Archive for the ‘Media’ Category

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Big Brother

June 7, 2013

bigbrother

The recent revelations about massive government spying on the American people should come as no surprise. Indeed, they merely confirm what many of us have suspected for quite some time now. It’s worth noting here that all this obsessive information gathering did not prevent the Boston Marathon bombings from happening. The reason for this should be obvious: no terrorist with half a brain is going to discuss his plans over a cell phone or over the Internet. Even the Tsarnaev brothers, who weren’t exactly the brightest bulbs, knew better than that.

So, how concerned should we be about this? As long as you aren’t doing anything illegal, you shouldn’t be too concerned. The government, however, keeps expanding the boundaries of what is illegal. (In New York state, for example, it is now a felony to annoy a police officer. During the time I lived in New York, I got the impression that the cops there were a bit touchy. I imagine it can’t be that hard to annoy them.)

The Internet is a useful organizing tool, but it clearly has its limits and it should be used with caution. Those who have argued that the Internet is the solution to all the Left’s problems should reconsider their position. It’s clear that the Left can’t rely solely upon the Internet.

Posted in Crime, F.B.I., Homeland Security, Internet, Media, New York, Obama, Police, Terrorism, United States | Leave a Comment »

Conspiracy Trolls Busy at Work

April 17, 2013

Mike_Big_SmileBW150
Mike Adams

Hardly had the smoke cleared from the bombs at the Boston Marathon, than our nation’s conspiracy trolls were hard at work, assuring us that this was another “false flag operation”. You see, any time a shooting or bombing happens, it’s a false flag operation by the government. It’s simply impossible for anything to happen in this country without the government being behind it.

Just ask Mike Adams (his friends call him the “Health Ranger”.) He is the editor of NaturalNews.com, which, I’ve been told, gets over 4 million unique hits each month. According to Wikipedia:

    Adams is an AIDS denialist, a 9/11 truther, a birther and endorses conspiracy theories surrounding the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

So, name just about any stupid idea you’ve ever heard, and chances are that Mike Adams believes it’s true. (Yeah, you guessed it, he believes in chemtrails.) For Adams, life is just one long, bad episode of The X-Files.

Not long after the bombings, Adams wrote on his website:

    The official story of the bombing is that terrorists detonated two bombs at the marathon finish line and that the Boston bomb squad magically located a third bomb one mile away, identified the bomb, rigged it with explosives and initiated a “controlled explosion” all in less than an hour! (Absurd.)

No, that is not the official story, and it has never been the official story. Shortly after the bombings, there were news reports about a third explosion occurring at the JFK Library, but it later turned out that this was just a fire in the equipment room. The police did search the library for a bomb, but they never claimed to have found one. So, Adams invents an “official story”, and he then proceeds to punch holes in it. Brilliant.

Adams later tells us:

    …the mainstream media is pushing a new narrative that blames “right-wing extremists” for the bombing, even without a shred of evidence to back that up.

Really? I haven’t noticed. To be fair, Adams probably doesn’t actually pay attention to the mainstream media, since he knows that everything they say is a lie. He also notes:

    It is impossible for a bomb squad to have located, analyzed, rigged and detonated the third bomb in under an hour, especially when it was located one mile away, at the Kennedy Presidential Library.

Which is no doubt why the mainstream media don’t claim that they did any such thing.

Adams then comes to this shocking conclusion:

    Although it’s still a bit early to know for certain, this looks more and more like a planned event that was deployed by the Boston bomb squad, called a “drill,” then used as a pretext for the President to call for TSA agents to be on the streets at all future sporting events.

    And that, in turn, is the run-up to the TSA occupation of America, which has always been the goal of Obama. Remember that back on the campaign trail, he announced he wanted to build a “civilian national security force.”

That’s right! Obama can’t settle for the FBI, the CIA, the ATF, the National Guard, Homeland Security, the Federal Marshals, the Secret Service, and local police departments. No! He must have TSA agents groping us on the streets! Bwahahahahahahahahaha!

I gave in to my morbid curiosity and looked at some of the other posts on Adams’s website. I found one entitled Should you leave the USA before the collapse? Words of wisdom from someone who tried. (I wont’ comment on Adams’s use of capitals.) By “collapse”, Adams means that the US is becoming a police state. (I would argue that the US is already technically a police state, but I will leave that for some other time.) Adams begins by talking about how he has visited other countries and found them wanting in various ways. He then advises people to move to Texas instead:

    Because Texas has its own power grid unlike the rest of the nation. Texas can grow its own food. [Texas has also been known to have severe droughts.] Texas is the energy capital of the nation and can produce natural gas, diesel, oil and even jet fuel. Texas has masses of armed patriots who own more guns than they do pairs of shoes, and that makes Texas practically impenetrable to any invading force. [Does this guy know anything about history?]

