If the First Amendment means anything,
it means that a state has no business telling a man,
sitting alone in his house,
what books he may read or what films he may watch.
On Sibel Edmonds blog today, this heroic naturalized citizen reminds us "home-groaners" of our responsibilities:
Here comes our Fourth of July. Surely what is left of our Bill of Rights is worth celebrating, and just as surely what has been taken away is worth fighting for. So let us enjoy that cold beer, savor that hot dog, and while doing that let us reflect and renew our pledge to fight for those irreplaceable American liberties that have been taken from us; the fight against our 'real' foes. Are we prepared to make the same pledge those founding fathers made 233 years ago?
Edmonds was fired from her position as a language specialist at the FBI's Washington Field Office in March, 2002, after she accused a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving foreign nationals, alleging serious acts of security breaches, cover-ups, and intentional blocking of intelligence which, she contended, presented a danger to the United States' security. Since that time, court proceedings on her whistleblower claims have been blocked by the assertion of State Secrets Privilege. On March 29, 2006, she was awarded the PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award in recognition of her defense of free speech as it applies to the written word.[5]
Both Franklin and Jefferson, two of the smartest guys to whom we attribute the inspiration for the Founding, repeated sentiments like these (the rhyme is Franklin's, I believe): "Those who would be both safe and free desire that which never was, nor ever will be."
Not long ago I found a disconcerting message on my answering machine. It said simply, "Don't send me any more emails. We went bankrupt." It is a message that has been reverberating through towns in America mostly below the radar screen of the mainstream media.
The businesses filing for bankruptcy range from manufacturers to auto dealers. Some of them are national, many of them are regional, and quite a few are local, the anchors of many small towns. A lot of them are niche businesses. By that I mean they operate in specialized markets often as suppliers to larger firms.
SEPARATED at BIRTH #1 - after seeing a photo of the newly-deposed Honduran president Manuel Zelaya .....
.... for all the world, all I could think of was El Exigente - the old Savarin Coffee pitchman (who, as it turns out, was portrayed by Ricardo Montalban's brother Carlos).
Such is life. Before I go off-the-deep-end - and it may be too late for that - why not stop in for a look at news items outside the headlines, in the arts and sciences; foreign news that generates little notice in the US media and ....well, just plain whimsy.....
It seems only yesterday that we could read entire five-hundred word essays and take the time to form an insightful comment to them, sometimes generating actual discussion. But that is so 2006. Today, online communication seems to have devolved to one-hundred-forty character Tweets, and endlessly wandering through Facebook, posting pithy comments on our friends' walls.
Even teh Google seems to be passe--taken over by the new Microsoft search engine, although from what I've seen about Google Wave, I'm not counting them out yet. (Warning, the linked video runs 80 minutes. Good luck sustaining your attention span for that long).
Michael Jackson made perfectly disposable music everybody was in love with for 15 minutes back in the 80s. It got real tired real fast, and, uh, let's see how long this rebirth in sales for his old trite shit lasts. Not. v. long. Here's the real meaning of Michael Jackson:
Joe Jackson beat his children to turn them into pop stars. For that he was rewarded with the American Dream, fame and fortune. Why don't we celebrate that?
Somewhere in Iran, there are terabytes of data - unseen photos, unwatched videos and unread words that have captured events that have yet to be seen by those of us in the "West."
The Ahmadinejad regime has struggled to tamp out communication among the Iranian people, now keeping it to a very slow drip. Hardly anything comes out from Iran these days, unlike the deluge that we have seen in the past. Keep in mind, Iran is the biggest blogging nation in the world outside of the United States. The culture there, with a majority of the population being young, is a wired culture. Hell, we are a wired planet, so why should Iran be any different?
When it comes to politics, new language and new thinking are different things. Whatever new language progressives used in 2004 failed to change the electoral outcome, and at most it'll help them eke out a few victories in the coming years. New language is like changing the window treatment, not the window, not the view, not the perspective.
What's required for social change, and it could come from either party, is the kind of political realignment we get once every 50 years. Such realignment pulls a sizeable majority from the vast non-ideological, sensible middle of the political spectrum, and creates a real mandate for fundamental social change. Like those that FDR and LBJ presided over. Like the universal health care and campaign finance reform that we need now.
Okay, I admit the title is a bit of a red herring, but this story is absolutely hysterical.
For a couple of decades now, social psychologists and behavioral economists have been amusing themselves manipulating consumers into doing odd things. They've delighted in debunking the notion of homo economicus, that theoretical creature who rationally seeks maximum economic utility.
...
But suppose, instead of scanning people's brains as they're sipping wine in a laboratory, you tested them in a more realistic situation: a restaurant where they're spending their own money. That challenge was undertaken at an upscale restaurant in Tel Aviv by two behavioral economists, Ori Heffetz of Cornell and Moses Shayo of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who expected to be able to manipulate diners' choices by changing the prices on the menu.
