Why does our media system attract so many uninformed and unbrave people who are locked into such predictable and parochial attitudes? Do they have an agenda that the public is unaware of?
Take Time Warner. Remember how it initially would not run the then new red white and blue Fox News on its platform in New York City, forcing it to cough up a high “per-subscriber fee” to get on the air? That was a clear commercial dispute with a bit of extortion thrown in, an attempt to protect their news channel, CNN, from being challenged.
Now that Al Jazeera has bought Current TV, a channel shown on Time Warner cable, the Time Warner megacorp became the first system operator out of the box to say it would not carry the new news channel that the Qatar-based network wants to launch in America, in much the same way that BBC set up BBC America to offer its programming to US viewers.
Even as Time Warner carries Russia Today, CCTV out of China and other foreign-owned channels, it is excluding this channel before they even know what it will offer. This could be a ploy to jack up licence fees – a la Fox News – but there is probably more to it.
SUMMARY: Around the world, criminal organizations and governments are fusing to an unprecedented degree, blurring the distinction between national interests and what suits the gangsters. Mafia states enjoy the unhealthy advantages of their hybrid status: they're as nimble as gangs and as well protected as governments, and thus more dangerous than either.
MOISES NAIM is a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy.
The global economic crisis has been a boon for transnational criminals. Thanks to the weak economy, cash-rich criminal organizations can acquire financially distressed but potentially valuable companies at bargain prices. Fiscal austerity is forcing governments everywhere to cut the budgets of law enforcement agencies and court systems. Millions of people have been laid off and are thus more easily tempted to break the law. Large numbers of unemployed experts in finance, accounting, information technology, law, and logistics have boosted the supply of world-class talent available to criminal cartels. Meanwhile, philanthropists all over the world have curtailed their giving, creating funding shortfalls in the arts, education, health care, and other areas, which criminals are all too happy to fill in exchange for political access, social legitimacy, and popular support. International criminals could hardly ask for a more favorable business environment. Their activities are typically high margin and cash-based, which means they often enjoy a high degree of liquidity — not a bad position to be in during a global credit crunch.
But emboldened adversaries and dwindling resources are not the only problems confronting police departments, prosecutors, and judges. In recent years, a new threat has emerged: the mafia state. Across the globe, criminals have penetrated governments to an unprecedented degree. The reverse has also happened: rather than stamping out powerful gangs, some governments have instead taken over their illegal operations. In mafia states, government officials enrich themselves and their families and friends while exploiting the money, muscle, political influence, and global connections of criminal syndicates to cement and expand their own power. Indeed, top positions in some of the world's most profitable illicit enterprises are no longer filled only by professional criminals; they now include senior government officials, legislators, spy chiefs, heads of police departments, military officers, and, in some extreme cases, even heads of state or their family members.
The west's dwindling connection with the natural world puts it in increasing peril, says the distinguished anthropologist in his new book. Many of the practices of tribal cultures can help us to rediscover our way, he argues – from respecting the environment to letting toddlers play with knives
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Since moving to LA, Diamond has produced a series of books that have propelled him to fame. The first, The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, appeared in 1992, its title referring to Homo sapiens, who are depicted by Diamond as a species of chimpanzee that is increasingly out of kilter with the natural world, particularly since the invention of agriculture, “a catastrophe from which we have never recovered”. With the arrival of farming, Diamond argues, women were subjected to domestic drudgery; people started to hoard resources and wealth; and our proximity to animals triggered disease epidemics that still threaten to overwhelm us. “With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence,” he states. The Third Chimpanzee won the Royal Society prize for science books that year.
The “death squads” being deployed throughout the United States under Obama’s orders, this memo continues, are frighteningly called VIPER teams, which is the acronym for Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response Team, a programme run by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and whose agents terrify millions of Americans with Nazi-like Gestapo tactics on a daily basis at airports and who report to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Phi Beta Iota: Analysts of this situation must distinguish between normal bureaucratic mission creep and special interest “grow the base” imperatives (bigger mission, more pork), and such hidden agendas as may or may not be in existence.