    For example, suppose North Korea launches an ICBM into the high atmosphere over North America and unleashes an EMP weapon that destroys nearly all electronics.

    This could theoretically be followed by a naval invasion of forces from Red China [sic] and North Korea, both of which suffer from too many young males that can hardly be fed and might as well be thrown at some enemy nation as cannon fodder.

This could theoretically be followed by Martians landing in New Jersey and killing every human being, so they can then leave their dying planet and colonize Earth.

Life’s a bitch, huh?

Posted in Conspiracy Theories, Cults, John Carter of Mars, Media, Mike Adams, Obama, Police, Political Cretinism | Leave a Comment »

The New York Times Beats the Drums of War (Again)

April 14, 2013

new-york-times-building

It was irresponsible of the New York Times to publish the op-ed piece by Jeremi Suri titled Bomb North Korea, Before It’s Too Late. Suri argues that the U.S. should take out North Korea’s missiles. He argues that this will not result in a war because:

    The North Korean government would certainly view the American strike as a provocation, but it is unlikely that Mr. Kim would retaliate by attacking South Korea, as many fear. First, the Chinese government would do everything it could to prevent such a reaction. Even if they oppose an American strike, China’s leaders understand that a full-scale war would be far worse. Second, Mr. Kim would see in the American strike a renewed commitment to the defense of South Korea. Any attack on Seoul would be an act of suicide for him, and he knows that.

First of all, it’s not clear how much influence China actually has over North Korea. Second, it’s just as possible that “Mr. Kim” would see the attack as a prelude to a ground invasion. And if it is true that “Mr. Kim” knows that a war with the U.S. is “suicide”, why should we worry about him having missiles?

Suri concedes that North Korea might attack South Korea:

    A war on the Korean Peninsula is unlikely after an American strike, but it is not inconceivable. The North Koreans might continue to escalate, and Mr. Kim might feel obligated to start a war to save face. Under these unfortunate circumstances, the United States and its allies would still be better off fighting a war with North Korea today, when the conflict could still be confined largely to the Korean Peninsula.

It think it worth noting that an estimated two million Koreans were killed in the last Korean war. It’s reasonable to suppose that at least that many would die in another Korean war. This is the price that Juri would be willing to pay to maintain “stability” in the Far East.

Since the U.S. clearly has not exhausted its diplomatic options in Korea, one can only wonder why the Times thought it worth running an article like this.

Posted in Journalists, Korea, Media, New York Times, War | Leave a Comment »

Roger Ebert (1942-2013)

April 5, 2013

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The word “beloved” is almost never used to describe a critic, but, judging from the comments I’ve been reading about him, the late Roger Ebert seems to be the exception. I think this is because he managed to give the impression that he was basically a decent person, even when he was being waspish. He was willing to admit that he was not infallible (which is unusual for a critic), and he was courteous towards people who disagreed with him.

Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris had far more influence among cineastes, but Ebert reached a much broader audience, because of his shrewd use of first television and then the Internet. When Ebert and Gene Siskel started their Sneak Previews TV show back in the 1970’s, there was much skepticism that people would want to watch a show that was basically two guys talking about movies. (Critics derided them as “the Fat Guy and the Bald Guy”.) Yet the show turned out to be hugely popular, and it was much imitated. Part of the attraction of the show was the sometimes tense relationship between Ebert and Siskel. (I have a suspicion that they may have deliberately played this up a bit. In that respect, it can be argued that Sneak Previews was the first “reality” TV show.) Their “thumbs up/thumbs down” gimmick irritated many of their fellow critics, but Ebert was in his own way an entertainer who knew how to get an audience’s interest.

Over the years, Ebert praised a lot of movies that I didn’t really think were that good, though in that respect he was no worse than most other critics. One thing I will say for Ebert is that he believed that it’s legitimate to criticize a film for moral reasons, which is something I completely agree with.

Posted in Cinema, Film Criticism, Journalists, Media, Roger Ebert, Television | Leave a Comment »

Greg Palast Has a Man-Crush on Alex Jones

January 21, 2013

And you thought that Alex Jones is just a loud-mouthed buffoon. According to Greg Palast, Jones, who promotes 9/11 conspiracy theories, as well anti-immigrant racism, is “the host of one of the only intellectually substantive, fact-heavy forums on American radio”.

