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Propaganda

Best of the Web: 'Freedom' of the press: Journalism in the Obama age shows the real media bias

Douglas Brinkley
© CNNThe Rolling Stone's Douglas Brinkley
A new Rolling Stone interview with the president shows subservience to power, not partisan favor, is what drives the press corps

Last month, Vanity Fair featured a major profile of President Obama by Michael Lewis, who was given what the New York Times called "rare" and "extraordinary access". Lewis "conducted multiple interviews with the president"; "rode in the official presidential limousine"; "was given a special lapel pin that identified him to the Secret Service as someone who was allowed to be in close proximity to the president"; and "flew with the president on several foreign and domestic trips" -- "not with the rest of the press corps in the back of Air Force One, but near the front." And, noted the Times, "the president even allowed Mr. Lewis to play on his basketball team."

But in exchange for such access, Lewis, unbeknownst to readers of his profile, had agreed to a journalistically corrupt practice - now banned by many large media outlets - whereby the only quotes he was permitted to use were ones the White House approved in advance. Unsurprisingly, the profile was pure hagiography that left Obama's most devoted media fans gushing with ecstacy.

Though I would have thought it impossible, Rolling Stone somehow just managed to top that profile when it comes to sycophantic, power-worshiping "journalism". This week, it features a cover story on Obama by its contributing editor, the historian Douglas Brinkley, largely based on a 45-minute interview in the Oval Office. The questions Brinkley posed are so vapid and reverent that it is hard to believe it's not satire.

Rocket

Best of the Web: Permanent War: Plan for hunting terrorists signals U.S. intends to keep adding names to kill lists

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America's drone culture, a relentless killing machine
Over the past few years, the Obama administration has institutionalized the use of armed drones and developed a counterterrorism infrastructure capable of sustaining a seemingly permanent war.

Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the "disposition matrix."

The matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations. U.S. officials said the database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the "disposition" of suspects beyond the reach of American drones.

Although the matrix is a work in progress, the effort to create it reflects a reality setting in among the nation's counterterrorism ranks: The United States' conventional wars are winding down, but the government expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years.

Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaeda continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight.

Eye 1

Best of the Web: Just what is the 'Disposition Matrix'? Obama makes the War on Terror permanent

Counterterrorism Center
© FBI The National Counterterrorism Center, the site of a new bureaucracy to institutionalize the 'kill list'.
Complete with a newly coined, creepy Orwellian euphemism - 'disposition matrix' - the administration institutionalizes the most extremist powers a government can claim

A primary reason for opposing the acquisition of abusive powers and civil liberties erosions is that they virtually always become permanent, vested not only in current leaders one may love and trust but also future officials who seem more menacing and less benign.

The Washington Post has a crucial and disturbing story this morning by Greg Miller about the concerted efforts by the Obama administration to fully institutionalize - to make officially permanent - the most extremist powers it has exercised in the name of the war on terror.

Based on interviews with "current and former officials from the White House and the Pentagon, as well as intelligence and counterterrorism agencies", Miller reports that as "the United States' conventional wars are winding down", the Obama administration "expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years" (the "capture" part of that list is little more than symbolic, as the US focus is overwhelmingly on the "kill" part). Specifically, "among senior Obama administration officials, there is broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade." As Miller puts it: "That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism."

USA

Best of the Web: Those Despicable Foreigners

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I have travelled this world much more extensively than either Obama or Romney, and I still do. I find everywhere, even in areas of conflict and economic difficulty, the vast majority of people are friendly, even kind, and have very similar aspirations, across cultures, to personal development and emotional fulfilment.

The striking thing about last night's US Presidential "foreign policy" debate, is when it did occasionally discuss foreign policy, the world out there was discussed not as a place of vast potential, but as a deeply disturbing place full of foreigners who are, apparently, all evil except the Israelis, who are perfect.

The vast benefits from cooperation and trade with "abroad" were not mentioned once that I noticed (though I confess the thing was so awful my attention wandered occasionally). Europe apparently doesn't exist, other than Greece which is nothing more than a terrible warning of the dangers of not being right wing enough.

Dollar

Best of the Web: The Billionaires Funding Romney and Obama

money changing hands
© unknown

The last time we checked on the (funding) status of America's real presidential race - the one where America's uber-wealthy try to outspend each other in hopes of purchasing the best president money can buy - the totals were substantially lower. With November 6 rapidly approaching, however, the scramble to lock in those record political lobbying IRRs is in its final lap. And thanks to the unlimited nature of PAC spending, look for the spending to really go into overdrive in the next 2 weeks as the spending frenzy on the world's greatest tragicomedy hits previously unseen heights.

Bulb

Best of the Web: How Psychologists Subvert Democratic Movements

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By the 1980s, as a clinical psychology graduate student, it had become apparent to me that the psychology profession was increasingly about meeting the needs of the "power structure" to maintain the status quo so as to gain social position, prestige, and other rewards for psychologists.

Academic psychology in the 1970s was by no means perfect. There was a dominating force of manipulative, control-freak behaviorists who appeared to get their rocks off conditioning people as if they were rats in a maze. However, there was also a significant force of people such as Erich Fromm who believed that an authoritarian and undemocratic society results in alienation and that this was a source of emotional problems. Fromm was concerned about mental health professionals helping people to adjust to a society with no thought to how dehumanizing that society had become. Back then, Fromm was not a marginalized figure; his ideas were taken seriously. He had bestsellers and had appeared on national television.

However, by the time I received my PhD in 1985 - from an American Psychological Association-approved clinical psychology program - people with ideas such as Fromm's were at the far margins. By then, the focus was on the competition as to what treatment could get patients back on the assembly line quickest. The competition winners that emerged - owing much more to public relations than science - were cognitive-behavioral therapy in psychology and biochemical psychiatry. By the mid-1980s, psychiatry was beginning to become annexed by pharmaceutical companies and forming what we now have - a "psychiatric-pharmaceutical industrial complex." Increasingly marginalized was the idea that treatment that consisted of manipulating and medicating alienated people to adjust to this crazy rat race and thus maintain the status quo was a political act - a problematic one for people who cared about democracy.

Dominoes

Best of the Web: UN warns of looming worldwide food crisis in 2013: Collapse of global food supply inevitable

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World grain reserves are so dangerously low that severe weather in the United States or other food-exporting countries could trigger a major hunger crisis next year, the United Nations has warned.

Failing harvests in the US, Ukraine and other countries this year have eroded reserves to their lowest level since 1974. The US, which has experienced record heatwaves and droughts in 2012, now holds in reserve a historically low 6.5% of the maize that it expects to consume in the next year, says the UN.

"We've not been producing as much as we are consuming. That is why stocks are being run down. Supplies are now very tight across the world and reserves are at a very low level, leaving no room for unexpected events next year," said Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist with the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). With food consumption exceeding the amount grown for six of the past 11 years, countries have run down reserves from an average of 107 days of consumption 10 years ago to under 74 days recently.

Fireball 4

Best of the Web: Fragmentation and Sonics! Northern California Fireball Meteor +19'42 PDT 17OCT2012 - Unrelated to the Orionids

MBIQ indicates that a meteor was seen minutes ago over California on 17OCT2012 at 07'42 pm. The meteor appears to be slow-moving sporatic fireball meteor and NOT related to the Orionids meteor shower. The meteor fragmented with sonics and is a very good candidate for a meteorite producing event.


CHP and local San Mateo County police radio traffic about a meteor in the San Francisco Bay Area meteor on October 17, 2012:


Comment: See our SOTT Focus: Meteorite Impacts Earth in Minden, Louisiana - Media and Government Cover It Up


MIB

Best of the Web: FBI shows up at teenager's home to ask about his Ron Paul school report

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© Agence France-Presse/ Robyn Beck
A 16-year-old high school student's video report for his American Government class earned him an A+ from his teacher. It also yielded a visit from the FBI.

Justin Hallman says that a project he put together for school that included information on the National Defense Authorization Act, Rep. Ron Paul, Anonymous and the Occupy Wall Street movement was well received in the classroom, but wasn't exactly praised by others. After agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation saw a copy of Hallman's finished work on YouTube, they paid a visit to his own home.

The boy's mother says the FBI showed up at their home one month after the class project was first turned in and told her, "We need to talk to your son." Once inside, Justin Hallman says he was drilled about his thoughts on an array of issues included in his project.

"They also asked me why I had talked to my teacher about the Illuminati," he writes in an email obtained by Infowars. "I told them it was just harmless talk about the 1776 Illuminati that formed from the enlightenment era. I said my teacher said they are/were terrorists and not to talk about them (this caused the FBI agents to look puzzled and they changed the subject very fast to Anonymous). In the end they finally left for an 'important meeting.'"

Light Saber

Best of the Web: Young woman who was arrested for owning 'anarchist literature' says: I am ready to go to prison

Note: Leah Lynn Plante was sentenced to prison yesterday afternoon after refusing to answer questions to a grand jury in Seattle. The following article was posted yesterday before Leah went to court. This witch-hunt style grand jury is unacceptable. Leah and her comrades are tremendously brave for standing up to state repression of anarchists by refusing to cooperate.
leah jailed
Leah Plante will again appear before a federal grand jury in Seattle, Washington, for the third time, and refuse to testify about her political beliefs and political associations. It is likely that she will be imprisoned for her principled stance against what she calls a witch hunt against local anarchists.

The grand jury is investigating anarchists in the Northwest, following FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force raids in search of "anarchist literature." Two other anarchists, Matthew Kyle Duran and Katherine Olejnik,have already been imprisoned for refusing to cooperate.

Plante wrote a powerful statement to her friends and supporters in preparation for today's hearing. Here is an excerpt:

Comment: Read also: Young Persons Called to Private Grand Jury for Owning Books