Best of the Web:


TV

Best of the Web: The new propaganda is liberal, the new slavery is digital

John Pilger
johnpilger.com
Thu, 14 Mar 2013 12:41 UTC
Image
What is modern propaganda? For many, it is the lies of a totalitarian state. In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl and asked her about her epic films that glorified the Nazis. Using revolutionary camera and lighting techniques, she produced a documentary form that mesmerized Germans; her 'Triumph of the Will' cast Hitler's spell.

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.
Read More...
Fireball 2

Best of the Web: We live in a cosmic shooting gallery

Nancy Atkinson
Universe Today
Wed, 13 Mar 2013 18:14 UTC

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

Read More...
Propaganda

Best of the Web: The New York Times v. Hugo Chavez

Stephen Lendman
The People's Voice
Tue, 12 Mar 2013 14:46 UTC
Image
The Paper of Record's history is longstanding and unprincipled. It supports corporate and imperial interests. It deplores populist ones. It features managed news misinformation. It betrays its readers doing so.

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.
Read More...
Vader

Best of the Web: The Anti-Empire Report 114 - Chavez, 'socialism' and the end of the world

William Blum
williamblum.org
Tue, 12 Mar 2013 04:42 UTC
Image
If you can't beat 'im, kill 'im
Hugo Chávez

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.
Read More...
Colosseum

Best of the Web: Iraq may be broken, but it is our political class that is bankrupted

George Galloway
The Independent, UK
Fri, 08 Mar 2013 11:39 UTC
Image
Virtually nothing has been learned, and now history is repeating itself

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.
Read More...
Star of David

Best of the Web: 65 years ago the green light for Zionism's ethnic cleansing of Palestine

Alan Hart
www.alanhart.net
Mon, 11 Mar 2013 07:37 UTC
Image
I find myself wondering how many of our present day leaders, President Obama in particular, are aware of what happened in Palestine on 10 March 65 years ago.

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.
Read More...
MIB

Best of the Web: CIA cancer weapon killed Chavez?

Charles Kong Soo
The Guardian
Mon, 27 Feb 2012 21:16 UTC
US Senators Frank Church and John Tower
© UnknownUS Senators Frank Church and John Tower examine a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) poison dart gun that causes cancer and heart attacks, during the US Senate Select Committee's investigation into the assassination plots on foreign leaders in 1975.
The heart of the matter

It was a case destined for the X-Files and conspiracy theorists alike, when Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez speculated that the US might have developed a way to weaponise cancer, after several Latin American leaders were diagnosed with the disease. The list includes former Argentine president, Nestor Kirchner (colon cancer) Brazil's president Dilma Rousseff (lymphoma cancer), her predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (throat cancer), Chavez (undisclosed), former Cuban president Fidel Castro (stomach cancer) Bolivian president, Evo Morales (nasal cancer) and Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo (lymphoma cancer). What do they have in common besides cancer? All of them are left-wing leaders. Coincidence? In his December 28, 2011 end-of-year address to the Venezuelan military, Chavez hinted that the US might have found a way to give Latin American leaders cancer. "Would it be so strange that they've invented the technology to spread cancer and we won't know about it for 50 years?" Chavez asked. "It is very hard to explain, even with the law of probabilities, what has been happening to some leaders in Latin America.

It's at the very least strange," he said. Chavez said he received warning from Cuba's former leader Fidel Castro, who has survived hundreds of unsuccessful assassination attempts. "Fidel always told me, 'Chavez take care. These people have developed technology. You are very careless. Take care what you eat, what they give you to eat ... a little needle and they inject you with I don't know what'," he said.
Read More...
Light Saber

Best of the Web: 10 years later, Dixie Chicks right all along

LZ Granderson
CNN
Tue, 05 Mar 2013 21:13 UTC

Two days past 18

He was waiting for the bus in his Army green ...

Those are the first two lines from one of the most powerful songs I have ever heard, . If you don't know it, I encourage you to look it up -- unless you're one of those folks who still hates the group that made the song popular, in which case, its beauty might be lost on you.

It was 10 years ago this week -- as the country was barreling toward war with Iraq -- that Natalie Maines, lead singer of the Dixie Chicks, stood in front of a packed house in London and said:
"Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence. And we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas."
It didn't matter that the evidence to invade Iraq was questionable or that Maines later apologized. The damage was done, and one of the most popular acts in the country became its most hated. Its music was banned from radio, CDs were trashed by bulldozers, and one band member's home was vandalized. Maines introduced "Soldier" with a call for peace, but she would soon find that the group needed metal detectors installed at entrances to shows on its stateside tour because of death threats.

It was a classic case of freedom of speech meeting the irrational repercussions of that speech. "Soldier" is not only their last No. 1, it's still their last single to chart in the top 30. Officially, they've been on hiatus since 2006, but Maines, who is planning on releasing a solo CD in May, recently said, "I just don't feel like it's the Dixie Chicks' time."
Read More...
Dollars

Best of the Web: Wealth inequality in America

politizane
YouTube
Tue, 20 Nov 2012 16:11 UTC
The following video presents infographics on the distribution of wealth in America, highlighting both the inequality and the difference between our perception of inequality and the actual numbers. The reality is often not what we think it is.

Read More...
V

Best of the Web: We Are Bradley Manning

Chris Hedges
truthdig
Sun, 03 Mar 2013 15:24 UTC
Image
Bradley Manning, persecuted by the US government to deter other potential whistleblowers from coming forward, anonymously or publicly
I was in a military courtroom at Fort Meade in Maryland on Thursday as Pfc. Bradley Manning admitted giving classified government documents to WikiLeaks. The hundreds of thousands of leaked documents exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as government misconduct. A statement that Manning made to the court was a powerful and moving treatise on the importance of placing conscience above personal safety, the necessity of sacrificing careers and liberty for the public good, and the moral imperative of carrying out acts of defiance. Manning will surely pay with many years - perhaps his entire life - in prison. But we too will pay. The war against Bradley Manning is a war against us all.

This trial is not simply the prosecution of a 25-year-old soldier who had the temerity to report to the outside world the indiscriminate slaughter, war crimes, torture and abuse that are carried out by our government and our occupation forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a concerted effort by the security and surveillance state to extinguish what is left of a free press, one that has the constitutional right to expose crimes by those in power. The lonely individuals who take personal risks so that the public can know the truth - the Daniel Ellsbergs, the Ron Ridenhours, the Deep Throats and the Bradley Mannings - are from now on to be charged with "aiding the enemy." All those within the system who publicly reveal facts that challenge the official narrative will be imprisoned, as was John Kiriakou, the former CIA analyst who for exposing the U.S. government's use of torture began serving a 30-month prison term the day Manning read his statement. There is a word for states that create these kinds of information vacuums: totalitarian.
Read More...