Palast likes Jones a lot. How much does Palast like Alex Jones? He tells us:

    I love Alex Jones. If I were a woman, I’d appear on his show in my highest heels and shortest mini-skirt.

Palast also tells us that Jones has “iron balls”.

Some things simply defy satire.

Why does Palast like Jones so much? It has to do with a story he once did. He tells us:

    While the BBC ran the story regardless of the threat, my investigations of Singer, despite gaining the cover of Nation, were suddenly pulled from US airwaves, including Piers’ CNN. A major news service said it was spiked not by editors, but by “high up”. Even MSNBC said, coyly, that the story was “too complex for our viewers”.

    But not Jones’ audience. “This is complex,” Jones told me, “so we’ll give you a full hour to explain it.” Which is part of the reason Alex is such a hero in the US – he has the cojones to venture where the mainstream media fear to tread.

So what? The people who listen to Jones’s conspiracist rants aren’t going to build a movement for social change. They’re going to stock up on assault rifles and wait for Armageddon to come. Palast, however, is so vain, he is willing to slobber all over Jones just for letting him talk on his show.

To be fair, Palast says he doesn’t agree with everything that Jones says. Which is nice to know.

Vice.com promises us that this article is the first of a three-part series, in which, among other things, Greg Palast will talk about his penis. I can hardly wait.

You can find out more about Alex Jones here.

Posted in Alex Jones, Conspiracy Theories, Greg Palast, Journalists, Media, Political Cretinism, Republicans | 2 Comments »

More Thoughts on the Connecticut Shootings

December 17, 2012

It’s interesting the ways that people will try to avoid the arguments for gun control. One argument that’s been circulating tries to blame the media for mass shootings. It argues that shooters do what they do in order to become famous. Because the media devote so much attention to these shootings, it makes other people want to become shooters themselves. (This argument is made in a quote circulating on the Internet that has been falsely attributed to Morgan Freeman.) With regard to Adam Lanza, this idea is pure speculation. We simply don’t know what he was thinking when he went to that school or even when he shot his mother. He left no notes (or none that have been found so far). He didn’t say anything to anyone. All we know for certain is that Nancy Lanza purchased semiautomatic weapons that her son later used to kill people. It was the availability of weapons that made the shootings possible. That is all we know so far.

Posted in Crime, Gun Control, Media | Leave a Comment »

The Fall of General Petraeus

November 13, 2012


Gen. David Petraeus and Paula Broadwell

It’s been a long time since we’ve had a really good sex scandal in Washington, so the one involving Gen. Petraeus comes as a welcome relief after a truly dreary presidential election. Petraeus is accused of having had an affair with his “biographer”, Paula Broadwell. She is the reputed author of an admiring book about Petraeus with the perhaps unfortunate title of All In. (It has also come out that this book was at least partly ghost-written.)

There is more than a little moral hypocrisy in all this. Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who is chair of the Democratic National Committee, has said: “Disturbing is the word that has come to my mind since all of this has come to light. Really, I think it goes without saying if you’re the director of the CIA, if you are a four-star general in the United States army, that you have to hold yourself to a higher standard. And you can’t put yourself in a compromising position.” Yes, a man who authorizes torture and drone strikes can’t sully himself with extra-marital sex. Schultz, by the way, helped organize last summer’s Democratic convention, at which one of the featured speakers was former president Bill Clinton, who coaxed a White House intern into giving him blow jobs.

It all started when Jill Kelley, a friend of Petraeus’s family, told an FBI agent, with whom she was apparently involved in some way, that she had been receiving harassing e-mails from Broadwell. Even though the FBI normally doesn’t investigate this sort of thing, those intrepid G-Men went to work, eventually examining 20,000 pages of e-mails. (I’m not making this up.) Not only did they discover Broadwell’s affair with Petraeus, but they also discovered that Kelly was having an affair with Gen. David Allen, Petraeus’s successor in the Afghanistan command.

Kelley is an interesting person in her own right. According to the Los Angles Times: “…she has angered some senior officers for what were described as persistent efforts by her to forge close personal ties to successive Central Command four-star officers by deluging them with emails, a former Central Command aide said.” Could there be such a thing as a military groupie? There must be something about a man who bombs villages in Afghanistan.

Some will cite this affair as evidence that the American empire is in decline. This is nonsense. There is, for example, good reason to believe that Eisenhower had an affair with his female chauffeur during World War II. And at one point in his career, MacArthur was demoted when it was discovered that he had a mistress.

