Information control, or, How to get to Orwellian governance

How tyrannical do you think corporations have become?
Have they mass murdered millions? thousands? or even hundreds? I think not! But governments asked by their people to relieve their people of much of the responsibility of supporting themselves, have mass murdered hundreds! thousands! or even millions!

ican711nm wrote:

How tyrannical do you think corporations have become?
Have they mass murdered millions? thousands? or even hundreds? I think not! But governments asked by their people to relieve their people of much of the responsibility of supporting themselves, have mass murdered hundreds! thousands! or even millions!

First of all, corporations have murdered many, many people. They have reduced the polar regions. They are responsible for what may be irreversible changes in the ecosystem. Every person on this planet has Teflon in their bodies thanks not to governments but to corporations. Every day, corporations ask poor schliemiels to ask their doctors for medicines they don't need, for minor irritations that those same corporations have elevated to the level of diseases. Corporations have made it so that parents can buy pure cotton pajamas, free from fire retardants (which may be to blame for certain mental conditions) for their children when such pajamas have never caused a child to die in bed.

Second, no government ever relieved anyone of the responsibility of supporting themselves. You live in lala land, which is probably why you also write under the name Lone Star Madam.

BTW, you are incorrect on the number of ice ages and sketchy, at best, on the warm spells, but, then, I am certain you never heard of Gondonaland.

BTW, you are incorrect on the number of ice ages and sketchy, at best, on the warm spells, but, then, I am certain you never heard of Gondonaland.

One of the most enduring features of our planet, Gondwana (or Gondwanaland) was a composite continent, made up of South America, Africa, Madagascar, Antarctica, India, other parts of South Asia, and Australia. At one time it even included Florida and most of Southern Europe.

Gondwanaland is named after the Upper Paleozoic and Mesozoic formations of the Gondwana district of central India, which display a number of shared geologic features (the "Gondwana beds"). In the late nineteenth century, on the basis of comparative geological evidence, the Austrian geologist, Edward Suess, suggested that the continents of Africa, South America, Australia and India were once part of a single supercontinent, which he called "Gondwanaland".

Science tells us that the Continents of Australia, India, South America, Africa, and Antarctica, existed together as a separate landmass as long as 650 million years ago. And as these continents only began to break up some 130 million years ago, this great supercontinent had a life of around 520 million years; making it perhaps the most important geological structure of the last billion years.

okie wrote:

It seems pretty evident to me that if people of your mind ever control government, we might as well all kiss freedom of speech goodbye. You could kiss corporations goodbye as well. I don't know exactly what the alternative would turn out to be, but I can only guess, perhaps it would be hello to somebody like Hugo Chavez or worse.

People of my mind? Scientific, literary and inquisitive? Hmmm. Now, you are the one who doesn't want kids to ever hear the words, "global warming is real." You are the one who quotes the Heritage Foundation and then accuses liberals --who you neither know nor understand -- of being single minded.

FYI -- I attended one of the few high schools in the 1960s that had economics as a required course. I majored in political science as an undergraduate, a course of study that is wed to economics. I went to business school in the 1980s. I think the person here who knows nothing about economics is you.

A CBS story 'too important to ignore'
Posted: January 31, 2007
By Michelle Malkin

Let us contemplate some wisdom from a media ethics expert quoted by the New York Times this week:

"To most journalists, the notion of anonymous reporters relying on anonymous sources is a red flag. 'If you want to talk about a business model that is designed to manufacture mischief in large volume, that would be it,' said Ralph Whitehead Jr., a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts."

No, he wasn't talking about the Associated Press' (and the Washington Post's and the Los Angeles Times' and the New York Times') anonymous stringers relying on unnamed and unreliable sources reporting (or rather, rumor-mongering) on the war in Iraq.

No, he wasn't talking about the anonymous reporter identified only as "an Iraqi employee of the New York Times from Najaf" in three stories just this week, which quoted various unnamed Iraqi clerics, residents and officials.

No, professor Whitehead was talking about the swiftly and widely discredited InsightMag.com story about Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., attending a madrassa as a child. Fox News Channel (for which I am a contributor - see, transparency's not so hard) took a pounding for picking up the inaccurate story. The liberal media pile-on continues despite the network's immediate acknowledgement of error in repeating the false charges and despite the fact that Fox didn't originate the story.

Unlike, say, CBS News, Dan Rather and the faked National Guard memos.

Meanwhile, CBS News has another potential controversy on its hands involving unnamed sources that Whitehead and the New York Times won't get around to flogging.

On the left-wing MediaChannel.org website, supporters of CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan published a mass e-mail she had sent out asking for "help." She had filed a report on recent Iraqi and U.S. troop action along Baghdad's Haifa Street, but complained that it "only appeared on our CBS website and was not aired on CBS. It is a story that is largely being ignored." The report featured a masked "Haifa Street resident" who "blamed the fighting on the U.S." A CBS spokesman told BroadcastingCable.com that the story, which included footage of sprawled corpses of men in Iraqi Army uniforms, had been deemed "too graphic for an evening news audience."

This didn't mollify the correspondent-turned-activist, who asked her friends to send CBS a message that her piece wasn't "too gruesome to air, but rather too important to ignore." Logan has done much good work on the ground in Iraq, but her extra-curricular lobbying was a bit much even for some of her colleagues. "I think anything that happens internally should stay internal," the network's spokesman told BroadcastingCable.com.

What does deserve external airing, however, are Logan's glaring omissions from her online piece. Nibras Kazimi, a Hudson Institute scholar and blogger at Talisman Gate, took a close look at Logan's Jan. 18 report and recognized the grainy corpse footage "obtained by CBS." He says it matched an eight-minute video published online Jan. 7 by an al-Qaida propaganda arm under the title "Some of the Casualties of the Heretics in Haifa Street After Sunday's Fighting, January 7, 2007, in Baghdad." Indeed, many of the video images (available here) are identical.

At the time, Kazimi notes, "the Iraqi military claimed that some of its soldiers were cornered on Haifa Street and killed after running out of ammunition. This incident set off the subsequent battles there. Al-Qaida also released written statements at the time taking credit for the initial phase of fighting. ... The footage 'obtained by CBS' is identical to that put out by al-Qaida. But Logan makes no mention of al-Qaida's video and does not address the implication that the footage she used was off an al-Qaida video. And if it's not off the al-Qaida video, then how did she get footage identical to the one used by al-Qaida? This needs to be explained."

But "the most damning indication of journalistic incompetence," Kazimi blogs, is that "Logan makes no mention about the affiliation of these insurgents fighting on Haifa Street. Not even the slightest mention is made that al-Qaida is taking credit for the fighting there. On the contrary, the audience is treated to a blanket accusation by an anonymous civilian (wearing a headdress in the insurgent manner) denouncing the Americans and the destruction they've brought to bear on Haifa Street."

Was Logan a willing tool or an ignorant fool? Either way, the story is - as she says herself - "too important to ignore."

No, professor Whitehead was talking about the swiftly and widely discredited InsightMag.com story about Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., attending a madrassa as a child. Fox News Channel (for which I am a contributor - see, transparency's not so hard) took a pounding for picking up the inaccurate story. The liberal media pile-on continues despite the network's immediate acknowledgement of error in repeating the false charges and despite the fact that Fox didn't originate the story.

I thought "madrassa" was an Arabic word, meaning "school," ...

Malkin says

Quote:

No, professor Whitehead was talking about the swiftly and widely discredited InsightMag.com story about Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., attending a madrassa as a child. Fox News Channel (for which I am a contributor - see, transparency's not so hard) took a pounding for picking up the inaccurate story. The liberal media pile-on continues despite the network's immediate acknowledgement of error in repeating the false charges and despite the fact that Fox didn't originate the story.

Hard to weigh who is more repugnant here, Malkin or you, tico.

Here's the timeline and what was said. We'll just note that the Insight smear originated on the 17th, was picked up by Fox on the 19th and as of the 29th, via Dick Morris, they've kept it in play.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200701300007

From the January 22 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends First:

DOOCY: One other thing. We want to clarify something: On Friday of last week, we did the story from the Insight magazine where we talked about how they were quoting that Barack Obama, when he was a child growing up in Indonesia, had attended a madrassa. Well, Mr. Obama's people called and they said that that is absolutely false. They said the idea that Barack Obama went to a radical Muslim school is completely ridiculous. In his book it does say that he went to a mostly Muslim school but not to a madrassa.

KILMEADE: And the reason why -- because the madrassa -- really, when that term went out there, and the Wahabbiism that was speculated in the article, really started taking root in Saudi Arabia and around there after the fall of the shah and then all of a sudden that starts rampaging across the Arab world, and we're dealing with that -- the radical Islam now. But they wanted to make it clear they had nothing to do -- he had nothing to do with going to any radical Islamic school, and he was very angry about it.

