03-22-09
- Military-Industrial Complex:
- Venezuela's Chavez calls Obama "ignoramus" (reuters) Chavez: "'He goes and accuses me of exporting terrorism: the least I can say is that he's a poor ignoramus; he should read and study a little to understand reality,' said Chavez . . . ." In fact, Obama appears to be listening more to his exploitation-minded neocon and laissez faire capitalist advisers and pals than to the people who elected him -- and he's getting the wrong story from them. He's driving away supporters, and that will hurt him during the next two elections, because the Republican election theft machinery will not have been remotely diminished by then. It will be warmed up, well oiled, and ready to take back maximum seats, maybe even his own. Obama is BushLite in too many areas of governance -- that means this country is in very deep shit. Dennis Kucinich once told Neel Kashkari he wanted to know who Kashkari was really working for. That's what we should be demanding to know of Obama now.
- Those Murdering Tasers and the Murdering Hands Holding Them:
- Boy, 15, Dies After Police Tasering (mlive) -- How long must these murders go on? How many must be murdered 'in the name of the law' before these instruments of torture are taken away from police departments?
- TASER International, Inc. Reports Sequential Revenue Growth in 2008 Q4 (globenewswire)
- Update 03-24-09: Amnesty International: Death Shows Taser's Risks (commondreams/ap)
- The Great Economic Shakedown - Is Obama Dense or Is He Part of It?
- A Frank Rich Must-Read: Has a ‘Katrina Moment’ Arrived? (nytimes) "President Obama may not realize it yet, but his Katrina moment has arrived. . . . But rhetoric won’t tamp down the anger out there, and neither will calculated displays of presidential 'outrage.' We must have governance to match the message. To get ahead of the anger, Obama must do what he has repeatedly promised but not always done: make everything about his economic policies transparent and hold every player accountable. His administration must start actually answering the questions that officials like Geithner and Summers routinely duck."
- Matt Taibbi: The Big Takeover (rollingstone) "The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution"
- The US Government: Of, By and For... Goldman Sachs? (alaskafreepress)
- Damaged Packaging -- Damaged Goods -- Discredited Witness / Evidence:
- Last night I watched paleoconservative Alex Jones's 'The Obama Deception' and was astonished at the deceitful way Jones interweaves bits of reality with outrageous lies, deceptive intimations and contextual misinterpretations. The viewing left me with two questions: Which elements of his films may actually represent truth? AND Is Alex Jones actually a PsyOps operative whose major occupational responsibility is to deliver the truth, but all entangled in so much deception that no one but a non-thinking, non-critical paranoid could possibly take it seriously? -- What I describe in this entry is a tried and true propaganda technique that we see over and over, day in and day out. Only the most upright trial lawyer could possibly function without the ability to obfuscate or wrongly 'discredit' an opposing witness. -- The truth leaks out through various means and is even deliberately placed into the public domain, but Psy-Operatives then enter the scene and stir into that truth some insignificant or enormous misinformation that in one way or another puts off a rational person. Rather than try to ferret out what is real and what is not, the fact-challenged but interested inquirer may be inclined to toss out the whole mixture as untrustworthy--the baby with the bathwater--although certain targeted concepts that complement core beliefs and values may have already been absorbed. I see the insertion of what I consider deliberate small mistakes or misrepresentations repeatedly on The History Channel, your go-to channel to augment your generalized fear or for encouragement to resolve conflict by armed confrontation rather than rational negotiation. -- Dan Rather's report on Dubya's incomplete, 'Champaign' Texas Air National Guard career is another case in point. Dan Rather reported the truth, but because he relied on document photocopies, not originals, and could not absolutely authenticate their chain of possession--therefore the authenticity--of certain incriminating documents (even though the then-retired secretary reported to have typed the memos declared that they generally expressed the prevailing attitude at the time in her office about young Bush). In Rather's case, it appears that he was deliberately set up and his GOP attackers were ready and waiting for the 'sic 'em' command, which indeed came within a couple hours after the report aired and continued relentlessly for days--never, never over the content of the report, but only over the authenticity of the photocopies--the 'damaged packaging'--used in the report. CBS was now uncomfortable, and Dan Rather was also now 'damaged packaging'. A highly partisan kangaroo court was set up by CBS to officially and summarily sentence Rather to journalistic obscurity, and in so doing, once again ingratiate itself with Republicans. No other high-profile investigative reporter dared challenge Bush again. -- The 9/11 false flag attacks upon the U.S. (follow the links), probably engineered, or at least extensively collaborated in by elements of the Bush regime, U.S. intelligence agencies and military, is another favorite target for a big dose of misinformation and misdirection mixed into the mountain of damning evidence of our own government's indispensable participation in the attack that blasted this country into the Bush dictatorship and a burgeoning police state. -- Finally, looking at 'damaged packaging' in still another way, consider the the right wing's knee-jerk reaction of viciously smearing its critics. If they can repeat the smear loudly and often enough through the ready assistance of their ever-blaring partisan noise machine, what's left is 'damaged packaging'. Mission accomplished.
- The Very Large Array of Radio Telescopes (VLA) (apod) -- While flying from California over the desert west of Socorro, New Mexico one clear day, I happened to notice a white spot on the ground below. Then a mile or so away, another, and another. A week earlier I had watched 'Contact' and had just learned about the existence of this unusual radio telescope observatory. I scanned the desert below and realized that the entire array of 27 dishes was evenly spread out in three directions along its 13-mile arms. I was impressed--and grateful to have learned about it so fortuitously only a week earlier. Otherwise, I might never have realized what I had just seen. The pilot, by the way, said nothing whatsoever as we flew overhead. -- Reminded me of a similar trip when the mute pilot flew us very near the Grand Canyon, and only ground-watching mavens and map trackers may have noticed it.
