Disinformation » Revolutionaries

Gil Scott-Heron: ‘Me And The Devil’ (Video)

god — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 07:20:00 +0000

The Filthy Little Atheist … Founding Father

Daniele Bolelli — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 01:13:51 +0000

[Site editor's note: The following is an excerpt from the new Disinformation title 50 Things You're Not Supposed To Know: Religion, authored by Daniele Bolelli.]

The story of his life is richer and weirder than any fiction. Among his close friends were visionary poets such as William Blake as well as political icons like Benjamin Franklin. Napoleon slept with his books by his pillow, and told him statues of gold should be erected to him in every city in the universe (but the admiration was not reciprocated). Thomas Edison believed him to be one of the most brilliant minds in human history. Some of his writings rank among the greatest bestsellers of the 18th century. He participated in the two revolutions (the American and the French) that changed the political face of the modern world.

During the American Revolution, George Washington used his writings to inspire his troops to remember what they were fighting for, and even suggested that no other individual had done more for the cause of American independence. John Adams stated that without his pen, Washington’s military victories would have been in vain. In France, the revolutionaries invited him to join the National Convention in charge of drafting a new constitution. His unconditional love for freedom, however, made him allergic to “revolutionary” totalitarianism just as much as he was opposed to monarchic totalitarianism. So, Robespierre and his proto-fascist cronies had him arrested and sentenced to death. But the blade of the guillotine missed the date with his neck thanks to a mistake by the jailer in delivering condemned prisoners. Before the mistake was fixed, a future American president, James Monroe, intervened on his behalf and had him rescued. And another president, Thomas Jefferson, personally offered him political asylum.

The man we are speaking of is Thomas Paine.

Even though his name is relatively well known, it is not nearly as celebrated as one may imagine given such a wild, intense existence, and such a deep impact on history. Paine was after all the man who came up with the terms “United States of America,” and is credited by many to be the ideological father of modern democracy. So why is his face not on the dollar bills? Why is he not hanging out with Jefferson & co. on Mt. Rushmore? Why is he not given his due among the greatest American heroes?

Paine’s problem is that he didn’t die in 1792. Had he done that, his place among the pantheon of beloved founding fathers would have been assured. But instead he lived, and wrote another book entitled The Age of Reason. The result? By the time he actually died in 1809, only six people attended his funeral. The most repeated of his obituaries by the newspapers read, “he had lived long, did some good and much harm.” His supporters found themselves under relentless attacks. Thomas Jefferson’s political opponents had a field day using over and over his friendship with Paine against him. Abraham Lincoln’s friends burned a booklet he had written, in which he defended Paine’s ideas, for fear that this would irreparably ruin his reputation. Over a hundred years after Paine’s death, Theodore Roosevelt still referred to him as a “filthy little atheist.”

What exactly was it about The Age of Reason that transformed Paine into a ghost among the founding fathers? Why did he turn overnight from popular hero into a hated villain? It’s because the man took on organized religion with a furor, in an age when doing so was neither fashionable nor conducive to good health.

As he wrote, “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches … appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”

When he had composed passionate defenses of freedom against political tyranny, the masses had loved him. But now that he had composed a passionate defense of freedom against religious tyranny, they hated him. Paine hadn’t changed. It’s simply that his audience was much readier to attack political rather than religious institutions. But for Paine tyranny was tyranny regardless which adjective was attached to it. To him, sworn enemies like the king of England and Robespierre, the pope and Martin Luther were but different faces of the same evil. Whether they called themselves monarchists or revolutionaries, Catholics or Protestants, whether they indulged in inquisitions or guillotines, didn’t matter much since they were all equally addicted to totalitarianism. The Age of Reason was Paine’s declaration of war against the religious dogmatism that had squashed individual liberties over the centuries.

The fame of being a godless atheist followed Paine like a shadow forever afterwards. But the punch line in all of this is that Paine was anything but an atheist. It was precisely because he believed in God that he despised organized religions since—in his view—these turned the divine mystery into bad mythology, and projected onto God their own psychotic hopes and fears. In Paine’s brand of freedom-loving spirituality, God was something greater than any religion. And this was the belief that cost Paine his place of honor among the founding fathers.

The above is an excerpt from the new Disinformation title 50 Things You’re Not Supposed To Know: Religion, authored by Daniele Bolelli.

Apple’s Famous ‘Think Different’ Ad (Video)

god — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 08:34:15 +0000

Good question for the Disinfo crowd: is this ad accurate or appropriating?

Steve Jobs Has Died

ralph — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 23:50:44 +0000

Wow, AP just reported and go to the Apple homepage to confirm. In case anyone doesn’t know, he was battling cancer for years. In terms of significance aside from the human, Apple is considered to have more cash than the U.S. government.

“Death… is Life’s Change Agent”

Louis C.K. on George Carlin (Video)

ralph — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 07:30:34 +0000

A future master praising a past (and always remembered) master:

In Defense of the Hipster: Part 2

TunaGhost — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 04:03:14 +0000

PART 2: AUTHENTICITY IS BULLSHIT, or: POP IS THE NEW PUNK

(Part 1, titled “What Is A Hipster, And Why Does Everyone Hate Them? or: You’re So Fake (And So Am I)“, can be found here.)

As noted in Part 1, the main thrust of the criticisms against hipsters have roots in a notion of authenticity. Lorentz mentions the words “authentic” and “inauthentic” a dozen times in his article, and the Adbusters piece is just as bad. It’s a fair charge to say that hipsters fetishize the authentic, as Lorentz does. This is hardly unique to hipsters, though; one can find it in practically any sub-culture. It’s so common that I find it disingenuous to use it as a criticism of hipsters and Hipsterism. The problem, as I see it, is that notion of authenticity being used is utter bullshit.

Some years ago, before I became a hipster or had even heard of hipsters, I was confirmed as “real” at a party by a group of counter-culture kids. There were several reasons given. First, I was living in a “real” neighborhood. At that time my rundown flop of a house was located in a neighborhood of Detroit, a mostly working-class ethnic neighborhood that was deemed hip by the minority of caucasian youths living there. It was popular for a number of reasons: it was much safer than the surrounding areas, close to a University and had been, even back when it was predominantly white, an ethnic neighborhood (Polish). Second, I was working two jobs to pay my way through school. I was living month-to-month, sometimes bills didn’t get paid and I lived for months on brown rice and Siracha stolen from the Chinese restaurant at which I was employed. Third, I had a pretty good drug habit going, the likes of which would eventually take the life of a couple friends later on down the road.

I contemplated this. Apparently, making several terrible choices in the suburbs that resulted in losing my funding for school and having to move to the significantly cheaper housing in the city had made me “real”. And to think I didn’t even know I was “fake” when I was out in the suburbs! Apparently, my gritty, dirty, dangerous life meant I was “real” and not some automaton or something.

This notion of realness, of authenticity, is very popular today. Grit and dirt = real. Danger = real. This is despite the fact that all of the above can be acquired without much effort: you can move to a shitty-but-hip neighborhood, you can give up your scholarship and work all the time, and believe you me you can pick up a substance-abuse problem with startling ease.

The absurdity soon makes itself apparent. If it can be faked with ease, where is the value of its authenticity? Someone doing the three steps listed above can have just as “real” a life as I was leading. It would be indistinguishable from the life of someone who ended up there by accident or, like in my case, as the result of poor decision-making skills. The real life can be acquired, and when it is, does that person miraculously go from “fake” to “real”? How does that work? If all the ways one uses to define oneself as authentic are, in a way, “for sale”, how authentic can one’s identity really be?

The primary problem with the counterculture is its rebellion against perceived inauthenticity, against the manufactured lifestyle represented by prime-time television and pop culture. The problem lies in where we are running to, in what we are clinging to instead of the manufactured lifestyle. We think we are leaving image-without-substance behind and embracing realness, embracing something with meaning and substance. We are doing no such thing. We’re just falling for a different kind of deception.

They say that if you’re going to steal, then steal from the best. With that in mind, I offer you an excerpt by Warren Ellis from his discontinued series Doktor Sleepless:

Now, after seeing hordes of people rebelling against Pop and seeking refuge in authenticity, I see his point. Punk, now, is as baldly selling an image, a brand, as any bit of pop culture. It’s about as authentic as Bob Dylan, and the same goes for pretty much every counter-culture.

How do you rebel, then, when all the culture rebels are buying into bullshit notions of authenticity? What do you do when the people rebelling against the image and the spectacle of pop culture are indulging in an image and a spectacle of their own? The answer is obvious: go the other direction. Embrace the shallowness, embrace the trends that have a half-life of half a season, embrace the superficial fashion and culture that Hipsterism provides. If its authenticity you’re after, be like me. Be a Real Fake. Be sincere in your devotion to affectations, in the shallow trends…

1896 Film: Loie Fuller’s Psychedelic Serpentine Dance

Haystack — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 22:24:12 +0000

Via VictorianGothic.org:

This 1896 Lumière Brothers film captures a performance of Loïe Fuller’s “Serpentine Dance.” No, there was no LSD in the 1890′s, but yes, there were colorized films. In the technique used above, each frame was individually hand-tinted using stencils and colored dyes. It was a laborious, manual process, and it was first employed to recreate Loïe Fuller’s stage magic; acclaimed for its early use of chromatic theatrical lights that illuminated the dancer’s flowing white silk.

On a visit to Notre Dame, Fuller became enthralled by the kaleidoscopic light that shone through the cathedral’s stained glass windows. She lost herself in a bedazzled reverie, catching the colors upon a white handkerchief that she waved through the air…and was promptly taken for crazy and escorted out of the building. For Fuller, color possessed a natural harmony that could be honed into new art form, in the same way that sound had been transformed sound into music. “Colour,” she wrote, “so pervades everything that the whole universe is busy producing it, everywhere and in everything … The day will come when man will know how to employ them so delightfully that it will be hard to conceive how he could have lived so long in the darkness in which he dwells to-day.”

To this end, she developed new compounds and techniques for stage lighting for which she held numerous patents. She was a member of the French Astronomical Society, and a friend to Marie Curie, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and countless other French artists, scientists and intellectuals. Some of the most well-respected members of the French creative class featured her in their work, and through her performances she became a prominent figure in the Art Nouveau movement.

[Full Article at Victorian Gothic]

New Theory Blames KGB For Albert Camus Death

Pelliciari — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 18:12:35 +0000

Albert Camus, 1957

Did the Soviet foreign minister have a hand in the death of famed french writer Albert Camus? Via AFP:

Famous French author Albert Camus, who died in a car accident in 1960, may have been the victim of a Soviet plot, new research suggests.

Italian academic Giovanni Catelli, an eastern European specialist, put forward the theory in the pages of the Italian daily Il Corriere della Sera. On Monday it was greeted with scepticism among other experts.

He noted that a passage in a diary written by Czech poet Jan Zabrana, published as a book, was absent from the Italian translation.

According to Catelli the missing paragraph concerns a meeting between Zabrana and and a Russian KGB contact.

“I heard something very strange from a man who knew lots of things and had very informed sources,” Zabrana writes in the unexpurgated version.

“He said the road accident that cost Albert Camus his life in 1960 was organised by Soviet spies. They damaged a tyre on the car using a piece of equipment that blew out the tyre at a certain speed.”

[Continues at AFP]

George Carlin on Why Religion is Bullsh*t! (Video)

bluemana — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 05:34:08 +0000

The Grand Master speaks:

Mandela Releases A New Book Of Quotations As He Turns 93

Danny Schechter — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 12:32:03 +0000

Nelson Mandela, icon-hero of the world, turns 93 this month. He is hanging on despite family tragedies that claimed another great-grandchild in June. The child was born premature and died after just four days.

The man known by his clan name, Madiba, still evokes wonder and admiration and almost god-like reverence, with airport stores selling “We Love Mandela” posters and T-shirts. He is the one South African that most of South Africans take pride in, including the older generation that first knew him as an apartheid government designated terrorist.

He was so feared that his picture could not be shown in the media and his words could not be quoted for 27 years.

Ironically, all these years later he has released a book of authorized quotations (‘By himself”) that cull his thoughts from a life time of public and private utterances in letters, private papers, audio recordings and from generations of speechifying.

Mandela doesn’t really get out much anymore although a select few can still get in to see him especially if their name is Michelle Obama, whose comment on being given an advanced copy of the quotations was a not very quotable, “Wow!” (I have that on good authority from someone who was in the room).

The last big book of political quotations that went to the top of the sales charts that I remember was Mao’s, The Little Red Book. China’s Communist party assured it would be a global bestseller given the size of the population, their control over the country and penchant for disseminating propaganda. Mao’s idea appealed to Moammar Gadaffy who then released his own Little “Green Book” to thunderous yawns.

Mao used his book to fight his ill-fated cultural revolution. Now, Mandela’s collection that could be called a little book of struggle and solidarity is out to promote the fight for the democracy he led.

Its mission is spelled out in a letter he wrote from his prison cell to his daughter Zindzi back in 1980. That quotation explains: “A good pen can also remind us of the happiest moments in our lives, bring noble ideas in our dens, our blood and our souls. It can turn tragedy into hope and victory.”

It wasn’t just his words that brought his victory, but they surely helped. This collection features more than 2,000 quotations over 60 years, organized into 300 categories including “character” “courage” and “reconciliation.” Many have never been published before and were archived by the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s Memory Project. The editors, Sello Hatang and Sahm Venter, say their aim is to offer an accurate and extensive resource.

