The highly-praised spot, which features Oscar-winner Clint Eastwood narrating over a collage of images that includes broken towns and factory workers, includes a short clip from videographer Matthew Wisniewski’s montage of the protests over a budget repair bill in Madison, Wisconsin last February. The original clip that Chrysler used from Wisniewski’s video features protestors marching in front of the capitol building, holding signs made by Madison Teachers Inc. union.

As first pointed out by The Nation, the footage in the Chrysler ad (found at :50) has been scrubbed of the pro-union messages on the signs. On one, “Care About Educators Like They Care for Your Child” has been replaced by a picture of an alarm clock.

The whole #OccupyWallStreet thing is cool and all, but it’s not a real party until some heavyweights of radical music start throwing their weight behind it. Fans of industrial metal will be pleased to know that KMFDM has done just that, releasing a new version of their classic track (which the more angsty of us rocked in our angsty bedrooms over a decade ago), A Drug Against War, but have altered their own lyrics to spotlight the recent rebellion against evil psycho-clown corporations.

The vocals in the track are now all about defeating our shady bankster-GMO-Annunaki overlords with the new title A Drug Against Wall Street! Calling upon the 99% to “march to the drum of the ultra heavy beat,” the vocals warn against remaining passive to the ravages of class warfare, warning us rather succinctly that “make no mistake, our children’s future is at stake.”

Shortly after the release of this slammer in its new incarnation, KMFDM’s founder and front-man, Sascha K, stated, “On Oct 15, I suddenly had this idea of doing a new version… using alternate lyrics voicing support of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Working quickly I was able to get it done and posted so it could be made available for free to everyone during the Global Day Of Action.”

Listen to the track at HoodooEngine.

An operation planned by a large international team of law enforcement working over the course of years and carried out with helicopters and machine guns in a military style raid. Taking refuge in a safe room, reportedly found “near a semi-automatic shotgun”, a larger than life villain is dragged out and taken into custody.

Photo: Andreas Bohnenstengel (CC)

No, the target is not a drug kingpin, nor a deposed dictator (hence the safe room – sewage drains are reserved final hiding places for deposed dictators and jihadist masterminds), not a banker responsible for tearing the world economy apart, nor a corrupt Western politician on the leash of said bankers.

Much hay has been made of Kim Dotcom’s expansive mansion, expensive toys and cheesy movie villain antics. For those wondering why Megaupload was the target this fact alone should make it clear. They needed someone who would not invoke sympathy, and in this respect, they chose well. A huge congratulations to our owners for selecting and directing a story in a manner that would qualify them to take the raw footage shot for a reality TV show and create a narrative. If spying on citizens and enforcing laws not yet passed loses its luster, they should have no problem getting a job with Wife Swap or Deadliest Catch.

The takedown of megaupload is framed in the mold of major drug busts to which we have become used when presented with such a laundry list. More ingeniusly, in a fresh new year following the annum of the birth of the Occupy movement, the preceding list brings to mind the lists of bonuses, net worth and ostentatious belongings of hedge fund managers and bank executives. Our master’s meme-schemers had all of us in their thoughts in the planning stages. If this is all a coincidence, why would the presence of a full-size inflatable replica of a Russian T-72 tank on Goldfinger’s, uh, I mean Mr. DotCom’s property be relevant to the story? What does the widespread discussion of his license plates with “POLICE,” “MAFIA,” “V,” “STONED,” “CEO,” “HACKER,” GOOD,” “EVIL,” and “GUILTY” tell us about what the law enforcement side of the story wants us to think? Like Joseph Kennedy, DotCom amassed what to the great majority of us is a vast fortune (a $200 million company isn’t enough to impress our owners) through insider trading, shady schemes and outright fraud before founding the “Mega Conspiracy”…

(Full article)

Intellectual self defense for the awakening of the masses. Understand the methods of sophistry which are utilized to enslave and control the minds of humankind.

government (govern = control / ment = mental/mind)

For a list of some of the more common fallacies please visit ww.nizkor.org.

Abby and Robbie Martin discuss the Iowa Caucus: the GOP candidates, the corporate media’s coverage of the events, cherrypicking racist attributes among the contenders, the phasing out of Ron Paul as a “front runner”; election fraud: the fact that there is voting software designed to flip the vote; NDAA: an update of how the legislation was passed and breakdown of what it actually means for citizens living in the US.

The big question is why did the North Koreans alter the image? Aesthetically, the doctored photograph is tad bit cleaner, lines straightened, but hardly improved. Psychologically speaking though, the clone job adds order to an already tidy scene. I’ve been examining photographs released by the KCNA for years and many are strikingly beautiful—enormous, perfectly-positioned crowds, immaculate and intricately composed. Now we may know why.

Remember when you were growing up and wanted to be a police officer, fire fighter or other public servant?

Now the TSA appears to be tapping children as future recruits for airport checkpoints, as evidenced by this novelty “Junior Officer” badge handed out at Austin Bergstrom International Airport. Not only are young, impressionable fliers indoctrinated by the unconstitutional checkpoints themselves, but now by a subtle driver to join the team someday when they can get the power to conduct their own pat-downs and body scans.

Abby & Robbie Martin cover Occupy Wall Street: the police state repression against the First Amendment, the Democratic Party’s attempt to co-opt the movement, the Obama administration’s hypocrisy to praise revolution abroad and censor it at home, the fact that the Tea Party and OWS are fighting two heads of the same beast, the “Black Bloc” provocateurs and their attempt to discredit peaceful movements; media censorship and the fact that news anchors are repeaters, not reporters; the two-tiered justice system catered toward the elite; citizen journalism and its role in allowing participation and unification in the global revolution.

Imagine that you wake up one morning, sit at your computer, and you are bombarded with links to a developing story from a major news outlet: Stephen Hawking, by making novel use of Cambridge University’s new quantum supercomputer to analyze data from SETI’s telescope array, has discerned that the universe is awash with signals from intelligent life. It reads like a regular science story, at first, but soon it is revealed that Hawking and his colleagues have tapped into an extra-terrestrial television transmission, and are even now watching, breathless, as the first, dream-like images of alien civilizations display themselves on the Q-computer’s tiny monitor.

You and your friends refresh your browsers compulsively, talking over each new description that emerges of strange alien races and the exotic landscapes they inhabit, as gleaned from upon the wacky sitcoms and low-budget reality shows that they are indiscriminately beaming into space. Then, questions are raised, skepticism emerges. You begin to have doubts. Eventually, you realize that you have been taken in by a clever hoax—you ought to have known better than to trust Fox News, after all—but despite the deception, you find that you cannot help but appreciate how, for one shining moment, people everywhere had set aside their petty rivalries and believed in marvels from above.

Such is how the people of New York City must have felt during the summer of 1835 when the New York Sun published a series of articles describing the startling lunar discoveries that had recently been made by the famous astronomer John Herschel from his observatory at the Cape of Good Hope. Using cutting-edge “hydro-oxygen magnifiers,” Herschel had developed a powerful new telescope that could achieve an astounding magnification of 42,000x—enough to resolve objects on the lunar surface as small as 18 inches in diameter—and project the images onto the wall of his observatory. Purporting to be a reprint from a supplement to the (non-existent) Edinburgh Journal of Science penned by Herschel’s assistant, Dr. Andrew Grant, it contained just the right mixture popular science buzzwords and technical minutia to render itself plausible.

The first images to resolve themselves onto the wall of Herschel’s observatory were of basaltic rock, and then, tellingly enough, a poppy field. The telescope next swept over lunar forests, populated by what looked like massive yew trees, by beaches of “brilliant white sand, girt with wild castellated rocks, apparently of green marble,”and clusters of resplendent crystalline spires and pyramids, lilac in hue. Finally, it came to rest on an oval valley, surrounded by crystallized hills of “purest vermilion,” with cascading waterfalls pouring from their cliffs, where they discovered, nestled in among its lush trees and vegetation, a herd of diminutive lunar bison…

[Full Article at Victorian Gothic]

Abby & Robbie Martin cover the Occupy Wall Street Movement: the divide and conquer tactics being used to discredit OWS, the different schools of thought and ideology within the movement and the original demands made by the U.S. Day of Rage; the Obama administration’s shocking crackdown on medical marijuana and new federal law banning medical marijuana card holders from owning firearms; Blackwater and the privatization of the armed forces: is the corporatization of the U.S. military preventing an anti-war rebellion similar to that seen in the ’60s?

Ever since the Occupy Wall Street movement began, one of the ways members have told their stories is through simple photos of themselves holding writings of their life experiences and what makes them part of the “99 percent” of Americans who have been ignored, mistreated, and misrepresented by their government. Some of their heartbreaking stories include tales of vast amounts of medical debt due to unforeseen chronic illness and no insurance coverage, overwhelming college debt coupled with joblessness or no job prospects, and a shortage of work combined with short unemployment assistance, among many others. To read their stories, see We Are The 99 percent.

This week, founder of the right wing blog Red State, Erik Erickson began a Tumblr account dubbed the “53 percent.” The project attempts to be the conservative perception of Occupy Wall Street and solidarity occupations as a movement of whiners and layabouts who don’t want to pay their taxes and are looking for handouts.

First, the idea of the 53 percent is that a majority of US citizens pay more in federal income tax than they receive back in deductions or credits. Basically, the 53 percent are the people supporting the government and are complicit, even proud, to have the government operating in the manner it does.

The logic of the notion of 53 percent is skewed, as Alex Pareene at Salon points out: “Pretty much every adult American pays taxes. Workers who are too poor to pay federal income taxes still pay payroll taxes, and property taxes if they own their home. Even the unemployed pay sales taxes. The poorest Americans — people who make an average of $12,500 a year — pay, on average, 16 percent of their paltry income in taxes.”

The idea to seperate federal income taxes from payroll taxes is semantically splitting hairs. We’re all still paying taxes, not only in the form of either of those, but also in things like sales tax. The argument is a false equivalency, like saying a renter doesn’t have the right to decide what happens in their neighborhood because they don’t pay property taxes. The landlord or management company pays those taxes, but does that give them more of a right to decide what happens on someone’s block, rather than a person who might have been renting for years in the same home?

Read the full post at Diatribe Media

An ugly old tradition is back: exploiting anti-Semitism to break the backs of popular movements that threaten the power of the wealthiest 1 percent of our population. It is being used to undermine the Occupy Wall Street movement, which has conservatives in a state of near panic.

I don’t know the first time the tactic was used, although it dates back almost to the beginning of the Jewish diaspora.

Perhaps its most famous use was by the viciously anti-Semitic Czar Nicholas, whose supporters concocted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion at the start of the 20th century to prevent Russians from joining socialist movements and other reform efforts that were fighting to get the czar to cede some power to an elected parliament.

The Protocols were a forged document purporting to show that a cabal of Jews met regularly to solidify their supposed control of the entire world. According to the Protocols, Jews were behind socialist and liberal movements but also ran the banks and Wall Street. (A modern version of this ridiculous theme was a staple on Glenn Beck’s television program that ran on Fox News until being canceled this summer.)

Read more here.

Poster A:  religion is stupid

Poster B:  YOU’RE stupid

Sometimes it’s a little more eloquent, but this is the bare bones of it. Not very useful, nor very informative. This I think we can agree on.  So how does one go about creating a better, more informative dialogue? Can it even be done? One side believes the other to be irrational, delusional, utilizing a sort of maladaptive coping mechanism to either protect oneself from the harsh realities of life or as an easy way to answer the hard questions with which life presents us. Coming from the other direction, one side believes the other to be narrow-minded, hypocritical (“atheism is just another faith!”) and every bit as dogmatic as their opponents. Is there any ground between the two camps wherein a discussion can be had?

I believe so, and I think I’ve got the way to do it. First one must ask why the discussion even needs to take place. When these discussions occur, one may hear an oft-repeated cry for tolerance: “Why does everyone have to argue about this? Why can’t you just believe want you want to believe and let others do the same?”

Well, the problem is person x may believe that everyone needs to believe as they do, or that the laws of the land need to reflect person x’s religious beliefs because they are the basis for all morality. Allowing people to believe whatever they want means allowing them to act however they want, which means allowing moral crimes to occur. Person y believes that person x’s beliefs infringe upon their personal freedom by influencing the policies of whatever organizations that have an effect on person y’s life. So to answer the question of “why can’t we just let everyone believe whatever they want to believe”, it is because other people’s beliefs will affect you in real ways. We all share this ball of mud hurtling through space, and the things we believe can dictate how we act and how we believe other people should act. Other people’s beliefs don’t just stay in their head.

So now that we agree the discussion is inevitable, how can we go about it properly? If our goal is to have an informed and informative discussion in which there is a frank exchange of ideas, opinions and facts, how can we ensure that happens?

A productive way to move forward is to lay out some questions that will get to the heart of the discussion in a lucid, easy-to-follow way. For your consideration I have borrowed a set of questions from a fellow I speak with fairly often on Liminal Nation, a message board devoted to an “intelligent and visible” discussion on religion, occultism and associated fields. I will provide my own meager answers as examples, as well as to hopefully begin a rational discussion on the topic.

1.  What was the origin of religion? Can its origin be meaningfully traced at all?

I often hear atheists describe the origins of religion as proto-men drawing pictures on the walls of caves, of legends and superstitions from a time when our brains were wired up different and we were hearing voices in our heads. Religion comes from a time when we really didn’t know a lot about the world around us so we filled in the gaps with ideas that, from the perspective of the 21st century, seem silly, out-dated, and most importantly false.

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. “Religion” and “spirituality” are not synonymous. I grind my teeth when I hear people say “I don’t go for organized religion; I prefer a non-specific spirituality”. The reason is simple: there is no such thing as unorganized religion. Religion is an organized set of spiritual beliefs and rituals. It arose when mankind began to get itself more organized. There was a time when magic, science, and religion were considered the same thing and were generally handled by the same person. There is one religious tradition that all cultures on all continents share: Shamanism. The shaman was the person who would “travel” to the Other Worlds, returning with knowledge or power given to him by spirits or gods or whomever one runs into in the Other Worlds handing out knowledge and power. But at some point in the development of mankind, magic and religion began to separate.  It’s useful to consider when priests began to become separate entities from magicians. They became two separate jobs, performing different duties. The priest ran the rituals and served the public through the duties of an office in an organized religion.

The follow up question is very important, and it has quite a bit to do with what I was just talking about. Can this moment, this separation, be traced meaningfully? What if it can’t? More importantly, if religion IS a product of the past, why is it still around? Why is it still very, very popular? This leads us to the next question…

2. What functions does religion serve?

This is a difficult question to answer. There are many different religions, and many different people following these religions, and many different interpretations of the same religion. Attempting to answer this question seems to involve trying to get inside the heads of religious people.

Fortunately, there are ways to begin answering it. One can look to history to see what role religion has played in different countries at different times. I’ll leave this to others to investigate, but I can offer answers from my own experience.

When people ask me about my religious beliefs, I usually make a joke or brush it off or distract them or ignore it completely. I do this not because I don’t enjoy talking about religion, but because I don’t want to disclose that I worship Hermes Trismegistus, a fusion of the Greek deity Hermes and the Egyptian deity Thoth. Aside from the fact that it would break my dyed-in-the-wool Southern Baptist mother’s heart to learn I was involved with a *GASP* pagan deity, and thus am barely a step above worshiping Satan outright, in these times it is still considered odd to have a DIY religion or be involved with a deity whose worship insignificant numbers dropped off at least a thousand years ago.  It leads to dumb and occasionally insulting questions that I would prefer not to hear.

But the question is “what role does religion serve in my life”.  To be blunt, it helps me achieve my goals.  There is a style to Hermes Trismegistus, a way of operating, a style that I appreciate and want to incorporate into my own life. I find it graceful and a useful way to get what I want.  The objective existence of Hermes Trismegistus is unimportant; what matters is whether or not the things I do in regard to my religion actually help me accomplish my goals.

3. To what extent does religion serve as a psychological crutch for some people?  Does religion have legitimate functions other than as a psychological crutch?

I just told everyone that my own religion is basically a tool, a method for adjusting my behavior to get what I want, so I can’t deny that it functions as a tool. I wouldn’t call it a crutch; I can (and did for quite some time) get along without it with no adverse effects. I would not be limping along, psychologically-speaking. But what of other religions, specifically those that offer a “happy ending” for folks when they die?  What about those that offer (or demand) a set of behavior that takes care of a lot of decisions one runs into in daily life? How deep does that go, and is it a legitimate function of religion? Should it be? Marx’s famous phrase “Religion is the opiate of the masses”, is commonly thrown about. But few mention the sentence that is directly prior to that, wherein Marx calls religion “the heart in a heartless world”.

Since Abrahamic faiths are by and large the most popular in the west, it is obviously a good step to answer these questions as they pertain to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

4. Is there a significant connection between religion (as opposed to other aspects of human culture) and violence?  Between religion and morality?  Between religion and love?

This is similar to the question of what role religion plays in one’s life. This is a very meaty topic, so I won’t attempt to give any quick answers. I  hope this gets explored by others, though. These questions are important when one considers religion’s influence on morality and law, two areas where one’s religion intrudes on another’s religion (or lack thereof) and life in general.

5. Can Atheism be considered a faith?

This question, or rather answers to this question, are proposed very often here. Is the lack of a belief a belief, can atheism be considered a “belief” like Christianity?

Here’s a hint: no.

Militant atheists seem dogmatic, yes. They place a great value on reason and the scientific method, and since neither has produced any proof or anything close to proof, they don’t believe there is a god.  Is that the same as saying they believe there isn’t a god? Yes. Is it the same as a religion? No. The difference comes in the word “believe”, which is being used in two different ways when one says one “believes” in god and when one says one “believes” there is no god.  It’s a shame that one word can have two very different meanings, but that’s English for you.

