October 19, 2007 archive

Propaganda has been around since human beings began habituating the earth at it existed in the simplest of forms: the spoken word or the painted picture. But, over time as people have grown more sophisticated so has propaganda and how it is delivered. As the average person has moved away from receiving their news in the printed form to relying on the broadcast media the sound byte has become the outlet of choice for the delivery of propaganda. Considering the power of that medium and the presentation of the news its not surprising then that large majorities would come to believe what was being delivered as news was the truth because no one chose to refute it.

One of the things my club does, and has for the last 40 badump years, is run an Arts and Crafts Show on the Stars Hollow Green.

Taylor Doose hates it because we tear up the turf more than all the Weddings and Concerts and Easter Egg Hunts and Festivals he runs; but you know, that’s just the way it is in Stars Hollow, do something long enough and you have squatters rights and old Taylor can just piss up a rope.

It was a bad year.  We had less than 8 members to cover the whole event and it is our major fundraiser.

At the end of the day we were all pretty beat.  I won’t pretend I worked any harder than anyone else.  I still smoked and I must say I enjoyed it, sitting on the bench.  Still, it was just getting darker and colder and I was just getting stiffer so I mildly suggested-

“Seems to me we ought to get started cleaning up.”

Yes.  Well, it got exactly the kind of response I expected.

It occurred to me some stronger measures might be required, so I bestirred myself, picked up a garbage bag and said-

“Ok, I’m starting at that end”, and I pointed to the shorter and less garbagy part of the green since if you lead you get to do stuff like that, “and we need a team to start over there”, and here I pointed toward the horrendous pigsty, “and we’ll meet in the middle.  Let’s do it!”

And I did an unconvincing little jump and stalked off.

Oddly enough a half hour later the job was done.  The last Crafter on the Green closing up was a person who did tumbled rocks like Emily’s Mom.  Before she finished packing up her van she stopped me and said- “I saw what you did.” and gave me a piece of polished quartz of the type that normally went for a buck, so no big deal.

After all stones don’t bring you luck you make your own.

Link:

Tim Starks of Congressional Quarterly reports that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) plans to bring the Senate’s surveillance bill up for floor debate in mid-November. That’s despite the hold that Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) plans to place on the measure . . .

then Harry Reid can go fuck himself. I will never want to hear another fucking word about how hard Harry Reid is trying. This is unprecedented.

Say it ain’t so Harry, cuz if it is . . .

One of the terms I use for my various sigs is “Never trust any organization bigger than two, and even those are suspect.”  I’ve never read it anywhere, so I think it’s an original (if not, please send me the citation).

Today’s quote for discussion comes from our own Brandon Friedman’s book, The War I Always Wanted, which I highly recommend, and not just because I think he should be rich and famous.

Buy The War I Always Wanted at Amazon.

A citizen of Republican-occupied territory, I frequently tune in to government radio in order to monitor the movements, mental and physical, of the enemy.

This morning I turned on the Grand Poobah of GOoPerdom himself, Rush Limbaugh, and was extremely discomfited to find myself nodding along in agreement, disconsolately reduced to mumbling, in the words of Limbaugh’s own blowharding bumpersticker, “Rush Is Right.”

I reproduce the relevant portions of his monologue below, because I want desperately to be wrong about this. I would like someone, anyone, to show me that, in the substance if not the rhetoric of what he says, Rush is not, in fact, right.

Google video and youTube are releasing a beta software package that “allows” copyright holders to block clips.

http://www.youtube.c…
The 911 truth people are most upset as it means all those clips of original news footage of the day could be forever lost. Yes, we are backing up the good ones now.  Technicians will once again have to figure out a way to bypass this crap.

Today though those many websites I saw two years ago warning of the Orwellian dangers of DRM(digital rights management) and Windows Longhorn have disappeared and been replaced with the how wonderful Microshaft is.

Net neutrality was never a real issue, the real issue is will the net become just a cheap plastic shopping mall with streaming Faux News reports geared to a mental age of twelve.

Shit like this just sends me into my usual incoherent rage.

crossposted at Daily Kos and Truth & Progress

This is going to be a fairly short diary.

Television’s favorite political pundit, Jon Stewart, will continue his reign over at ‘The Daily Show’ at least until 2010

Jon Stewart Extends Deal With COMEDY CENTRAL Through 2010

COMEDY CENTRAL has reached an agreement with Jon Stewart to extend the contract of the host of the critically- acclaimed and award-winning “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” it was announced today by Michele Ganeless, president, COMEDY CENTRAL.

Stewart, whose contract was set to expire at the end of 2008, will now remain with the all-comedy network through 2010.  In addition to hosting “The Daily Show,” Stewart also serves as an executive producer and writer and is the principal behind Busboy Productions, Inc. with whom the network has a first look television agreement. 

“I love doing this show.  I feel like I work with and for the best in the business.  I look forward to using this extension to having great fun at President Colbert’s expense.”

Stewart declined to say if future President Colbert had taken any positions regarding SCHIP or the Iraq War/Occupation.

We live in an age of hypertrophic indecency and immodesty.  This is perhaps best symbolized the Presidency of George W. Bush and his aggressive wars, rendition torture, illegal search and seizure, and absolute disregard for human suffering.  A fundamental indecency and immodesty suffuses us.  We have suffered a collapse of the sense of “enoughness.”

As Seymour Hersh has reported, the Bush Administration has made a deliberate calculation to change the rationale for its warmongering against Iran. They realized that the lie about Iran’s nascent nuclear weapons program wasn’t selling, so they decided to recalibrate and relaunch with a new marketing campaign claiming Iran is a major cause of the violence in Iraq. Of course, there wouldn’t be much violence in Iraq, had Bush not launched an invason, but we’re talking about catapulting propaganda, not reality.

So, the first Iran War rollout wasn’t working, and the Administration decided on another one; because it’s not the facts that matter, it’s the selling of war. So, Iran suddenly became a dangerous influence in Iraq. And some-time general, and full-time political hack, David Petraeus was recently in England, trying to sell the same story– although the Brits aren’t buying it. Apparently, neither are the people who would actually know something about it: the Iraqis.

The New York Times is reporting:

Iraq has agreed to award $1.1 billion in contracts to Iranian and Chinese companies to build a pair of enormous power plants, the Iraqi electricity minister said Tuesday. Word of the project prompted serious concerns among American military officials, who fear that Iranian commercial investments can mask military activities at a time of heightened tension with Iran.

Or maybe those American officials are actually worried that it’s going to be hard to sell a war based on Iranian meddling in Iraq when Iraq itself is inviting Iranian businesses into Iraq to build power plants.

The Iraqi electricity minister, Karim Wahid, said that the Iranian project would be built in Sadr City, a Shiite enclave in Baghdad that is controlled by followers of the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr. He added that Iran had also agreed to provide cheap electricity from its own grid to southern Iraq, and to build a large power plant essentially free of charge in an area between the two southern Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf.

So, Iran’s going to actually help solve Iraq’s electricity problem. Something at which we’ve not been doing such a good job.

The Chinese will be paid about $940,000,000 for their plant, and the Iranians about $150,000,000 for theirs. Don’t ask where the money’s coming from. The article doesn’t say whether it’s out of the funds we’re giving Iraq, but it would be interesting to trace it. Because we are giving them a lot. And these are expensive projects. So, it does actually seem plausible that our tax dollars will be going to Iran, to help them rebuild Iraq.

And there’s this: