January 5, 2011 archive

Climate Change ‘no longer newsworthy’ says Media in 2010

The Daily Climate has a breakdown of the past decade of America’s corporate-held media’s coverage of climate change, where they found that 2010 was the year climate coverage ‘fell off the map’. Media coverage of climate change in 2010 dropped globally by 30 percent since 2009 and “slipped to levels not seen since 2005”.

Corporate broadcast news coverage of climate change was so insignificant that Robert Brulle, a Drexel University professor, who has analyzed nightly news coverage of climate change stories, said he is doubting his data. “I can’t believe it’s this little. In the U.S., it’s just gone off the map,” he said.

“The cycle of media interest in climate change has run its course, and this story is no longer considered newsworthy,” Brulle said. Total coverage of the UN climate talks in Cancun last month by the networks was a single 10-second clip, he said.

Social Security: Beyond Red and Blue

George Carlin said it bluntly a few years ago, and it was dismissed as comedy by more than a few who saw that it wasn’t – who saw that he he was using the comedic stage as a platform to deliver a serious warning, to pass on the truth as he saw it clearly:

They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations, they’ve long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear.

They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else.

But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting f*cked by a system that threw them overboard 30 f*ckin’ years ago. They don’t want that.

You know what they want? They want obedient workers – obedient workers – people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paper work, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.

And now they’re coming for your social security money.

They want your f*ckin’ retirement money. They want it back. So they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street.

Carlin was a unique talent – he had a stage presence that was fun to listen to and he had a way with phrasing and delivery that made the depressing message he had to pass on a little easier to swallow than dry facts would have.

Fighting Intolerance Requires Trusting Other People

An English professor at Auburn University Montgomery (Alabama) has recently sparked a firestorm of criticism for his decision to edit two Mark Twain classics.  Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both read by generations of schoolchildren, contain frequent usage of racially insensitive language.  However, they are also products of their time.  The books were written by an author who used dialogue authentic to the period, as objectionable as it is to us in this day.  The controversy among Twain scholars and the general public has been substantial.  But until recently, the professor held a completely different attitude altogether.

The Day Tenacatita was Returned to the People

(Editor’s note: Reprinted in full with the kind permission of Juan Frost. Original post can be read in English at Cyberpueblo.)

For those of you who don’t have the basic details of the gross injustices of August 4th in Tenacatita, I recommend these two videos.

broken in this story since I last wrote it, and I had promised to update my readers.

Never Leave an Ironing Board up Overnight in the Kitchen and other Musings by X, formerly Xanthe

If a young bride were to come to me and ask for homemaking advice (unlikely since I’ve never been married) – my maxim would be “Never Leave an Ironing Board up Overnight in the Kitchen.”  You can leave it up in the dining or living room because when company comes – you are sure to clean it off and parcel it off to the basement or nearest closet.  But in the kitchen, it becomes counter space, and one morning with a cab honking outside waiting to take you to the airport, you will be ironing your white cotton blouse on the real granite counter space and wondering where your luggage tags are, the ones you bought last year.  They are on the ironing board where you put them about six months ago, now covered by unfinished crossword puzzles, Spanish grammar books (unopened), several items of clothing needing new zippers and buttons and three cats sitting with their paws folded watching you with interest.  (Where is she going do you think?  Who will feed us?)  A minor advisory warning, but certainly worth thinking about.



Social Security and Self-Esteem – Self-Worth – Self-Confidence (you know that kind of stuff)

If SS is cut in a real meaningful way, older women will be in the center pathway of that oncoming truck crash. I am a member of the Silent Generation – raised by children of the depression.  I watched my father especially trying to navigate in this money equals worth world with a kind of timidity and lack of self-esteem as closely as only girl children observe their fathers – with a mixture of anger and pity.  It certainly was a marker to my future choice of men – I am a rescuer and then I get angry.  ‘Nuff said.  That would require a novel so I won’t elucidate.  My mother was feisty but looking back I think women are allowed a leeway that men aren’t as far as rebellion against an unjust society – just enough, mind you – but women just aren’t threatening the way men are.  Or maybe it was just a reaction to the husband she married.  My father was a good and gentle man.  He was very smart – could have been an engineer had he been born a few years later or had some meaningful help.  But I am pretty much what I am due to the scars of that 30s depression – it defined him and I have to fight for other definition markers.  My son, having been raised by me alone, has exactly the opposite tendencies.  He needs to worry more, not less.  He may be learning these hard lessons now (another diary) but that is also a legacy of that ’30s political and economic landscape – these damages are handed down one, two generations.  And they are costly, in oh so many ways, financially and damming up a creativity and spirituality and generosity of spirit because we are afraid.  As to self-sacrifice, in my experience we are good at that.  Dick Durben, in his exhortation to us older ladies to stop whining and face the reality of self-sacrifice needs to observe his constitutency (or should I say prior constituency) – and honor us, not slap us around.  But what the heck – he’s a member of Congress.  What can we expect?

Self worth, self confidence translates into a productive society with enough for everyone, happiness included.  These financial breakdowns managed by thieves and murderers and aided by sissy lawmakers make sure there will be monumental breaks in society every so often.  Count on it.

 

Gerry Rafferty, 1947- 2011, Scottish Bard of “Baker Street”

Gerry Rafferty, April 16, 1947  –  January 4, 2011  the Scottish singer songwriter best known for “Baker Street,”  (1978) which took saxophones and made them sing like bagpipes doing jazz,  has passed away at home.  He was 63.

http://www.latimes.com/news/ob…

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvs…

Jerry Rafferty

Gerry Rafferty

the lyrics, Baker Street. (The song’s iconic musical saxophone riffs were played by Raphael Ravenscroft. )

Winding your way down on Baker Street

Light in your head and dead on your feet

well another crazy day you’ll drink the night away

and forget about everything

this city desert makes you feel so cold

it’s got so many people but it’s got no soul

and it’s taken you so long to find out that you were wrong

and forget about everything

You used to think it was so easy

you used to say it was so easy

but you’re tryin’   you’re try -in’ now

Another year and then you’ll be happy

just one more year and then you’ll be happy

but you’re crying,  you’re cryin’ now

(music riff )

Way down the street there a light in his place

He opens the door, he’s got that look on his face

and he asks you where you’ve been you tell him who you’ve seen

And you talk about everything

He’s got this dream about buyin’ some land

He’s gonna give up the booze and the one night stands

and then he’ll settle down

in a quiet little town

and forget about everything

But you know he’ll always keep moving

You know he’s never going to stop movin’

He’s rolling, he’s a rolling stone

And when you wake up it’s a new morning

THe sun is shining, it’s a new morning

But you’re going, you’re going home

(music riff )

Late Night Karaoke

Barack Obama Reviews “It Begged For Death” By Jacob Freeze

Ruin

As if feeding my dog “magic” brownies and telling Jarrett I like Axelrod better than her weren’t enough, now my idiot sock-puppet Jacob Freeze wants to publish It Begged For Death: American Culture and Society in the Age of Obama!

Of course I immediately stamped that thing top-secret and disappeared it down the memory hole in Michelle’s White House garden, and of course my stoner dog dug it up again, and again, but I’m posting a review of it anyway just so you know what I have to put up with in the Oval Office, with my DFH dog always yipping for munchies and Axelrod demanding $500 for wedgie-proof underpants because Valerie Jarrett…

Oh, forget it!

So my idiot sock-puppet’s dismal tome would be totally worthless except for some cover art he stole from Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s photo-book about the ruins of Detroit, that garbage-metropolis which only remains in existence because we’re all too broke and lazy to knock it down, and the rest of America likewise, with our imbecile cartoon-movie culture, Jersey Shore on TV, and a “sociopathic con-man” in the White House, as if Snooki in that hamster ball on New Year’s Eve wasn’t classic TV!

snooki ball drop taping 311210

Barack Obama Reviews “It Begged For Death” By Jacob Freeze

 Ruin

As if feeding my dog “magic” brownies and telling Jarrett I like Axelrod better than her weren’t enough, now my idiot sock-puppet Jacob Freeze wants to publish It Begged For Death: American Culture and Society in the Age of Obama!

Of course I immediately stamped that thing top-secret and disappeared it down the memory hole in Michelle’s White House garden, and of course my stoner dog dug it up again, and again, but I’m posting a review of it anyway just so you know what I have to put up with in the Oval Office, with my DFH dog always yipping for munchies and Axelrod demanding $500 for wedgie-proof underpants because Valerie Jarrett…

Oh, forget it!

So my idiot sock-puppet’s dismal tome would be totally worthless except for some cover art he stole from Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s photo-book about the ruins of Detroit, that garbage-metropolis which only remains in existence because we’re all too broke and lazy to knock it down, and the rest of America likewise, with our imbecile cartoon-movie culture, Jersey Shore on TV, and a “sociopathic con-man” in the White House, as if Snooki in that hamster ball on New year’s Eve wasn’t classic TV!

snooki ball drop taping 311210

 

Pakistan’s Punjab Governor Taseer Assassinated

News Being Ignored by the cable TeeVee AMSM Dept, not that we’re in a covert war or anything:

Tuesday, Jan 4, 2011. The governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province, Salman Taseer, age 56,  has been assassinated in the northern capital of Islamabad by one of his bodyguards.   Taseer was a member of the Bhutto legacy Pakistan People’s Party.  In 2008, the president of Pakistan, Zadari, appointed him governor of Punjab, which is Pakistan’s wealthiest province and in the east along the Indian border.   According to Al Jazeera, Taseer, who was visiting Islamabad, was not being guarded by his usual security detail. The alleged assassin was from Rawalpindi, which is slightly south of Islamabad, and that is where former PM Benazir Bhutto was also killed in 2007 by a bomb explosion.  Rawalpindi is the headquarters of the Pakistani Army and Air Force.

Tomorrow, January 5th, was to be the anniversary celebration of the birth of Bhutto’s father,   Zufikar Ali Bhutto.  

The government has closed parliament and announced a three day period of mourning.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worl…

Last month he publicly supported Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman and mother of three who has been sentenced to death for allegedly insulting the prophet Muhammad. Bibi’s case has triggered a fresh debate around the blasphemy laws, which human rights groups say are frequently abused to settle scores or target minorities.

Enraged PPP supporters took to the streets across Pakistan, chanting slogans and weeping. A procession of ashen-faced ministers and officials trailed into the Islamabad hospital where Taseer’s body was taken after the shooting. “These are the forces that are ranged against us,” said Latif Khosa, a former attorney general. “Every time our party comes to power, its leaders are assassinated or disappear.”

Foreshadowing ?


Monday, Jan 3rd, 2011.  

http://www.reuters.com/article…

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani’s government lost its parliamentary majority Sunday when the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) announced it would go into opposition over fuel price policies.

The former military chief (Musharraf), who came to power in a bloodless coup in 1999, has lived in self-imposed exile since he stepped down under threat of impeachment in 2008. He spends most of his time in London and Dubai.

Musharraf said: “I must return (to Pakistan) well before the next elections, whenever that may be. I strongly believe the real momentum for my party will start once I reach Pakistan. So we are trying to create an environment for me to reach there.”