An interesting clip on the way liberal-left blogs merge into the mainstream media:
My Comment:
Someone might counter this with the argument that Fox, Limbaugh, and right wing talk-radio more than make up for the mainstream bias. Now, there’s some truth in that, if you’re only thinking in terms of popular appeal. But no one thinks of Fox etc. as unbiased. The mainstream outlets claim objectivity and have the imprimatur of “news” – not “opinion”. Their responsibility is greater.
Also, it’s doubtful if conservative voices would be so shrill if mainstream news were more even-handed.
Who started the culture wars isn’t a useful question to raise at this point. More useful is, who’s going to end them?
In Argentina, the view from below is not nearly so pretty as the vineyards of Mendoza:
Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, the highest authority of the Catholic Church in Argentina, criticized the lack of action against poverty in Argentina and warned of a “dramatic situation” as he was leading the traditional San Cajetan mass, a day after the Church unveiled a statement from Pope Benedict XVI denouncing a state of “scandalous poverty.”
“We’re noticing situation of dramatic poverty and unemployment,” said Bergoglio in Liniers. “More and more people are sleeping in the streets, and they have become disposable materials,” he added. Bergoglio, a critic of the Kirchner administration, echoed the word of the Pope and said the local church also noticed “scandalous poverty.”
Following on my own social media problems, I found this story compelling. An extraordinary cyber attack that silenced all Twitter users on Thursday turned out to have been intended for just one blogger…
“According to CNET News.com, which got its information from a Facebook security executive, it appears that Cyxymu’s Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and Blogger accounts were attacked simultaneously in a massive denial-of-service attack. Facebook, LiveJournal and Blogger were able to ward off the attack for the most part, but the assault brought Twitter to its knees for much of Thursday.
The culprits still haven’t been identified, CNET reported, although an Internet traffic expert quoted by the New York Times said the attack came from Abkhazia, a territory along the eastern coast of the Black Sea that’s in dispute between Russia and the Republic of Georgia.
And why was Cyxymu—a pro-Georgian blogger who “has long been viewed as an antagonist by some Russian supporters,” according to The Register—targeted? “To keep his voice from being heard,” the Facebook exec told CNET.”
Here’s what I find so chilling about yesterday’s Twitter attack: that these guys, whoever they are, apparently thought nothing of taking down an entire communications network because they didn’t like what one person was saying.
Imagine if someone didn’t like what you were saying, and decided to shut you up by nuking your ISP, or your wireless carrier. Or heck, the entire phone system. All for you….”
So – no it’s not paranoia. If you happen to stumble on certain things and if your world view is not in synch with that of the powers that be, I can assure you, you will be targeted — but in such a way that you may pass it off as “random” or “happens to everyone..”
Now you know. There are people senseless and ruthless enough that they don’t mind how many people are affected so long as the voice they want to shut up, shuts up…
The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it.”
I got a long critical response from a liberal reader to my Sarah Palin piece at Lew Rockwell (now also posted at Palin for 2012 website). I’ve added my responses below the salient points in the response, which you can find in full in the Comments to the post entitled Liberals Love to Hate Sarah Palin.
Here are my responses:
Bill:Quote: Standards of decency from ” journalists”?? you are kidding right?
Lila: Well, no, not really. If journalists want to consider themselves professionals, they should act with professional standards. I think journalists need to be restrained toward the private
lives of ALL politicians. If they aren’t – no one competent and half-way
decent will want to go into politics – especially not women.
Bill: Palin is a media whore and she dragged her family in front and center, and
now expresses shock and dismay when the media does what the media does. I don’t get it,
Lila: I don’t think she was a media whore. You have to be able to project
yourself in the media – that’s the job of politicians these days.
They can’t be called whores for doing what they have to do to get visibility
The media is supposed to be the 4th estate, not some tabloid trash..but
today there’s no distinction.
Bill: You do cause me some vertigo “defending” bill clinton, but your venial
tirade is relatively trivial IMO, particularly in the context of the
recent POTUS history of pursuit of excellence to the bottom. I prefer to use
body count and erosion of civil liberties as the litmus test, not the
Berlusconi
scale. **
Lila: I do too..but in Clinton’s case, it’s related. Berlusconi certainly used women he’d bedded in his political empire…and he used them to shut down critics – so there’s really no distinction between those two facets of his life.