The FBI agent who started the investigation – who has so far only been identified as Agent Shirtless – is said to have a “worldview” that is “hostile” to Obama. I think we can guess what that probably means.

Those who live by the media, die by it. When the Iraq war wasn’t going well, the government and the media decided that they needed a hero to distract people. Petraeus, who wears more medals than a Soviet-era bureaucrat, seemed a logical choice. He was given credit for a non-existent victory in Iraq, to hide the fact that Bush had actually cut a deal with Sunni militia groups. Now Petraeus has been undone by one of those who worked hardest create his myth. Shakespeare would have relished this.

Posted in Afghanistan, Imperialism, Iraq, Media, War on Terror | Leave a Comment »

Welcome to L.A.

October 22, 2012

Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town!
― John Fante

I have returned from the Land of White People to the Real World. It was not without some trepidation that I made the decision to return here. Los Angeles is an ugly city in some ways, and it is laid out in a way that is not environmentally sustainable. Yet I must admit to having fond memories of this place. Since I have arrived here, I have come to the realization that I am a big city person. I like being around people, and I like having many choices as to things to do. In Eugene, I was going to the same hippy hang-out every week, which got old pretty quickly. (I must say, though, that Eugene has a nice art house movie theatre called the Bijou.)

I have noticed that there seems to be more theatres and live music venues than when I left. And Hollywood looks more prosperous than I’ve ever seen it look before. And there are new buildings here and there. It seems that L.A. has weathered the recession fairly well. The only sour note is that the L.A. Weekly, which I used to enjoy reading, is now a shrunken homunculus of its former self. This once eminent newsweekly is now edited by the right-wing crank, Jill Stewart. She used to write for the now defunct New Times L.A., and the Weekly seems to have adopted that paper’s strategy of emphasizing scandals, both real and imaginary. The cover story of the latest issue is a long article about sex scandals in the city of San Fernando (pop. 23,645). We all want to read about that, don’t we? I must admit that I miss the old Weekly. Harold Meyerson may have been a brown-noser to the Democrats, but he hired good reporters and interesting writers. What has happened to the Weekly may be symptomatic of what has been happening to alternative newspapers across the country, but one would have wished that the Weekly would have gone down fighting, instead of becoming an embarrassment.

It’s always nice to be in a city where people speak languages besides English. Spanish is, of course, ubiquitous, but what is not so well known is that L.A. has a large Russian-speaking community. Years ago, I used to take the Hollywood subway early in the morning to a job I had at the time. I swear, it was almost as though I were riding on the Moscow subway. L.A. also has substantial Chinese, Korean, Thai, Iranian, and Armenian communities.

Fuck you, Mayberry!

Posted in Journalists, Los Angeles, Media | Leave a Comment »

Dr. Ismail Salami and the “Clash of Cultures”

September 26, 2012


Ismail Salami, Shakespearean scholar, author of children’s books, spouter of gibberish.

Dissident Voice has recently posted this cracking good article by Ismail Salami, entitled West Braces for Clash of Cultures. (No one I know is bracing for a clash of cultures, but then maybe I just don’t move through the right social circles.) The article begins:

    With the publication of the profane pictures of the holy Prophet of Islam in Charlie Hebdo magazine, the West seems to be consciously moving in a direction where chaos will dominate the international arena and a clash of cultures will inevitably run deeper for an indefinite period of time.

A literary agent once said to me, “You’ve got to grab the reader by the throat and lift him out of his chair.” Dr. Salami (I’m trying hard not to go for the obvious joke here) has clearly accomplished this with this extraordinary paragraph/run-on sentence. But what exactly does it mean? In the first half, he seems to suggest that Charlie Hebdo is published by somebody named “the West”. In the second half, he seems to be saying that a “clash of cultures” will “run deeper” (like a submarine?).

Clearly, Salami is a master of the Nietzschean aphoristic syle. However, he can be shockingly blunt when he puts his mind to it:

    There are abortive attempts by western analysts to interpret the two baneful incidents in the light of freedom of expression and thereby explain away the emotional hurt of the Muslim world.

That’s right, 1.6 billion Muslims will not be able to sleep tonight because of some cartoons in an obscure left-wing newspaper in France. If you believe that, I’ve got some property in Florida I’d like to sell you.

    However, to an intellectually trained mind, this seems more than just an insult to Islam and the Muslims.

Of course, those of us without intellectually trained minds just have no idea what the fuck is going on, do we? (By the way, someone needs to explain to Dr. Salami that “intellectually trained mind” is redundant.)

    The calculated move of the French magazine [sic] in publishing the insulting cartoons immediately after the blasphemous film indicates a united front forming against Islam in the West.

Damn right. As soon as the right-wing Christian producers of Innocence of Muslims had finished filming, they immediately called up their left-wing atheist comrades in France and said, “It’s your turn, bros!” Tag team style.

    On the one hand, the move can be seen as an attempt to help escalate the crisis in the Middle East region and on the other hand to plunge the world into a vortex where a clash of civilizations is imminent.

“… plunge the world into a vortex where a clash of civilizations is imminent.” This may not be worthy of Shakespeare, but it’s almost worthy of H.P. Lovecraft.

    Should we naively believe that the anti-Islam film which has caused much uproar and intellectual chagrin in the Muslim world is the work of a Coptic Christian Egyptian fraudster, a small-time porn director and a bunch of extremists who harbor deep hatred against Islam?

Uh… yes? Is this some sort of trick question?

    This is a good question and it deserves an answer.

As my Aunt Bea used to say, “Every good question deserves an answer.”

    Still, the answer seems to be found in the incident which followed the film i.e. the publication of the blasphemous cartoons.

Uh… what?

    Seen from an analytical point of view, the entire scenario apparently tilts the scale in favor of the Zionists who capitalize on a large-scale fracas between the Muslim countries and the rest of the world. In fact, they are the ones who will catch the bigger fish in these trouble waters.

Bigger than whose fish?

    Amidst this craftily authored plan [yeah it’s fucking brilliant, isn’t it?], Israel has commenced a series of war games in Golan Heights, the biggest the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has conducted in the six years since the second Lebanon war on Hezbollah in 2006. Military sources say the war game looks like a real war with tens of thousands of soldiers and senior officers, including the artillery and the air force taking part. Israeli officials have announced that the situation in Syria is precariously volatile and that the country is in possession of a huge arsenal of chemical weapons which they fear might fall into the hands of wrong people stockpile if President Bashar Assad is ousted. This is the excuse which they use to justify their military show-off. In point of fact, Israel is readying itself to wage a military encounter in the region by using the anti-Islam scenario.

Perhaps I’m nitpicking, but the last two sentences seem to contradict each other. If Israel can use an alleged chemical weapons stockpile as an excuse to intervene in Syria, why would they need to use “the anti-Islam scenario” (whatever that is)? (By the way, the Israelis have never needed an excuse to do anything.)

One can clearly see why the editors of Dissident Voice thought this article was worth posting. What better way to understand what is currently happening in the Muslim world than by reading gibberish?

I feel inspired to write my own article for Dissident Voice. It will be a learned dissertation on why the sea is boiling hot and why pigs have wings.

Watch for it.

Posted in Conspiracy Theories, Dissident Voice, France, Iran, Israel, Journalists, Media, Middle East, Religion, Syria | 4 Comments »

Random Thoughts on the Current Troubles

September 15, 2012

The growing inter-connectedness of the world does not always redound to our advantage. Case in point: a cheesy movie made in a strip mall in Monrovia, California, causes riots and the deaths of four people on the other side of the world. We are living in the Global Village, and just as Marshall McLuhan warned, it is filled with “panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.” Fear increasingly becomes people’s normal state of existence, because they are increasingly bombarded with ideas and facts that they don’t understand or only partially understand.

Reading the comments on threads on other sites, I am struck by how many people have no desire to try to understand what is happening. We have an amazing informational tool in the form of the Internet, yet some people would prefer to use it for spewing hate and parading their ignorance. Sad.

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, alias “Sam Bacile” is the auteur responsible for that blood and sand epic, Desert Warrior Innocence of Muslims. Nakoula is a Coptic Christian from Egypt, yet he told the Wall Street Journal that he is an Israeli and that the film was funded by Jewish donors. The kindest thing one cam assume here is that Nakoula wanted to prevent any blame for the film being placed on Egypt’s Coptic community, yet there is something sinister about the fact that Nakoula invented a story about non-existent Jewish donors. One has to question what game Nakoula is really trying to play.

The cast and crew of the film say they were duped, and I believe them. The 14-minuste clip on Youtube is heavily (and badly) dubbed. These people will be haunted by this for the rest of their lives. They were used by Nakoula, Steve Klein, Terry Jones and other right-wing Christians to advance their twisted political agenda.

Posted in Anti-Semitism, Christianity, Cinema, Egypt, Globalization, Islam, Libya, Media, Middle East, Movie Industry, Racism, Religion | Leave a Comment »

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