Just wait. I haven't gotten to the punch line yet.
In a recent thread concerned with the social construction of gender and the essential (or non-essential) differences between men and women, Joools made the following observation:
And anyone who has spent any time at all in organizations that are mainly female knows that women can be very aggressive. Just not in a guy way. More subtly, probably, but still very aggressive.
the consequences of how "we wake up in the morning to hear and watch the newest tragedy that has swept the world's media attention"--whether it's "the tragic crash of an airplane" or "the death of a star." Meanwhile:
Serious events and acts are taking place everyday which merit serious social debate, yet because of the fact that our societies are deeply fragmented, broken and clashing between each other, we are unable to grant ourselves the necessary pause, required for conciliation and unity.
Because of this, we are easy to control as a mass of isolated individuals, which is held together by norms and regulations, bureaucracies, military and police, and concepts such as the nation state, the church and the corporation.
If we are to stay in this model of society, I fear we will live in perpetual war until we destroy ourselves by not paying attention to the fact that something is drastically wrong.
Ouziel's digest of exactly what is wrong reads like a list of topics steadfastly avoided by corporate media in the U.S.: "We are living in societies plagued with corruption at all levels, we are constantly expanding our militarized societies surveilled by police forces and colonizing armies, which are rapidly eroding our freedoms." (See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "The Media Ignore Their Core Duty: Arianna Huffington & Glenn Greenwald on Media Accountability" (9-10/08).)
Isolation, ironically, has ALWAYS been part of the telos of "massification," through alienation. The increased development of 'niche markets' exaggerates alienation. Alone in the crowd, we are puppets of the media who pull our strings and push our buttons while driving us, aas individuals, even further apart. This is not surprising given that 1) the media are owned by the CorpoRats, and 2) the 'solidarity' of members of related groups is utterly inimical to the CorpoRat interests in imposing more corporate authoritarianism, globalism, and increased, (repressive) social surveillance.
5:00 PM ET -- Mousavi rejects partial vote recount.
Defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mirhossein Mousavi on Saturday rejected authorities' proposals for a partial recount of votes from this month's election and repeated his demand the entire ballot be annulled.
Iran's top legislative body, the Guardian Council, had offered to recount 10 percent of ballot boxes from the June 12 vote in the presence of senior officials representing the government and opposition.
"This kind of recount will not remove ambiguities...There is no other way but annulment of the vote...Some members of this committee are not impartial," Mousavi said in a statement posted on his website.
5:06 PM ET -- "Hactivists" take up cause as streets quiet. A report from the AP:
A sharp clampdown by Iranian authorities may have quelled street protests, but the fight goes on in cyberspace.
Groups of "hacktivists" -- Web hackers demanding Internet freedom -- say they are targeting Web pages of Iran's leadership in response to the regime's muzzling of blogs, news outlets and other sites.
It's unclear how much the wired warriors have disrupted official Iranian sites. Attempts by The Associated Press to access sites for state news organizations, including the Islamic Republic News Agency and Fars, were unsuccessful -- with a message saying the links were "broken."
Other Iranian Web sites, including the official site for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were able to be viewed.
Below, Gary Larson 'bird's-eye' view of the House/Senate
reconciliation process on climate protection and health-care Bills:
The "LEAST" being the (Ree-vo-fucking-LUTIONARY!) "Cap-and-Trade" band-aid on the suppurating, metastacizing bed-sore which is the USer reply to global climate change, passed by the House (but still pending in the Senate), and the "Obama-care" health care reform 'plan' which has not even been introduced in EITHER House. Both of these, whatsoever their weaknesses, holes, absences, and flaws, will assuredly be hailed as the GREATEST THING SINCE EDIBLE UNDIES, and will be touted, by everyone involved in passing them, as the 'answer' to the (apparently, otherwise, abjectly betrayed) "promise" for a new approach to USer health care and climate change, and neither of which will make sufficient strides to ameliorate the problems they're allegedly designed top meet; but each of which will be sufficient reason/excuse to postpone any FURTHER "pain" to the legislators who are required to enact them.
"They," of course, being the corpoRat pig-fuckers in the WhiteHouse and Congress (inclusive).
To the extent that either the energy-plan or the health-plan is in any way 'satisfactory' to the industries which must fall under the regulatory supervision of the legislation, that bill will be a failure to the interests of common folks and the environment, the planet and life in general. These folks always seem willing to prove the null hypothesis in my theory, that humanity is a cosmic experiment testing whether "life" can survive "intelligence."
To the folks who claim that ANY attempt is better than no effort, I offer a hearty "Cods'-wallop!" Both measures, in whatsoever form they eventually comprise, will become excuses to forego FURTHER reforms, to IGNORE the metastacizing crises, and to go before the voters as "reformers," their patent, looming, reeking, odious failures to act in any meaningful way notwithstanding...