Bill:Quote: *assaulted a couple of women, bit one on the lip until she bled,
Assault!.Are you sure of that?
Lila: Very sure. Two is a conservative number, I think.
Bill: * Quote: sodomized the barely-adult daughter of a loyal Democrat donor and then
tried to trash her as a stalker? Barely adult !?! you have got to be kidding.. Stalker, no doubt
Lila: Lewinsky was a very young, chubby intern with a history of emotional problems, in her early twenties. He’s fifty plus and the most powerful man in the world, with a history of wheeling and dealing in unsavory circles – you tell me who’s the player
Bill: *Quote: besides causing unaccountable career-implosions,... causing?, Arent
career implosions ultimately the stuff of free will
*gory suicides …innuendo, have any facts?
Lila: Vince Foster’s suicide was very odd and there were several others among less-known figures
Bill: *Quote: causing.. jail time... facts? did you mean elective jail time?
Lila: That woman who covered for him – Susan McDougal, for one
Bill: Ultimately what is your point? The liberal media gave Clinton a pass?? You
have got to be kidding..
Lila: No, I said the opposite. I said the media could have been more responsible and sensitive toward Clinton too..but the trashing of Clinton shouldn’t be the reason liberals use to go after conservatives on minor issues.
Bill: The whole time honored canard of the “liberal
media” unjustly persecuting conservative stalwarts has gotten pretty
threadbare. Liberal media, conservative media, I think you mean to imply
Corporate media. Corporate media goes after easy red meat irrespective of> affiliation and sells it to the superficial ADD public that laps it up.
Lila: The media is corporatist and reflexively liberal – since when are these two things opposed?
Bill: Quote: And that wouldn’t be something ever committed by Barack Obama now, would
it – he with the near-halo on every magazine cover,> are you forgetting the
evangelical canonization of Bush???
Lila: No, not at all. It’s all bad. I criticized Bush on the same grounds. Check it out.
Bill:Quote:Todd was the Palin they should have picked. Have you have taken leave of
your senses? BTW, in debate 101 that would be called Fallacy of False
Choice..
Lila: That was a cute line expressing the idea that real feminism would involved more concern for the family and less for a power career. By the way, it’s not a false choice. The unspoken implication of the line is if they had to have a Palin, Todd was the one they should have picked…
Bill:
*Quote*insiders who dragged America through the mud over the last two decades>> Once someone is elevated to be the Establishment throne POTUS, they are by
default the new insider by definition, don’t you get that? Was Clinton was
an insider when he was living larger than he ever expected in his wildest
dreams as gov. of AK?
Lila: Palin barely got into office in a remote state.
Bill:Quote* The persistent trashing of Sarah Palin is a trashing of ordinary
Americans. If Palin represents “ordinary americans” come and shoot me now
Lila: Yes, she does. She stands for a large part of America.
Bill: Perhaps BHO really sucks, but having Palin a heart attack away from POTUS
would have been in the realm of fantastic reality to take a line from
Richard Burton in the Night of the Iguana..
Lila: Agreed, she was a bad choice for Veep. I said I wasn’t a fan..
As reported in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner called fellow bank regulators, included Fed Chair Ben Bernanke and FDIC Chair Sheila Bair, over for an obscenity-laced rant about their audacity in raising questions about his scheme to fix our financial system.
Reportedly the Secretary told regulators that “enough is enough” and that they’ve been heard, so the time for debate is over. This sounds eerily like the President’s previous comments about including Republicans in the talks over the stimulus – you’ve been heard, so you were “included,” now shut up. The shouting down of debate is becoming all too much a signature of this Administration.
The Secretary apparently also told the regulators in attendance that it was the administration and the Congress that sets policy. Perhaps next he’ll tell us that the power of the purse lies with the Treasury and the Congress. Secretary Geithner has no more constitutional authority to set policy than do any of the bank regulators. It is the job of Congress to make laws, not the Treasury Secretary’s. He can offer his opinion, just as they can, and should, offer theirs.
