Culture of Life Media News

CENTCOM Wasting Taxpayer Dollars Trolling Liberal Blogsites

2006-03-03T09:44:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The military is boasting about how they are going after antiwar bloggers, trolling their blogs. They also spend a lot of taxpayer time high fiving pro-military web sites, heaping praise on each other over the great job they are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

From Defense Link.mil:

"We were given the mission to do electronic media engagement," Flowers said. "The idea was put forth that so many people are getting their news from online sources that we would be remiss if we neglected that audience."

Flowers is one of three people who read blogs and try to drive Internet readers to the CENTCOM Web site, where readers can learn more about operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom.

"We needed to do something to make people aware of the fact that we had this clearinghouse of photos and information," Flowers said. "We can get the whole story out there. We let them know we have a Web site."

OK. Instead of fighting in Iraq, these right wingers can sit at headquarters and troll the net. Isn't that fun? People can learn all about the military's doings in Iraq by reading the news. If the sole function of these trolls is to get victims to read fake propaganda churned out by neo-cons, well, I think this is a total waste of taxpayer dollars.

We are paying for all this and the military is wasting billions of dollars playing games as if they were little boys sitting in mom's basement, eating Cheetos. Half a trillion dollars wasted a year and we don't have even the skeleton crew needed to pluck people off of roofs during floods! We don't have alert troops protecting America from attackers on 9/11. We don't have many things but we do have trolls.

For years, we liberals suspected both the GOP and the government paid trolls to harrass or annoy us at our websites. We clock their hours, the 9-5 pattern is pretty obvious. We examine their "post by rote" propaganda which is both uninspiring, insipid and identical. Namely, they seem to all be using the same template, the same rhetoric.

And it is pure Limbaugh who is still, despite being unmasked as a drug abuser who broke the law, is broadcast daily within the miltiary. This is also why most of the military staff still erroneously believes that Saddam has something to do with 9/11, a completely false idea and one that lies at the root of our inability to find bin Laden and win hearts and minds.

Being totally insane, our military can't negotiate through the shoals of reality.

This part of the article is a direct hit at me:

In another blog contact, the team wrote a blogger who had written untrue information about U.S. military tactics. The blogger stated that the U.S. military routinely used children in Iraq and Afghanistan as human shields during their operations by using candy to entice and lure kids near them. The team posted a comment on the writer's blog stating that the U.S. military did not use human shield tactics and explained the full circumstances of the incident where Iraqi children died in 2004 when insurgents attacked U.S. forces in Baghdad.

Most blogs ordinarily have a feature that enables readers to contact the writer or allows readers to post comments. When the team "reaches out" to a blogger, the team members do not conceal their identity. They fully disclose that they are public affairs personnel and identify themselves accordingly. And, McNorton said, they are there to correct information, no more.

OK. I wrote several articles about children being blown up after fully armed troops wearing bullet proof vests entered dangerous neighborhoods and then, in order to protect themselves, handed out candy and toys to kids so they would be surrounded by a cloud of children and thus, able to go about the place, arresting older brothers and fathers and uncles. The other purpose of this is to feel better about stealing oil. "See, we are Santa Claus!" our troops can say to each other.

Third is the propaganda. "See, the children love us even if their parents hate us!". When, during a bomb attack alert, the troops announced they were handing out toys at a hospital, a whole bunch of children were blown up along with our troops.

According to CENTCOM's trolls, they saw my outraged article about this and they successfully argued with me. I googled and web explored for other stories like mine and found only pro-military tales attacking the insurgents and praising the handing out of candy and luring children into fire fights.

Here is one article I wrote. I note that there is no CENTCOM trolling in the comments section but I did receive email from them. They didn't identify themselves, it was a rather crude email and I don't want to bother digging for it. The main thing is, there was no other blogger talking about how this practice of luring children to our soldiers should be stopped, I went through 100 articles seeking one and over and over again, it came up "Culture of Life News" articles. So, either they were lying about posting comments or they were just lying but my articles needled them so much, they had to pretend they won an argument with me, concerning this issue.

If the situation is such that our soldiers were walking around with no more than a light sidearm if even that, fraterizing with friendly children, then they could indulge in displays of charity and fun. But they are target number one in an insurrection that is very serious, very effective and very obvious. Luring children to surround our troops in this hostile situation is insanity.

The Pentagon last year should have put out a directive forbidding this. The sole reason is to protect the children from the battlefield which is all of Iraq. Of course, the urge to win the hearts and minds of tots by bribing them is very strong. We hoped they would go home and lobby mommy and daddy to stop fighting us and let us pump Iraq dry and leave them with nothing at all.

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Washington Pest

New York Times Loves Brutal Police State Tactics

2006-02-20T07:55:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

As the official mouthpiece for the ruling elite, it comes as no surprize that the New York Times blacks out the story of Riverbend, in Bagdad, suffering from the horrors of a masked paratrooper invasion of her home, terrorizing herself and her younger sisters. Instead, they publish an article praising these same thugs, approving of their violent suppression of Iraqis, innocent or guilty. Welcome to our future police state they plan to run here, too.

From the New York Times:

It was the kind of smash-and-grab mission that not many months ago was conducted solely by American forces in Iraq. But this time, only one-third of the troops were American, there to observe and advise. Kicking down the door and seizing the suspect were members of the new Iraqi Counterterrorism Force.

The Bush administration has anchored its plans for troop withdrawals from Iraq on the promise of increasingly capable indigenous security units: the army, the police, border patrols and a facilities-protection service, currently totaling 227,000, although they are trained to vastly different levels of proficiency.

Now, as part of that program, American Special Operations forces commanders say they have shifted their own efforts from carrying out raids and attacks to training elite Iraqi teams to take over the most challenging missions.

The war on drugs has spawned an amazing police state here. In our collective eagerness to make Americans "healthy" and "strong" our culture has decided this requires passing laws concerning the use of medicines and foods the state wants to control. To do this, they have to invade homes quite violently. So we have developed, over time, sophistocated methods of turning our homes, which were formerly called "our castles" into prisons.

Of course, sex and drugs are favorite targets of these privacy invasions but there are many other reasons to invade homes. A zillion excuses.

Before we illegally invaded Iraq, we told the world that the Iraqi people had no freedom and Saddam terrorized and oppressed them by breaking into their homes and taking away people to be tortured and then we did exactly the same thing. And now we are "training" troops to do what we claim they did in the first place is the height of madness and if there is a god somewhere, he better have a hell ready for the people responsible for all this.

Nigeria, another oil/slave state we terrorize, is devolving into rebellion and revolution because American oil/slave states are hideous affairs that have no freedoms, no rights, no democracy and no social services. The sole function of the police state powers is to keep the populace terrorized so they don't interfer with our looting of all natural resources. Burp.

We have terrorized Central and South America for many years. This is where we perfect our police state tactics. Note how these same tactics end up being used on Americans.

For you can't run police states far away without them leaching back home to here. I have noted here in the past how Venezuela with a duly elected President who is very popular, who had to do a snap election at our instistance because we refused to believe he won the real election, he won that after we tried the old fashioned police state coup and failed and now we are in a verbal war with him and he is threatening to cut off our oil sales and sell it all to China. So we are preparing to attack him so we can impose the same sort of totally evil police state we are running in Iraq, on that country too.

The philosophy behind our elite troops is the same as the one that Hitler carved out for the SS. In the nineteenth century, governments barely were able to start organizations like the police and Scotland Yard and all that. As the states grew in power and technology, the police state extended deeper and deeper into what was once considered private territory. The mega-totalitarian police states of the twentieth century like the Soviet Union or China, for example, privacy totally disappeared. No one was allowed even the slightest sliver of privacy.

When I hosted some top Chinese officials on of the first lessons they had to learn was how to ring a door bell and ask for permission to enter. We had to practice this several times over. It was rather sad. They would ring my doorbell, I would answer and they would simply silently shove me out of the way and try to enter and I would say, "Step back! You can't come in!"

When my parents followed Nixon into China, being some of the very first Americans to stay there to do business, when my parents went into the bathroom to take a shower together and talk while the water was on, someone came into their room and tried to open the bathroom door so he could listen to them better since the microphones weren't working. Another time, my mother said something to my father, opened the bathroom door and the man listening to them fell into her chest, nearly knocking her down.

My father went off to see Cho Enlai and complained and the invasions of their bedroom ceased.

The whole furor over Bush and his minions illegally spying on Americans is exactly what this is all about. A police state giving us zero privacy. Think it can't get like China in the seventies?

Note how the media isn't screaming about spying on us! Note how there were never any big headlines, "Bush Lies About Spying On Americans--Innocent Peace Activists Targetted!" Nope. We bloggers yelled about this until hoarse but the ruling class tool papers and TV stations played along with the police statists. This is because they hate and fear fellow Americans and want to keep us in chains especially after the farce of the last six years comes crashing down. By colluding with Bush to cut taxes to the point that our government must end up in the dire arms of the IMF, they have set the stage for a really nasty police state here as they plan to squeeze us all literally to death. They are in a hurry, they have to kill off much of the baby boomers before the retire and demand their share of the Social Security pie which the rich already ate up.

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Washington Pest

Chinese People Slip Out of Propaganda Net Using The Internet

2006-02-19T10:34:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

After screaming at us bloggers and internet rebels, the Washington Post turns around and crows about how the Chinese circumvent their own country's attempts at censorship. Geeze. Someday the WP will figure this out. What is good for the Chinese is good for Americans for the same reasons! And tell Rummy to not touch OUR internets, thank you!