Utah State University presented a first-of-its-kind electric bus that is charged through wireless charging technology in a demonstration Nov. 15, 2012.
The Aggie Bus rolled onto the streets carrying passengers today; just 16 months after USU demonstrated the first high-power, high-efficiency wireless power transfer system capable of transferring enough energy to quickly charge an electric vehicle. In July 2011, the USU Research Foundation demonstrated 90 percent electrical transfer efficiency of five kilowatts over an air gap of 10 inches. The demonstration validated that electric vehicles can efficiently be charged with wireless technology.
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USU’s Aggie Bus has achieved several significant milestones. It is the first bus developed and designed by a North American organization that is charged with wireless power transfer technology and is the world’s first electric bus with WPT technology combining the three following performance metrics: A power level up to 25 kilowatts, greater than 90 percent efficiency from the power grid to the battery and a maximum misalignment of up to six inches.
Phi Beta Iota: “Low” technologies capable of providing free power and clean water to the masses have been repressed for decades. They are finally creeping out of their corporate patent prisons. Free localized energy and wireless energy recharging of free cell phones (OpenBTS) are the first priority. Everything else follows from those two.
As we ring in 2013, it’s time to recognize how the major media buries the issues most important to Americans. With newsrooms focusing so much right now on the fiscal cliff and gun rights, it’s instructive to see nobody looking at the heart of either issue.
But even bigger issues face us, now in the fifth year of prolonged recession and the second decade of a debt-fueled war on terror. It’s more evident each year how “professional” journalists are unable or unwilling to report on reality-based news, making them ever more feeble.
The major media is not useless to you just because of billionaire ownership, it’s also the non-disclosure clauses in contracts that prevent anchors or reporters from telling the story behind the story. Final editorial control over what goes out over the air causes major behind-the-scenes conflict. Even when marquee names try to blow the whistle, the contractual gags always hold in the end.
List Only (Commentary for Each in Article):
The Fiscal Cliff
Gun Control
Obama's Non-Prosecution of Fraud
Industry Ads Trump Science in Hydrofracking Debate
FCC Unaware of Federal Communications Law
Top Media Covers Up for the “ACORN Pimp”
Ignoring the Bigger Picture: Our Constitution Under Attack
The Sixth Amendment
The First Amendment
The Fourth Amendment
“Sons of Citizens United” Creeping in Every Direction
I Said It Last Year And I’ll Say It Again This Year
I’m not sure what you saw, read or wrote that was under-reported in media this year, but feel free to share it in the comments below.
I’ll bet however, that regardless what your foremost burning issue is, whether it’s war, income disparity, health care, energy, the environment, education, civil liberties, corporate personhood, food safety, human rights, LGBT equality or anything else, I guarantee the problem stems from the bigger issue of money in politics and cannot be fixed until our elections are fixed first.
Gareth Evans, Australia’s foreign minister for eight years and President Emeritus of the International Crisis Group, is currently Chancellor of the Australian National University and co-chair of the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect. As Foreign Minister, he was at the forefront of recasting Australia’s relationship with China, India, and Indonesia, while deepening its alliance with the US, and helped found the APEC and ASEAN security forums. He also played a leading role in bringing peace to Cambodia and negotiating the International Convention on Chemical Weapons, and is the principal framer of the United Nations’ “responsibility to protect” doctrine.
Project Syndicate, 27 December 2012
CANBERRA – If we were hoping for peace in our time, 2012 did not deliver it. Conflict grew ever bloodier in Syria, continued to grind on in Afghanistan, and flared up periodically in West, Central, and East Africa. There were multiple episodes of ethnic, sectarian, and politically motivated violence in Myanmar (Burma), South Asia, and around the Middle East. Tensions between China and its neighbors have escalated in the South China Sea, and between China and Japan in the East China Sea. Concerns about North Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear programs remain unresolved.
2012: Another Year in Mainstream Media Malpractice