Of course, Secretary Geithner’s frustrations are understandable, given that his regulatory proposals have hit a brick-wall with both Congress and the Public. He has made no effort to explain to either Congress or the public how exactly his plan will stop future bailouts. Instead, any reasonable read of his proposal would lead to the conclusion that we will have more bailouts, rather than less, under the Obama-Geithner plan. Instead of directing his energies at anger, he should put them toward coming up with solutions that actually increase the stability of our financial system.
We were all told during his confirmation process that we must overlook such facts as his failure to pay taxes, because Tim Geithner was the “boy-wonder” who would save our financial system. As his recent out-bursts demonstrate, “boy-wonder” is only half-right.
Dr, Ian Stevenson’s research into the paranormal at the University of Virginia has always interested me:
“Ian Stevenson is a man extraordinary in his intellectual and scientific accomplishments and even more extraordinary in his possession of a quality of mind which resists and never allows itself to be dominated by assumption. And so, against a powerful scientific ethos, which generally looks askance upon matters such as religions and more specifically the question of the soul, Stevenson has stood firm, recognizing that such issues are highly debatable issues and cannot be dismissed as trivial, irrelevant or devoid of value.
He is one of those remarkable men whose creativity and intelligence enable him to look beyond boundaries, instead of tempting him to contain his gaze within the pale of a single discipline. His early experiences in science, as a student of biochemistry, and as a young doctor, taught him that scientists are not always free of the prejudices and assumptions which as scientists they should be.
Indeed, Stevenson came to understand that the vanities, pride and jealousies, which historically have been the failings of politicians, philosophers, and theologians, can be, and often are, the same failings of scientists. Scientists, no matter how much they are taught to be wary of the personal and the subjective, are men, and as men they cannot be completely free of arrogance, pride, ambitions and other human failings. It is these human flaws which constrict and hinder that primal imagination of science, out of which come new possibilities from old impossibilities, and new considerations from old rejections. Stevenson’s mind is full of these transfiguring impulses of the imagination which are the source of his admirable resistance to those assumptions generated by the past accomplishment of science. Stevenson is remarkable for having been resistant to those vices of self to which science is loathe, vices which make error and shortsightedness among scientists…..
……And so even to this day, Stevenson submits to a vigorous scientific scrutiny an idea which for years has engaged his mind: the notion of survival after death and the possibility of reincarnation.
Stevenson has done more in the lecture than give us a brilliant paradigm of mind; he has returned to us something which has been too long absent from discussion in philosophical, religious and theological groups and in our intellectual life. I am referring to the argument for the immortality of the soul, a central idea in what we call the perennial philosophy. For centuries the possibility of survival after death has engaged the imagination of men; yet in the last hundred and fifty years, this conception has not fared well in a world in which Darwin, Freud and Marx have gained currency in the general culture….”
— from the Preface of Some of My Journeys, Ian Stevenson, 1989
For more on Dr. Stevenson’s research on reincarnation (his most famous research) visit the University of Virginia’s Department of Perceptual Studies.
More research along those lines has been done by another accomplished scientist, Dr. Satwant K. Pasricha, of the Department of Clinical Psychology of the National Institute of Mental Health & Neurosciences in Bangalore, India.
We hate to say it, but a year back we noted on this blog and in a couple of pieces at Lew Rockwell that Mr. Buffett was profiting every which way from the Goldman bail-out.
We also noted his corrupt ties with AIG. And we refused to bow low before his genius at investment. We figured it was another American media myth. The man was an “insider.”
Aside from the nearly $100 billion in taxpayer aid extended to Buffett’s holdings — which include mortgage lender Wells Fargo and Bank of America, credit card leviathan American Express and the bonus-happy brokerage Goldman Sachs — his companies also benefit from $130 billion in FDIC backing for their debt.
“Were it not for government bailouts, for which Buffett lobbied hard,” writes Reuters’ Rolfe Winke, “many of his company’s stock holdings would have been wiped out.”
Buffett owns 27 percent of Berkshire Hathaway, for which he serves as chairman and chief executive for an annual salary of $100,000. He’s known for his frank and simple-worded investment advice, often laced with colorful sexual metaphors.
Winke says Goldman Sachs would have collapsed without government aid it received…”
************************
Oh these Masters of the Universe. Turns out that without the Universe, they are Masters of…nothing much at all.