“In editing the book,” they write, “ we were struck as much by the gravitas of his words, as by their simplicity.”

I was fortunate to be at the book’s launch in the offices of the Foundation in Johannesburg.

It was an appropriate place for me to spend my June 27^th birthday reflecting on Mandela’s triumphs and my own small role in bringing some of them to public attention with six films documenting some of what happened after his release from prison—his election campaign in 1994 and two visits to America, among other memorable markers in his amazing life.

The event was typically low key with a few talks by people who knew him well, worked with him in the ANC and served alongside him in the cells on Robben Island. I knew some of the stalwarts who were there and they were very welcoming to have me back among them.

Doing what I could as a journalist and TV producer to help free South Africa is work that I am very proud of. In the end, I received far more than I gave. It was a great privilege.

In the formal program, his daughter from his first marriage told of visiting her father in prison and being asked if she had had a pap smear. Despite his reputation as a Victorian patrician, he was open about personal matters, and shocked her by talking about intimate subjects, even urging her not to have unprotected sex.

Ahead of his time, that orientation led him years later to become a global leader in the fight against AIDS, a pandemic that also claimed one of his sons.

A former ANC leader described him as someone who was open to, and welcomed, disagreement and debate to correct him when he was “wrong.” She read quotes that showed Mandela’s openness to criticism and self-criticism, qualities we don’t see in many world leaders better known for arrogance and elitism.

Two quotes in the book offer insight to his approach and humility. This comes from a speech he gave in September 1953:

“Long speeches, the shaking of fists, the banging of tables and strongly worded resolutions out of touch with the objective conditions do not bring about mass action and can do a great deal of harm to the organization and the struggle we serve.”

Although he often looks stern he also values a good sense of humor, explaining in 2005:

“You sharpen your ideas by reducing yourself to the level of the people you are with and a sense of humor and a complete relaxation, even when you are discussing serious things does help to mobilize friends around you. And I love that.”

Next was Ahmed “Kathy” Kathrada, one of the eight convicted activists including Mandela assigned to a special section in the draconian Robben Island prison. The apartheid government practiced its racism there openly, giving Kathrada, an Indian, more privileges than his black comrades. He joined Mandela in protesting discriminatory practices.

Mandela always “led from the front,” he explained, taking principled stands and refusing any special treatment unless it was also given to his colleagues. Kathrada’s description of their life together on the inside for decades was vivid and matter of fact, even if his words brought tears to the eyes of people who have heard his stories before. These prisoners had nothing but contempt for the court’s verdict because they knew it was made on a political basis, not a legal one.

Mandela himself embraces the notion of the role of people in the front. He puts it simply in this quotation: “Good Leaders Lead.” And leading he still is with several foundations, one for children, one focused on AIDs, and the principal one encouraging community dialogues to fight xenophobia and violence.

Sitting in the front row and listening was one of the lawyers who represented Kathrada and Mandela in their famous treason trial. He is a legal legend by the name of George Bizos who came to South Africa from Greece, the cradle of democracy.

It was Bizos who convinced Mandela to add three small words to his most famous quotation, the one in which he told his Judges he was prepared to die for his ideals.

Bizos persuaded him not to be so categorical by, in effect, challenging the state to kill him. Before the phrase vowing he was ready to die, his lawyer interjected the words, “If needs be” to the statement of defiance giving Mandela some political wriggle room. In the end, he was not sentenced to death and lived to outlast his warders and go from prison to the presidency.

Mandela is right: words and ideas matter, but he also insists they must lead to action. The movement he led was admired for its moral stance. Today, that movement is in power. Known for the progress it brought, but also for a pervasive corruption that threatens the legacy of his beloved African National Congress (ANC).

Cry, The Beloved Country was one of South Africa’s greatest novels. Today, many of those who fought for its freedom are crying about its many self-inflicted crises. That’s an issue I will return to.

News Dissector Danny Schechter produced the globally broadcast TV series South Africa Now and was a director six documentary films about Nelson Mandela. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org

Was John Lennon A Closet Republican?

BananaFamine — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 05:10:26 +0000

Photo: Roy Kerwood (CC)

Via the Toronto Sun:

John Lennon was a closet Republican, who felt a little embarrassed by his former radicalism, at the time of his death — according to the tragic Beatles star’s last personal assistant.

Fred Seaman worked alongside the music legend from 1979 to Lennon’s death at the end of 1980 and he reveals the star was a Ronald Reagan fan who enjoyed arguing with left-wing radicals who reminded him of his former self.

In new documentary Beatles Stories, Seaman tells filmmaker Seth Swirsky Lennon wasn’t the peace-loving militant fans thought he was while he was his assistant.

He says, “John, basically, made it very clear that if he were an American he would vote for Reagan because he was really sour on (Democrat) Jimmy Carter.

“He’d met Reagan back, I think, in the 70s at some sporting event… Reagan was the guy who had ordered the National Guard, I believe, to go after the young (peace) demonstrators in Berkeley, so I think that John maybe forgot about that … He did express support for Reagan, which shocked me.

For more information, see original article.

South Africa’s Youth Face A Grim Future

Danny Schechter — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 16:12:30 +0000

School Children at Imperial Primary School in Eastridge, Mitchell's Plain (Cape Town, South Africa).

“Don’t Know Much About History”

DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA: I got into South Africa before I got there.

I did so through meeting a young woman whose given name was Pony, in the tradition of South Africans who call their daughters “Beautiful” or “Truth” or some other creative appellation.

She was on her way home to a small country town, after a year spent in Cuba where she was in a course teaching scientific sport. She was one of a number of scholarship students traveling on the plane with me from Madrid. Cuba had adopted the systematic training system, or Sports institutes, used in East Germany and put it to good advantage in its award winning State backed athletic program. Now they are sharing their knowledge with other Third World countries

Pony, in her late teens, was one of a large number of foreign students attracted to the idea, and was selected by the Cuban Embassy in Pretoria for the five year opportunity beginning with a immersive Spanish language course. She now speaks Spanish pretty well, and knows all the Cuban revolutionary songs and slogans like “Patria O’ Muerte, Veneceremos” (“Fatherland or Death, We Will Win”) that tens of thousands of Cubans echo at huge rallies. She laughed when I chanted one at her as we unexpectedly sat next to each other on the large Iberia jet.

As it turned out, I knew more about Cuba’s role in supporting South Africa’s liberation struggle, a gesture of solidarity that led to Fidel Castro being cheered the loudest of all foreign heads of State who attended Nelson Mandela’s inauguration as the first President of a Democratic South Africa. I covered the scene in a film, Countdown To Freedom, that I made about the historic l994 election.

