Things to consider—

Since early 2011, Obama's been waging proxy war on Syria. Imported death squads masquerade as freedom fighters. The scheme's familiar. It repeats. It reflects US imperialism's dark side. In the 1980s, CIA-recruited mujahideen fighters battled Afghanistan's Soviet occupiers. Ronald Reagan called them "the moral equivalent of our founding fathers." He characterized Contra killers the same way. —Stephen LendmanFor over a century now US ambassadors have acted as fifth columns in the nations they are embedded in, their role chiefly to foster corporate and plutocratic power and coordinate machinations against any truly pro-democratic government.•••••"The dead end identity politics of SF Pride, which sells out a peace hero like Bradley Manning to curry favor with the American ruling class, is what I had in mind. The empire loves your tameness, irrelevance and cowardice, SF Pride. You don’t bother the American ruling class — a five foot two, 105 pound soldier does because he has a conscience and because he didn’t make comfort the guiding principle of his life...." —Randy Shields
  • Apple’s tax dodge: The case for public ownership

    Apple’s tax dodge: The case for public ownership

    Guest Editorials— By Andre Damon, wsws.org The US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a report Monday showing that electronics giant Apple Inc. uses offshore tax shelters to avoid taxes on the majority of its income and cheated the US government out of $9 billion in 2012 alone. That same day, a tornado leveled the town [...]

  • Rise Up or Die

    Rise Up or Die

     By Chris Hedges Joe Sacco and I spent two years reporting from the poorest pockets of the United States for our book “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.”We went into our nation’s impoverished “sacrifice zones”—the first areas forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace—to show what happens when unfettered corporate capitalism and ceaseless economic expansion [...]

  • Obama’s Orwellian rhetoric

    Obama’s Orwellian rhetoric, Congo war crimes, Jailed for silence, DOJ assault on Fox Source: RT.com On this episode of Breaking the Set, Abby Martin and political commentator Sam Sacks go over the Orwellian rhetoric in Obama’s latest foreign policy speech. Abby highlights a recent UN investigation bringing to light crimes against humanity committed by a [...]

  • Dr. Noam Chomsky breaks the set on war, imperialism and propaganda

    RT’s Abby Martin interviews Noam Chomsky on current issues stemming from pseudo-democratic governance in the United States. On this episode of Breaking the Set, Abby Martin talks to philosopher, linguist, professor, political critic and author of over 100 books Dr. Noam Chomsky about the Boston bombings, US terror inflicted abroad, drones, Obama’s rebranding of Bush [...]

  • OpEds: The entire globe is a battlefield for Pentagon

    OpEds: The entire globe is a battlefield for Pentagon

    By Pepe Escobar, RT.com  Forget it; the Global War on Terror (GWOT) is not becoming more “democratic” – or even transparent. US President Barack Obama now pledges to transfer the responsibility of the shadow ‘Drone Wars’ from the CIA to the Pentagon – so the US Congress is able to monitor it.  Did you like this? Share [...]

  • Why Corporate Media Focuses on Benghazi Instead of Guatemalan Genocide

    Why Corporate Media Focuses on Benghazi Instead of Guatemalan Genocide

    AlterNet [1] / By Sean McElwee [2] Last week two important stories about U.S. foreign policy broke. First, the White House released some 100 pages of e-mails confirming a dastardly scandal: rather than call the Benghazi attack a “terrorist act,” President Obama, in a Nixonian power grab, called it an, “act of terror.” Did you like this? Share it:

  • Religious Barbarians

    Religious Barbarians

    From Tbilisi to Worchester by CHRISTOPHER BRAUCHLI (With report & VIDEO by PressTV, see addendum below) It was humanity at its best.  Showing compassion for the quick and the dead.  The quick made news in Tbilisi, Georgia.  The dead made news in Worcester, Massachusetts. Did you like this? Share it:

  • The Strange Trial of Ríos Montt

    The Strange Trial of Ríos Montt

    Despite Annulment, Genocide Trial a Breakthrough for Justice and Truth by LUZ MENDEZ The sentence of 80 years in prison against former de facto president Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide and crimes against humanity committed during Guatemala’s armed conflict, emitted on May 10, 2013, was annulled by the Constitutional Court ten days later. The court’s [...]

Deranged Angels Of Self-Preservation: Second Amendment fetishism and the empty grandiosity of Hollywood’s comic book boilerplate.

 ARTS & FILM, ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, BATTLE OF COMMUNICATIONS, CULTURE & CRITICISM, DECADENCE, KULTURKAMPF, PUTRID CORPOMEDIA  Comments Off
Aug 032012
 

Phil Rockstroh

“Stupid is as stupid does, sir…”

In the contest between Stupid and Evil, Stupid reaps far more destruction. Why? Stupid prevails by the sheer force of numbers in its ranks. 

But the argument is moot: Because all too often Stupid is working for Evil…believing it is serving as a force for good…and, I might add, for degrading wages as well.

German born filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003) insisted to her dying breath that her 1936 masterwork of visual bravura, “Olympia,” documenting the 1936 Summer Olympics, held in Berlin, Germany, and funded and promoted by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi state, was not a political film nor was intended as propaganda for the Third Reich…as writer/director Christopher Nolan is claiming his “The Dark Knight Rises” is not a political movie. 

 Continue reading »

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Remembering Gore Vidal

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, ANNOTATED NEWS, BATTLE OF COMMUNICATIONS, BETTER HUMANITY, CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM  Comments Off
Aug 032012
 

By Steven Lendman

This file photo taken on October 5, 2006 shows Gore Vidal the iconoclastic commentator on American life and history posing for a photo in his Los Angeles home.

STEPHEN LENDMAN AUGUST 2, 2012

Reflecting on his accomplishments, he said “I just played the game harder.” He hoped to be remembered as “the person who wrote the best sentences of his time.” He thought of himself as a modern-day Voltaire.

Many labels characterize him: distinguished author, essayist, playwright, historian, acerbic sociopolitical/cultural critic, freethinker, intellectual, and humanist.

In 2009, the American Humanist Association (AHA) named him honorary president.

On July 31, Gore Vidal died from complications of pneumonia at his Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles home.

He was 86. He’ll be missed. Los Angeles Times writer Elaine Woo called him a “gadfly on the national conscience” and “literary juggernaut.” He was that and much more.
Continue reading »

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 Posted by at 4:33 pm

CHICK-FIL-A INTRODUCES NEW HATE SAUCE

 ANNOTATED NEWS, COMMENTARIAT, CORPORATE CRIMES, CULTURE & CRITICISM  Comments Off
Aug 032012
 

Posted on The New Yorker by Andy Borowitz

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—Customers across the nation who turned out for Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day were in for a surprise, as the chicken restaurant chose today to launch a new product, Hate Sauce.

Delighted customers mobbed the restaurants to try the zesty new sauce, with many chicken fanciers ordering their sandwiches with extra hate. “It’s so spicy it makes your mouth feel like it’s on fire—like a gay couple in hell,” said Harland Dorrinson, who sampled the sauce at a Chick-fil-A in Orlando. Continue reading »

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Gore Vidal: the improbable moralist

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, ANNOTATED NEWS, ANTIWAR, BATTLE OF COMMUNICATIONS, BETTER HUMANITY, CELEBRITIES  2 Responses »
Aug 032012
 

By Patrice Greanville

The year 2012 is turning out to be a hard year for the enemies of the Empire and its tegument of lies.  Death is silencing some powerful voices. In June we lost Alex Cockburn, now Vidal.

Protean in talent and interests, Gore Vidal was a complex man who did not fit under one or two labels. Contrarian by nature,  an intellectual lion by any standard, and an early and calmly defiant overt homosexual with some heterosexual frissons thrown in to confuse those who like things nice and predictable, Gore Vidal cast a long and exemplary shadow on American culture for much of the 20th century.  He was that rare bird: a true original writer whose public persona easily overshadowed the legacy of his own books, and he had no real competitors or imitators. Enfant terriblism defined him from the start, perhaps as the natural allergic reaction of a free spirit to the stifling parochialism, priggishness and conformity he found in American society, so it was pretty much inevitable that, despite his own ties to the native aristocracy (such as it it exists in the US), he could never resist shocking the bourgeois and the comfortable, a sport he maintained throughout his 86 unapologetic years of residence on earth.  Mired in philistinism and banality, to a man like Gore Vidal America provided enormous targets. Continue reading »

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The 5 Most Awful Atheists

 ALERTS, ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, BATTLE OF COMMUNICATIONS, BETTER HUMANITY  1 Response »
Aug 032012
 

By Ian Murphy [2] 
AlterNet [1] 

Sarah Cupp: Pinup pretty with reactionary sawdust for a brain. Perfect critter for the corporate media corral.

Like a fresh-baked loaf of sanity resting on the window of human possibility, atheism is on the rise in the United States. Will this growing constituency become a formidable political force before global warming decimates civilization? I’m skeptical. But according to the Pew Research Center, 1 in 5 of Americans now say they’re either atheist, agnostic, or that they simply don’t believe in anything in particular. That godless number was a scant 6 percent in 1990, and this spring roughly 20,000 atheists showed up—rain and all—at the first ever Reason Rally in DC, so, surely, despite the protestations of Texas Republicans, this newfangled thing called “critical thinking” is poised to better the national discourse, yes? Well…

The thing about the so-called “rationalist” movement in America is that disbelief in gods seems to be the only qualification to join the club. Disbelief in a supernatural creator, especially as the movement becomes more popular or “hep,” as I’m pretending the kids say, in no way guarantees rationality in matters of foreign policy or economics, for example. Many notable atheists believe in some powerfully stupid stuff—likely owing their prominence to these same benighted beliefs, lending an air of scientific credibility to the myths corporate media seeks to highlight, and thereby eroding the credibility of all atheists in the long-term. In other words: The crap always rises to the top. Continue reading »

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 Posted by at 10:07 am