Category Archives: Media

Media Reports Raise Fears of Indo-Chinese Water Wars

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While Chinese government officials apparently deny it, the Indian media is seriously discussing reports about China’s diversion of the River Brahmaputra (on which India, Bangladesh and China depend).

Here’s a piece from the Hindu Business Online

“China’s attempt to divert the Brahmaputra has reared its head again. The Chinese are apparently eyeing about 40 billion cubic metres, out of the annual average inflow of 71.4 billion, of the Brahmaputra’s waters. The river skirts China’s borders before dipping into India and Bangladesh. China has a serious need to feed water to its north-west territory, the Gobi Desert, which contains almost half the country’s total landmass, but only seven per cent of its freshwater. The Gobi occupies an area of 13,00,000 sq.km making it one of the largest deserts in the world. Desertification of Gobi since 1950s has expanded it by 52,000 sq.km and it is now just 160 km from Beijing. It is said to expand by 3 km per year.…….
What does this diversion mean for India? The move by the Chinese Government will put almost 40 per cent of India’s hydel potential in trouble…”

Liberals Love to Hate Sarah Palin

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Update: This piece is now up as a full-length article at Lew Rockwell.. Reader responses will be below in the Comments, as usual…

In an August 3 piece in Salon magazine, even the usually well-modulated voice of Professor Juan Cole, shot up a few octaves. He compared Sarah Palin to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, and came out in Ahmadinejad’s favor. Now, according to some people, Ahmadinejad stands guilty of anti-Semitism. I don’t know if that’s true or not. But that’s what the establishment media seems to think. So, if the same media thinks Palin is worse than Ahmadinejad, then what it’s saying is that to liberals, being a conservative small-town mother is more dangerous than being anti-Semitic.

Palin and the Iranian president are both dangerous populists, writes Cole. They blame their failures not on their own loose lips (Palin’s stutterings on the Katy Couric show and Ahmadinejad’s alleged anti-Semitism), but on media conspiracies against them.

Of course, there’s no real reason why both things couldn’t be true. Palin could have her short-comings, and she could still be the victim of a hatchet-job by the media. But measured logic is not the style of the Sarah-phobics:

Here’s Cole again on the Irani-Alaskan Axis-of-Medieval:

“Both politicians ‘encourage a political style of exhibitionism, disregard for the facts as understood by the mainstream media, and exaltation of the values of people who feel themselves marginalized by the political system….’

Dear me. Tut-tut. Political exhibitionism, eh? And that wouldn’t be something ever committed by Barack Obama now, would it – he with the near-halo on many a magazine cover, who dubbed himself a voice for people marginalized by the system – or so I recall – in his celebrated Getty- er- pre-election speech on race?

As for “facts as understood by the mainstream media,” since when are facts determined by how journalists understand them? Isn’t that just what some guy called Donald Rumsfeld said not so long ago and got these very same journalists lathered up at his solipsism?

I’m no fan of Sarah Palin.

Anyone who has five children at home and hankers for high office has her priorities confused. If a real feminist was needed on McCain’s team, Todd was the Palin they should have picked. And no, the photogenic governor doesn’t have the experience needed to take on DC. No more than our genial President himself.

But by trashing Sarah Palin in such a rancid, racial, and bigoted way, the media did itself no good, and turned her into an instant symbol of the double-standards practiced by this country’s political elites toward outsiders.

Whatever you think of the moose-hunting mayor, she isn’t an insider, and it was insiders who dragged America through the mud over the last two decades.That makes her – one way or other – a voice for ordinary people, one of us. The persistent trashing of Sarah Palin is a trashing of ordinary Americans.

“Shooter” Conspiracy Theory is a Form of Anti-Sinitism

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My post today is from Canadian trader and blogger, Bill Cara (a critic of the “shooter” theory).

[NOTE: “Shooter,” gentle reader, is my derogatory name for those who believe in the government’s “fringe” conspiracy theory that “green shoots” are popping up all over the economy. This theory, I believe, is premised on “hatred” and “mean-spiritedness” toward creditors, savers, and dollar-holders. In fact, if you are a “green-shooter,” I’d say you are a racist and an anti-Sinite (since the Chinese are the biggest creditors of the US)]

Bill Cara Quote:

“When I started blogging over five years ago, I noted my concern that in America, everything is for sale and everybody a salesman. The problem, of course, is that a salesman believes his own stories because he has to believe. Facts are perverted, history changed, and truth misrepresented. In five years, America has gotten worse in this regard.

The nation has actually become a parody of itself where the most accurate news now comes from sources like Saturday Night Live, Jay Leno, David Letterman and Jon Stewart.”

My Comment:

There’s the truth from an objective observer. And I’m here to second it. If there’s one thing that’s a problem in America, it’s not “crime,” or “violence,” or “drugs,” or “porn.”
All of these are just secondary manifestations of the underlying problem. That problem is – unreality.
In Language of Empire, I referred to the plastic, virtual world in which the country lives.

That’s the rub.

We leave in a world of phony perceptions, phony reality, phony problems, phony solutions, phony political divisions, phony theories, phony experts…

All other problems America shares with other nations.

But this one problem is more unique to her than to any other country – almost because of her virtues, rather than on account of her vices.

Other people don’t have governments that are nearly as efficient, thorough-going, or as clever at spin as ours.

That’s their good fortune.

Pots & Kettles Update: White House Accuses Drudge, Bloggers of Spin…

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From an AP report this morning:

WASHINGTON – The White House is turning to the Internet to hit back at a Web posting that claims to show President Barack Obama explaining how his health care reform plans eventually would eliminate private insurance.

The three-minute White House video features Linda Douglass, a former network television correspondent and now White House Office of Health Reform communications director, sitting in front of a computer screen showing the Drudge Report Web site. That site carries a series of video clips from another blogger who strings together selected Obama statements on health care to make it appear he wants to eliminate the private health insurance business.

In the video Douglass says the site is “taking sentences and phrases out of context, and they’re cobbling them together to leave a very false impression.“

My Comment

And of course, the government and its minions would never take anything “out of context,” or “leave
a false impression..”

Oh nooooooo.

Drudge must have hit pretty close to get this level of presidential attention…

As for your jaded blogger at this humble site, I am as wary of the word “private” as I am of the word
“public.” Private is just the other face of public, most times. Gates, Buffet, Trump, Welch – they’ve all proved that their companies aren’t “private” enterprise – they all profit from insider ties, knowledge, subsidies, and pay-offs.

The “private-public” divide, like the “left-right” divide, is an elaborate bit of window-dressing intended to camouflage a much more real divide: “honest-dishonest.”

Update: I notice that Barack Obama has now joined Michelle Obama on Vanity Fair’s “best-dressed list.” Look, I agree Mrs O. has a distinctive and interesting fashion voice, but her husband?

Now the president is a runway model too?

Could this have something to do with creating positive spin in the wake of the recently resuscitated “birther” controversy?

“Birther” is the disparaging term applied to anyone who questions whether President Obama was born within the US, or believes he was born in Kenya, or apparently even brings up the subject – as the recent attacks on conservative broadcaster Lou Dobbs suggest. To clarify, I have no idea what positions Lou Dobbs takes or doesn’t take. And to further clarify, my personal opinion is that naturalized citizens should be as free to become president as natives. Of course, that isn’t the position of the constitution, but that’s another issue.

Surely, questioning the president on a constitutional point would seem to be the essence of what free speech protects. Instead, the establishment puts a derogatory label on it that makes it off-limits and a kind of racist “hate” or “fringe” speech, like the speech of holocaust revisionists (‘denialists’), 9-11 theorists (‘truthers’), critics of Israel or Zionism (‘anti-semites’), and critics of the US (‘anti-Americans’)

[how come if you criticize China, you’re not an anti-sinite?]

Please. Talk about feeding a fire…

Fire is a useful tool but a dangerous god. Feed it with too much fuel, and it burns in every direction. It consumes everything in its path.

He who glows in the fire of public adulation today burns in it tomorrow.

England Unrepentant for Role in Torture

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Lynndie England is unrepentant for what she did, says this piece:

“We move on to another hideous image, in which the same group of prisoners – one of whom Graner had punched full in the face – were lined up and ordered to masturbate.

How long had this sick charade continued? ‘You are going to find this ridiculous,’ says England, half suppressing a snigger. ‘One guy did 45 minutes! Freddie [Graner’s fellow prison guard, Ivan Frederick] just wanted to see if they would do it – and all seven of them lined up doing this.

‘Well, six stopped after a few minutes, but the seventh carried on.’

Hearing this account for the first time, even Roy T. Hardy, her lawyer, who had thought himself beyond shock after representing England for five years, is clearly taken aback…..

‘Sorry? For what I did?’ she interjects, incredulous. ‘All I did was stand in the pictures. Saying sorry is admitting I was guilty and I’m not. I was just doing my duty’

……it is impossible to empathise with her, for she is such an unsympathetic character……”

More of the same at Drudge on England’s interview with the German news magazine, Stern.