By the pricking of my thumbs/Something wiki this way comes…”
The tinkering with my wiki page continues. The page was nominated for deletion after I made blog posts about – guess what? – wiki manipulation, the Wall-Street- media nexus, social media attacks, my co-author’s company…
(I am eliminating this reference, since I’ve decided to put this whole business behind me)
In any case, to return to this petty saga: the page was nominated.
Then, after it became clear that the page would NOT be deleted, a new tack started
– delete the Getabstract award page, thereby reducing my claim to notability…
Why is the Getabstract award not notable? Because wiki says so…
Circular reasoning?
Was the Getabstract company informed about this? I don’t think so.
Now, would it be unreasonable to infer from all this that wiki – an international source- can easily be manipulated in favor of US parochial interests?
And US news? and US viewpoints?
And if so, is it any surprise that Wall Street robbed the public under the very noses of the much vaunted US free media…and not a soul peeped up about it, except a very few voices in the alternative press – just that press that has been declared unilaterally non-notable…
and here’s the latest comment at the bottom of that page.
Comment – I have put GetAbstract International Book Award up for deletion. I’m putting the notice here as that article is one of the significant anchors for this article being notable. –
No slur intended against individual editors. They might each have their own honorable motives…
Can you see, though, that in order to get visibility, you need a platform..in order to get the platform, you need visibility…if you have enough money, you can often get both..and then use that money and influence to determine how visible anyone else can be.
“Everybody’s got an excuse in our current system, and perhaps that’s why it is morally and financially bankrupt. The U.S. (and certainly not Santa Monica) was not a Third World nation in 1952; people did not feel their healthcare was deficient or poor. There was simply no money to pursue marginal returns except perhaps for a few millionaires seeking exotic treatments. Fine, it’s their money; most died right along with the rest of us and at about the same lifespan.
As for “overall health” of the populace: what with the “diabesity” epidemic out of control due entirely to lifestyle changes, it’s hard to say we’ve gotten 50 times healthier as a result of our healthcare costs rising 50-fold.
When it comes right down to it, the current system is based on this premise: the average American is too dumb to figure out healthcare for themselves and so we need a gigantic structure of “experts” to figure out what should be done and what it should cost. It’s not even really “insurance” because everyone gets old, ill and then dies.
This has resulted in the most brutally inefficient and even cruel system possible, one in which the very elderly are milked for hundreds of thousands of dollars of “healthcare” in the last days or weeks of their lives while tens of millions get no care at all except at the emergency room. Since no one takes responsibility for their own health or healthcare costs, then people take poor care of themselves and thus many of our ills are self-inflicted. People save little to nothing for emergencies because they’ve learned to expect someone, somewhere, to pay for their healthcare. (It’s a “right.” Really? At whose expense? The Chinese who buy our debt?)
I know, I know–going to a market/cash system is “impossible.” But the irony is that’s where we’ll be in a few years, regardless of what anyone thinks or wants: “healthcare” in its present incarnation will bankrupt the nation just as surely as the sun rises.”
My Comment:
That’s been my opinion of American health care, for years. Despite all the rhetoric and the high technology and expensive medicine involved, it’s not “the best” in the world, by any means. For the amount of money spent, I have to believe it’s actually rather middling.
Why?
Because the whole thing is a racket between the insurance companies, the medical establishment (including the pharmaceutical companies), and the lawyers – in which the consumer of health (notice the peculiarity of making health a product you consume) is encouraged to go in for bigger and sloppier portions, which he doesn’t fully eat or throws away, while all around people starve in the gutters.
Hospital overbilling ($17 dollar cotton swabs, for example), unnecessary diagnostic tests, lack of preventive care, patients who abdicate all responsibility for their own health, control of the supply of doctors, the medical research boondoggle….
Take all this away. Pay in cash for what you want. It sounds radical…impossible.
But with no incentive to over-bill, doctors will lower costs dramatically.
What about poor people who can’t afford health care now? Lower costs should help them too.
But there are other things we can do to to make health care affordable.
Here are some:
1. Increase the supply of doctors by immigration and single licensing standards
2. Utilize/license alternative practitioners, instead of demonizing them
3. Allow non-generic drugs into the market-place
4. Encourage medical tourism and comparison-shopping across countries
5. Educate the public on nutrition and preventive health
6. Allow nurses and technicians to perform more procedures than they do now
7. Include nutrition as a required subject in high schools