Tweedle Dee: “We dropped our subscription to the Denver Post. We don’t watch TV news, ever.”

Tweedle Dum: “But how do you stay informed?”

Tweedle Dee: “I just told you.”

I made that up, but the content is true. We dropped our Denver Post subscription around June of last year, and we do not watch TV news. I subscribe to Rolling Stone, and we take the Financial Times. I usually skim the bar on the left-hand side and look for news of importance. Though FT is technically a British publication, the version we see is aimed at wealthy Americans who are keen to stay on top of business news. That’s not us, but it does offer a wider range of news than a typical American source.

The Denver Post is crap. It’s amazing that a city of this size is so poorly served by its one major circulation newspaper. It does what newspapers are supposed to do – entertain while appearing to inform. It’s not unusual for sports to dominate the front page. I’ve long been an ardent editorial page reader, but in the final days with the Post, with their redundant and extreme right wing editorials balanced by squishy “liberals” (The Ellen Goodman Syndrome), I found myself focusing more on letters from readers. They sort through them, it appears, looking for the most predictable and reflexive. There’s got to be better ones that don’t make the cut!
Continue reading “American journalism: Exponential credulity” →

As I drove down the road listening to Fresh Air on NPR, I heard one of them say that there are parts of Afghanistan where the United States is not welcome on a long term basis. She said nothing about the short-term love we get for invading their country. She also said nothing about Pakistan, also invaded, but one would assume we are as welcome there as in Afghanistan.

Above I have identified those regions of the country that they were talking about where the US is not welcome on a long-term basis. These are the provinces on the map above that have colors. I have shipped this information off to Terry Gross for future reference.

I watched Steven Colbert interview Tom Brokaw this evening. It was quite disgusting. The normally irreverent Colbert turned serious, and the always pompous Brokaw profundicated. Tom is a serious guy who fancies himself a “journalist.” He talked about 9/11 and the people who were harmed that day.

There’s going to be a whole lotta profound breast beating this weekend as we head into the tenth anniversary of 9/11. It’s going to be ugly. I would watch football, but all of those moments of silence are going to be too annoying.

If I were Colbert, I would ask Brokaw what it was like to be an Iraqi in Baghdad in March of 2003 when the US launched its unprovoked attack, blowing up buildings, killing innocent people. Or ask him what he thought of the mass killing spree the US went on after that day.

Brokaw, of course, would have no clue. That is his job.

The Billings Gazette did a gutsy move in putting it’s Internet content behind a pay wall. It’s caused some grousing, but should we not pay for the work they do?

We should. But we don’t. And won’t. The Internet is an ideal medium for free exchange of information. That drives the business class nuts – a good thing. Not everything of value comes with a price tag.

The engine that drives “free” markets is exclusion. In order to charge for something, a seller has to have roped off access to that product. Newspapers used to own the classified ad business, but with Craigslist, it was no longer exclusive. They lost an important source of revenue. Circulation is in decline as well. They are up against it.

I wish I cared more. What will replace newspapers? I don’t know. Something. I DVR TV shows to avoid ads. If enough people do that, the shows will disappear. I wish I cared more. But without ad-based programming, TV can only get better.

And without ad-based journalism, maybe news reporting will get better.

Or not. I wish I cared more.

There was an amazing interview conducted by Amy Goodman in London last Saturday. Since I don’t watch television news or read American newspapers these days (we have temporarily stopped the Denver Post but will resume this fall), I don’t know if it got any coverage here. I can only say … not very damned likely. The interview featured philosopher Slavoj Žižek and Assange. Žižek’s comments were animated by a heavy accent and constant involuntary arm movements, and so he was very hard to follow. Fortunately, Democracy Now transcripts all of their shows, so I was able to read his remarks. But I was most interested in Assange.

Below are a few of the more interesting comments from Assange:

And we worked together to statistically analyze this with various groups, around the world, such as Iraq Body Count, who became the specialists in these areas and lawyers here in the U.K. who represented Iraqi refugees—to pull out the stories of 15 thousand Iraqi civilians, labeled as civilians by the U.S. military, who were killed and were never before reported in the Iraqi press, never before reported in the U.S. press, world press even in aggregate—even saying today 1,000 people died. Not reported in any manner whatsoever. And, yeah just think about that—15 thousand people whose deaths were recorded by the U.S. military, but were completely unknown to the rest of the world—that’s a very significant thing.

Imagine that when they tore up the ground at the World Trade Center they found an additional 15,000 victims? How many more countries would we attack? But news that Wikileaks exposed the deaths of 15,000 new victims not reported in newspapers received no coverage here. And a statistician might have a field day. Opinion Research Bureau estimated Iraq casualties to be around 1,200,000 (in 2007!).

Finding 15,000 unreported in one fell swoop might be all there is, but it could also well be that the US his hiding bodies somewhere, perhaps in mass graves. They might be using gas ovens to incinerate them. I don’t know.

The only way you can easily make an impact is push information about the world to many, many people. So, the mainstream press has developed expertise for how to do that. And it’s competition also for people’s attention. So, if we had several billion dollars to spend on advertising across the world, if we could get our ads placed, we wouldn’t easily be able to make the same impact as we did. And we don’t have that kind of money.

So, instead we entered into partnership with over 80 media organizations all over the world, including many good ones that I wouldn’t want to disparage. To increase the impact and push our material into over 50 different countries endemically. That has been, yes, subverting the filters of the mainstream press.

But an interesting phenomena has developed amongst the journalists who work in these very large organization that are close to power and negotiate with power at the highest levels, which is the journalists having read our material and having been forced to go through it to pull out stories have themselves become educated and radicalize. And that is an ideological penetration of the truth into all these mainstream media organizations. And, that to some degree, may be one of the lasting legacies over the past year.

That is exciting. I remember my own jolt-to-awakening, completely unexpected. If it happens inside media organizations, well, let’s just say it is damned exciting.

[Amy Goodman] Bill Keller of the New York Times said “arrogant, thin-skinned, conspiratorial”.

[Julian Assange] Well, after Bill Keller said that I was thin-skinned it doesn’t really leave much ground for reply does it? Sarah Palin also, once on Twitter, complained about my grammar, which is really the biggest insult for me. Calling for a drone attack is perfectly understandable, correcting my grammar from Sarah Palin, that’s a real insult.

I clipped that just for the humor of it.

…power that is completely unaccountable is silent. So, when you walk past a group of ants on the street and you accidentally crush a few, you do not turn to the others and say “Stop complaining or I’ll put a drone strike on your head”. You completely ignore them. And that is what happens to power that’s in a very dominant position. It does not even bother to respond, does not flinch for even an instance.

Yet we saw all these figures coming out and speaking very aggressively. Bill Keller, in a recent talk, as a way of perhaps legitimizing why he was speaking with me, said “if you have a dealing with Julian Assange, you’re fated to sit on panels for the rest of your life explaining what you did.” No, actually that’s a choice made by Bill Keller, a choice to twist history and whitewash history, and adjust history on a constant basis. Why? Why expend energy doing that? Why not just knock off another pager of the New York Times? Because, actually, these people are frightened of the true part of history coming about and coming forth. So, I see this as a very positive sign.

I’ve never heard it put better … the example of ants. That is how power operates, and the noisy ones we hear all day long do not have real power. They are just actors. There is amazing power entrenched on Wall Street and in London’s banking district. We don’t hear from them. We are merely the ants who did not get crushed. And the interesting thing is that American elections are the ants speaking, and power wishes us well, but doesn’t care about that.

So by all reports, this is a young man [Bradley Manning]of high moral character and when people of high moral character are pressured in a way that is illegitimate, they become stronger and not weaker. And that seems to have been the case with Bradley Manning and he has told U.S. authorities, as far as we know, nothing about his involvement.

We need a Cablebate for the CIA, we need a Cablegate of the SVR, a Cablegate of the New York Times, actually. All the stories that have been suppressed and how they’ve been managed. Once we’ve gotten that type of volume and concretize and protect the rights of everyone to communicate with each other, which – to me – is the basic agreement of civilized life. It is not the right to speak. What does it mean to have the right to speak if you’re on the moon and nobody is around. It doesn’t matter. Rather the right to speak comes from our right to know.

The two of us together, someone’s right to speak and someone’s right to know, produce a right to communicate, so that is the grounding structure for all that we treasure about civilized life…

I think the distortion by the media of history, of all the things we should know so we can collaborate together as a civilization, is the worse thing. It is our single greatest impediment to advancement, but it’s changing. We are routing around media that is close to power in all sorts of ways, but it’s not a forgone conclusion, which is what makes this time so interesting.

That we can wrest the Internet, we can wrest communication mechanisms that we have with each other into the values of the new generation that has been educated by the Internet. Has been educated outside of the mainstream media distortion, and all those young people are becoming important inside those institutions.

The battle for control of the Internet has been fascinating to watch. It is somewhat akin to an alien that keeps having babies even as Sigourney Weaver is trying to kill the mother. They didn’t know back when they talked about the “Information Superhighway” that a tool had been invented that would one day free Tunisia from American grip, and even, if only almost, Egypt.

I do want to talk about what it means when institution — the most powerful institutions from the CIA to news corporation are all organized using computer programmers, system organizers, technical young people. What does that mean when all those technical young people adopt a certain value system and they’re in an institution where they do not agree with the value system and yet actually their hands are on the machinery.

Because, there has been moments in the past like that. And it is those technical young people who are the most Internet educated and have the greatest ability to receive the new values that are being spread and the new information and facts about reality that are being spread outside mainstream media distortions.

The American media plays a hands-off role when it comes to abuses by governments that are under our control. But when a government as gone “rogue”, that is, is not under dominance by the US, the media is free to report all that goes on there that does not reflect badly. So we know when there are abuses in Iran, and we are hearing all about the abuses of the Syrians, but Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, or the new uprising in Egypt … not so much. Assange here is talking about political prisoners in Egypt who could not get any attention from Western Media while Mubarak was in power:

So for those 20,000 political prisoners in Egypt, they could gain no traction in the Western press, and yet others such as in Iran we hear about all the time. It’s very interesting that Egypt was perceived to be a strong ally of Israel and strong ally of the United States in that region, so all the political and human rights abuses that were occurring every day in Egypt simply did not get traction.

He goes on to talk about how these prisoners carried on a strike to gain conjugal visits from their wives, a sex strike, and how the western media showed some interest in that due to the salacious nature, but that too quickly dissipated.

You know, when Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers, actually I spoke to Daniel Ellsberg last night, he told me an incredible story about that, but did you know the New York Times had a thousand pages of the Pentagon Papers one month before Daniel Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times? Fresh news. Amazing stuff.

So, on December sixth last year, these, uh, MasterCard, PayPal, The Bank of America, uh, Western Union, all ganged up together to engage in an economic blockade against Wikileaks, and that economic blockade has continued since that point.

So it’s over six months now, we have been suffering from an extrajudicial economic blockade that is occurred without any process whatsoever. In fact, the only two formal investigations into this, one was on January thirteen last year, by Timothy C. Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury, who found that there was no lawful excuse to conduct an economic blockade against Wikileaks. And other, was by a Visa subsidiary, who was handling our European payments, Teller, who found that we were not in breach of any of Visa’s bylines or regulations.

Those are the only two formal inquiries. And yet, the blockade continues, it’s an extraordinary thing, that we have seen that Visa, MasterCard, Western Union, and so on, are, instruments of U.S. foreign policy, but, instruments of U.S., of not U.S., as in a state operating under laws foreign policy, but rather instruments of Washington’s patronage network policy. So there was no due process at all. And so, over the past few months, you know we have a number of cases on, so we’ve been a bit distracted, but over the past few months we have build up the case against Visa, and MasterCard, under European law.

It is indeed telling that these three companies are dovetailing their efforts with the US Government to shut down Wikileaks. Ya think?

There’s the big future, there’s the deep future that one can long for. So that is a future where we are all able to freely communicate our hopes and dreams, factual information about the world with each other and the historical record is an item that is completely sacrosanct. That would never be changed, never be modified, never be deleted, and that we will steer a course away from Orwell’s dictum of ‘he who controls the present controls the past.’

That is something that is my life long quest to do. And from all- from that justice flows because each, most of us have an instinct for justice and most of us are reasonably intelligent and if we can communicate with each other, organize, not be oppressed, and know what’s going on then pretty much the rest fall out. So that is my big hope. In the short term, it is that my staff stop hassling to tell me to go.

It ended on a high note with 2,000 well-wishers sending him back to detention for a crime for which he has not even been formally accused. Power is at work behind the scenes there. Real power. How do I know? Because they are so quiet.
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Watch the entire two hour interview here.

One of the arguments for supporting Democrats even as they wallow in mush is that we get better judicial appointments with them. I have copped to that point on numerous occasions, and see some merit in it. If only there were other reasons to support them, but let’s take a look at that one issue:

Thom Hartmann, an Obamabat who believes that his guy is just in learning mode, has been making a good point lately that bears repeating: There is nothing in the constitution about judicial review. That power was usurped by the court for itself in Marbury v Madison. The essence of that decision is that we live under a ruling body that is not accountable to the electorate. We can only remove Supreme Court justices by impeachment, or they have to die. John Roberts and Sam Alito* appear to have perjured themselves in their confirmation hearings, and there is nothing to be done about it.

The Supreme Court operates like the Iranian Guardian Council, exercising naked power. The Citizens United ruling is an abomination that does not stand up under even modest scrutiny, and is by decree the law of the land. (Obama said in a SOTU address that that decision needed to be overturned, and has since done and said exactly … nothing.)

The essential problem is not the appointment of good judges, but the lack of accountability of those we appoint. It’s always a crap shoot. We are not a democratic republic, but rather, a fake democracy. Behind the scenes lurks the oligarchy, and right before our eyes a council of nine that rules by decree.

All that aside, is our only chance at improvement of our lot to elect Democrats and hope that they appoint kinder masters? Is that our lot?

Yes. That is our lot. Excuse me if I elect not to participate in this foolery.
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We had opportunity to visit with Ladybug on our recent trip, and I never leave an encounter with him without marveling at his insight. He cuts to the quick. We had a delightful visit, toured his property with all of its original artwork and rustic charm. I took away a lot from that encounter, but these points stand out:

Journalists are trained by use of what he called “shock collars,” and so know exactly how far they can go before they will endure pain. In all of my thousands of words about that profession over the years, LB’s one thought sums it all up.

The other point – why do Democrats behave as they do, reflexively staying within the fold even as they are time and again betrayed? Fear. Simple fear. The party offers them a safe playground. Outside is scary.

Thanks LB
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*It should be noted here that the Democrats had it within their grasp to block Alito’s nomination, and backed down.

We are witnessing an interesting phenomenon going on right now – the first phrase that comes to mind is “selective indignation,” but that really doesn’t cover it. The focus on Anthony Weiner is not merely hypocritical. It’s indicative of the selection system for high office. Weiner has been found unqualified, and it has nothing to do with his sexting.

First, the supposed “crime:” I’m speculating based on personal experience here, but Weiner is young and attractive. Monogamy is not in the nature of a man – it is a learned behavior. He’s in a new marriage, and is slowly coming to grips with the notion that he is confined to one vagina for the rest of his life!!! It’s the first year of marriage, and not the seventh, that is hardest for most of us. But also, for most of us, there are not a lot of alternatives. We’re happy that even one woman wants us.

But Weiner has other options. He’s in Washington, DC, a sexual playground. Like Hollywood, it is hard to maintain a normal relationship with all the distractions. He is either going to settle into this marriage and find out its true meaning, or he’s going to Clintonize. He might also go through a divorce, which is unfortunate when a child is involved.

All of that is none of our business.

The drumbeat that is going on now is not natural. It’s contrived and reserved for special cases. This is the “many could be called, only a few are chosen” phenomenon. On any given day, maybe a hundred members of Congress could be caught in flagrante delicto, but are not. (How do I know this? It’s elementary: Washington is a place where there is power, money, women, lobbyists, and intrigue. Duh.) The media, directed from above, can either focus our attention or allow it to naturally dissipate regarding Weiner. No matter the public’s interest, which is directed by television coverage anyway, Weiner’s indiscretion could easily fade into the background. But instead it’s being showcased, the ‘other’ party wants his scalp, and his own party is abandoning him.

Consider this: David Vitter was caught paying for sex with prostitutes. We know about it, but it was not put in our headlights, and he’s still in office. Without media focusing our attention on the matter with incessant coverage, the matter withered and died. Newt Gingrich is famous for serial affairs, but he tends to marry his concubines. Orrin Hatch is said to be a wild-hare penis on a perpetual scent trail. John McCain’s marriage is rocky at best, his wife the philanderer as his appeal diminishes with age. George W. Bush was a cocaine abuser and drunk who sponsored at least one abortion. These are some of the few we know about, and I only mention them because the media backed off, and no resignation was demanded of these powerful men.

Chris Lee did something similar, and quickly stepped down. Don’t know what to make of that, as I know nothing about him other than that he was new in office and not powerful.

I don’t care about sex, as random encounters simply don’t matter. It’s just sex. Men and women in marriages have to work this stuff out, privately. I don’t care about prostitution, as it seems a woman’s business whether she wants to sell her favors. Who am I to say that someone should be denied an economic opportunity due to mere prurience? So I don’t care about Vitter or McCain or Clinton or Bush or Gingrich or Gary Hart or John Edwards or Elliot Spitzer or Anthony Weiner in that regard. It’s none of our business. Men are men. Answer for yourself: Given opportunity and certain knowledge of not being discovered, would you? Would you? We who are happily married don’t actively seek what Charlie Sheen calls his “strange,’ meaning unfamiliar nooky, but don’t sit there and tell me that you, if you are a man, are immune to this stuff. You know what’s real here.

My only questions are these: Given that so many could be called, why are so few chosen? And why, with Gingrich, Vitter, McCain, Hatch and Bush and so many others, does the dog not bark?
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Footnote: Media managers (both in government and the media itself) are known to use stories as a distraction to avoid covering other stories, even to invade a small Caribbean island that grows nutmeg, for example, to distract the media from marine deaths in Lebanon. (The Obama White House used this tactic in December of 2010, inviting Bill CLinton to a press conference to deflect attention from House Democrats rebelling against his tax deal.) So the Weiner story could be a mere distraction, in which case the question becomes: What else is going on? Yemen is the only story that comes to mind. It is big, but not as big as the Weiner story, obviously.

Just for sake of example, imagine that you are a low-level employee at the NSA, National Security Agency, and that your job is to monitor the behavior of elected officials. You have access to technology that allows you to eavesdrop on their land lines and mobile phones, and have planted bugs in their offices and homes. There are 535 of them, so that you have only 15 on your list, and each week you make a list of questionable activities, and this information travels up the NSA food chain. That agency, by this activity, has at its disposal the ability to intimidate and blackmail every member of Congress – perhaps except those who live exemplary lives.

It’s a right wing country, and the National Security State exists to advance a right wing agenda. This includes the wars and ongoing covert operations in countries that do not toe the neoliberal agenda. Those members of Congress who hold the national security state to strict account would be the ones to bring down. They are troublesome. Further, if they are bright and charismatic, they can be even more troublesome.

Assume, for the sake of this example, that of the 15 men in your keeping, that 13 have succumbed to the host of temptations available in DC – drugs, bribes (real and disguised), prostitutes provided by lobbyists, canoodling staffers and even staffers planted for the sake of blackmail. But of those 13 who are misbehaving, say that 12 are voting correctly, not introducing pain-in-the-ass legislation to undermine the security state, the ongoing wars or tax policy. They are not harassing, investigating, or otherwise attempting to intimidate high officials. The one that is misbehaving does not know that his private activities are under surveillance. Thirteen are available for sandbagging, only one goes down.

His name is Anthony Weiner. He’s a good man, bold and effective, a strong and smart and well-spoken progressive, and a pain in the ass to the executive branch.

Sex is no big deal in Washington, but in our post-Victorian prissy country, normal sexual behavior is treated as mortal sin. Bill Clinton was likely sandbagged by Linda Tripp, showing that the National Security State can reach into the highest office to bring a man down. Sexual misbehavior is the most common failing of powerful, narcissist men who tend to be drawn to politics. Sex is, frankly, no big deal. But in DC, sex is one of many tools available to control the behavior of elected officials.

I know – this is paranoid fantasy. Elected officials are not under surveillance, and sting operations are never run for purposes of entrapment. Anthony Wiener’s sexting just happened to be exposed, John Edwards just happened to have a concubine and his activities, as opposed to say, Newt Gingrich’s or George W. Bush’s, were exposed. Senator David Vitter is still in office, but then again, he was exposed by Larry Flynt, known to go after public hypocrites for non-political reasons, and so gets to stay in office.

I am speculating. We do have a super-secret agency that is capable to spying on any one of us. The common assumption here in American-exceptionalism-ville is that even given that kind of power, people don’t use it.

Of course it would be highly useful to keep tab not on just office holders, but also journalists. They have the ability. Russell Tice worked fro NSA during the Bush Administration, and after that time became a whistle blower. He was fired, of course, and then made public appearances as the one above with Keith Olbermann, and on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, where I heard him say that the NSA had 24/7 surveillance going on all American journalists.

What followed the Daily Show appearance was silence. Only Olbermann seemed interested, and his MSNBC interview was a mere pebble on the window trying to get our attention. The issue died.

Now, imagine that NSA has unsupervised power to keep watch on every journalist, every office holder, and collect information on them. The most common ‘failing’ of people, men especially, is sexual meandering. Men are by nature sexual polygamists, and we stay in line for two reasons: 1) lack of opportunity, and 2) fear of losing something valuable. Even a man who loves his wife and does not want to hurt or lose her will succumb to opportunity, especially if it appears he will not be caught.

So Anthony Weiner was caught sexting a picture of his unit … it’s pretty common, and for an elected official or journalist, kind of stupid. But it’s not evil. It’s not harmful. It’s just sex. A drumbeat is starting up now to remove Weiner from office. He will leave office. That is the whole point. There was no drumbeat when Vitter was exposed. The silence is deafening.

Maybe I’m paranoid in saying that a powerful secret agency that has the ability to spy on powerful people and use that information against them actually does so. But I suggest that not to wonder about that is polloyannish.

I’d like to take this opportunity to ask all liberals and progressives of all stripes, all talk show TV comedy show hosts to do me a favor: Stop complaining about Fox News.

Here’s the deal: Fox News viewers do not go anywhere else for their news. So when Jon Stewart does a particularly funny bit about them, only the people who watch Jon Stewart know about it. Fox viewers never watch the Daily Show, and do not know about the bit, and will not find out about it second-hand. Similarly, when Fox lies or does photo-imagery trickery to misstate the nature of events, the trickery is well exposed among liberals. But it never graces the eyes or ears of Fox viewers. And when Fox does something stupid, as using the image of Tina Fey as they discuss Sarah Palin’s presidential aspirations, Fox viewers don’t recognize Tina, and probably do not even know that the image is not precious Sarah.

So please, let Fox be Fox. They have a captive audience, and know what they are doing. It may appear stupid from the outside looking in, but since the inside never looks beyond that outlet for their world view, it is merely an alternative reality.

“The first duty of the press is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of the events of the time, and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common property of the nation … The Press lives by disclosures … For us, with whom publicity and truth are the air and light of existence, there can be no greater disgrace than to recoil from the frank and accurate disclosure of facts as they are. We are bound to tell the truth as we find it, without fear of consequences — to lend no convenient shelter to acts of injustice and oppression, but to consign them at once to the judgment of the world.” (Robert Lowe, editorial writer for The London Times, 1851

Mr. Lowe He had been asked by his editor to refute the claim of a government minister that if the press hoped to share the influence of statesmen, it “must also share in the responsibilities of statesmen.” (h/t: Creators.com, Alexander Cockburn)

When I talk to senior government officials on the phone, it’s my own policy — our conversations are confidential. If I want to use anything from that conversation, then I will ask permission. (Tim Russert)

(Hint: If you were a journalist and hundreds of government officials attended your funeral to honor you, you probably didn’t do your job.)