From the WP:

The top editors of the China Youth Daily were meeting in a conference room last August when their cell phones started buzzing quietly with text messages. One after another, they discreetly read the notes. Then they traded nervous glances.

Colleagues were informing them that a senior editor in the room, Li Datong, had done something astonishing. Just before the meeting, Li had posted a blistering letter on the newspaper's computer system attacking the Communist Party's propaganda czars and a plan by the editor in chief to dock reporters' pay if their stories upset party officials.

HAHAHAHA. God. I am seriously going to die laughing. OK. Why were all the reporters working for top corporate owners who were seeking tax breaks, favors and money from Bush who spent over a billion taxpayer dollars on media purchases!---so scared of pursuing stories about Bush? Why did they openly lie or misreport situations or facts on the ground?

Guess what! The American media is a whore of the rulers! This is why no one can trust anything they write or broadcast. They have sneaky ways of lying like using interesting adjectives to describe people. We saw it just yesterday when they described the messed up, frowning, shot to hell and back victim of Cheney's shoot out as "hale and happy." One look at the photos showed the articles were pure lies.

When ordered to villify someone, they will use words like, "agitated" or "sour faced" or even, in Hillary's case, "angry faced." They use every variation of negative wording when describing people they are ordered to mock. This frustrates many people who think the Democrats hide from the newsmedia because they are scared. They aren't just scared, they know it is fruitless unless the media overlords tire of Bush and his tax cuts and change course. Then it will be safe to emerge out into the open.

The Washington Post and us bloggers had several drag down fights recently. One was over the fiction that Democrats got money from Abramoff, the K Street sleazebag man. We gave the Post the data which conclusively showed, Abramoff didn't give even one Lincoln penny to any Democrat in his entire life. The Post refused to retract their lies and instead, reworded their original lie over and over, trying to make it look truthful. We pounded them for this and so they cut off communication and wrote a series of attack articles pretending we said and did things that never happened.

When we demanded they show some proof of all this, they got very nasty and wrote more lies and fumed so hard they set off fire alarms in their office building!

Now, because the force of good created by the free movement of information is helping the Chinese outwit their rulers, the WP applauds this and pretends, which is yet another lie on their part, that this is a great thing and everyone should imitate the Chinese!

Well, I agree! And the Chinese are very busy, acting up! May we do this too! The blog is mightier than the sword!

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Washington Pest

Rumsfeld Thinks Spending Billions On Propaganda Will Fool Muslims Into Loving Us

2006-02-18T07:06:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Rumsfeld believes the reason Muslims hate and fear us is due to propaganda and he thinks, all we have to do is spend a lot of money borrowed from China on propaganda aimed at Muslims and they will love us as we torture, rape, kill and steal everything,

From the BBC:

The US is losing the propaganda war against al-Qaeda and other enemies, defence chief Donald Rumsfeld has said.

It must modernise its methods to win the minds of Muslims in the "war on terror", as "enemies had skilfully adapted" to the media age, he said.

"Skillful adaptaion" the "enemy" uses most often is gossip. Word of mouth passed hand to hand. If Rummy is refering to Al Jazeera TV reporting the news then I must inform him that they are not an "enemy" and indeed, thinking of a fairly neutral TV news service that isn't filled to the gills with ridiculous propaganda as an "enemy" is exactly why we are losing the battle for the hearts and minds of the Muslim world.

When a little 12 year old child was shot dead in the illegally occupied Palestinian homelands, the headlines in America was "Palestinian MAN shot dead." OK, in simple matters like this, we can't resist lying. This sort of lying is standard operations in the USA and much of Europe. We can't look at our own crimes without whitewashing them via words, making little of our own malice by maliciously belittling or warping reality to suit us, not Muslims.

It used to be, they had no voice. No news media that the rest of the world could see. I happen to trust al Jazeera much more than most stuff I see here in America.

Correspondents say that in recent months victory in the battle for public opinion has become a new front for the Bush administration.

In a speech to the Council of Foreign Relations, Mr Rumsfeld said some of the US' most critical battles were now in the "newsrooms".

"Our enemies have skilfully adapted to fighting wars in today's media age, but... our country has not," he said.

So, our "enemies" (all Muslims not working for us) are "skillfully adapted." And what is this war criminal refering to? Bin Laden and others sending out video tapes? What is so high techie about that? Bloggers talking about the stupid propaganda churned out by the New York Times and Washington Post are skillfully using media? Huh? Or the very existence of the internet is skillful and clever?

Just this last week, the Pentagon ran war games directed at the media and the internet. They specifically tagged bloggers as a potential "enemy". Co-incidentally, most of this last week, from 9-5 EST, Blogger was up and down like a yo-yo with absolutely no explanation from Blogger as to what was wrong or why.

America's rulers who own vast media empires that stretch across the nation and over the entire planet, these rulers work with their tools in the White House and Pentagon to herd the rest of humanity along the road they chose for us and here they are, they and their stupid tools, whining about bin Laden's cave and his video camera.

Our media owners and military/industrial rulers deliberately targetted al Jazeera and quite a few other reporters, killing more than a few of them. So our counter-propaganda has been mostly threats, bluster and outright murder.

This program of bullying people until they surrender is failing spectacularily. It is even failing here at home as more and more people are getting disgusted with the war for oil disguised as a war on "terror". Clue to clowns: wars on terror aren't won by terrorizing everyone.

Indeed, if America wants to stop terror, worldwide, all they have to do is stop trying to control the entire planet. Our troops are patrolling everywhere and protecting only the ruling elite of America. Two helicopters crashed yesterday, lots of dead troops. This barely rates a low level headline in America. Seems we don't want to report any news anymore except for happy face lies churned out by our rulers.

Catapult the propaganda, as Bush said so memorably.

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Washington Pest

Killer Klowns: Once Again, The Texas Rangers And The Secret Service Hid Crimes

2006-02-13T09:43:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Again and again, the Texas Rangers are caught covering up Bush/Cheney crimes. The entire state aparatus in Texas exists to cover up the crimes of the well connected. This is why the Texas National Guard assisted Bush in scrubbing his files of mention of his desertion, the Driver's License Bureau scrubbed his many arrests for drunk driving as well as Laura's killing of ex-boyfriend. The Secret Service tried to cover up the fact that the Bush twins illegally used fake ID in bars and actively assisted them in violating the laws, helping them bar hop! Arrest all these clowns.

From Editor and Publisher:

Asked by The New York Times why it did not make the news known, Cheney spokeswoman McBride said, "We deferred to the Armstrongs regarding what had taken place at their ranch."

Armstrong said later, according to The Associated Press, that everyone at the ranch was so "focused" on Whittington's health Saturday that it wasn't until Sunday she called the Caller-Times to report the accident.

In an odd disparity, Armstrong told the Houston Chronicle that Whittington, 78, was "bruised more than bloodied" in the incident and "his pride was hurt more than anything else." Yet he was airlifted to a hospital and has spent more than a day in an intensive care unit.

The Chronicle also reports Monday that hunting accidents are amazingly rare in Texas. In 2004, it said, the state's 1 million-plus hunters were involved in only 29 hunting-related accidents (19 involving firearms), four of which were fatal.

So, they were too "concerned" to call the cops. Yeah, right. And too busy to tell anyone. And the Secret Service which was forced to testify about Clinton's sex life have to keep mum about Cheney's murderous rampages. OK.

Why weren't all the Secret Service agents who escorted Babs and Jenna Bush on their totally illegal underage drinking expeditions arrested for helping minor girls get drunk which happens to be totally illegal? Why weren't those girls put in prison for using fake IDs? That is illegal, very illegal.

Again and again we see the Bush/Cheney clans using the police, state agents, federal officers to cover up or commit crimes with them. And this is all "in our faces" from a gang that screams "Law and Order" all the time.

This latest case is classic. The Secret Service try to cover up a crime for it is a crime to shoot other hunters. Going back over 200+ years, whenever anyone is shot, there is an investigation and an inquest. Then a report is issued and someone is either arrested or vindicated. But it is NOT ignored! The fact that the Texan authorities and the hospital covered this up makes them all complicit in a crime. For the most powerful man in America to get away with shooting someone is exactly how royalty acts.

My family remembers a king they hated so much, they decided to get rid of him. This is why we are here, when our revolt failed, back in the 1600's. The king of England was out hunting with his queen, using crossbows. She shot at a deer only she hit the man who was herding the deer towards her so she could pretend she was hunting. Since the king was going bankrupt, he and she and their nobles decided to hide the body instead of paying the family. So a scandal ensued as the beater's dogs found his body in a shallow grave.

This is what America is now. The royal hunters shoot people and then try to stick it all under some leaves. The lawyer he shot knows the law, too, and should be arrested for covering up a crime that should, by law, be investigated.

Arrest them all. We can kill several birds with one stone here. Heh. Save America.
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Washington Pest

New Studies of Chimp Brains Show How TV Pundits Operate

2006-02-06T11:44:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

90% of what TV pundits say is pure rubbish yet millions of Americans believe what they say simply because TV gives them status within the monkey troop. The same goes for top chimp, the number one monkey, Bush. Now scientist figured out how this works, from our cousins, the real chimpanzees.