Cuba’s foreign policy has put a premium of backing revolutionary movements since 1960 and was the only country in the world to openly help South Africa militarily by sending its own troops, their “internationalist volunteers,” to Angola where they defeated the apartheid army in a crucial battle that accelerated the process of political change in Southern Africa. Many Cubans died alongside Angolan soldiers and South African liberation fighters in a war that has been largely forgotten.

Cuba has, in the years since, mellowed in its revolutionary ardor and is in the process of reforming its top-down Socialist economy.

After 19 years of “freedom,” post apartheid South Africa has also cooled its commitment to “struggle politics” and has become more of a “normal” African state, albeit an advanced one economically. It is now battling corruption within the ranks of its government and the ruling African National Congress (ANC) while coping with enormous challenges to create a new society so that youngsters like Pony who are very ambitious and eager to learn will have a future.

She admitted to me she doesn’t know as much about politics or her own history as she would like, and says that’s true of many in her generation. That’s in part because the real history is not taught in any detail in the schools or shown with any regularity on South African TV stations. They are more into selling than telling by pumping out sports and popular culture.

Kids know more abut Mandela than the movement he led, an expression of the celebrity worship that dominates youth culture. On TV here, Oprah is better known than such lionesses of the freedom fight as Albertina Sisulu, revered by many as the Mother of the Nation, who died a month ago.

When I asked a young white South African girl who the ANC leader and Mandela law partner Oliver Tambo was, she said, “you mean the airport guy?” Johannesburg’s principal airport was renamed for Tambo after years of honoring Afrikaner leaders. (This is all more anecdotal evidence for why South Africa needs its own History Channel of the kind being proposed by producer Anant Singh).

In Durban, where streets are being renamed for other liberation heroes vandals have blacked out the new street names with paint to protest the change. I was told that people are pissed off because it screws up the GPS’s in their cars. (I was thrilled to see a highway named after my old friend and London School of Economics colleague, the journalist and feminist heroine Ruth First).

As it turns out, Pony was flying home on June 16^th, the annual youth day holiday marking the anniversary of the Soweto uprising of l976 where kids Pony’s age and younger revolted against forced instruction in Afrikaans. (South Africans were scandalized when an iconic picture of a young man carrying a victim of that police massacre was mocked on Facebook. In the new one, the child who had been shot in the original was smiling and carrying a bottle of beer).

At least Youth Day is commemorated, as it was this year with concerts and hip-hop shows. In Soweto this time, there was riot when local kids felt excluded and fought their way into a stadium while private cops maced and beat them to the horror of many onlookers. The event turned into chaos when all many kids wanted to do was “krump.” the latest street dance craze.

South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma hardly made the ceremony a priority, showing up three hours late after most of the crowd left in the company of Julius Malema, the controversial head of the ANC’s Youth League. Malema claims to be a youth leader but he is more like a demagogic politician who has learned that the more outrageous his statements, the more “militant” his pose, the more publicity he gets. Sadly the media can’t get enough of his provocations.

He and his League are certainly not doing much of a practical sort to improve education or create jobs for tens of thousands of unemployed and perhaps unemployable young people who cheer his rhetoric while being stuck in lives of crime and desperation.

Here in Durban, a newspaper states, “the youth today mistake nastiness, name-calling, crass materialism and the sale of political office to the highest bidder for revolutionary thought.” Some of those demanding more youth leadership are being dismissed as “Gucci revolutionaries.”

Their demand to nationalize the mines without compensation (a demand rejected by the ANC) is seen as radical to some, but analysts think it is a ploy to shake down patronage payments out of worried business leaders, some of whom have already made them. A bigger problem would occur if this demand was ever realized because the government has a poor record of running industries in the so-called “para-statals” like ESCOM, the electricity monopoly with its frequent mishaps.

A new book, Zuma’s Own Goal, (Africa World Press) picturing the president playing soccer on the cover, details the miserable failures of the ANC’s poverty reduction strategies arguing its continuing loyalty to neo-liberal policies are responsible for a still widening gap between rich and Poor

South Africa was rebranded through last year’s World Cup that brought the country so much world attention and its people so much good cheer.

But now, the people are left with enormous debts to pay off for the construction of fancy stadiums that are barely used. The global financial crisis has now hit home with poverty up and foreign investments down.

The Rainbow Nation, the hope of so many with the fall of apartheid, faces enormous challenges from structural economic issues that are increasingly intractable, even as protests mount.

My new friend Pony may be oblivious to this swirl of contradictions but is bound to be affected by them.

News Dissector Danny Schechter produced the South Africa Now TV series and directed several films about Nelson Mandela. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org. “Don’t Know Much About History,” is a line from an R&B classic sung by Sam Cooke.

Timothy Leary: Back In The Mainstream

majestic — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 11:49:56 +0000

Leary recording 'Give Peace a Chance' with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Photo: Roy Kerwood (CC)

He may have turned on, tuned in and dropped out, losing his post as a Harvard professor and instead becoming an icon of ’60s counterculture, but Timothy Leary has finally (and posthumously) made it back into the mainstream. The New Yorker details the acquisition of his archives by the New York Public Library:

Sitting in a storage complex in Long Island City, waiting to be sorted and processed, are several hundred boxes that make up the complete archive of Dr. Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist turned fugitive drug propagandist. The material was recently acquired from Leary’s estate by the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library, whose collection includes Mesopotamian clay tablets from the third millennium B.C.; documents from America’s founding, including a handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson; letters and manuscripts by Hawthorne, Melville, Mencken; the papers of Fiorello LaGuardia and Robert Moses; and the archives of this magazine.

Against this eminent backdrop, Leary, who was labeled by Richard Nixon (albeit with some hyperbole) “the most dangerous man in America,” seems an odd fit. His notoriety began with his controversial stewardship of the Harvard Psilocybin Project, which in 1960 commenced a series of experiments into the effects and therapeutic potential of hallucinogens. The increasingly loose and unorthodox methodology of this analysis virtually eliminated the distinction between experimenter and subject, and Leary’s handling of the drugs was cavalier, to say the least. “Would you be willing to meet this guy for a drink, size him up and then if you think he is a swinger, make arrangements to give him mushrooms?” he wrote to a colleague in 1961. “As a pharmacist he might teach us a lot.” Allen Ginsberg took notice, and initiated Leary into the cultural cognoscenti. They gave psilocybin to Robert Lowell (to no great effect), and before long Ginsberg was writing Leary to ask, “Do you want I should take on Monk or Franz Kline or De Kooning?”

The project’s lack of discretion and diminishing credibility aroused the ire of the Harvard faculty and student body, resulting in a dispute over its merits that wound up in the pages of the Harvard Crimson and then the national press. By the end of the year, the university had shuttered the project. Defiant, Leary and his chief collaborator, Richard Alpert, defended their work in a letter to the Crimson. “A major civil liberties issue of the next decade will be the control and expansion of consciousness,” they declared. “Who controls your cortex? Who decides on the range and limits of your awareness? If you want to research your own nervous system, expand your consciousness, who is to decide that you can’t and why?” Both were soon out of a job…

[continues in the New Yorker]

Madame Restell: The Wickedest Woman in New York

Haystack — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 17:15:26 +0000

Madame Restell was a flamboyant 19th century abortionist whom history remembers as ”the wickedest woman in New York” —but had she been? Victorian Gothic takes a critical look:

The cover of The New York Illustrated Times for February 23rd, 1878 depicts the arrest of the notorious abortionist Ann Lohman, alias “Madame Restell,” by the moral crusader Anthony Comstock. Flanked by reporters and deputies, the statuesque crime-fighter is pictured with a search warrant in hand, which he reads to the lady villain in the attitude of a holy messenger, banishing evil by its sacred words. Comfortably situated amongst the opulent furnishings of her Fifth Avenue mansion, Madame Restell wears a cool, appraising expression, as if to say “Ah, Comstock, my nemesis—I have been expecting you.” Her right hand is clenched into a fist, which overlaps the womb of a veiled woman who weeps with shame in the background.

Dubbed the “wickedest woman in New York,” Madame Restell built an empire of cruelty; promoting vice, and profiting upon the mistakes of married women and wayward girls. She plied her trade openly, publicizing her services through thinly-veiled advertisements in the penny press. Though she was object of perennial public scandals and outbursts of moral outrage, she shamelessly flaunted her wealth, parading about the city in a showy carriage with four horses and a liveried coachman. She evaded justice by bribery, by clever legal maneuvering, and by threatening to expose the identities of her wealthy clientele—or so, that’s how the story goes.

Ann Lohman and her relations left no journals or correspondence to offer us insight into her true actions, personal feelings or motivations. She has been the subject of two modern biographies, Allan Keller’s Scandalous Lady and Clifford Browder’s The Wickedest Woman in New York. Each of these, in weaving its narrative, has been forced to rely heavily upon hostile newspaper accounts, courtroom transcripts, police memoirs, and anti-abortion tracts, as these are virtually the only sources now available. History has recorded the story Madame Restell almost exclusively in the voice of public condemnation—a circumstance that immediately begs the question: who was she, really?

[Full Article at Victorian Gothic]

Gil Scott-Heron, RIP

majestic — Sat, 28 May 2011 13:25:23 +0000

Gil Scott-Heron was one of a kind. His politically-infused songs and poetry defined a new generation of activism for many people in the ’70s and ’80s. The “Godfather of Hip-Hop” died on Friday, May 27, 2011 in New York. Remembering Gil, here’s a video of his best known work, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

Bob Marley Died Dreaming of Babylon on Fire

cybercasualty — Sat, 14 May 2011 03:59:37 +0000

Courtesy of Brandt Hardin

Fire up a spliff and bow to this man at RockStarMartyr.net:

Bob Marley shined a ray of hope upon the starved and battered denizens of the Third World with his soothing reggae rhythms. The singer rose up from the brutal Jamaican ghetto to emerge on the international music scene as a charismatic voice of conscience, holding up the bitter legacy of European colonialism to the shame of well-fed “baldheads.” He sang an apocalyptic song of freedom, tapping Rasta prophecies that promised the return of Africans to their homeland, “Zion,” and the total destruction of decadent Western society — Babylon. As the tumultuous 1970s drew to a close, Marley and his fellow Rastafari were certain the end was nigh.

Bob Marley’s world ended in a Miami hospital bed thirty years ago this week on May 11, 1981, while the First World’s marketing gurus captured and framed his image in ganja green, blood red, and merchandising gold. Despite the best intentions of international charities and the impassioned diatribes of pot-smoking college students, thirty years later the Third World continues to groan under the weight of commercial exploitation and crushing poverty. Maybe Jah smoked one spliff too many and forgot all about Armageddon.

If Heaven is peace and plenty, then sweltering Caribbean ghettos are Hell on earth. Even sheltered tourists can’t help but notice the desperation and violence that seethes beyond the putting green…

Read the rest at RockStarMartyr.net

Hip-Hop And The Middle East Uprisings

BananaFamine — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 13:03:27 +0000

Via Freemuse:

Hip-hop plays a central role in the revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria and Libya. Rap songs create an important platform for communication creating moral support and encouraging a spirit of resistance and revolt against the regime.

“The Arabic revolutions have largely been a revolt by the young, who have made clear they are no longer willing to live in a climate of corruption, repression and hopelessness. And, like every youth revolution, this one has its own sound,” wrote Anne-Beatrice Clasmann of the US news site M&C: “Since the weight of the protests have been carried by the young, the protest songs are not the classic marches or ballads that were used when Arabic countries rose up against colonizers. Instead, today’s protest songs are all hip-hop and Oriental pop. Many of the songs aren’t available in stores. To find them, one has to go to YouTube or other websites.”

“The fact that many musicians place themselves in the front line has inspired a lot of people in the Middle East to question the rules that the system has pulled down over their heads,” told Freemuse Officer Martin Buch Larsen who recently travelled in the region:

“The rappers are in their 20s, often reasonably well educated, and they see music as a way they can express themselves on the issues they are confronted with in their daily lives. They rap about unemployment, poor housing, mismanagement, corruption. And that is what makes the political leaders so furious. But the leaders’ rage has had the opposite effect: Rappers have suddenly acquired a kind of revolutionary celebrity,” he said.

For more information, see original article.

Former CIA Analyst Blows Cover Off Libyan Intervention On CNN (Video)

BananaFamine — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 04:31:57 +0000

CIA Operating In Libya, In Consultation With Opposition

BananaFamine — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 08:12:47 +0000

Via CNN:

CIA operatives are providing intelligence from Libya, where opposition forces are on the run and the defiant government suffered the embarrassing defection of its foreign minister Wednesday.

The NATO-led coalition, which is enforcing a no-fly zone and protecting civilians from the intense fighting, got no help from the weather in its ongoing efforts to protect the fragile opposition movement.

“The weather conditions did not allow close combat support by aircraft in the last couple of days,” said Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Moammar Gadhafi’s government, for its part, kept up the war of words. State-run Libyan TV late Wednesday quoted a military source as saying a “civilian location was shelled tonight in the city of Tripoli by the colonizing crusader aggression.”

Amid debate on whether the allies will arm the retreating and undertrained rebels, a U.S. intelligence source told CNN the CIA is in the country to increase the “military and political understanding” of the situation. “Yes, we are gathering intel firsthand and we are in contact with some opposition entities,” said the source.

For more information, see original article.

American: The Bill Hicks Story (Video)

Aaron Dames — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 07:14:27 +0000

The trailer for American: The Bill Hicks Story:

CNN Attributes ‘Mainstreaming Of Conspiracy Theories’ To Rise In U.S. Hate Groups

BananaFamine — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 14:42:59 +0000

While “hate groups” undoubtedly can be a problem for a civil society, I believe this article is awfully biased against those who are rationally weary of Big Gov.

CNN reports:

The number of radical right groups in America — including hate groups, “Patriot” groups and nativist groups — increased in 2010 for the second year in a row, according to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The organization’s quarterly publication, Intelligence Report, said the growth was “driven by resentment over the changing racial demographics of the country, frustration over the government’s handling of the economy, and the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories and other demonizing propaganda aimed at various minorities.”

The SPLC documented 1,002 hate groups operating in the United States in 2010, a 7.5% increase from the year before. It was the first time that more than 1,000 hate groups were recorded since the organization started tracking them in the 1980s.

But the biggest growth was in so-called “Patriot” groups, which the organization described as conspiracy-minded groups that see the federal government as their primary enemy. There were 300 new groups like this, an increase of more than 60% from the year before, the report said. A lot of the growth in the Patriot groups came from an increase in the number of militias recorded.

Article continues at CNN.com

How a Slap Sparked Tunisia’s Revolution … And Perhaps For the Entire Middle East (Video)

ralph — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 02:20:36 +0000

While Libya now, and Egypt not too long ago, are/were dominating the news cycle, 60 Minutes had a recent piece on what happened in Tunisia before these events. The most amazing part of this video to me, is in Tunisia, some young people who were part of the protest movement are now part of the new government. Bob Simon of 60 Minutes reports:

The wave of revolutions sweeping the Arab world started in a forgotten town in the flatlands of Tunisia. It was an unlikely place for history to be made. But so was Tunisia itself, the smallest country in North Africa, strategically irrelevant, with no oil and not much of an army.

It has been an oasis of tranquility in this tumultuous part of the world, famous for its beaches, its couscous and its wonderful weather. But there was a dark side to paradise: for 23 years, Tunisia was ruled by a corrupt and ruthless dictator named Zine Ben Ali, who filled his prisons with anyone who spoke out against him.

Day Of Rage: Americans Finally Reacting To Economic Rape?

BananaFamine — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 20:28:14 +0000

Undoubtedly, many are wondering if the unrest in Africa and the Middle East would spark any movements in the United States. What comparisons can be drawn from the protests in Wisconsin to the other protests seen around the world?

Paul Joseph Watson of InfoWars offers his perspective:

Last month we speculated how long it would take for the scenes on the streets of Cairo to be repeated in America. After all, Americans are facing similar levels of economic rape to those that prompted Egyptians to rise up and overthrow 30 year dictator Hosni Mubarak.

Now Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan (R) is making similar comparisons after protesters massed in the hallways of the Wisconsin state Capitol this morning as part of what Matt Drudge dubbed a “day of rage”.

The demonstrators are rallying against a “momentous bill that would strip government workers, including school teachers, of nearly all collective bargaining rights,” reports the Associated Press.

The bill asks public sector workers to make a 5.8 percent pension contribution, roughly equal to the national average, along with a 12.6 percent health insurance contribution.

Ryan expressed his opposition to the demands of the protesters, but noted that the Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was now facing, “Riots — it’s like Cairo has moved to Madison these days.”

Similarly, noting that the Governor has threatened to break the union protests by deploying the National Guard, writer Noam Chomsky told Democracy Now that what happened in Egypt was “the beginning of what we need here – democracy uprising.”

As part of the demonstration against the bill, students of Stoughton High School staged a walkout on Monday as a show of support for their teachers.

Whether you’re in favor of making public sector workers pay more in contributions or not, the fact is that Americans in general now face the terrible consequences of a derivatives debt black hole that threatens to shut down the entire economy…

[continues at InfoWars]

Seven Arrested Over Plot to Sell Drugs to Arm Taliban

BananaFamine — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 17:51:47 +0000

Taliban flag

Selling drugs to finance arms purchases — why does that sound so familiar? The New York Times reports:

A group of men agreed to assist the Taliban in a conspiracy to ship narcotics through West Africa to the United States and with the proceeds buy weapons for use against American forces in Afghanistan, federal prosecutors in Manhattan announced on Monday.

The charges stemmed from a sting operation run by the Drug Enforcement Administration, in which paid informants posed as representatives of the Taliban and discussed arrangements for the proposed drugs and weapons deals with the accused conspirators in meetings in West Africa and Eastern Europe.

One conspirator told the confidential informants that they could obtain heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles, antitank missiles, grenade launchers, night vision equipment, sniper rifles and AK-47 assault rifles, according to a criminal complaint unsealed in Federal District Court in Manhattan.

The defendants included two Americans, who were both accused of conspiring to provide surface-to-air missiles to the Taliban and to provide material support to terrorists.

As part of the sting, an informant acting as a Taliban representative explained that the missiles were needed to protect the Taliban’s heroin laboratories from attacks by American Cobra and Blackhawk helicopters.

Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, said the defendants “were prepared to provide millions of dollars in dangerous narcotics and lethal weapons to men they believed represented the Taliban.”

“This alleged effort to arm and enrich the Taliban,” Mr. Bharara said, “is the latest example of the dangers of an interconnected world in which terrorists and drug runners can link up across continents to harm Americans.”…

For more information, see original article.

Could A U.S. Government Crackdown Take America Off The Internet?

BananaFamine — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 13:54:46 +0000

I’m sure this has been on the minds of many following the ongoing events in Egypt. An io9 article discusses the possibility:

With the threat of today’s protests looming in Egypt, on Thursday Egyptian authorities cut the nation off the internet. No online communication could pass in or out of the country. We investigated whether a similar lockdown could happen in America.

How the Egyptian government erased its citizens from the internet

No one is completely certain what happened to the Egyptian internet, but it appears that the shutdown started off early in the week with the country blocking Twitter and Facebook access for those within its borders. Then, shortly after Thursday midnight local time, the country simply disappeared from the internet. With a few exceptions like the stock exchange, Egyptian websites and services were unreachable; the network traffic over Egyptian borders dropped by an astonishing 90 percent. Cell phone networks were also down. Today Vodafone confirmed that all mobile providers been “obliged” by the Egyptian government to shut off service to customers in that country.

How did it happen? Most likely, according to experts, the Egyptian authorities made a few phone calls to the country’s handful of large internet service providers. Their request would have been simple: Make it impossible for Egyptians to communicate with other countries and each other using the internet. But carrying out this order isn’t like hitting an off switch.

To erase Egypt, those providers would have to corrupt routers, nodes in the internet which direct data traffic. Each router helps traffic along by advertising the many IP addresses it knows using a system called border gateway protocol (BGP). When you visit a website in Egypt, your internet provider uses BGP to ask an Egyptian router, “Hey, how do I get to this Egyptian blog?” The router responds by using BGP to send you on your merry way to the right address. BGP is basically the border language that helps different parts of the internet speak to each other.

But early Friday morning, thousands of routers in Egypt had their minds wiped. Suddenly they had no idea where anything was on the Egyptian internet. When your internet provider looked for web addresses inside Egypt, it found nothing. Egyptian routers no longer gave meaningful answers to BGP requests for border crossings.

Article continues at io9.

FBI Issues Warrants Over “Anonymous” Cyber Attacks

BananaFamine — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 23:50:11 +0000

Will “I did it for the lulz” hold up in court? Fox News reports:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation refused to elaborate Friday on the status of more than 40 search warrants the agency issued throughout the United States on Thursday, as part of an ongoing investigation into recent coordinated cyber attacks against major companies and organizations.

An FBI spokesman refused to tell FoxNews.com whether arrests had been made or were expected, instead referring all questions back to a press release the agency issued late Thursday announcing the warrants.

The FBI also said that the United Kingdom’s Metropolitan Police Service had executed search warrants that had resulted in five arrests. The suspects in custody are identified as young men from the central and souther England area, and range in age from 15 to 26.

Targeted suspects are members of a group called “Anonymous,” which coordinated cyber attacks against companies like PayPal, Visa and MasterCard after the companies had dropped support for WikiLeaks. “The FBI is working closely with its international law enforcement partners and others to mitigate these threats,” said the agency in a statement. England, France, Germany and the Netherlands are also participating in similar investigations in their own countries…

[continues at Fox News]

Iranian Book Celebrating Suicide Bombers Found in Arizona Desert

BananaFamine — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 19:55:07 +0000

U.S. Border Patrol dune buggy in Arizona. Look who's riding shotgun!

This loaded article is sure to stir some controversy. Fox News reports:

A book celebrating suicide bombers has been found in the Arizona desert just north of the U.S.-Mexican border, authorities tell Fox News.

The book, “In Memory of Our Martyrs,” was spotted Tuesday by a U.S. Border Patrol agent out of the Casa Grande substation who was patrolling a route known for smuggling illegal immigrants and drugs.

Published in Iran, it consists of short biographies of Islamic suicide bombers and other Islamic militants who died carrying out attacks.

According to internal U.S. Customs and Border Protection documents, “The book also includes letters from suicide attackers to their families, as well as some of their last wills and testaments.” Each biographical page contains “the terrorist’s name, date of death, and how they died.”

Agents also say that the book appears to have been exposed to weather in the desert “for at least several days or weeks.”

Authorities told Fox News that there were no people in the area at the time the book was found, and no arrests have been made in connection with it.

“At this time, DHS does not have any credible information on terrorist groups operating along the Southwest border,” a Department of Homeland Security official said in a statement. “We work closely with our partners in the law enforcement and intelligence communities and as a matter of due diligence and law enforcement best practice, report anything found, no matter how significant or insignificant it may seem.”

Statements from U.S. officials, including FBI director Robert Mueller, have raised serious concerns in recent years over “OTMs” — or illegal immigrants other than Mexicans — who have crossed the southwest border at alarming rates…

For more information, see original article.

‘The Empire Strikes Back’ & Others To Be Preserved By U.S. Library

HAL9000 — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 08:38:04 +0000

Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back is to be preserved by the US Library of Congress as part of its National Film Registry:

Each year, 25 “culturally” significant films are added to the registry, which was founded in 1989. Lucas’s Star Wars and American Graffiti are among the 550 titles already selected for preservation.

This year’s raft of entries includes Robert Altman’s 1971 western McCabe and Mrs. Miller starring Warren Beatty, Blake Edwards’ The Pink Panther and Elia Kazan’s first feature film, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, made in 1945.

Wikileaks And The Secrets That Deceive Us

Danny Schechter — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 18:34:56 +0000

In the days of Stalin’s Russia, not only would dissidents “disappear” but also even in the pre-digital era, photographs of officials at May Day reviewing stands would be erased from photographs when their political stars fell. Our own “Kremlinologists” would know who was in, and who was out by comparing last year’s pictures with this year’s.

That’s one way of concealing information.

Just last week, Republicans on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission pushed to have certain words removed from the report they were writing because they posed a conflict to their view that only the government was to blame for the financial collapse

Explained economist Paul Krugman:

Last week, reports Shahien Nasiripour of The Huffington Post, all four Republicans on the commission voted to exclude the following terms from the report: “deregulation,” “shadow banking,” “interconnection,” and, yes, “Wall Street.”

When Democratic members refused to go along with this insistence that the story of Hamlet be told without the prince, the Republicans went ahead and issued their own report, which did, indeed, avoid using any of the banned terms.

In our media today, omission of images and ideas is as key to sanitizing the news as is commission, What is not reported or perhaps even known is often more important than stories that are twisted by bias.

Enter Wikileaks and an age-old battle between our right to know and their right to keep us from knowing. Its critics make a fetish about keeping secrets as if it is a holy duty and not a system of keeping the public uninformed about what their government is doing in its name.

The public has a right to know if officials are saying one thing in private and another in public, if they are concealing information or just plain lying.

The Pentagon Papers showed us that wars could be waged deceptively, based on deliberate falsehoods. Wikileaks revelations about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars tell a similar story. We have learned how torture and civilian deaths were pervasive—and covered up.

Veteran investigative reporter Bob Parry argues that in the national security area, journalists—and the people—need leaks from officials of conscience. He writes:

“Whatever the unusual aspects of the case, the Obama administration’s reported plan to indict WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for conspiring with Army Pvt. Bradley Manning to obtain U.S. secrets strikes at the heart of investigative journalism on national security scandals.

That’s because the process for reporters obtaining classified information about crimes of state most often involves a journalist persuading some government official to break the law either by turning over classified documents or at least by talking about the secret information. There is almost always some level of “conspiracy” between reporter and source.

Contrary to what some outsiders might believe, it’s actually quite uncommon for sensitive material to simply arrive “over the transom” unsolicited. Indeed, during three decades of reporting on these kinds of stories, I can only recall a few secret documents arriving that way to me.”

It’s not just the government that hides behind secrecy rules it puts in place. The private sector does too—with the complicity of much of the media, which did not warn us about the financial crisis that was building. We didn’t learn about the pervasive fraud in the banking and real estate industries and still don’t know the full extent of the crimes of Wall Street.

Do we have to wait for historians to tell us that the stories we are being told are a crock?

Anyone remember reading about the Spanish American war. That’s the one which also marked the beginnings of “yellow journalism” when screaming headlines and falsified photos were used to mobilize the public for war.

Back then, at the turn of the last century, an American battleship, the USS Maine sank in Havana Harbor. The incident sparked a battle cry, “REMEMBER THE MAINE.” We were told that “THEY” sank it. The incident led to war which later spread to the Philippines at a cost of six million lives.

80 years later, a submersible submarine went down to the remains of the Maine on the harbor floor. What they found was that no one — no terrorists, no Spaniards, no Cubans, nobody sank the Maine. There had been an accident in the engine room. The whole war was based on a well publicized event that never happened.

If we had known that at the time, many lives would have been saved and the direction of US foreign policy might not have gone in an imperial direction.

So, back to today: What do we gain from persecuting and prosecuting Bradley Manning who was among three million people with access to the diplomatic cables we are now reading about? What will we gain by jailing or killing (as some right wingers advocate) Julian Assange who is already being called “the Che Guevara of the Information Age”?

The CIA’s murder of the original Guevara created a global martyr whose image is still among the most popular icons in the world. Guevara had his own problems with hostile women. One, Molly Gonzales, tried to break through barricades upon his arrival in New York with a seven-inch hunting knife. He later became famous for saying, “the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.”

Assange is being accused of sexual crimes in Sweden, a country, ironically, recently condemned by Amnesty International for not enforcing its own laws against rape. Now, the Wikileaker in chief, is being targeted by the leak of a Swedish police document detailing charges against him. (They are charges, not facts and may be serious under Swedish law.)

The ongoing and well-orchestrated war on Wikileaks is also outraging millions worldwide who see the United States as a secretive and manipulative colossus that lives on lies and deception.

For many, this issue has reached a level of hysteria which, like the “Red Hunts” of the 1920s and the commie “crimes” of the cold war era, will only bring more shame to a Washington desperate to change the story away from the content of the leaked cables to allegations of wrongdoing by Assange. The Administration is also virtually torturing the man who dumped the documents, Bradley Manning, in Gitmo-like conditions, in an effort to turn hum against Assange. He has yet to be tried.

We can’t put leaks genie back in the bottle. We might do better reflecting on the meaning of these disclosures for our democracy and media. The big secret is the one we don’t want to see: that we are building support and respect for Wikileaks even as officials fulminate against it.

Filmmaker and News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org.

For more on his film Plunder: The Crime of Our Time and companion book The Crime Of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big To Jail, visit plunderthecrimeofourtime.com.

Newton’s Third Law – The Coming Collision

Ken Vallario — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 21:45:41 +0000

The Singularity by Ken Vallario.

“To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction: or the forces of two bodies on each other are always equal and are directed in opposite directions.”

In watching the coming collision collision between one individual and the world’s mightiest government, we are about to see if these forces are in fact equal, or if these laws will soon be broken.

The Good News

In the light of the latest Wikileaks events I have been thinking very deeply about citizen empowerment and how technology enabled a small group of people to threaten the legitimacy of the most powerful government the world has ever known. And surprisingly that same government has yet to find a legitimately effective response against this very big pie in their very large collective face.

As many of us have done, I have attempted to fill this void with my own speculations about the retaliatory use of power and how it might subsequently threaten future freedoms, but to my surprise I am left with no other recourse than optimism simply because the technology seems finally to be on our side. These ever-shrinking and ever more powerful devices are quickly growing out of government control. In other words, Julian Assange and Wikileaks are not only symbolic of a political shift but represent the dawn of a new age in the most existential sense, one marked by the emergence of a new form of intelligence, a new culture. Even though we are the creators of this machine it has taken on a life of its own as evidenced by the utter inability for government to stand in its way. To many, the notion of autonomous machine intelligence is met with trepidation as it is assumed that such an intrusive presence would, by its unconscious nature, be a threat to our very fragile ecosystem.

However, the Wikileaks phenomenon indicates another possibility, one that exposes our reluctance for hope, that these machines might tend toward progressive ideals; that it is in their nature to assist in a positive human destiny. Now, I am not proposing that these machines are conscious, but I am putting forward the idea that the hyper-networking of the digital age not only enables the empowerment of egalitarian virtues, but that it actually favors them. The printing press created a favorable efficiency gap between the intellectuals of the enlightenment and the cumbersome bureaucracy of the church but more specifically it nurtured an expanding literary attitude as opposed to a zealous dependence upon singular texts. So now we have a ubiquitous and universalizing machine that provides profits in direct relation to how easily it supports a felicitous sharing of information.

And even though I avoid ascribing to this new technological giant that great human virtue of consciousness I must admit my suspicion that its effects have entered that phase where words like personality and intention are not indefensible. We now have a true ‘other’ in our world, an alien enigma, toward which we relate in ways we cannot fully understand, but there is evidence that this relationship might enable us to do what we have long dreamed to do; put our ideas in an open competition with bullets and brawn. This fully integrated machine gives life to these very words; this medium might not only be the message but it might also be the messiah, marking the coming of that mythical judgment day of the sort that can transform the skeptics into believers and the believers into skeptics.

These are all imaginative speculations, but they are hopeful ones, and hope is the fruit of the imagination, and after centuries of toiling in the hard empirical ground of rational being we might have finally enriched the earth with enough complexity to nourish a whole new thriving ecosystem, one that joins the animal kingdom with the promised land of ideas. Whereas once it was proclaimed that God is dead we might soon have the satisfaction of proclaiming not only that Darwin is dead but Henry Ford too.

As much as we worry about government control and surveillance of the internet and communication technology we have only to consider what makes these machines profitable, the idea of ‘user-friendliness’ to see that this basic idea is unstoppable, that those who attempt to hinder the free flow of information in this virtual world will always be a few steps behind those who have embraced these new laws.

In summary, the strength of Julian Assange is found, not in his personal heroism or his intelligence, but simply in his pointing toward a mechanism for liberation, radical transparency. Anyone who is familiar with Ray Kurzweil’s work, with his description of the Singularity, actively seeks signs of that transformative moment that will mark our transition into a transhuman future. I propose that perceiving the Singularity is merely a matter of sensitivity, that it is here, that Wikileaks is the herald of good news, that we have finally achieved the holy grail of progressive activism, in a quality we can only find in the realm of virtual avatars, the ability to confront oppression and remain bulletproof. This symbolic arena allows us to detach from the vulnerability of our bodies thus dissolving the crutch of weaponry from those who have for too long held us captive to their unsustainable greed. What makes the unfolding of the coming drama so exciting, as these two forces prepare to collide, is the fact that the battle has already been won and, as we ought to become accustomed to, is merely playing out in the echo of physical space.