American Mass Media: 24 Hours of Non-Stop Lies, Obfuscations, and Omissions
Is there anything in all of human history that is quite like American mass media in its power and capacity to pump out – through gigantic electronic fire hoses for 24 hours a day, every day of the week – lies upon lies (to paraphrase the Koranic “light upon light”) and obfuscations and yet still manage, above all, to omit and cover up the truth, especially the most important truths, whatever the subject matter? This article confirms my increasing conviction EVERYTHING the mass media says is a lie, nothing they say can be believed, and that any news that is true and important is ALWAYS omitted and covered up.
A web of deception has finally been untangled: the Justice Department got the US supreme court to dismiss a case that could have curtailed the NSA's dragnet. Why?
In his new book, No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald writes:
The perception that invasive surveillance is confined only to a marginalised and deserving group of those “doing wrong” – the bad people – ensures that the majority acquiesces to the abuse of power or even cheers it on. But that view radically misunderstands what goals drive all institutions of authority. “Doing something wrong” in the eyes of such institutions encompasses far more than illegal acts, violent behaviour and terrorist plots. It typically extends to meaningful dissent and any genuine challenge. It is the nature of authority to equate dissent with wrongdoing, or at least with a threat.
The record is suffused with examples of groups and individuals being placed under government surveillance by virtue of their dissenting views and activism – Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement, anti-war activists, environmentalists. In the eyes of the government and J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, they were all “doing something wrong”: political activity that threatened the prevailing order.
A full interview with Ricardo Semler by the Dutch TV-show Backlight. In our episode ‘The capital power of hapiness' we made a portrait of this Brasilian business man. Here you can watch the full interview of one hour and a half. Mostly unedited, but divided in chapters.
This man is Semco's business guru, and known for his development of leadership by omission.
Offers major insights into education as well as business — structures that focus on “managing” large groups of people, especially children, are not focusing on their core mission — creating value or teaching. A society's “constraints” and blinders begin embedding at the age of two — that is the starting point for creating a Smart Nation of free spirits instead of sheep.
Not much to say. New York Times. Going nowhere. Internal hassles. Here’s the scoop, which I assume is sort of accurate. Enjoy this internal report. Innovation.
I have been thinking about the issues Paul Krugman addresses all this week. Is it possible for an entire political party to continue to maintain a fantasy that serves their corporate masters in the face of over-whelming facts and personal experience? The only precedent I can think of is slavery, and it took a war to end it as a viable political position, even as it continues to exercise considerable influence! over a large part of the electorate.
Points of No Return
PAUL KRUGMAN, Nobel Laureate – Op-Ed Columnist – The New York Times
Recently two research teams, working independently and using different methods, reached an alarming conclusion: The West Antarctic ice sheet is doomed. The sheet’s slide into the ocean, and the resulting sharp rise in sea levels, will probably happen slowly. But it’s irreversible. Even if we took drastic action to limit global warming right now, this particular process of environmental change has reached a point of no return.
Meanwhile, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida – much of whose state is now fated to sink beneath the waves – weighed in on climate change. Some readers may recall that in 2012 Mr. Rubio, asked how old he believed the earth to be, replied ‘I’m not a scientist, man.” This time, however, he confidently declared the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change false, although in a later interview he was unable to cite any sources for his skepticism.
So why would the senator make such a statement? The answer is that like that ice sheet, his party’s intellectual evolution (or maybe more accurately, its devolution) has reached a point of no return, in which allegiance to false doctrines has become a crucial badge of identity.
American Vets May Become American Guerrillas When the SHTF in the USA
Despite what seems like an endless parade of stories about federal government stupidity and malfeasance repetitively emerging over years and decades, there are a few in government who have brains, who think and connect the dots, at least in connection to the ever enlarging presence of American veterans who know tactics and strategy and how to make and use weapons. Such thinkers have, as part of their responsibility to look after the interests of their elite 1% masters, surely recognized, in light of the developments mentioned in this article, the threat American veterans trained in warfare may represent to their elite master's interests as the economy implodes due to their master's machinations:
“In an interview with Fox 59, a Morgan County, Indiana Police Sergeant admits that the increasing militarization of domestic police departments is partly to deal with returning veterans who are now seen as a homegrown terror threat. Sgt. Dan Downing of the Morgan County Sheriff’s Department states, “When I first started we really didn’t have the violence that we see today,” adding, “The weaponry is totally different now that it was in the beginning of my career, plus, you have a lot of people who are coming out of the military that have the ability and knowledge to build IEDs and to defeat law enforcement techniques…Indiana seems to be a major trial balloon for the militarization of law enforcement given that the Indiana National Guard has also just purchased two military UH-72 Lakota helicopters which will also be used by local police and the DHS for “homeland security missions”. Downing’s claim that armored tanks are necessary to deal with violent crime doesn’t jive with actual statistics which suggest that violent crime is in fact on the decrease.
If you’re wondering why some US politicians are so hot for war in the Ukraine, think “merchants of death.” At the height of the antiwar movement, that was nasty label some of us applied to Lockheed Martin, Boeing and other major manufacturers of high-tech war-fighting equipment—planes, tanks, missiles, whatever does the job. When the drums of war are sounding in some distant land, these the weapons makers naturally smell sales opportunities.
Trouble in Ukraine has aroused the same ambitions and hawkish politicians have picked up the ball and are running with it. They are demanding that the US government send military stuff to Kiev to hold off threatening Russians (our favorite bad guys). The hawks are portraying President Obama as a wimp who’s insufficiently bellicose. But the president is so far playing a cool hand. He has been getting us out of two wars. He’s pretty sure the people don’t want another one.
In fact, neutral historians may someday conclude that it was the United States who stirred up the trouble in the Ukraine, inadvertently if not intentionally, and that US arms makers played an important supporting role. When the Cold War ended in 1991, these companies saw a promising new market opening for their stuff—the newly liberated Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe. Let’s expand NATO! The manufacturers lobbied policy makers in Washington and courted governments of post-Soviet nations as potential customers.
Bill Clinton decided to do it, cheered on by the arms merchants. Why is nobody talking about that? Because It might sound unpatriotic. And the media love bang-bang, even if the cause is stupid.