(*Anosognosia: "The condition in which a person who suffers illness or disability seems unaware of or denies the existence of his or her illness/disability; may include unawareness of quite dramatic impairments, such as blindness or paralysis." And my newest blog.)
The fact is that despite the bluster of the American Right that Something Must be Done, the United States is not a neutral or benevolent player in Iran. (And never has been. W) Washington overthrew the elected government of Iran in 1953 over oil nationalization, and installed the megalomaniac and oppressive Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, who gradually so alienated all social classes in Iran that he was overthrown in a popular revolution in 1978-1979. The shah had a national system of domestic surveillance and tossed people in jail for the slightest dissidence, (where they were tortured and sometimes killed. W) and was supported to the hilt by the United States government. So past American intervention has not been on the side of let us say human rights.
More recently, the US backed the creepy and cult-like Mojahedin-e Khalq (People's Holy Warriors or MEK), which originated in a mixture of communist Stalinism and fundamentalist Islam. The MEK is a terrorist organization and has blown things up inside Iran, so the Pentagon's ties with them are wrong in so many ways. The MEK, by the way, has a very substantial lobby in Washington DC and has some congressmen in its back pocket, and is supported by the less savory elements of the Israel lobbies such as Daniel Pipes and Patrick Clawson. I am not saying they should be investigated for material support of terrorism, since I am appalled by the unconstitutional breadth of that current DOJ tactic, but I am signalling that the US imperialist Right has been up to very sinister things in Iran for decades. A person who worked in the Pentagon once alleged to me that then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was privately pushing for using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran. And Dick Cheney is so attached to launching war on Iran that he characterized attempts to deflect such plans as a "conspiracy." Given what the US did to Fallujah, it strikes me as unlikely that a military invasion of Iran would be good for that country's civic life. And there are rather disadvantages to being nuked, even by the kindliest of WASP gentlemen of Mr. Rumsfeld's ilk.
As I write this, I'm sitting in a Dunkin Donuts -- one of two in this small college town -- and avoiding real work. The coffee here is quite drinkable, and it's at a pretty good price. I can get enough coffee to make my little heart go pitty-pat for less than two bucks. I can get a reasonably healthy little flatbread sandwich that I burn through in about two hours and want more. No, this is not an endorsement of Dunkin Donuts, because here's the thing: Starbucks makes a better cup of coffee. Heresy, I know, but the fact of the matter is that if you want to put cream and sugar in it, the coffee there is substantially better than the coffee at Dunkin Donuts. The kicker: the price is not that much better here, if at all.
YUK for today - when I saw the jersey of this hockey player from Slovakia (whose first name is Miroslav) for the Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins: I'll admit ..
Well .... maybe not. Regardless: why not stop in for a look at news items outside the headlines, in the arts and sciences; foreign news that generates little notice in the US media and ....well, just plain whimsy.....
Much has been made of the death of traditional media, particularly newspapers. Apparently, traditional journalism is going the way of the dinosaur, thanks to people like you and I who would rather get our news as it happens, rather than fished from our bushes or dragged out of a puddle twelve hours later.
The twenty-four-hour news networks, pioneered by CNN, and the internet have given people a myriad of information sources from which to choose. Now, rather than being patient enough to wait for the six-o'clock news, and sitting through the commercials, we can read about a story on numerous websites, filtering them for our preferred spin.
The recent "election" in Iran has been a lesson in the effectiveness of electronic media. While reporters have been stifled, phone service has been sporadic, and internet connections limited, Twitter has continued to provide us with a window into the protests on the streets, and YouTubes have been sent out using proxy servers.
The information provided by these new technologies has been consumed by an eager public, but the media conglomerates are struggling to find a way to make them pay off.
(I wrote this for the local fishwrap and there is a 500 word limit there so I hope you don't mind the brevity and consider the original venue. - X-posted at DK (with a pointer here ;)-D.)
For those of us who got hooked early on news from Iran the mainstream media was criminally complacent. The whole of the weekend of June 13th and 14th, with the streets of Tehran filling with protesters of the phony presidential vote, they completely missed the story; so we gathered like tribes at the virtual campfires of Daily Kos or Andrew Sullivan's blog "The Daily Dish" to anxiously follow the furtive "tweets" from cell phones, to watch over the brave young people for whom we feared.
Thousands of photographs flowed from our monitors, beautiful young people, green ribbons streaming from their wrists, hands upraised in clenched fist or flashing the iconic "V", simultaneously making our hearts soar with their courage and quake from fear and anxiety for their safety.
For we knew they defied monsters.
Their words, delivered in real time staccato bursts from unknown streets and plazas like dispatches fleeing a war zone stirred parental or familial concern - like troubling phone messages from loved ones we could not return...