For instance: I believe the sun will rise tomorrow. I have sufficient evidence for this. The belief is based on things like prior events and a heliocentric view of the solar system.  A belief in god relies on something very different, something called “faith”. Which leads us to the next question…

6. What’s up with faith?  I mean, what’s the deal there?

Okay, so it’s not phrased very eloquently. The same fella who offered these questions offered this quote from Sam Harris’s The End of Faith:

It takes a certain kind of person to believe what no one else believes. To be ruled by ideas for which you have no evidence (and which therefore cannot be justified in conversation with other human beings) is generally a sign that something is seriously wrong with your mind. Clearly there is sanity in numbers. And yet, it is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts, while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window. And so, while religious people are not generally mad, their core beliefs absolutely are. This is not surprising, since most religions have merely canonized a few products of ancient ignorance and derangement and passed them down as though they were primordial truths. This leaves us believing what no sane person could believe on his own. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.

Of what use is faith? Where does it crop up besides religion, and is it treated the same way when it does? Is it an essentially human thing? What is a life with faith like compared to a life without?

It is my hope that these questions lead to a discussion between atheists and those that follow a religion that isn’t based on insults and questioning the sanity of each other.

The American media deploys a deep and varied arsenal of rhetorical devices in order to marginalise opinions, people and organisations as “outside the mainstream” and therefore not worth listening to. For the most part the people and groups being declaimed belong to the political Left. To take one example, the Green Party – well-organised in all 50 states – is never quoted in newspapers or invited to send a representative to television programmes that purport to present “both sides” of a political issue. (In the United States, “both sides” means the back-and-forth between centre-right Democrats and rightist Republicans.)

Marginalisation is the intentional decision to exclude a voice in order to prevent a “dangerous” opinion from gaining currency, to block a politician or movement from becoming more powerful, or both. In 2000, the media-backed consortium that sponsored the presidential debate between Vice President Al Gore and Texas Governor George W. Bush banned Green Party candidate Ralph Nader from participating. Security goons even threatened to arrest him when he showed up with a ticket and asked to be seated in the audience.

In 2000, debate bosses excluded Nader using the excuse that his support (as measured by public opinion polls) was too insignificant to impact the election.That assessment was dubious at best. Most analysts believe that Nader drew enough liberal votes away from Al Gore to cost him the state of Florida, which handed the election to Bush (This is not my assessment. The 2000 race was stolen by corrupt Florida election officials and a judicial coup d’etat carried out by the US Supreme Court). The point remains: Nader was denied access to the debates, and to coverage by the TV networks, because he wasn’t an “important” candidate. Yet those same networks argue that he changed the course of the election.

“Over the past few weeks, Washington has seemed dysfunctional,” conservative columnist David Brooks opined recently in The New York Times. “Public disgust [about the debt ceiling crisis] has risen to epic levels. Yet through all this, serious people – Barack Obama, John Boehner, the members of the Gang of Six – have soldiered on.”

Here’s some of what Peter Coy of Business Week magazine had to say about the same issue: “There is a comforting story about the debt ceiling that goes like this: Back in the 1990s, the US was shrinking its national debt at a rapid pace. Serious people actually worried about dislocations from having too little government debt …”

Fox News, the Murdoch-owned house organ of America’s official right-wing, asserted: “No one seriously thinks that the US will not honour its obligations, whatever happens with the current impasse on President Obama’s requested increase to the government’s $14.3tn borrowing limit.”

Big US media uses the “serious people”/”nobody seriously thinks” marginalisation meme on numerous subjects, but none so often as on war. You guessed it: “Serious people” think wars are necessary and must continue indefinitely. “No one seriously thinks” that the American military can “just” stop fighting a war without suffering all sorts of terrible consequences: “Instability”. Becoming viewed by allies as “unreliable”. Creating a “power vacuum”. Allowing an already difficult situation to deteriorate “even further”. Sure, people are suffering and dying now. But if the US leaves, many more people will die. In order to avert a theoretical bloodbath of the future, the United States is obligated to continue its present, sustainable rate of killing and maiming.

In this wacky topsy-turvy world, where the people who are usually wrong get to lord it over those who usually get it right, abject failures like Obama and Boehner – who make logical assertions that are nothing but, and who have presided over fiscal collapse while not making the slightest effort to stimulate the economy with public works and other classic Keynesian responses to the global depression – are lauded as Serious People.

Throughout the last few years, especially since Obama took office in January 2009 and after the death of Osama bin Laden earlier this year, calls to withdraw from one or both of America’s major quagmires have been met with media claims by Very Serious People along the lines that “no one seriously thinks we can just withdraw”.

According to a June 21, 2011 Pew Research poll, 56 per cent of Americans favour immediate withdrawal of US occupation troops from Afghanistan. Many of these antiwar voters know that there could be negative ramifications; the same percentage believes that the Karzai regime will collapse without a US military presence. So it is not not true that “no one” thinks we can withdraw. In fact, most people think we should withdraw. And many of them are willing to countenance the possibility that the Taliban would win an ensuing civil war.