[...]

KILMEADE: And also, just to add to that. The Clinton camp said they said an unnamed Clinton source says they don't think America is ready to elect a Muslim candidate. Clinton camp says that has nothing to do with us. We did not have anything to do with that story.

So did Obama go to a Muslim school or not, yes or no? Honest question here, what is the latest scoop on this? I thought "madrassa" was an Arabic word, meaning "school," so what is the big deal here?

Hannity accused Clinton of "leaking" Obama drug story from Obama memoir
Summary: Despite admitting that they had no evidence to support their allegations, Fox News' Sean Hannity and Robert Novak suggested that "dirty political tricks" by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) are behind the recent "leaking" of Sen. Barack Obama's admission that he had used cocaine. But as Democratic strategist Laura Schwartz noted, Obama wrote in a 1995 memoir that he used drugs; she added, "There's no leak." Earlier in the conversation, Novak claimed that "we have no evidence whatsoever that George W. Bush ever used cocaine."

On the January 3 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, co-host Sean Hannity, discussing a January 3 Washington Post article on the potential political implications of Sen. Barack Obama's (D-IL) admission in a 1995 memoir that he had used cocaine, suggested that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) is using "dirty political tricks, leaking damaging information at a time where [Obama] is ascending quite rapidly," despite Hannity's own concession that he had "no proof whatsoever" for his allegation.

tico

You have a resilient mind. You are, for example, one of the few people I know who actually has answers to the question, "Upon whom would Jesus drop cluster-bombs?"

I do not consider you a functioning moral agent nor capable of changing your mind regardless of data input.

Look, its been fun debating here on this forum, but frankly you are so out in left field, I think you are a hopeless case. Can you even grasp the concept that you don't have to buy anything from anybody if you think it is going to kill you. Go live in a cave somewhere and dig your own grubs and kill your own game. Or move to Cuba where Castro runs the businesses. Better yet, move to Venezuela, where Hugo Chavez will probably soon have all businesses nationalized, and then you can rest easy, away from the terrible corporations that are cheating you, trying to kill you, and whatever else you imagine.

You haven't any right to criticize me, but, if spouting inanities makes you feel taller than your 5'4", spout away.

Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America's Media
by Eric Klinenberg
Metropolitan Books. 352 pp. $26

By Michael Shudson

American democracy is lost unless citizen Davids do battle against the corporate media Goliaths. We have heard this rallying cry before, and we hear it again in Eric Klinenberg's Fighting for Air. But Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University, has humanized and dramatized the argument by writing a book based on extensive original reporting. It is an investigative work, not a rant; it is both intellectually serious and politically passionate, and so it challenges readers like me who have never been much impressed with the claim that media concentration is destroying the Republic.

Quote:

Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America's Media
by Eric Klinenberg
Metropolitan Books. 352 pp. $26

By Michael Shudson

American democracy is lost unless citizen Davids do battle against the corporate media Goliaths. We have heard this rallying cry before, and we hear it again in Eric Klinenberg’s Fighting for Air. But Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University, has humanized and dramatized the argument by writing a book based on extensive original reporting. It is an investigative work, not a rant; it is both intellectually serious and politically passionate, and so it challenges readers like me who have never been much impressed with the claim that media concentration is destroying the Republic.

http://www.cjr.org/issues/2007/1/Schudson.asp

I do not accept the rules imposed by others. If I did, I would not be alive today. I am a law-abiding citizen, but I recognize that there are regimes that need to be opposed rather than accepted. And in periods of regime change, the normal rules don't apply. One needs to adjust one's behavior to the changing circumstances.

Usually it takes a crisis to prompt a meaningful change in direction.

Ousting Bush from the White House is the central focus of my life. It's a matter of life and death.

My greatest fear is that the Bush Doctrine will succeed--that Bush will crush the terrorists, tame the rogue states of the axis of evil, and usher in a golden age of American supremacy. American supremacy is flawed and bound to fail in the long run.

What I am afraid of is that the pursuit of American supremacy may be successful for a while because the United States in fact employs a dominant position in the world today.

These are not normal times.

Now the Democratic Party is our party. We bought it, we own it.

tico,

Quote:

I do not consider you a functioning moral agent nor capable of changing your mind regardless of data input.

Hypocrite.