My Comment

I read this report with interest for two reasons.

1. It substantiates, as many other reports have done since then, my early (July 2004) insight that there were pictures of women being abused that were being deliberately held back and that the key to understanding Abu Ghraib was that it was a deliberate policy.

2. It also vindicates the argument of an essay I contributed to “One of the Guys” (Seal, 2006), a piece called “The Military Made Me Do It,” that England got the benefit of double-standards that treated the women torturers as somehow victims themselves.

I was sympathetic to England, as far as she – and others low down in the pecking order – were made scapegoats for the military and government elites who actually developed the policy. I was also sympathetic about the class bias shown toward them (shown in  phrases like “trailer trash” that are used in this report as well).

But I thought England could still have behaved better than she did. I compared her to Joseph Darby, the whistle-blower, who did his duty despite all the dangers of being seen as a “snitch” by his colleagues. Both were about the same age. I thought England benefited from a double-standard exonerating the young women torturers.

I suggested in the essay that England’s sex was really as much an advantage as it was a disadvantage in the prison where she was a guard (female-deprived).

Another point of vindication: many journalists treat the story of Abu Ghraib as primarily a story about America. I find this somewhat narcissistic. The story is about the victims. To my mind, putting England and her colleagues at the center of Abu Ghraib adds a second injury to the victims.  And, as this report illustrates, the perps are rarely worthy of it, even as psychological case studies. Most evil is done by depressingly ordinary people.

A final point. I recall that some journalists made the culturally obtuse decision to interview the raped women, completely forgetting the consequences to the victims of such media exposure. Sure enough, some of the interviewed women ended up dead.

I have to wonder at journalists with so little imagination and compunction for the subjects of their stories…

‘Subjects’ are also subjects in the other sense – they have their own voices.

All this adds to my belief that the mediacrats can be as big a problem as the kleptocrats.

GOP’s Operative’s Racist Remarks About Michelle Obama

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Just as I was blogging about hate [this is government jargon] speech having the ability to become inflammatory and harmful (something some libertarians don’t seem able to understand), along comes a GOP operative to provide the requisite moronic example – he compared a gorilla to Michelle Obama.

Frankly, this isn’t only bigotry, it’s an example of such oral incontinence the man shouldn’t be let outside without Pampers around his mouth.

Animal imagery is an important clue to racist tendencies in a speech. Calling someone a “bitch” is fairly generic, but thinking up specific animal comparisons that have clearly racist histories to them is inflammatory and offensive. How do people not get that?

And by the way, why do these terms always seem to come out of people who don’t particularly look like the flower of the human species themselves?

I feel personally offended by this.  Not having Scandinavian features and a bustless, hipless physique doesn’t make you ugly. That’s cultural conditioning.  You don’t have to subscribe to the Michelle-is-Jackie-we’re-all-back-in-Camelot-whoopdeedoo being peddled, but what is this ugly reference?

And then I noticed in the blogosphere recently a few references to Jewish people that also use animal imagery – parasites, vipers.

With women, it”s bitch, dog, and body parts – but that’s almost standard.

We don’t want to recognize the faces of other people. Reducing them to bodies, body parts, animals, animality…is a way of  doing that.

Very troubling.

Words are powerful. We can’t use freedom in essentially cowardly and self-destructive ways without causing a reaction. People remember attacks like this for a very long time. They don’t forget them. I recall reacting to some of the language about Jerry Falwell at his death. I loathed many of Falwell’s Christian Zionist positions. But the language used about him was so venomous and degrading, I felt the critics lost their own self-respect and dignity when they wallowed in it. [The piece is “God’s Son, Falwell’s Mother and the Rest of Us ‘Ho’s”- at Dissident Voice, 2006].

And then people ask what a middle-class, privileged black women has to be angry about…  How about – not being able to escape this sort of thing even when your husband is in the White House?

Criticize the Obamas as savagely as you want for their policies. Leave their children, their bodies, their private lives alone. Same with the Palins.

The Neurolinguistic Programming of Reality

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“An excellent example of globalist
redefinition of a common term
is the use of the word “state” in place of “country”
. When the media and leaders
refer to a country like Iran as a “state”
this has the same or similar effect as the
British globalists referring to the United States
as “the colonies”, which is off-handed at best.
This type of redefinition of terms is
designed to belittle the conception of a
supposed and/or perceived enemy by making
them appear less important and smaller in perspective
to the aggressors. Most soldiers would be
more willing to attack a “rogue state” than an “enemy
country”. The actual usage of this type of
terminology actually creates a mass perception
that the said country has already been assimilated
into the globalist empire and is simply acting out of
turn and is deserving of punitive damage whether
compensatory or offensive or both.
However, the true modus operandi
of the globalists is essentially Hegelian
in nature. Time and time again as a
species we can observe the workings of “thesis,
antitheses and synthesis”.

An excellent example would be the attacks on
the World Trade Center of 2001.
Thesis: “terrorists are a continual threat
to our liberty”. Antitheses: the
attack on the World Trade Center. Synthesis:
the Patriot Acts and Office of Homeland
Security, also known as: the loss of liberty
in the name of security…….

There are many conclusions to be drawn when
looking at the cycle of empires, but one
stands clearly: ruling is a science, and it
involves coercion whether via induced
suffering, psychological
torture and/or destabilization….”

— Max Mitchell, “Foundations of War:
Terminology of the New World.”

Palins Fight Back Against Letterman’s Lewd Jokes About Daughter

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From New York Daily News:

“Concerning Letterman’s comments about my young daughter (and I doubt he’d ever dare make such comments about anyone else’s daughter): ‘Laughter incited by sexually-perverted comments made by a 62-year-old male celebrity aimed at a 14-year-old girl is not only disgusting, but it reminds us some Hollywood/NY entertainers have a long way to go in understanding what the rest of America understands — that acceptance of inappropriate sexual comments about an underage girl, who could be anyone’s daughter, contributes to the atrociously high rate of sexual exploitation of minors by older men who use and abuse others.’ ”

Todd Palin added: “Any ‘jokes’ about raping my 14-year-old are despicable. Alaskans know it and I believe the rest of the world knows it, too.”

My Comment

Not being much of a fan of Governor Palin’s, I think I can say that my outrage over the way she’s been treated by the media  is probably pretty objective. So I’m glad to see her rip David Letterman on his tasteless (to put it mildly) comments.  Missing from the column is another Letterman joke – about Sarah Palin’s look –  that of a “slutty flight attendant.”

Perhaps next time, some one should “joke” about Letterman’s own looks. How about a “pedophilic bank teller”? Sounds shocking when it’s done to a man, doesn’t it?

Update:

This is quote from Bernhardt’s “funny” routine about Palin from October, which I blogged here (October 2). I’m posting it again to show how the anti-Palin “jokes”  go far beyond what would have been said about any other candidate without provoking censure or outrage. That’s only the beginning of the routine. I took out the last part which went something like “one of my big black brothers here in New York will rape you” – that’s not a mistake – she really said that. I took it off because in the context of the elections, you never know whom it might set off. It manages to be offensive to Christians, black men, females, and Jews (yes, if I were Jewish, I’d be really unhappy to have Sarah speak for the Old Testament, a fine book that doesn’t need her in-ter-pre-tay- shun).

Now the election is over, I think it’s not irresponsible to post it in paraphrase in the context of proving that there’s a history of this sort of invective against Sarah Palin. Recall that the New Yorker cover of Obama as a terrorist (as stupid an editorial choice as I’ve ever seen) and the cartoon about killing the chimp both were widely considered incitatory – and rightly so.

But when it comes to a white, Protestant woman with fundamentalist beliefs, from a small town, who is pro-life, she doesn’t deserve any consideration whatever…

If this isn’t sexual, racial, and class-based discrimination, what is?

The woman is running for high office, and she’s a slut because she happens to be attractive? That doesn’t affect her job performance? That doesn’t affect how others see her and her work?

Phooey. Something really stinks in the way people think about these things here in the US.

Sorry. No intention to go all nationalist. But actually, Indian female politicians are treated more equitably.* No wonder the US hasn’t had a female president.