From Primates.com:

Monkey "Pay-Per-View" Study Could Aid Understanding Of Autism

DURHAM, N.C. -- Researches have found that monkeys will "pay" juice rewards to see images of high-ranking monkeys or female hindquarters. They say their research technique offers a rigorous laboratory approach to studying the "social machinery" of the brain and how this machinery goes tragically awry in autism -- a disease that afflicts more than a million Americans and is the fastest growing developmental disorder.

Fix autism? How about understanding why see see nothing but wall to wall monkey bottoms on TV pretending to be pundits? Seriously, these lower ranking monkeys on TV all groom and fawn over seemingly higher ranking monkeys and both conspire to drive the lowest ranking monkeys to go out and die in monkey wars a la "2001".

Here is another, similar story. From Live Science:

The social conformity displayed in a new study is a trait previously seen only in humans.

Researchers at Emory University's Yerkes National Primate Research Center presented two groups of chimpanzees a food puzzle. The chimps were faced with a small barrier that blocked food from rolling down a pipe.

They could either lift the barrier, allowing the food to roll towards them, or poke at it until it pushed the food reward down a different chute. The task was designed to recreate the type of problem solving chimps do in the wild.

Out of sight from the other chimps, researchers took aside one chimp from each group and taught each a different way to use a stick to get at the food. Erika was shown how to use the stick to lift the blockage. Georgia was taught to poke the blockage with the stick until it rolled into her hands.

"We chose those individuals because they had a lot of friends in the group and we thought that the other chimps would watch them," study coauthor Victoria Horner told LiveScience.

So, chimps act like Jr. High School girls? Who would have guessed! Actually, they show lots of human characteristics because except for only 1.5% of their genes, they are us.

Or rather, we are an infantilized version of them. This is why their teeth are big and strong and so are their arms, anyone who wants to arm wrestle a chimp will find their arm ripped out of its socket. The only chimps we can manhandle are their babies and toddlers.

This is why humans handling chimps can't do it so easily once they reach more than 7 years of age. This is when they discover they are stronger than even the biggest human. If nothing else, they can rip us apart with their teeth.

All animals like to imitate. This is why we humans were able to devise training for other animals, "taming" them pretty rapidly with no help from any scientific studies. When we let dogs move in with us, we did so because dogs always imitate the leader of the pack and so all you need is the top monkey to show the dogs who is boss and bingo. They go along.

Many animals I have owned end up watching me like hawks, trying to figure out what I do and why. For example, opening doors. I have had cats, dogs, horses and even a wild crow study how I open and shut things and then, behind my back, doing it for themselves. My horse, Sparky, is very dangerous about that. I have to hide my hands when manipulating things or he will memorize how I do it and then replicate it with his lips. This means, he is a top "escape artist". He even figured out how I turned on and off the electric fence because I stupidly thought he couldn't figure out the connection between the throw switch and the fence going off.

There is a place in the brain which recognizes faces. From National Geographic:

The brain of the macaque monkey has a distinct area dedicated to recognizing faces, according to a new study.

This brain region is the first one in any animal—including humans—found to have nearly all of its nerve cells focused on a specific visual form.

The finding adds weight to the theory that the brain works like a Swiss Army knife, with separate modules set to different tasks.

This must mean that Bush's brain is like a dull butter knife? Suits me.

The media exploits this tendency to not only face-recognize but couples it with the monkey see-monkey do reflexes. This is why our pundits don't care if they are naked butts on TV or lying or fuddling facts. All they have to do is bare their fangs, wave their manes hither and yon, flash the rear buttocks, and bark. The average monkey watching this dominance display then accepts the data without looking very closely. Those who dare look at information are driven away with the monkey pundits shrieking, "Shut up! Shut up!" More than one of these silly creatures has "won" their debates with me on TV or the radio by simply cutting my mike and rattling on, showing eyebrows, fangs and rear anal gear.

It works!

Scientists already know that humans have areas of the brain that are adept at face processing. For example, some stroke victims lose the ability to identify faces yet can still recognize everyday objects.

In my case, when I was hit by lightning in 1955, one of the odd side effects was, I couldn't recognize faces unless I "tag" them in some fashion. Mostly, though, I just don't bother with it, I warn everyone I have this bizarre deficit and they can do whatever. I LOVE heraldry because that, I can remember perfectly and when I used to fight in Society of the Creative Anacronism's battles fields, I had no problem knowing who was who. And who to whack with my sword!

Once, my parents and I were flying to different airports so when we said goodbye, I figured, I wouldn't see them again for another year.

I landed at Chicago airport and changed flights to Kennedy. A stewardess approached and said, "Some people want to see you," and I wondered if it was the Secret Service or something. Heh.

Two people came to me and I stared at them. "Don't you know who we are?" my mother asked. "Who are you?" I asked.

"We're your parents! You saw us only an hour ago at the airport in Tucson!" said my father. All the passengers around me laughed.

"Oh! Now I see you!" I said. For now I could ID them. Up until then, they looked like strangers because my brain told me they were in DC so they couldn't be standing in front of me. But their flight was diverted by a blizzard so they came to NYC with me, instead and visited the UN to talk about future projects.

Maybe this is why I am unimpressed by leaders. Since they have to be processed by a different part of my brain, the "worship the top monkey ass" isn't triggered. I always wondered about this. To spot loved ones in a crowd, I have to repeat what they are wearing or picture their hair style in order to cut down on the chaos of choosing.

Maybe if more humans disabled this part of the brain we won't see anymore Hitlers or Bushes since one would always be saying, "Who on earth is that bizarre looking idiot?" instead.
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Washington Pest

Republican Congressman's Wife Thrown Out of SOTU Speech

2006-02-01T20:44:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The paranoia of anyone showing any signs or anything around Bubble Boy are so intense, police even removed the wife of the powerful House Defence Appropriations Subcommittee for wearing a tee shirt saying, "Support the Troops"!

From commentator at Smirking Chimp:

Beverly Young, wife of Rep. C.W. Bill Young (news, bio, voting record) of Florida — chairman of the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee — was removed from the gallery because she was wearing a T-shirt that read, "Support the Troops — Defending Our Freedom."

"Because she had on a shirt that someone didn't like that said support our troops, she was kicked out of this gallery," Young said on the House floor Wednesday morning, holding up the gray shirt.

"Shame, shame," he scolded.

Mrs. Young was sitting about six rows from first lady Laura Bush and asked to leave. She argued with police in the hallway outside the House chamber.

"They said I was protesting," she told the St. Petersburg Times. "I said, "Read my shirt, it is not a protest.' They said, 'We consider that a protest.' I said, 'Then you are an idiot.'"

Heh. The fascists consider any expression of anything to be a "protest". As always, the right wing, and this lady is a far right winger, thinks they will be granted the privilage to do whatever they wish while the rest of us have no rights at all and are forcibly silenced and crushed underfoot. The idea that she would need some civil rights eludes her, normally.

I have often seen this. "You can't do (x) to ME!" is the common refrain of people desiring privilages. Whole societies are predicated on grantig vast privilages and benefits only to select members. America was supposed to be striving to do the opposite even though we have a really crummy record in the past which is why the Civil Rights Act had to be added to the body of laws even though the Bill of Rights pretty much covers everything.

Here is an attempt at censoring Tom Toles, the Washington Post cartoonist. From Americablog:

And why not have the Pentagon try to stifle a free media while supposedly promoting freedom in Iraq? The US government just arrested one of President Bush's top political critics for threatening his life with a t-shirt. So why not now threaten a top political cartoonist for drawing a cartoon that the Pentagon doesn't like? Why not use the power of government to try to censor the media, something that's a direct violation of that pesky and quaint 1st Amendment to the US Constitution - you remember, that document the Bush administration doesn't think is relevant.

Here is the offending cartoon:

Of course, the Out of Joint Chiefs of Staff who sit in protected offices are all snippy about this, chosing to pretend the cartoon mocks the wounded when it is pointing out the obvious: the Pentagon itself has boasted about taking amputees and putting them back into Iraq!

Of course, the GOP hausfraus don't get all upset over the purple bandaids or mocking Murtha for being a Marine who actually saw warfare unlike so many officers in the Pentagon and Rumsfeld himself who never saw anyone shoot at him, ever, since he "fought" when there were no wars going on.

Ditto most GOPers. They attack amputees who dare to run for office as Democrats, they show no mercy to fellow Americans if any soldier gets in the way of the pork barrel in DC!

Even as Bill Gates backs down about censoring a Chinese man's blog and Google tries to calm us all about censoring blogs like mine if the person is googling in countries that hate me, all the world writhes with attempts at censorship or pretending they don't censor when they do it.

From the BBC:

Newspapers across Europe have reprinted caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad to show support for a Danish paper whose cartoons have sparked Muslim outrage.
Seven publications in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain all carried some of the drawings.

Their publication in Denmark led Arab nations to protest. Islamic tradition bans depictions of the Prophet.

The owner of one of the papers to reprint - France Soir - has now sacked its managing editor over the matter.

The cartoons have sparked diplomatic sanctions and death threats in some Arab nations, while media watchdogs have defended publication of the images in the name of press freedom.

Muslims are raging about this all over the world. They are now boycotting many countries. The rage is justified because the Europeans, pretending there is no censorship therefore it is OK to publish sacrilege is sheer nonsense.

Try printing a cartoon showing Sharon wearing a swastika!

There, see? No go. Right now, they put "holocaust deniers" in prison just for saying, there were no deathcamps! They are lying, of course, but putting someone in prison for this is NOT FREE SPEECH. Period. The trials of holocaust deniers goes on and on with no on in the American and few in Europe mentioning this. Again, not only are they being tried for daring to speak their minds (wrong or right, it doesn't matter), they are being put in prison in a Nazi-like "Nacht und Nebel" media blackout!

If Europe wants to act like Nazis and stop free speech and not give news coverage of loss of the right to speak freely, they have no right to persecute anyone for talking about Nazis!

This creeping censorship is all over the planet and I am 100% against it. The blog is mightier than the sword is this blog's motto. But in the end, power grows out of the state and the state can silence anyone if the corporations and newsmedia want to conspire with the state.

And this, in a nutshell, is what is wrong today. Not enough free speech. Long live the net! Blog on!
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My Blog Is Often On Page One In Google Type Searches

2006-01-29T22:27:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

I check the stats of this site daily. One thing I am interested in is how people find this blog. Many do it through search engines and I want to thank them for coming back for more than one read, everyone here is interesting to me because of the you are from so many far flung places and different backgrounds. I want to explain how I think the search engines work.

Here is an example from today's newest readers of my blog:From Google, Germany:

Yachts for sale online - Yachts for sale
Yachts for Sale Super Yachts Mega Yachts for sale online. Buy - Sell yacths online - Super Yachts Mega Yachts for sale ...
www.find-yachts.com/ - 23k - I hurtigbuffer - Lignende sider

Azimut Yachts for sale. Buy - selling - buying - sell Azimuts for ...
Azimut Yachts for sale. Azimuts for sale. superyachts, motor yachts, brokers, ... Buy and Sell yachts online from www.find-yachts.com, please visit ...
www.find-yachts.com/azimut_yacht_for_sale_4.htm - 17k - I hurtigbuffer - Lignende sider
[ Flere resultater fra www.find-yachts.com ]

Culture of Life News II: Super Rich Buy Superyachts and ...
Super Rich Buy Superyachts and Supermodels Thanks To Bush Tax Cuts. By Elaine Meinel Supkis The disasterous Bush tax cuts which he wants to extend eternally ...
culturelifenewsii.blogspot.com/ 2006/01/super-rich-buy-superyachts-and.html - 20k - I hurtigbuffer - Lignende sider

Amazon.co.uk: Working on Yachts and Superyachts: Books
Perfect Partner Buy Working on Yachts and Superyachts with Crewing Aboard A Superyacht: A Guide to Working Af... today! ...
www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/185458295X - 35k - I hurtigbuffer - Lignende sider

Luxury Yachts & Super Yachts brokers :: Custom Line | Top Yachts
... tailored management, gardiennage, crewing and charter services. Contact us today and find out why you should buy your new super yacht from Top-Yachts ...
www.top-yachts.co.uk/ - 11k - I hurtigbuffer - Lignende sider

Buy and sell boats, yachts, etc. online
Sell/buy new and uses ships or other maritime products. ... Super & Mega Yachts, Sailing Yachts, Motor Yachts, Fishing Vessels ...
www.theyachtmarket.com/links.asp - 79k - I hurtigbuffer - Lignende sider

This is page 1 of 718,000 web citations. I was #3. I picked up this page from my webtracker. Someone in Germany, (Guten Abend, mein Freund!) clicked on my blog after googling "buy super yachts". If you are planning on buying a super yacht and want to give me a lift, I happen to love deep sea fishing in the Gulf...or Mediterranean, ahem (heh). But seriously, I used to wonder why my blog didn't show up on Google except for page 250.

So one of my wonderful readers, from Australia, gave me a clue about how to fare better with the search engines. Writing for the Web:

Research on how users read on the Web and how authors should write their Web pages. Mainly based on studies by John Morkes and Jakob Nielsen.

Short summary of the findings: How users read on the Web [read this one first]
Full paper (long): Concise, SCANNABLE, and Objective: How to Write for the Web (unfortunately this paper was written for print and not online)

Case study: Applying Writing Guidelines to Web Pages improved usability by 159% when rewriting sample pages from a popular website

Detailed study materials, including downloadable page files, tasks, and questionnaires (only useful if you want to replicate our experiments or conduct new studies in the area of reading and writing on the Web)

It is an old fashioned looking website with annoying aspects but their advice is sound, just don't copy their interface. Here is a paragraph I carefully analyzed and used to change my blog entries:

Journalists have long adhered to the inverse approach: start the article by telling the reader the conclusion ("After long debate, the Assembly voted to increase state taxes by 10 percent"), follow by the most important supporting information, and end by giving the background. This style is known as the inverted pyramid for the simple reason that it turns the traditional pyramid style around. Inverted-pyramid writing is useful for newspapers because readers can stop at any time and will still get the most important parts of the article.

On the Web, the inverted pyramid becomes even more important since we know from several user studies that users don't scroll,(*) so they will very frequently be left to read only the top part of an article. Very interested readers will scroll, and these few motivated souls will reach the foundation of the pyramid and get the full story in all its gory detail.

This is why I have the opening statement and then the relevent news story then analysis and connecting other news stories. Patient readers might even make it to the end, but since most of us have limited hours, the leisure of reading all the way through is something not everyone has. Thus the opening summary.

I noticed that my profile on search engines has shot up. Type in "Siberian Swans" and my blog is again, #3. Or "Deep Space Climate Observatory", I am #2. "Smurfettes", my blog is #1 on page 1.

I use Google a tremendous amount. Very seldom do I see the top popular blogs in the top 10 search items. I am usually sandwiched between the New York Times, the BBC or Washington Post. All of whom I quote a paragraph or two, but the original content is overwhelming, usually, compared to the direct quotes.

I suspect Google has cracked down on mere repetition of articles because many bloggers have gotten very lazy and post most often an opening sentence like this, "Wow. Look at this article!" and ending with, "Wow. That was so stupid/amazing/whatever." So up until recently, when I wanted more information about some topic, I had to plow through dozens of web sites that were almost identical, the search people disliked this because it made their engines a waste of time.

In the last three months, I noticed a change. The variety of links on page one have been much better and the repetition of the same article is nearly gone. No longer do they have 300 Associated Press releases under the titles of 300 different news delivery services. Most of the media use only a few services now since everyone has been firing reporters and reducing their overhead, lending a certain uniformity in the news which is pretty bad, I think.

Everyone is looking for some easy way to be on page 1 of Google. I got there the hard way: by posting diverse, researched, well organized (well, sort of! Heh.) articles, frequently and with origional content, especially the artwork. Many sites try using magic tricks like embedding words or sticking a string of "key words" at the start or bottom, etc. The search engines hate this. Once everyone does the same trick, the people programming the search engines, watching content collapse, retaliate by setting up a different system for grading content.

So the message here is simple: if you have good content, well produced and easy to read and access, you will end up being loved by the search engines. They do test their systems to see if the information retrieved is of good quality. And businesses pay a lot of money for gurus to show them the Golden Land which is the top 10 Google web search items on page1.

Isn't it funny, my odd ball blog has conquered that Mount Everest? And attacks corporate America? Truly, a laugh riot for me.
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Washington Pest

US Military Has Plans For Eliminating All Communications

2006-01-28T14:11:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Us webcitizens are very upset about the news that the military has plans to take down not only the web but everything we use to communicate. The web was build for NASA and the military. The military has never liked the web being expanded to ordinary citizens and AL GORE was the chief sponsor of the bill that did this which is why, I suppose, they hate him, eh?

From the BBC:

From influencing public opinion through new media to designing "computer network attack" weapons, the US military is learning to fight an electronic war.

The declassified document is called "Information Operations Roadmap". It was obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act.

I blogged about this in the past.

Bush Illegal Spying. This latest news story is just more confirmation of the malice and anger the military has towards free speech. It isn't just Chinese military overlords who want to lord it over us.

The operations described in the document include a surprising range of military activities: public affairs officers who brief journalists, psychological operations troops who try to manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of an enemy, computer network attack specialists who seek to destroy enemy networks.

The silliest part is the "manipulate the thoughts and beliefs" mandate. The only thing right wingers can influence, thought-wise, is other right wingers. The Nazis were like this, too. They could convince each other, stars were really blocks of ice and subhumans should die and all good things flow to Germans only. Convincing the people the conquered was a complete failure.

In our war against Muslims, waving the Bible at them and screaming at them isn't operational, is it? So we will just drop bombs. I think the real plan is to deliberately radicalize them and then huffily say, "Well, see, they are radicals, we must bomb them!" Just before the Palestinian elections which were "close" Bush and his crew announced they wanted Fatah to win so they sent Fatah some loot. Landslide for Hamas to the delight of the right wing Zionists who now don't have to negotiate with anyone! Whoopee! They immediately asked for more money to finish the Berlin Wall.

In Iran, Bush had us broadcast stuff saying, "Don't vote! Boycott the elections! Then there will be a revolution!" So now we see exactly that! Heck, look at Haiti! The NYT has a big "What happened in Haiti" article about two years too late. After all, more than one person demanded we support the duly elected President, Aristide, but no. Bush wanted a coup, got a coup, and now, the place is in chaos! Duh!

Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military's psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans.

"Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," it reads.

"Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," it goes on.

American TV is wall to wall psyops. It is one great big cycloptic psychotic psyops.

When it describes plans for electronic warfare, or EW, the document takes on an extraordinary tone.

It seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system.

"Strategy should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will 'fight the net' as it would an enemy weapons system," it reads.

The slogan "fight the net" appears several times throughout the roadmap.

The mainstream media has told us over and over that we are a problem, we have no "ethics" (ie, chains around our necks!) and that we need to shut up or else. They would dearly love to shut us down. Since the clever Chinese force American providers to do the censoring, the computer models created to do this are going to suddenly start doing it to us. For example, my blog has achieved the wonderful pinnacle of being on page one on international Google on many topics! Hooray! But with a flick of a key, they have eliminated me from 1/4 of the planet: China. Boo.From Xinhua net:

China is set to become the biggest user of broadband in the world, Bill Gates said Friday.

"No one will catch up (except) maybe India in 50 years," the chairman and co-founder of Microsoft Corp. said at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting.

Thanks to Bill Gates and Yahoo and good old Google, this audience is denied access to my cartoons and blathering commentaries. This angers me and should anger all bloggers and other information providers. I address Chinese issues frequently and the interface between China and America is a top issue for me and it is a crime that I can't debate these issues with people living in China nor can I hear from them! And this international exchange is very important! It is the key to the future!

How dare any of these people talk about "free trade" and "flat earth" when they are all conspiring together to keep us all apart?

On to a related topic, Congress is going to pass a lobbyist's dream law for the big movie/tv/music producers and they want the guts of the law to be a secret! From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

The Digital Transition Content Security Act (H.R.4569) - or Analog Hole bill - would force every video digitizing device in America to watch for and obey a VEIL watermark, a proprietary signal embedded in video broadcasts. But how would such a detector work? What would be its cost? And how secure is the watermark? Security researchers don't know - because the company behind VEIL won't let them look at the technology without first obtaining a "license." A license to examine the VEIL specification costs $10,000 and requires signing a non-disclosure agreement that forbids revealing the details of the technology to others. Congress is choosing a technology that must be built into your systems, and it's not giving non-entertainment industry experts the opportunity to check out the technology first to make sure it doesn’t break your systems, or, even worse, leave those systems vulnerable to attack.

Sounds like a Diebold law! No can-see! I feel like the guys running things are dropping a veil over all their activities, a steel veil.

The American military plans and the rich corporate entity plans are rapidly meshing into something rather ugly. Even though the blog can be mightier than the sword in a fair world, in the real world, the sword can wreck everything and anything and even annihilate everything once and forever.
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Even China Should Have Freedom of Speech

2006-01-27T13:00:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

I was the American advisor for the Chinese students who demonstrated in front of the UN in NYC for over a month back when the famous Tiananmen Square massacre happened. I went to the Chinese consulate on 42nd Street to deliver a message from my parents and myself when they locked the doors and wouldn't let me in, even though they knew me well, thanks to the long association my parents had with working in China for over 10 years.

I was ordered by the police to go across the street so I read the message with my very loud, bull horn level voice, shaking with rage. I then yelled I was going to stand there until someone came out to take my message. Within minutes, I was surrounded by bewildered and very angry students who asked who I was and wanted to know, what to do. Within minutes, I was explaining how to protest without being arrested, how to handle the press, how to do many things. So they voted me, on the spot, to be their advisor.

We failed to stop the government crackdown but our protests forced Bush the elder to not repriate the students back to China for punishment for being in front of the UN, we also sprang several Chinese out of prison, thanks to CNN which was a splendid news outlet back then (alas!). The Chinese government listed me as an "enemy of the state" and I thought this was totally hilarious since my own country had listed me as that, too! International enemy number 3! That's me!

Well, the Chinese government is cracking down again, stupidly and dangerously. Unlike in past times, this won't stick because wealth comes from freedom and freedom is freedom of speech and they better not shut us up!

They got Google and Yahoo and Microsoft to shut up. They think, the Chinese people are too dumb to figure things out.

Hate to clue you guys in, but even Americans can finally figure out things (I hope!). America has severely curbed freedom of speech despite the First Amendment, repeatedly, especially when they want to wage war and shut up any critics. During the Cold War, we had near zero freedom of speech, literally, if you wrote anything slightly off center, one was watched like a hawk and if one wrote like me, or worse, do cartoons! Well!

Enemy of the state!

China is abuzz about magazines and newspapers being suddenly shut down this week. Here is an example, in Chinese and English, I am doing this to add it to Google and pray Google googles this in China (hah!):

就《冰点》周刊被非法停刊的公开抗议

新闻界的同行们、知识界、法律界的朋友们、《冰点》周刊海内外的热心读者们：
2006 年1月24日，星期二，是《冰点》周刊的发稿日，《冰点》在京编采如往日一样，齐集编辑部，认真校对将于1月25日出版的新的一期周刊。下午4点多，版样全部出齐，送总编辑审阅付印。然而反常的是，迟迟没有回音。我们听到，报社领导层被全部召到团中央开紧急会议，没有人看大样了。这意味着将有不同寻常的事情要发生。

天塌下来，报纸也是要正常出版的，这是对所有订户、所有读者负责。我们将大样中所有发现的错漏改定，静等事变的发生。鉴于中宣部对《冰点》的批评指责从来就没有断过，星期一还刚刚见到中宣部阅评小组对《冰点》刊发的袁伟时教授的文章《现代化与历史教科书》作出的文革式上纲上线的蛮横指责，作为主编，我估计，撤销我职务的时刻来到了。

然而卑鄙所能达到的程度，总是超出常人的想像。大约5点多钟，全国各个媒体朋友们的电话纷至沓来，告诉我他们已接到中宣部、国务院新闻办、北京市新闻局的通知，"不许刊登任何冰点停刊整顿的消息和评论"、"不许参加冰点编采召开的新闻发布会"、"不许炒作"、"要保持距离"等等。继而，各个海外媒体记者的电话也络绎不绝，要求我证实这件事。然而直到7点，还没有人正式通知我，报社领导层从团中央回来，还在开会商量。我反倒成了最后一个知道这件事的人。所有信息证明，这是一个党内高层某些人甘冒天下之大不讳，蓄谋已久、精心策划的行动。这个行动，不仅没有任何宪法和法律的依据，也严重违反、践踏了党章与党内政治生活准则。

作为一个职业报人，《冰点》停刊是我最不能理解、最不能接受的事情。因为报纸是社会公器，报社与订户、读者有契约，是读者付款购买的信息产品，报社必须履约，不管个人的命运如何，《冰点》周刊应该如期送到订户手中。然而在作出这个决定的人那里，社会影响算什么？广大读者算什么？主流大报的声誉算什么？党章国法算什么？中国改革开放的形象算什么？执政党的形象又算什么？他们将社会公器视为个人的家产，认为可以随意处置。

晚上7点30分,我接到社长、总编辑叫我上去谈话的电话。对我宣布的决定，是团中央宣传部作出的。"决定"将袁伟时先生的文章冠以若干莫须有的大帽子，然后宣布《冰点》周刊"停刊整顿"；除对总编辑和我本人通报批评外，还要作"经济处罚"，谁给了他们这种权力！心态如此之龌龊，令人哭笑不得。

自然，这场谈话在前述种种背景之下，已经成了一场滑稽剧。很明显，这是"上面"少数人在背后操纵，团中央在前台扮演丑角。我据理向社长、总编辑痛斥这份" 决定" 和中宣部《新闻阅评》的荒唐，并向他们宣告：我将正式向党中央纪律检查委员会控告这次非法行为。

就在《冰点》周刊被停刊的今天，报社接到大量读者的询问电话，已有读者在得知《冰点》停刊后愤而去邮局退订本报。

" 上面"少数人对《冰点》周刊的扼杀，蓄谋已久。2005年6月1日，在反法西斯战争胜利60周年纪念日前夕，《冰点》刊发了《平型关战役与平型关大捷》一文，真实记录了面对民族危亡，国共两党两军密切合作、相互配合、浴血奋战的真实历史场景。与传统宣传不同的是，《冰点》首次在主流媒体上客观真实地报道了国民党将士在这场战斗中牺牲数万人的战斗历程。

这样一篇真实的历史描述，却遭到中宣部阅评组的蛮横批评。他们批评的根据是什么呢？没有任何事实，而是根据"××年××出版社的中共党史××页关于平型关大捷的记述"，《冰点》的报道是"美化国民党，贬低共产党"。结果，在纪念中国反法西斯战争胜利60周年的大会上，党中央总书记胡锦涛同志，在纪念讲话中全面肯定了国民党将士在抗日战争主战场上的功绩。谁对谁错，不言自明。

在连、宋访问大陆结束之际，台湾著名作家龙应台女士在《冰点》发表长篇文章《你可能不知道的台湾》。文章用丰富的材料，首次客观真实地向大陆人民介绍了台湾几十年来的变化和发展，在读者中引起了强烈的反响和好评，对沟通两岸民众起到了极为重要的作用。而这样一篇文章，竟被中宣部某些人指责为"处处针对共产党"，其眼界和心胸之狭隘令人惊诧。

去年11月18日，党中央隆重召开了伟大的无产阶级革命家胡耀邦同志诞辰90周年的纪念会，曾庆红同志代表党中央对耀邦同志一生的光辉业迹、伟大人格作了充分阐述，受到人民群众的热烈欢迎。而中宣部的某些人却禁止媒体发表纪念耀邦同志的回忆文章，规定只许发表新华社通稿，各媒体不允许有自选动作。

2005 年12月7日，《冰点》刊发胡启立同志的长篇回忆文章《我心中的耀邦》，引起强烈反响，海内外中文媒体纷纷转载，无数网友发帖说被文章感动得热泪盈眶。对这样一篇起到极好社会反响的文章，中宣部竟打电话到报社来问罪，称报社违反了"没有自选动作"的规定！在这些人那里，哪有一点对胡耀邦同志的真感情、真悼念啊！

中宣部少数人对《冰点》的无理指责和批评还有很多。譬如，2005年11月30日《冰点》刊发记者调查，披露了武汉大学法学教授周叶中在学术著作中的剽窃行为。这位周教授在《冰点》记者采访他时，竟有恃无恐地劝告道：你就不要管这事儿了，晚上中宣部就要找你的！你们总编辑会找你的！报道刊发后，果然遭到了中宣部某些人气势汹汹地问罪，蛮横地指责这篇报道有严重的舆论导向问题。

正是在这种压力下，《冰点》对此事的后续报道被撤版。2005年12月28日，《冰点》历史性地出了一期只有三块版的周刊。试问，中宣部的少数人究竟在保护什么行为？

现在，他们终于要跟《冰点》算总帐了！用袁伟时先生的文章为发难对象不过是个幌子。袁伟时教授在近代史的研究上著述颇多，在知识界影响很大。袁教授写的这篇文章依据的是史料，立论基础是开放的理性。文章发表后，亦引起很大反响。本来，对历史问题的讨论，需要对材料和观点有平等的、心平气和地交流，才能逐渐达到共识。诸多网上评论中，即便是不赞同袁先生文章的网友，也有态度十分认真、考据十分扎实的反驳文章。我本人曾将这些帖子转给袁先生参考，袁先生看后对我回复说：这些文章态度确实十分严谨，我将会认真考虑他们的观点，作出相应的回复。这正是一种健康的、正常的学术交流。而中宣部的阅评除了文革式的詈骂和扣帽子、打棍子，还有什么？！

这次事件再次集中暴露出我国新闻管理体制的根本性弊端，那就是中宣部少数人以其狭隘的眼界、逼仄的心胸、专制蛮横的工作方法，将本应该百花齐放、百家争鸣的活跃政治局面，管制得万马齐喑、一片死气沉沉。这些人要的是顺从，而不是平等。这种专权，中国共产党党章的哪一条授予过他们？！

对我国新闻管理体制的弊端，我们将另文论述。在这封信里，我们只是想告诉同行们、读者们、朋友们，到底发生了什么，为什么会发生。没有真理害怕辩论，没有真相惧怕公开。尽管中宣部的某些人动用权力，封锁所有媒介和网络，但我们相信，你们一定会看到这封信！你们有知道真相的权力！

衷心地感谢你们！

中国青年报《冰点》周刊主编李大同
2006年1月25日

Care of ESNW (http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20060126_3.htm)

Dear news media colleagues, intellectuals, legal professional friends and devoted readers of Freezing Point inside and outside of China:

On January 24, 2006, Tuesday, which the deadline for the Freezing Point weekly magazine, the Beijing editorial staff of Freezing Point worked as usual to edit and proof-read the weekly edition scheduled for January 25. At just after 4pm, we were ready with everything and the pages were forwarded to the editor-in-chief for review and print. The unusual aspect was that there was no reaction for a long while. We gathered that all the newspaper leadership had been called to the League Central Office for an emergency meeting and nobody was minding the store. This meant that something extraordinary was about to happen.

Then the skies fell down. The newspaper will be published as usual, because this is our obligation to our subscribers and readers. We looked for any possible errors and we patiently waited for the breaking event. Based on the fact that the Central Propaganda Department never ceased in their criticisms of Freezing Point and most recently the Central Propaganda Department criticism group issued an Cultural Revolution-style critique of Yuan Weishi's essay on "Modernization and Historical Textbooks" on the Internet, I suspected that it was my moment to be dismissed as the editor-in-chief.

But the contemptible level was beyond the imagination of ordinary person. At just after 5pm, the telephone calls from various media friends around the country began to arrive. They told us that they have received the notice from the Central Propaganda Department, the State Council and the Beijing News Office to "not report or comment on the stoppage of Freezing Point," "not attend any press conference given by the editorial and reporting staff of Freezing Point," "not hype," "maintain the distance" and so on. Thereafter, the overseas media reporters called non-stop to ask me to confirm the facts. But until 7pm, nobody had notified me formally. When the newspaper leadership returned from the meeting the League Central, they went into a meeting to discuss matters. I was the last person to know about this affair. All the information proved that this was something certain persons in the upper level of the party dared to risk public contempt and plotted carefully to take this action. This action had no legal or constitutional basis, and seriously violated and trampled upon the party constitution and political standards of the party.

As a professional media worker, I cannot understand the stoppage of Freezing Pont. I cannot accept this. A newspapers is a public instrument. The newspaper has a social contract with the subscribes and the readers, and it is a source of information that the readers pay money for and therefore the newspaper must fulfill its contract no matter what. Therefore, the Freezing Point weekly magazine should be delivered into the hands of the subscribers. Yet for the person who made this decision, what did the social impact mean? What does the broad readership mean? What does the reputation of a mainstream newspaper mean? What do the party constitution and the national constitution mean? What does the image of Chinese reform mean? What does the image of the governing party mean? They regard the social instrument as a personal property to be disposed of at their own will.

At 730pm in the evening, I received a call from the publisher and editor-in-chief to go and speak to them. The decision about me was made by the League Central Propaganda Department. The "decision" gave Mr. Yuan Weishi an uncalled-for label and then announced that Freezing Point will be stopped for reorganization. Apart from the personal attacks against the editor-in-chief and myself, there were also "economic sanctions." Who gave them that kind of power? They are so disgusting that I don't know whether to cry or laugh.

Of course, with the aforementioned background, this conversation was a farce. Obviously, this was controlled by a small number of people "above" in the background and the League Central was just playing the role of the fools. I used reasoning to condemn the "decision" as well as the absurdity of the Central Propaganda Department's News Criticisms. I told the publisher and editor-in-chief that I will formally complain to the party central disciplinary committee about this illegal act.

On the day when Freezing Point weekly magazine stopped publication, the newspaper received a large number of telephone inquiries from readers. I learned that readers are angrily terminating their subscriptions at the postal offices on account of the stoppage of Freezing Point.

A small number of people "above" have plotted for a long time to strangle Freezing Point. On June 1, 2005, on the 60th anniversary of the victory of the anti-Fascist war, Freezing Point published the essay on "Pingyingguan battle and Pingyingguan victory", in which we recorded the historical truth about how the Kuomintang and Communist Party worked together in the face of national survival to win the battle with their blood. This was different from the unification propaganda, because Freezing Point was the first in mainstream media to objectively report on how the Kuomintang army sacrificed tens of thousands of warriors in this battle.

This true historical account attracted the brutal criticism by the Central Propaganda Department's Criticism Group. What is the basis of their criticism? It was based upon the "XX year XX publisher's Chinese Communist Party history about the Pingyuanguan victory." The Freezing Point report "glorified the Kuomintang and debased the Communist Party." In the end, at the memorial meeting of the 60th anniversary of the victory in the anti-Fascist war, Communist Party General Secretary comrade Hu Jintao said in his memorial speech that he affirmed the contribution of the Kuomintang solders in the war of resistance against the Japanese. It was clear that who was right and who was wrong in this case.

When Lian and Soong completed their visits to Taiwan, the renowned Taiwan writer Ms. Lung Yingtai published a long essay at Freezing Point titled "The Taiwan That You May Not Know." The essay used a rich content to objectively and truthfully present to the people of China for the first time the changes and developments in Taiwan over the past few decades. It created a tremendous response and approval among readers and had an important impact on communication between the people on the two sides of the Taiwan strait. But this essay was accused by certain people within the Central Propaganda Department as being "against the Communist Party at every step" and their narrow-mindedness was truly astonishing.

On November 18, the party central held a solemn memorial for the great proletariat revolutionary Hu Yaobang's 90th birthday. Comrade Zeng Qinghong represented the Party Central Committee to pay tribute to Comrade Hu Yaobang's glorious accomplishments and he was warmly received by the people. But certain members in the Central Propaganda Department forbade the media to publish memorial articles of Comrade Hu Yaobang and required that all media can only publish the Xinhua release and nothing of their own creation.

On December 7, 2005, Freezing Point published Comrade Hu Qili's long memorial essay "The Yaobang of My Heart" and drew a tremendous response. The media inside and outside of China carried that essay. Numerous netizens posted comments to say how they had been moved to tears. About that well-received essay, the Central Propaganda Department called the newspaper to complain and claimed that the newspaper had violated rule of "not having any voluntary choice."! For those people, they felt no genuine emotion or grief over Comrade Hu Yaobang!

A small number at the Central Propaganda Department had numerous unreasonable complaints and criticisms against Freezing Point. For example, on November 30, 2005, Freezing Point published a reporter's investigation about the academic plagiarism by Wuhan law professor Zhou Yezhong. When professor Zhou was interviewed by the Freezing Point reporter, he said: "You better not mind this matter! Sooner or later, the Central Propaganda Department is going to come after you! Your editor-in-chief will come after you!" When the report was published, certain people at the Central Propaganda Department came after us and complained that the essay had major problems with editorial directions.

Under these pressures, Freezing Pont withdrew its follow-up report. On December 28, 2005, Freezing Point published a historical first weekly edition of only three pages. We ask just who the small number of people at the Central Propaganda Department were protecting?

Now, they are looking for a final accounting with Freezing Point! The essay of Mr. Yuan Weishi is just an excuse. Professor Yuan Weishi has published numerous works on contemporary history and he has great influence among intellectuals. When Professor Yuan wrote this article, it was based upon historical materials and his theoretical basis is about the rationality of openness. After the essay was published, it generated a great response. On any discussion of historical issues, it is necessary to have materials as well as viewpoints and to exchange ideas in a calm and peaceful manner in order to reach agreement. Of the many Internet commentary, even those netizens who disagreed with Mr. Yuan were very serious and their rebuttals were very solid. I have personally forwarded some of these comments to Mr. Yuan and he replied afterwards that these essays were very rigorous and he would seriously consider their viewpoints and make the appropriate responses. This is a healthy and normal kind of academic exchange. But the Central Propaganda Department Criticism Group used insults and characterizations in the style of the Cultural Revolution and then nothing else!?

This incident exposes the basic flaws in the news control system of our country. A small number of people in the Central Propaganda Department have a narrow worldview and mind and used dictatorial methods to impose controls that deaden what should be a lively political scene in which a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools speak out. These people want obedience and not equality. Which item in the party constitution of the Communist Party lets them do that?

We will write elsewhere about the flaws of our national news control system. Here, we just want to tell our colleagues, readers and friends just what had happened and why it happened. When one does not have the truth, one is afraid of debates; when one does not have the truth, one is afraid of openness. Although certain people in the Central Propaganda Department used their power to lock up all the media and websites, we believe that you will see this letter! You will know the power of truth!

We thank you sincerely!

China Youth Daily Freezing Point weekly magazine editor Li Datong
January 25, 2006

Posted by ACB at January 27, 2006 07:51 AM

Thank you, Peking Duck. I was waiting for someone to post this in Chinese!

Here is some news about the crackdown: From Reuters:

China is preparing to "strike hard" against rising public unrest, a senior police official said according to state media on Thursday, highlighting the government's fears for stability even as the economy booms.

An unnamed top official of China's Ministry of Public Security told a Wednesday meeting that China faced a long period of dangerous social discontent, Xinhua news agency said.

We get closer and closer to war for wars unite, ask Bush about this, and to redirect worker/peasant anger, all one has to do is give a little push and America teeters on the edge of destruction so we know, all it takes is a tiny push and off we all go, deep into that well of misery, WWIII.

The latest unusually grim police diagnosis of China's social strains comes less than a week after Premier Wen Jiabao was reported as warning that corrupt land seizures in the countryside were stoking protests and riots.

"Some locales are unlawfully occupying farmers' land and not offering reasonable economic compensation and arrangements for livelihoods, and this is sparking mass incidents in the countryside," Wen said in a speech published on January 20.

Wen said the continued "reckless occupation" of farmland threatened "the stability of the countryside and whole economy and society." He promised stricter land controls and improvements to farmers' rights and income.

The Chinese rulers know they can't merely "crack down" or they might have a sudden revolution on their hands. They teach revolution in school and then try to undo it at work. This model won't work in the long run. I was amazed at how well the Chinese students reproduced various revolutionary posters, using flags, trucks and the famous Goddess of Democracy statue design.

Real revolutions are breaking out all over the place like in Nepal. From the Independent:

Police in Nepal opened fire on pro-democracy demonstrators with live ammunition yesterday for the first time in almost a year, wounding at least three, in the resort town of Pokhara, in the shadow of Annapurna.

The country was shut down in a national strike called by political parties to protest against the dictatorial King Gyanendra. The streets of Kathmandu were deserted. Protesters attacked vehicles. Visitors could venture out of hotels only in special buses with banners reading "Tourists only". The bazaars of Thamel were empty and the shutters closed on shops selling Tibetan devil masks and Tintin T-shirts.

My parents spent a lot of time in Nepal. They became close friends of the Royal Family and trust me when I say, the murder of that family was a palace coup, not the son suddenly going mad.

The right wing neocons were terrified when the King had started negotiations with the people of Nepal and was ceding authority to them and preparing for a real election. Now we have an evil despot ruling autocratically there, supported by the CIA and other American forces. And the country is literally burning down. The Chinese rulers are hysterical about this disorder on their valuable and vulnerable Tibetan border which is why they are so anxious to settle matters with India.

As the Chinese rulers play Go on the world stage, making one power move after another, they worry about the other game that is running, the very ancient game of People vs Rulers. They know, with prosperity comes happiness, but prosperity for only a few equals revolution for the many since there is something to loot. After all, any palace can be stormed if people are organized enough to endure dying while storming it!

And like the Muslims, the Chinese people are feeling energetic and powerful. They know, there is no escaping their fates, so they are ready to stand and fight.

From Cina Economic Review:

In an open letter threatening to take the case of the closure of the Bingdian Weekly to the Communist Party's disciplinary committee, editor Li Datong protested the shutdown as many mainland reporters expressed anger over censorship in chat-room messages, blogs and emails, reported the South China Morning Post. One website was organizing a petition while journalists proposed raising money for a legal challenge. An offending Bingdian article by a professor questioned the official history of the Boxer Rebellion and of the Communist-Kuomintang cooperation in World War II. Other articles, one outlining Taiwan's arguments for separate status, also sparked anger from the Communist Party’s propaganda department.

Interesting, they are fighting back. I will keep on this story, hope they aren't sent to prison. We need world-wide freedom of speech.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon plans to do something about the net if we have a "war or terrorist attack"---namely, eliminate all non-propaganda, non-ruling class information access in America using the Chinese methods.
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Davos World Economic Forums Freak Out Over Pro-Palestinian Magazine Article

2006-01-26T16:14:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

This is funny in a pathetic way. Many top American magazines, TV and movie empires as well as newspapers and radios are owned or run by people who happen to be Jewish. They have successfully locked out nearly any mention of Palestine except on Zionist terms. But the official magazine at Davos allowed a call for boycotting Israel to slip into public view.

From Haaretz.com:

The chairman and executive director of the Davos World Economic Forum on Thursday offered a sweeping apology to all delegates for an article calling for the boycott of Israel that appeared in a prestigious magazine issued by the forum.

Professor Klaus Schwab, who founded the annual Davos conclave 35 years ago, said he was "shocked" to read, just today, the article that appeared in the magazine "Global Agenda."

Some American Jewish leaders attending the conference said they were not satisfied with the apology.

"As a publisher," said Mortimer Zuckerman of U.S. News and World Report, "I have to take full responsibility for everything that appears in my publications, whether I read them or not."

You can bet, Zuckerman carefully checks his own many publications to insure they are 100% pro-Israel. This is why stories like this one never made the news here and isn't talked about here: From Aljazeera courtesy of Lawrence of Cyberia:

When I first got to Hebron I wouldn't open fire on little children. And I was sure that if I ever killed or hurt anyone, I'd go so crazy that I'd leave the army. But finally I did shoot someone, and nothing happened to me. In Hebron I shot the legs off of two kids, and I was sure I wouldn't be able to sleep anymore at night, but nothing happened. Two weeks ago I hurt a Palestinian policeman, and that didn't affect me either. You become so apathetic you don't care at all. Shooting is the IDF soldier's way of meditating. It's like shooting is your way of letting go of all your anger when you're in the army. In Hebron there's this order they call "punitive shooting": just open fire on whatever you like. I opened fire not on any sources of fire but on windows where there was just wash hanging to dry. I knew that there were people who would be hit. But at that moment it was just shoot, shoot, shoot.

Heck, the Corrie story, the peace activist who was deliberately run over by an Israeli driving a huge earthmover, didn't get any sane coverage. The NYT openly lied about the circumstances and I saw a film of the event when it was obvious, the man saw her and deliberately drove over her, not once, but repeatedly.

The NYT could have and probably did see the same film footage which is why they didn't mention it when they made up a story about this incident, lying nearly nonstop.

Indeed, the lying is so seamless here in America, it is a shock to go online to other countries' publications and see not only stories but movies showing very clearly, the horror of occupation Israel.

For example, the little girl in this photo was shot dead by an IDF soldier in a watch tower. Evidently, he was playing "Nazi concentration camp guard" and was pinging civilians for fun. I'm sure the Germans enjoyed this sport, too. Of course, we are supposed to pretend Naziism is a German mental disease.

It is not. Anyone can turn themselves into a Nazi. All you have to do, is become self centered and desire the death of anyone who has things you want. A grotesque form of "me-ism." Criminals think this way. It isn't pretty.

In his letter of apology, which Schwab said he would circulate to all delegates at Davos, he wrote: "With great concern and pain I just learned that 'Global Agenda,' a publication distributed to our members at the Annual Meeting 2006, contains an article calling for the boycott of Israel. This article is totally in contradiction to my own, and the Forum's, mission and values. For 36 years I have been committed to fighting for better mutual understanding in the world. The Forum has been deeply involved in efforts to create better relations and reconciliation in the Middle East...

It is interesting watching all these wealthy Jewish binationals weeping about how they are making the Middle East "better". The "mutual understanding" part is particularily hilarious.

Instead of telling the raw truth: "Yes, we are tribalists who believe that we and we alone get to occupy, use and dispense with whatever parts of the earth we want, but who cares? This is a dog eat dog world," they go for the hypocritic oath, "Pretend you are nice while being very nasty."

