August 9, 2008 archive

Unmasking the MSM: Ladies and Gentlemen, Meet the NSA

Update: Since the two main links I refer to in this essay are dead, I thought I might just give the folks at the NSA a small task to remove these two links from the Wayback Machine. Good luck! There are lots and lots of pages out there.  (:^D)

Two updated links:

1. Pierceland Herald

2. Leading The Charge (click on a local story to see locality: Sapphire Coast)

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A while back, Buhdy wrote, Media War: The Power Of The Press…is Profit!. However, upon further analysis, I tend towards disagreement. Although profit could be seen as the major driving factor in what we read see and hear in the MSM, profit is not the real agenda for the press. Profit is only an additional side benefit. The real power of the press is a Pravda style mind control. One that creates and shapes “realities” in order for the usurpers to continue with their agenda.

This will be the last time I will write about this particular subject. My reasoning is thus: every time I write about the MSM, the implicating evidence is quickly scrubbed from the Internet. As you will see, most of the evidence has already been scrubbed . But their work is not as thorough and complete as they think it is. And I am not as dumb as I sometimes sound.

I still have one ace up my sleeve and I am about to play it. You can be sure that once I play this ace, the Google cached link and the corresponding implicating Internet page will soon be removed. Purposely, I never mentioned this mirror site and they forgot about it.

But soon the Republican lurkers will discover what I wrote and have these last two pages removed. Once these pages are removed, any linkable evidence– that I am aware of– (except my documented rantings filled with dead links) to the machinations of how our media truly operates, will disappear too.

Did you click on the two links above? If you answered no, then stop and do so now. This is the last chance you will get to see it for yourself. I ask, “How can a local online newspaper in Canada and a local newspaper in Australia have the exact same local businesses with the same exact same local addresses and more importantly what does this really mean?”  

Pony Party: Heroes



Heroes – David Bowie

cat
more cat pictures

Who cares about John Edwards…Russia just invaded a country!

While the media is pouring over the whole Edwards affair, Russia has been sending in military forces into Georgia.  Now I grant you, what John Edwards did was horrible, and I feel for his wife.  But the media has a responsibility to report all the news and to focus on events that will have greater impact on its viewers.

Friday Night at 8: Those Who Dared

On July 16, 2008, CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) put out a report (warning:  pdf) entitled “Those Who Dared: 30 Officials Who Stood Up for Our Country.

CREW explains:

The actions of those named in this report are as varied as the people themselves and cut across the federal government. Some, like Glenn Fine at the Department of Justice and John Higgins at the Department of Education, are inspectors general who have been the only check on agency-wide corruption, misconduct and undue political influence. Others are included for a single act of courage, such as Army Specialist Joseph Darby who turned over to authorities the now infamous pictures of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who rushed to Attorney General Ashcroft?s hospital bedside to prevent top White House officials from pressuring the Attorney General to approve an illegal surveillance program.

Imagine working in the belly of the beast – in the Bush Administration, imagine the feeling of realization that something is terribly wrong with the way things are working.  And everyone around you seems to be just fine with it all.  Imagine feeling things become more and more wrong, maybe talking with a co-worker about it only to find they think there is something wrong with YOU, imagine how high the stakes suddenly appear — you can lose your job, you can be smeared so badly you will never get another job, or you can even be physically harmed.

And yet these people spoke out anyway.

Midnight Thought on Living Energy Independence

Excerpted from Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence (8 August 2008), in the Burning the Midnight Oil blog-within-a-blog, hosted by the EENR

Would California have HSR today if it had been settled by France? That’s what Michael Mahoney argued last Friday in the SFGate Open Forum.

The French, according to Mr. Mahoney, have a straightforward approach. The High Speed Rail train leaves the city on regular tracks running like an ordinary interurban express. When it gets out into the countryside, the HSR tracks start and it kicks up to full speed … 220mph and over, depending on the specific train. Then when it gets to into the urban area of its destination, it switches to regular tracks and back to running like an interurban express.

Most of the route is through the countryside, and that’s where its cheapest to build … both directly, and in terms of cutting down on the cost of overpasses.

SO … what did they do in California?

Information Overload is Our Main Problem

I often puzzle over whether I should be concerned with our political situation and write about it or just get on with life. The situation often appears utterly hopeless, not because there’s nothing we can do but because there are so many choices and possibilities as well as too much information to process. Human beings are not meant to have so much stuff to think about which is why, as hard as we try, it feels like we are increasingly overloaded not just with things to do but also the knowledge that problems are multiplying faster than solutions. Any reasonable look at the current state of politics shows that every possible solutions to the critical short, medium and long term problems are just quick-fix-its that are designed to enrich some set of grandees. And knowing that, knowing that to put your faith in Obama or any conventional politician is a sure road to hell just plain hurts. We sit here at our screens and really we are in pain and if we are not in pain then we are largely unconscious or enlightened masters.

Information overload is the most direct cause of our political and social problems. The more intelligent and compassionate you are the worse it is. So how do we create a situation where expanding our knowledge can help us rather than weaken us and make us miserable. Other people just ignore stuff that is difficult or inconvenient to think about–why do we persist? Should we?

What we lack is a positive framework to put our insights and realizations into something we can build on. What that entails I’m not sure–but it’s worth thinking about.

But the first thing we need to do before we go any further is to have compassion for those that choose to hide and not think, yes even the yahoos who believe that the Bible is literally true. What if they didn’t? They don’t have the ability to navigate doubt and intellectual cross-currents–they would be swallowed up and driven mad so they survive by ignoring the blaringly obvious contradictions and clear fictions in the Bible (in fact few fundies actually read anything other than carefully selected passages of the Bible). Few of the people who actually vote for Republicans are bad people who are as glaringly selfish and destructive as the Republican public policy positions would indicate–they just want some sense of security and certainty and belongingness in a world that seems to have gone mad. That the people they are voting for actually seek to create a world filled with war, violence, pornography, materialism and hedonism and then blame others is to painful to look at. To seek alternatives that don’t offer them a place with dignity, that doesn’t offend their sense of public morality as abortion, gay rights and feminism as well as “patriotism” obviously is not going to happen easily. Most importantly these communities in the “red” areas of the country don’t want to move away from prejudices and traditions that make for a common sense of community. Generations ago it would have been far easier for them to stay in traditions because contrary information was not widely available–but today they must make a strong act of will to deliberately pull the wool over their own eyes (as the sub-genius movement suggests).

We may not “like” these people but we are required, if we truly believe in egalitarianism and democracy, to accept them and the fact they will not change sides easily or automatically believe in gay marriage or peace. Cooperation and compromise with them is required (and not with the Republican and some Democratic politicians that run confidence games on them).

Second thing we need to do is have compassion for ourselves and see how hard it is for us to swim against the current and acknowledge that just surviving without running screaming into the street (though some of us may do that from time to time) is quite an accomplishment. So we can pat ourselves on the back for a sec and then start looking for a way to use those muscles we have develop to start swimming with the stream creatively and get something done. With that in mind we must understand that inner and outer work is the same and that for that work to be effective we must, must, must be part of communities focuse on building something. Giving each other insights, keeping the information flowing as we have been doing is part of what we need to do but it is not enough because unless we build something with that information we will just get more and more frustrated–we build and create something. For example, building a wiki or database like this 9/11 timeline. There are other kinds of collective actions we could take as well–if anyone has any suggestions I’d like to hear them.

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