Now you got Uncle Women, like Sarah Palin, who jumps on the sh*t and points her fingers at other women. Turncoat bitch! Don’t you f*ckin’ reference Old Testament, b*tch! You stay with your new Goyish crappy shiksa funky bullsh*t! Don’t you touch my Old Testament, you b*tch! Because we have left it open for interpre-ta-tion! It is no longer taken literally! You whore in your f*ckin’ cheap New Vision cheap-ass plastic glasses and your [sneering voice] hair up. A Tina Fey-Megan Mullally broke down bullshit moment.” (rest of the comment censored)

*On second thoughts, I remember some of the language used about Sonia Gandhi, which was also racial. I wrote a piece about it on the net, “The New Post-Colonial Racism.” But it wasn’t misogynistic…

Bill Blum on the Obama Cult

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Bill Blum at the Anti-Empire Report:
“The praise heaped on President Obama for his speech to the Muslim world by writers on the left, both here and abroad, is disturbing. I’m referring to people who I think should know better, who’ve taken Politics 101 and can easily see the many hypocrisies in Obama’s talk, as well as the distortions, omissions, and contradictions, the true but irrelevant observations, the lies, the optimistic words without any matching action, the insensitivities to victims.  Yet, these commentators are impressed, in many cases very impressed.  In the world at large, this frame of mind borders on a cult.
In such cases one must look beyond the intellect and examine the emotional appeal.  We all know the world is in big trouble — Three Great Problems: universal, incessant violence; financial crisis provoking economic suffering; environmental degradation.  In all three areas the United States bears more culpability than any other single country. Who better to satisfy humankind’s craving for relief than a new American president who, it appears, understands the problems; admits, to one degree or another, his country’s responsibility for them; and “eloquently” expresses his desire and determination to change US policies and embolden the rest of the world to follow his inspiring example.  Is it any wonder that it’s 1964, the Beatles have just arrived in New York, and everyone is a teenage girl?
I could go through the talk Obama gave in Cairo and point out line by line the hypocrisies, the mere platitudes, the plain nonsense, and the rest.  (“I have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States.” — No mention of it being outsourced, probably to the very country he was speaking in, amongst others. … “No single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons.” — But this is precisely what the United States is trying to do concerning Iran and North Korea.) But since others have been pointing out these lies very well I’d like to try something else in dealing with the problem — the problem of well-educated people, as well as the not so well-educated, being so moved by a career politician saying “all the right things” to give food for hope to billions starving for it, and swallowing it all as if they had been born yesterday.  I’d like to take them back to another charismatic figure, Adolf Hitler, speaking to the German people two years and four months after becoming Chancellor, addressing a Germany still reeling with humiliation from its being The Defeated Nation in the World War, with huge losses of its young men, still being punished by the world for its militarism, suffering mass unemployment and other effects of the great depression.  Here are excerpts from the speech of May 21, 1935.  Imagine how it fed the hungry German people.
———————
HITLER:
“….. Germany, too, has a democratic Constitution.  Our love of peace perhaps is greater than in the case of others, for we have suffered most from war.  None of us wants to threaten anybody, but we all are determined to obtain the security and equality of our people……….
The German Reich, especially the present German Government, has no other wish except to live on terms of peace and friendship with all the neighboring States. Germany has nothing to gain from a European war.  What we want is liberty and independence.  Because of these intentions of ours we are ready to negotiate non-aggression pacts with our neighbor States.
Germany has neither the wish nor the intention to mix in internal Austrian affairs, or to annex or to unite with Austria.
The German Government is ready in principle to conclude non-aggression pacts with its individual neighbor States and to supplement those provisions which aim at isolating belligerents and localizing war areas…….
Germany is ready to participate actively in any efforts for drastic limitation of unrestricted arming. She sees the only possible way in a return to the principles of the old Geneva Red Cross convention. She believes, to begin with, only in the possibility of the gradual abolition and outlawing of fighting methods which are contrary to this convention, such as dum-dum bullets and other missiles which are a deadly menace to civilian women and children.
To abolish fighting places, but to leave the question of bombardment open, seems to us wrong and ineffective. But we believe it is possible to ban certain arms as contrary to international law and to outlaw those who use them. But this, too, can only be done gradually.  Therefore, gas and incendiary and explosive bombs outside of the battle area can be banned and the ban extended later to all bombing.  As long as bombing is free, a limitation of bombing planes is a doubtful proposition. But as soon as bombing is branded as barbarism, the building of bombing planes will automatically cease.
Just as the Red Cross stopped the killing of wounded and prisoners, it should be possible to stop the bombing of civilians……
The German Government is of the opinion that all attempts effectively to lessen tension between individual States through international agreements or agreements between several States are doomed to failure unless suitable measures are taken to prevent poisoning of public opinion on the part of irresponsible individuals in speech, writing, in the film and the theatre.…… [1]

— End of speech excerpts —

How many people in the world, including numerous highly educated Germans, reading or hearing that speech in 1935, doubted that Adolf Hitler was a sincere man of peace and an inspiring, visionary leader?

NOTES
[1] The entire speech can be found at: http://members.tripod.com/~Comicism/350521.html