April 10, 2008
April 9, 2008
Robert Parry: Losing the War for Reality
Robert Parry, Consortium News, April 8, 2008
When future historians look back at the sharp decline of the United States in the early 21st Century, they might identify the Achilles heel of this seemingly omnipotent nation as its lost ability to recognize reality and to fashion policies to face the real world.
Like the legendary Greek warrior – whose sea-nymph mother dipped him in protective waters except for his heel – the United States was blessed with institutional safeguards devised by wise Founders who translated lessons from the Age of Reason into a brilliant constitutional framework of checks and balances.
What the Founders did not anticipate, however, was how fragile truth could become in a modern age of excessive government secrecy, hired-gun public relations and big-money media. Sophisticated manipulation of information is what would do the Republic in.
That is the crucial lesson for understanding the arc of U.S. history over the past three decades. It is a central theme of a new book by former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman, Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.
As a senior Kremlinologist in the CIA’s office of Soviet analysis, Goodman was on the front lines of the information war in the early 1980s when ideological right-wingers took control of the U.S. government under Ronald Reagan and began to gut the key institutions for assessing reality.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!
This is how rock musicians are supposed to age. At 50, Nick Cave’s hairline is receding, but he’s turned that setback into a “look,” growing out his locks and cultivating the coolest mustache in the industry. Over 30 years, first with the Birthday Party and then with the Bad Seeds, he has refined his lurid growl and lascivious subject matter– the usuals: sex, death, God, murder, redemption, all in the most brutal and salaciously poetical terms possible– without losing any of his charisma or menace. During the past decade alone, despite sounding hoarse on No More Shall We Part and Nocturama, he has transformed his swagger into a potent brand of musical and amoral authority, honing his persona in tandem with the Bad Seeds, who a few years ago were one of the tightest and most versatile backing bands around and have only gotten better with each release.
April 7, 2008
The Tattlesnake – McCain Says Listen to Bin Laden Edition
“I’ll speak for the man, or against him, whichever will do the most good.”
– Richard M. Nixon
On March 25th, MSNBC’s First Read reported John McCain’s delusional comment, “We’re succeeding [in Iraq], I don’t care what anybody says.” True to form, McCain’s Big Media Fondlers cast this bit of insouciant ‘unsinkable Titanic’ stupidity as their War Hero’s steadfast refusal to back down after the marking of the 4,000th American death in Bush’s Bust in the Dust.
What was more interesting about the story, though, was McCain’s embrace of Osama bin Laden’s position on Iraq, and how the Big Media mavens covered it.
Bin Laden, as he’s wont to do to influence US politics, apparently echoed George Bush’s and John McCain’s contention that Iraq is the central front in the war on terrorism and McCain, incredibly, accused those that didn’t believe bin Laden of “naivete”.
Who’s being naïve, Senator?
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China Must Pay For Its Crimes
China should never have been awarded an Olympics. Since its modern inception as a communist country, China has been outlaw to the rest of the world. China has annexed other countries, arrests anyone who dares speak out against it human rights record manipulates it monetary system to appear competitive in the world, engages in wholesale pirating of copyrighted material and supports rogue regimes throughout the world. Not exactly the picture of a country that deserves to hold the Olympics.
The current uproar over China’s annexation of Tibet and its ethnic cleansing program the country has shed new light on why many people were against giving China the Summer Olympic Games. Supporters of giving China the games used the argument that hosting the Olympic Games would force China to be better on human rights, economic and currency issues and its foreign policy. None of that has come about. Instead China has become worse in every single area.
Now that they have the games the Communist rulers in China do not feel they need to appease the rest of the world in any way. China knows that a full scale boycott of the Olympics will not happen. They know that the world will be watching and so they have scrubbed down Beijing removing its seamy underbelly and have rounded up those that may cause trouble this summer.
The very least that the nations of the world should do is boycott the opening ceremonies this summer. The athletes should not be punished but a message must be sent. China’s favored trade status with the US and European Union should be halted until China changes on the issues of human rights, currency and its rogue foreign policy. China should no longer be rewarded for its outlaw behavior. If China wants to play with the rest of the world then it must meet the standards of the rest of the world.