Arse We Go.”
He bore an uncanny resemblance to celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. Welsh agriculture officials discovered Foster’s body in an underground chamber, leading to this grisly headline from British tabloid The Sunday Sport.
Quite possibly a new low in print journalism…
Media Fail: Is Anonymous Helping Time Warner’s Bottom Line?
Photo: Vincent Diamante (CC)
Way more positive social action than feeding their machine, but an interesting shot at activism from Nick Bilton in the NY Times:
Anonymous, the hacker group, has jostled with the Iranian government and the Church of Scientology and has briefly shut down the Web sites of Visa, MasterCard and other global corporations.
When members appear in public to protest censorship and what they view as corruption, they don a plastic mask of Guy Fawkes, the 17th-century Englishman who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament.
Stark white, with blushed pink cheeks, a wide grin and a thin black mustache and goatee, the mask resonates with the hackers because it was worn by a rogue anarchist challenging an authoritarian government in “V for Vendetta,” the movie produced in 2006 by Warner Brothers.
What few people seem to know, though, is that Time Warner, one of the largest media companies in the…
Dylan Ratigan Blasts U.S. Political & Banking Ties and the Partisan Hacks’ Excuses (Video)
Britain Is Only ‘Four Meals Away From Anarchy’
[Site notice: Re-posting this now (originally posted 7/19/2011) due to a timely observation (of an older post) from Disinfo.com commenter SuddenlySpam.] A blast from the past for all you newshounds. Enjoy via the Times:
Modern civilisation may not be quite as safe as we thought. Britain’s security services have been privately warning their staff that western societies are just 48 hours from anarchy. MI5’s maxim is that society is “four meals away from anarchy”. In other words, the security agency believes that Britain could be quickly reduced to large-scale disorder, including looting and rioting in the event of a catastrophe that stops the supply of food.
The maxim will provoke debate over whether MI5 is over-egging the threat, partly to justify its rapidly growing budget. It also opens a wider question as to whether civilised societies could so quickly revert to primitive behaviour. MI5 — whose motto is “regnum defende”, defend the…
Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare … But It Could Never Happen Here
A very disturbing bit of reading from from Al Jazeera during the current American election season. Paul Rosenberg writes in Al Jazeera:
Prior to 9/11, the Taliban government in Afghanistan did not register very much on American radar screens, with one notable exception: when it blew up two colossal images of the Buddha in Bamiyan province in early 2001. But destruction of treasured artifacts isn’t just limited to the Taliban.
There’s a right-wing politico-religious presence centred in the US, but with a global reach, engaging in similar practises, destroying religious and cultural artifacts as a key aspect of its ideology of “strategic level spiritual warfare” (SLSW).
Until recently a fringe evangelical movement, warned against as deviant, “spiritual warfare” is rapidly positioning itself within America’s mainstream political right. It’s well past time for political journalists to start covering what this movement is up to.
How ‘Experts’ Are Used in News
Charlie Brooker’s take on how news ‘experts’ are doing little more than guessing, which is more or less what we could do, in the Guardian:
I went to bed in a terrible world and awoke inside a worse one. At the time of writing, details of the Norwegian atrocity are still emerging, although the identity of the perpetrator has now been confirmed and his motivation seems increasingly clear: a far-right anti-Muslim extremist who despised the ruling party.
Presumably he wanted to make a name for himself, which is why I won’t identify him. His name deserves to be forgotten. Discarded. Deleted. Labels like “madman”, “monster”, or “maniac” won’t do, either. There’s a perverse glorification in terms like that. If the media’s going to call him anything, it should call him pathetic; a nothing.
On Friday night’s news, they were calling him something else. He was a suspected terror cell with probable links to…
Rupert Murdoch Optical Illusion
Via The World’s Best Ever, while being grilled by Britain’s Parliament yesterday, the News Corp. head was revealed in him true form thanks to an extremely unfortunate background:
Media Roots Radio: News Censorship, Nuclear Energy, War & Revolution, 9/11 Truth, Be Your Own Leader
Via Media Roots Radio::
This episode covers sensationalism in the corporate media about meaningless issues, media censorship about nuclear energy and the terrifying reality of Fukushima, issues surrounding war and US imperialism, the current global democratic revolution and the need for more artists to get involved in politics, Charlie Veitch’s 180 regarding 9/11 and the importance for us to be our own leaders in our quest for truth.
Adam Curtis Paints Rupert Murdoch As Satan
Rupert Murdoch at the 2007 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting. (CC)
The British phone hacking saga has brought to light the Machiavellian machinations of Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation like never before. Ted Hope reminds us on his blog today that the BBC’s amazing Adam Curtis (The Power of Nightmares) wrote very revealingly about Murdoch earlier this year (using great video clips — go to the source to view them):
Rupert Murdoch doesn’t like the BBC.
And sometimes the BBC doesn’t seem to like Rupert Murdoch either.
Following the principle that you should know your enemy, the BBC has assiduously recorded the relentless rise of Rupert Murdoch and his assault on the old “decadent” elites of Britain.
And I thought it would be interesting to put up some of the high points.
It is also a good way to examine how far his populist rhetoric is genuine, and how far its is a smokescreen to disguise the…
Crikey! FBI Opens Inquiry Into Murdoch’s News Corp.
Richard A. Serrano, Jim Puzzanghera and Kim Geiger write in the LA Times:
The phone hacking scandal that has ignited a political firestorm in Britain jumped the Atlantic on Thursday as the FBI opened an investigation into whether British reporters tried to access cellphone messages and records of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in violation of U.S. law.
The preliminary probe further rattled the New York-based global media empire of Rupert Murdoch, who was forced this week to withdraw his $12-billion bid to take over Britain’s largest satellite broadcaster, and raises new questions about the future of News Corp.
U.S. officials said the FBI is trying to determine if a full investigation is warranted, and no evidence has yet emerged to confirm that News Corp. employees sought to hack phones in the United States. But the unfolding scandal sent the company’s battered stock down another 3% in trading.
Evidence of Murdoch’s Newspapers Distorting News to Fuel Racism
Media disinformation and negativity against non-Western cultures in Australia is a terminal disease spreading into the bloodstream of the mainstream media industry in Australia. The following incident demonstrated how easy it is to demonize a Chinese restaurant in Melbourne through the manipulation of news using the techniques of factual omission, misleading heading, misleading bullet-point-highlight, misleading bold-highlight and the editorializing of content using a series of subjective and strong wordings to sell the personal opinion of the journalist or editor as news.
How did Murdoch’s Newspapers demonise a Chinese Restaurant in Melbourne?
Can you tell the problem with the following report by the Herald Sun?
St Kilda Chinese restaurant food bill handed to man in ambulance
By Jessica Craven From: Herald Sun April 26, 2011 7:21PM
- Man suffered seizure while dining at Chinese restaurant
- Man given bill as he was being loaded into ambulance
- Restaurant manager said someone had to pay for meal
A CHINESE restaurant that slapped a customer…
Sheen Trumps Palin and More Junk Food News
Illustration: ssoosay via Flickr (CC)
Abby Martin writes on Media Roots:
“We are awash in electronic hallucinations. The worse it gets, the more we retreat into those hallucinations. Dying cultures always sever themselves from reality, because reality becomes so difficult to face, and we’re no exception to that.” — Chris Hedges, interview with Media Roots
Of Tiger Blood and Birthers
During the first four days of the corporate media’s fanatical coverage of actor Charlie Sheen’s drug-addled, tiger-blooded neurosis, four more US soldiers were killed in combat in Afghanistan. Yet, CNN only took notice after a Facebook campaign initiated by a fellow soldier went viral, which pitted the coverage of fallen soldiers against the celebrity addict. The campaign galvanized tens of thousands of people to write the following on their Facebook pages:
“Charlie Sheen is all over the news because he’s a celebrity drug addict, while Andrew Wilfahrt 31, Brian Tabada 21, Rudolph Hizon 22, Chauncy Mays…
BBC Scotland Shows You Hitler’s Weather Forecast and a Strange Looking Rudolf Hess (Video)
Disinfo.com site note: New video link, thanks to commenters below.
Why Are Democrats So Weak? Thoughts on the Weiner ‘Scandal’ (Video)
Rachel Maddow speaks with Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks who has plenty to say:
