Warning: Viewers may find some of the clips in the film - which you can watch in its entirety below - disturbing.
Warning: Viewers may find some of the clips in the film - which you can watch in its entirety below - disturbing.
For over a week, the media has subjected the public to a tidal wave of euphoric banality on the Roman Catholic Church's selection of a new pope.
This non-stop celebration of the dogma and ritual of an institution that for centuries has been identified with oppression and backwardness is stamped with a deeply undemocratic character. It is reflective of the rightward turn of the entire political establishment and its repudiation of the principles enshrined in the US Constitution, including the wall of separation between church and state.
What a far cry from the political ideals that animated those who drafted that document. It was Thomas Jefferson's well-founded opinion that "In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own."
Jefferson's view - and the reactionary character of the media's sycophantic coverage - finds no more powerful conformation than in the identity of the new pope, officially celebrated as a paragon of "humility" and "renewal."
© Desconocido
What a far cry from the political ideals that animated those who drafted that document. It was Thomas Jefferson's well-founded opinion that "In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own."
Jefferson's view - and the reactionary character of the media's sycophantic coverage - finds no more powerful conformation than in the identity of the new pope, officially celebrated as a paragon of "humility" and "renewal."
Acclaimed leftist journalist Alexander Cockburn at his home in Humboldt County, California.
Comment: Salient points on the man-made global warming hoax and dangers posed by nuclear power along the US West coast.
© Getty
Cereal killer: The introduction of agriculture was followed by malnutrition and disease.
Cereal killer: The introduction of agriculture was followed by malnutrition and disease.
To understand why this extraordinary suggestion could make sense, you need to visit the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies in Cambridge, a shrine to modern anthropology. Its gates resemble a Cubist take on the DNA double-helix and its clouded glass windows are etched with phrases from Darwin's Origin of Species.
According to Prof Diamond, agriculture evolved about 12,000 years ago, and since then humans have been malnourished and disease-ridden compared with their hunter-gatherer ancestors. Worse, because agriculture allows food to be stockpiled and enables some people to do things other than look for food, it led to the invention of more and better weapons, soldiers, warfare, class divisions between those who had access to food and those who did not, and inequality between the sexes. This idea has been picked up again in a recent book, An Edible History of Humanity, by Tom Standage, which argues that agriculture is a "profoundly unnatural activity".
Comment: Check out last week's SOTT Talk Radio show on this very topic:
Paleo food: Staying Healthy in a GMO world
She told me that the "messages" of her films were dependent not on "orders from above," but on the "submissive void" of the German public. Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? "Everyone," she said.
Today, we prefer to believe that there is no submissive void. "Choice" is ubiquitous. Phones are "platforms" that launch every half-thought. There is Google from outer space if you need it. Caressed like rosary beads, the precious devices are borne heads-down, relentlessly monitored and prioritised. Their dominant theme is the self. Me. My needs. Riefenstahl's submissive void is today's digital slavery.
Edward Said described this wired state in 'Culture and Imperialism' as taking imperialism where navies could never reach. It is the ultimate means of social control because it is voluntary, addictive and shrouded in illusions of personal freedom.
In this new video from Big Think, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson says he's almost embarrassed for our species that it takes a warning shot across our bow before legislators take seriously the warning they've been getting from astronomers that its a matter of when not if Earth will get smacked by an asteroid.
"But it took an actual meteor over Russia exploding with 25 times the power of the atom bomb in Hiroshima to convince people that maybe we should start doing something about it."
Comment: We understand his frustration! SOTT.net has been warning people about this for years. The latest research indicates that it's not the multi-million-year larger space rocks that we need to be concerned about, but the swarms of smaller objects that wreak havoc on human civilizations far more often than people realise...
Celestial Intentions: Comets and the Horns of Moses
When America goes to war or plans one, it marches in lockstep. It's comfortable with neoliberal harshness. It abhors progressive politics. It supports wrong over right.
It suppresses "All the News That's Fit to Print." It ignores America's march to tyranny. It endorses policies demanding condemnation. It's typical Times.
It vilified Chavez throughout his tenure. It did so unfairly. It shamed itself doing so. It matters what it says. It's America's leading voice. It prioritizes propaganda. It has global clout. It lies for power.
After Chavez's December 1998 election, Times Latin American correspondent, Larry Roher, called him a "populist demagogue, an authoritarian....caudillo (strongman)." He lied saying so.
If you can't beat 'im, kill 'im
I once wrote about Chilean president Salvador Allende:
Washington knows no heresy in the Third World but genuine independence. In the case of Salvador Allende independence came clothed in an especially provocative costume - a Marxist constitutionally elected who continued to honor the constitution. This would not do. It shook the very foundation stones upon which the anti-communist tower is built: the doctrine, painstakingly cultivated for decades, that "communists" can take power only through force and deception, that they can retain that power only through terrorizing and brainwashing the population. There could be only one thing worse than a Marxist in power - an elected Marxist in power.There was no one in the entire universe that those who own and run "United States, Inc." wanted to see dead more than Hugo Chávez. He was worse than Allende. Worse than Fidel Castro. Worse than any world leader not in the American camp because he spoke out in the most forceful terms about US imperialism and its cruelty. Repeatedly. Constantly. Saying things that heads of state are not supposed to say. At the United Nations, on a shockingly personal level about George W. Bush. All over Latin America, as he organized the region into anti-US-Empire blocs.
The finest of all journalists in the English-speaking world, Claud Cockburn, said:
"Believe nothing until it has been officially denied."This basic rubric of the trade was all but abandoned a decade ago in the run-up to the war on Iraq, when every official claim was assumed to be true and those who denied it were treated as bad, or even mad. One honourable exception was Cockburn's son, Patrick, in The Independent, an exception continued in his magisterial look back in anger in this newspaper over the past week. If journalism is history's first draft, then Patrick Cockburn's work on Iraq will prove to be close to the finished article.
On that day in 1948, two months before Israel's unilateral declaration of independence in defiance of the will of the organized international community as it then was at the UN, Zionism's in-Palestine political and military leaders met in Tel Aviv to formally adopt PLAN DALET, the blueprint with operational military orders for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
They did not and never would refer to the crime they authorised as ethnic cleansing. Their euphemism for it was "transfer".
As noted in an excellent anniversary briefing paper by IMEU (the American-founded Institute for Middle East Understanding), from the earliest days of modern political Zionism its advocates grappled with the problem of creating a Jewish majority state in a part of the world where Palestinian Arabs were the overwhelming majority of the population.
The earliest insider information we have on Zionism's thinking is from the diary of Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism's colonial-like enterprise. He wrote:
"We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country... expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."Those words were committed to paper by Herzl in 1895 but they were not published (in other words they were suppressed) until 1962.
Comment: Just replace 'global warming' with 'Earth changes brought on by cometary intercession' and the picture is complete:
Celestial Intentions: Comets and the Horns of Moses