For “their” newspapers, radio and television journalists, however, these people – over half the population – don’t count. They are “no one”. They are certainly not “serious people” who have done the hard thinking. They are not, in other favourite meme, “realistic” or “pragmatic”.

“We can’t leave Afghanistan at this juncture,” former US National Security Council member Rick Nelson told ABC News after US commandos assassinated Osama bin Laden. “There is still a significant terrorist threat emanating from western Pakistan.” The US must “commit the resources, personnel, and money against this threat until we are certain that it is completely dismantled”, said Nelson, talking as though to a small, slightly dim, child. To which such a child might reasonably respond: How would one know that such a threat had completely vanished? Fortunately for Nelson, ABC’s excuse for a journalist didn’t follow up.

“So why not just get out?” asked Newsweek’s John Barry in 2009. “As always, it’s not so simple.”

Sure it is.

To paraphrase my fellow political cartoonist Matt Bors, US soldiers could go to the airport. They could board planes. They could go home.

Back to the debt ceiling crisis.

For many Americans the gravity and absurdity of the current economy was crystallised by news accounts that Apple Computer had more ready cash on hand than the US Treasury ($76bn versus $74bn).

Apple isn’t alone. “Corporations collectively are hoarding more cash than ever before, posting glowing balance sheets,” reports International Business Times. “At the end of 2010, companies held an estimated $1.9tn of excess cash, and so far in 2011 most have not let go.” US banks, says The Washington Post, have more than $2tn available to lend.

If you’ve read Karl Marx you can probably imagine a solution to the US debt ceiling crisis. The government is poor but giant corporations are rich. Why doesn’t the Obama Administration appropriate the necessary sums from private companies and wealthy individuals via taxes or nationalisation? The Post answers: “But while the country is flush with assets, it doesn’t mean the government can seize them to pay for public debt.”

Why not? The article doesn’t say. Nor does it use the dreaded phrase “no one seriously thinks that …” But it’s there all the same. Because the US doesn’t officially countenance socialist economic solutions, advocates of European-style socialised medicine were dismissed by President Obama as naïve (and not Serious). Even when the federal government transferred hundreds of billions of dollars to banks and insurance companies during the 2008-09 meltdown, calls for accountability were dismissed as unrealistic. Not pragmatic. Nationalisation? Definitely not serious. Clownlike, really.

As Daniel Larison says, the track record of the Serious Ones is atrocious. And yet, on one story after another, even relatively minor ones, the US media continues to turn yesterday’s “no one thinks” into today’s “everyone knows”.

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 world and parent of Warner Brothers, owns the rights to the image and is paid a licensing fee with the sale of each mask.

Read More: NY Times

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has leapfrogged to the top tier of Republican presidential candidates largely on the strength of one compelling fact: During more than a decade as governor, his state created more than 1 million jobs, while the nation as a whole lost 1.4 million jobs.

Perry says the “Texas miracle” rests on conservative pillars that he would bring to the White House: minimal regulation and government, low taxes and a determination to limit the reach of Uncle Sam.

What he does not say is that much of that job growth has come because of government, not in spite of it.

With a young and fast-growing population, a large and expanding military presence and an influx of federal stimulus money, the number of government jobs in Texas has grown at more than double the rate of private-sector employment during Perry’s tenure.

The disparity has grown sharper since the national recession hit. Between December 2007 and last June, private-sector employment in Texas declined by 0.6 percent while public-sector jobs increased by 6.4 percent, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Overall, government employees account for about one-sixth of the workforce in Texas.

The significant role of government in Texas’s relative prosperity stands in stark contrast to the “go-it-alone” image cultivated by Perry, who credits a lack of government interference for fostering a business-friendly environment in Texas.

Read more here.

In Europe, draconian libel laws are increasingly being used to intimidate bloggers who question the validity of specific alt-med products or modalities. The most recent case involves the multinational homeopathy manufacturer Boiron and an amateur blogger in Italy. Steven Novella at Science-Based Medicine writes:

There have been many cases now of big companies or organizations, or wealthy individuals, threatening to sue or actually suing a blogger for libel. The most famous case is that of Simon Singh who was sued by the British Chiropractic Association over comments he made in an article. Simon braved through the expensive and exhaustive legal process (which is especially onerous in England), but he is not just a lone blogger. He is a successful author and was writing for the Guardian. Eventually the BCA was forced to drop the case – but only after the blogging community rallied behind Simon, magnifying his criticisms of the BCA by orders of magnitude. By all accounts it was a PR disaster.

The blogging community as a whole is rather passionate about this issue. We exist on the premise of free and open public discourse about important issues. At SBM we take on many controversial issues and we don’t pull our punches when criticizing what we see as pseudoscience in medicine. So of course we take notice when a large company tries to bully a blogger to silence their legitimate criticism.

[Full Article at Science-Based Medicine]

(One would presume that the ad was effective, as Massachusetts’ male voters rejected women’s suffrage. Women were given the ability to vote five year later by the federal government in the form of the 19th Amendment.)

This discussion covers U.S. imperialism: wars, costs, media and government propaganda; the culture of fear, self-censorship and the erosion of privacy in the US; information as power and how communication is an important tool to strengthen and build communities.

The above timeline is interactive. Scroll through it to find out more about the show’s music and to resources mentioned during the broadcast. To see a larger version of the timeline with clickable resources go to the soundcloud link below the player. If you would like to directly download the podcast click the down arrow icon on the right of the soundcloud display. To hide the comments to enable easier rewind and fast forward, click on the icon on the very bottom right.

For more information go to www.MediaRoots.org

There’s now a 9/11 cartoon movie courtesy of Mike Huckabee, co-founder of Learn Our History, a for-profit company whose mission is to get kids excited and educated about history. The first initiative, an animated DVD series, has flicks on subjects like the American Revolution, and, perhaps more tellingly, “The Reagan Revolution.” The September 11th cartoon really explains, according to the literature, “How the ongoing War on Terror protects Americans at home and American ideals abroad.”

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.

The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion.

The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.”When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. “Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”

As an example, the ongoing events in Tunisia and Egypt appear to exhibit a similar process, according to Szymanski. “In those countries, dictators who were in power for decades were suddenly overthrown in just a few weeks.”

The findings were published in the July 22, 2011, early online edition of the journal Physical Review E in an article titled “Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities.”

An important aspect of the finding is that the percent of committed opinion holders required to shift majority opinion does not change significantly regardless of the type of network in which the opinion holders are working. In other words, the percentage of committed opinion holders required to influence a society remains at approximately 10 percent, regardless of how or where that opinion starts and spreads in the society.

Read more here.

A new promotional video released by the Department of Homeland Security characterizes white middle class Americans as the most likely terrorists, as Big Sis continues its relentless drive to cement the myth that mad bombers are hiding around every corner, when in reality Americans are just as likely to be killed by lightning strikes or peanut allergies.

Some Tennessee tea partiers are in hot water with a Las Vegas gambling resort that’s accusing them of skipping out on a big hotel bill.

On Monday Venetian Casino Resort, LLC., filed suit against Tea Party Nation Corporation of Franklin, Tenn., alleging the group owes $642,144 for canceling a conservative conclave last year. The event, which had been scheduled for July 14–18, 2010, was first postponed until October and ultimately canceled.

The Daily Caller reported at the time there was a lack of people willing to pay $399 for a weekend pass or $125 per day to hear speakers such as conservative commentator Laura Ingraham or politician Sharron Angle, who at the time was in the midst of a failed campaign to oust Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Las Vegas.

The lawsuit covers the dates for the proposed July event. Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation said he hasn’t seen the lawsuit and wouldn’t comment on the accusations. Las Vegas Sands spokesman Ron Reese said the company would have no comment on the case.

Read More in the Las Vegas Review-Journal

We have spent the last two years thoroughly researching DUCK AND COVER’s production history as well as its initial public reception in 1952. Interviews were conducted with living participants involved in the making of the film as well as surviving family members of those key players who had passed away.

Just how did the term “Duck and Cover” become universal shorthand for the paranoid excesses of the Cold War and for every geo-political panic attack since? The film is, after all, the Citizen Kane of American civil defense motion pictures. Clips from this movie are used almost every time a news piece is produced on the 1950’s or the Cold War. It struck us as odd that so little was known about the origins of a work that has had such a reverberating impact on the culture.

In many ways DUCK AND COVER is the perfect synthesis of the competing themes of the 1950’s: Fear and prosperity. In the context of the Cold War’s epic struggle between communism and capitalism, it seems oddly appropriate that the American government turned to private industry to help sell survival to an anxious population.

The FCDA was never afforded a large budget to pursue its education mandate so it used whatever avenues it could to cheaply maximize the distribution of the civil defense message. Two of these avenues were the public school system and the educational film market. Public school administrators were cooperative, even eager, to embody President Truman’s slogan “Education is our first line of defense.” Toward that end and beginning in 1950, public (and many private) schools—particularly in obvious target cities—began regular air raid drills sometimes known as “cover” or “sneak attack” drills. In such exercises the teacher would, without warning, yell “Drop!” and the students would kneel next to or under their desks with their hands clutched around the back of their necks.

nother step many school districts took during this period was to provide identification tags (i.e. dog tags) to school children to wear so that in the event of an attack their bodies could be identified more easily. Dog tags were the preferred method of identifying pupils because the other ID options that were considered like tattooing had negative connotations or, in the case of fingerprinting, elicited privacy concerns. Moreover, metal tags were thought to be the smarter alternative because metal was decidedly more “permanent” than human flesh. With such bizarre debates and practices shaping the childhood memories of the baby boomer generation is it any wonder there was a counter culture in the 1960’s?

Read the rest at Conelrad.

If you suspected that Fox News was nothing more than a decades-in-the-making Republican plot to pipe propaganda to unsuspecting rubes…you were right down to a tee. Gawker dug up this amazing find:

According to a remarkable document buried deep within the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, the forerunner for Fox News was a 1970 plot by Ailes and other Nixon aides to deliver “pro-administration” stories to heartland television viewers.

The memo is called, simply enough, “A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News”.

I have on good authority that this song was played at something called the “Jihadi Bar,” a place where CIA interrogators working at a Black Site went to unwind. That and other secrets of undisclosed torture prisons are found within my interview with ex-interrogator Glenn Carle for Danger Room.

Much like at Guantanamo, detainees at this specific Black Site — I don’t know this for sure, but will irresponsibly speculate based on certain clues that it was in Afghanistan but not at Bagram — had heavy metal blasted at loud volumes, constantly, to torture them. Alas, Carle couldn’t tell me if one of the songs he heard there was “Bodies” by Drowning Pool, a staple on the torturers’ mixtape of the 00s.

More on Spencer Ackerman’s Blog

New research at the Weizmann Institute shows that a bit of social pressure may be all that is needed. The study, which appears in the journal Science, reveals a unique pattern of brain activity when false memories are formed — one that hints at a surprising connection between our social selves and memory.

The experiment, conducted by Prof. Yadin Dudai and research student Micah Edelson of the Institute’s Neurobiology Department with Prof. Raymond Dolan and Dr. Tali Sharot of University College London, took place in four stages. In the first, volunteers watched a documentary film in small groups. Three days later, they returned to the lab individually to take a memory test, answering questions about the film. They were also asked how confident they were in their answers.

They were later invited back to the lab to retake the test while being scanned in a functional MRI (fMRI) that revealed their brain activity. This time, the subjects were also given a “lifeline”: the supposed answers of the others in their film viewing group (along with social-media-style photos). Planted among these were false answers to questions the volunteers had previously answered correctly and confidently. The participants conformed to the group on these “planted” responses, giving incorrect answers nearly 70% of the time.

Read more here.

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 25, are soldiers who gave their lives this week with no media mention. Please honor them by posting this as your status update.”

In addition to the nonstop updates about Charlie Sheen’s “winning” streak, ABC’s 20/20 and CNN’s Piers Morgan cleared hour long time slots for Sheen to rant about his wild escapades and delusions of grandeur. Good Morning America also dedicated an entire show to broadcast live from Sheen’s Hollywood home for a revelation not to be missed: his urine drug test results.

Showbiz mogul Charlie Sheen and his gaggle of euphemisms became quintessential brand name news, virally marketed by frothing media outlets worldwide. The public platform given to his breakdown resulted in him gaining a record breaking one million twitter followers in just one day, a feat which begat another onslaught of corporate news coverage.

Less than two weeks later, the devastating earthquake and nuclear disaster in Fukushima caused a brief switch in coverage to focus on the tragedy. However, once Donald Trump, billionaire real estate mogul and reality TV star, announced his presidential run and reignited the distracting “Birther” controversy surrounding questions about President Obama’s birth certificate, the corporate media unquestioningly followed suit, propping up the non-issue to the forefront of political discourse.

There were barely any more discussions about the global implications of Fukushima’s nuclear meltdown and the importance of pursuing sustainable energy alternatives. Instead of emphasizing the dangerous fact that there are 23 nuclear reactors in the US designed almost identically to those in Fukushima, the corporate media irresponsibly focused on Trump’s crazed news “Birther” claims. Although the Fukushima crisis still loomed heavy, the media’s focus shifted again- along with the American public’s attention span.

As Charlie Sheen’s downward spiral and Trump’s “Birther” issue reigned supreme in the corporate press, the US government continued its controversial bombing campaign against Libya unabated, potentially in violation of international law (something the nation’s media should likely address instead of the latest Sheen or Trump distractions). The obsession over such superficialities dilutes rational debate on aspects of American foreign policy, like the affordability of spending $40 million a month in Libya when our country is already racked with debt, or the sheer contradiction of bombing other countries for “humanitarian” reasons.

Read full article on Sheen Trumps Palin: Media Roots Writes for Project Censored.