America has a very sick public information system that apes the Chinese one, you know, China, which has strangled Google and squashed Yahoo and arrests anyone who writes stuff that displeases the rulers, here in America we have "freedom of speech" but accessing the mass media is a whole different kettle of fish. Namely, the gate keepers are locking out many people, blocking any view but their own, they are warping our dialogue, driving us into directions which will end us in the middle of WWWIII, they have agendas which are not allowed to be discussed except on lonely forums like mine.

These controls have to now be planetary thanks to the internet. I expect them to scheme to shut down the parts of the internet that carries messages they hate. So far, we have some tiny free speech left but I expect this to now be under fire, nonstop, from the ruling elites.

China is showing them how to do this. They will buy out or vy for control or pass laws making life impossible for anyone who wishes to talk about things they don't want us to talk about. They want uninterrupted propaganda with us drinking it like Kool Aid and then marching off to die in whatever wars they stir up.

This is what Davos is all about and why they are surrounded by the military which keeps the populace at bay. These people aren't loved by all that many of us and I see them becoming increasingly unpopular as the American financial tower of Babel collapses.
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Google Defies Justice Snooping

2006-01-22T14:57:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

One of Yahoo's "most popular articles" remains the news that Google is defying Justice Dept. snooping. The excuse for this snooping is just plain silly. They want to see how many people Googled "hot sex teens" for crying out loud. Geeze, don't these guys have girlfriends? Seems cops and government lawyers don't get enough excuses to look up "hot sex teens" sites while at work. Are they given rain coats while doing this, to fold over their laps?

From Reuters:

Right-to-privacy groups said on Friday an attempt by the Bush administration to force Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) to turn over a broad range of materials from its databases set a dangerous precedent that should worry all Americans.

"This is the camel's nose under the tent for using search engines and all kinds of data aggregators as surveillance tools," said Jim Harper of the libertarian Cato Institute who also runs Privacilla.org, an Internet privacy database.

Correct. Only it isn't a camel's nose, it is an elephant trunk attached to some of the nastiest sexual deviants on the planet earth. These snoopy jerks drove America into impeaching Clinton over a stupid blowjob, for example, while at the same time, screaming at us to look away as they whack off on telephone poles and skinny right wing loudmouth broads.

Give me a break.

In court papers filed on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, the Justice Department stated that Google had refused to comply with a subpoena issued last year for one million random Web addresses from Google's databases as well as records of all searches entered on Google during any one-week period.

The government said it needed the information to prepare its case to revive the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, which the Supreme Court blocked from taking effect two years ago.

Why would the Supreme Whores revisit this case? So some of them can leave a hair or two on a drink again? Heh. Or maybe give O'Reilly another opportunity to falafel us in public? Didn't Justice unveil the Whore of Justice in the main building? Geeze, give her the nine headed Beast and make it One and All.

Anyway, their favorite topic, sex, is again, their favorite topic over there.

But others were not reassured. Massachusetts Rep. Edward Markey, the ranking Democrat on the telecommunications subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said he would introduce a bill to strengthen consumers' Internet privacy by prohibiting the storage of personally identifiable information Internet searches beyond a reasonable time.

"Internet search engines provide an extraordinary service, but the preservation of that service does not rely on a bottomless, timeless database that can do great damage despite good intentions," Markey said.

Chris Jay Hoofnagle of the Electronic Privacy Information Center worried that the government could follow up its initial request with a demand for more information.

"If Google hands over the search logs and the Justice Department finds search strings like 'child porn' or 'naked children,' could they not then go back and ask Google for the user's Internet address?" he said.

You know, there were dirty books back in 1789. So why did our Founding Fathers insert the 1st amendment and made it first? Of course, the French never needed an amendment assuring them the right to look at dirty pictures since they have freely exercised this right since they began painting pictures and carving statues back about 45,000 years ago.

We need protection here from people who believe we all want to look at baby Jesus and his mother who had sex with a bird who impregnated her....Oh well, Leda and the swan without sex. Yup.

On the other side, the Cincinnati-based National Coalition for Protection of Children and Families, a Christian fundamentalist group, said search companies should be willing to help the government defend children from pornography.

"I'm disappointed Google did not want to exercise its good corporate branding to secure the protection of youth," said Jack Samad, the group's senior vice president.

I have this amazing ability to remember my childhood. We wanted to see nakkid pictures so we would rifle through parental bedrooms and more often than not, find something hot to giggle over, since we thought these pictures were D-U-M-B. Laugh, hahaha. Worse, one of my playmate's fathers was a surgeon and he had a book on sexual diseases with photos.

Ick. Hey, it wsa good for learning about siphylus and why it was good to avoid. Ever see the autopsy of a syphillic? Ech.

Anyway, kids had an even better snooping tool: going around, eavesdropping and sneaking looks at the neighbors when the bed was shaking or better still, watching horses or dogs go at it. Heck, cats.

Chickens. I saw alot of this stuff. But then, maybe I am weird, with this memory thing.

Anyway, lay off the net, you jerks. Bad enough we had to hear the details of Bill C's sex life.
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Media Tries To Ignore Gore's Call For Investigations of Bush But Notice Hillary Said, "Plantation"

2006-01-18T10:06:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The media whores worked hard, trying to ignore what Gore said in his famous speech this week, now, in order to change the topic, they are screaming about Hillary Clinton saying the word, "Plantation." Like, wow.

From Common Voice:

President George W. Bush's staff are mad as hell and they're not taking it anymore. They charged that the junior senator from New York, Hillary Rodham Clinton was "out of bounds" when she said Monday that the Bush administration was "one of the worst" in US history and compared the Republican House to "a plantation."

The former First Lady said this at a rally in Harlem to honor Dr. Martin Luther King. Senator Clinton shared the stage with Rev. Al Sharpton and New York City Councilman Charles Barron who once said he'd like to walk up to a white man and slap him just for his own mental health.

During the daily press briefing, White House Press Secretary Scott McLellan was asked about sharp remarks from two nationally prominent Democrats, Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore, who spoke before a crowd at a MoveOn.Org event.

Gore called for an independent probe of the administration program that listened in without a warrant on Americans suspected of talking to terrorists overseas.

Asked about the former Clinton Administration Democrats' comments on the same day, McClellan said, "Well, I think we know, one tends to like or enjoy grabbing headlines; the other one sounds like the political season may be starting early."

This article is typical of the right wingers. They never note how they spout racist, evil garbage but if ever a black man or woman ever says anything, any time, this has to be dredged up constantly.

The minions harping about Hillary saying, "Plantation" when more than half of America calls the GOP Congress a lot worse names is hilarious if it weren't so obviously tragic. This focusing on just one word, one gesture, one person is typical of the right wing scream machine which has smeared or changed the subject over and over again for years.

Only it is falling on deaf ears. Like Ulysses, we put cotton in our ears to cut out the shrieks of the sirens on the rocks. More and more, Americans are tuning out all this. The right wing hopes some of the screams will filter through which is why they took over NPR and thinking, silencing that last voice would fix their calliope is rather sad to see since we, on the internet, have circumvented them entirely.

As usual, pointing out the obvious mechanisms with which the right wing media bosses gull people is never ending work. I remember a NYT headline once, "Gore Campaign Must Repay $7 Million" and buried on the last line of the article was this eye-popper, "The GOP must repay $18 million" which was more than double what Gore had to return and after chastizing Gore for ten paragraphs, the much greater problems of the GOP rated exactly one sentence. The NYT could claim they covered the news but they covered it with manure.

The usual method was at work this week against Gore again. The media at first pretended this call to arms speech which basically said, Bush broke some very serious laws and has created a very serious Constitutional crisis, as some sort of obscure joke. Haha. Old Gore at it again. Then, as the web amplified his speech and cheered it and a Democrats.com poll showed that 54% of Americans want to see an impeachment investigation, as Bush's polling numbers as done by right wingers even are now below 40% approval ratings, the media had to boost Bush's crew of pirates so they attacked Gore directly.

No one can reply to this slime than the Man himself, Al Gore. From Rawstory:

"The Administration's response to my speech illustrates perfectly the need for a special counsel to review the legality of the NSA wiretapping program.

The Attorney General is making a political defense of the President without even addressing the substantive legal questions that have so troubled millions of Americans in both political parties.

There are two problems with the Attorney General's effort to focus attention on the past instead of the present Administration's behavior. First, as others have thoroughly documented, his charges are factually wrong. Both before and after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was amended in 1995, the Clinton/Gore Administration complied fully and completely with the terms of the law.

Second, the Attorney General's attempt to cite a previous administration's activity as precedent for theirs - even though factually wrong - ironically demonstrates another reason why we must be so vigilant about their brazen disregard for the law. If unchecked, their behavior would serve as a precedent to encourage future presidents to claim these same powers, which many legal experts in both parties believe are clearly illegal.

The issue, simply put, is that for more than four years, the executive branch has been wiretapping many thousands of American citizens without warrants in direct contradiction of American law. It is clearly wrong and disrespectful to the American people to allow a close political associate of the president to be in charge of reviewing serious charges against him.

The country needs a full and independent investigation into the facts and legality of the present Administration's program."

Of course, we should not expect the mainstream whore press or TV to cover any of this, certainly, the courtesy of letting him reply to his White House detractors won't be extended to him. So we on the web, as usual, will carry the burden.

Sometimes, when we make enough a fuss, they are dragooned into reporting what is going on. But only sometimes. Just like the dust-up with the Washington Post over articles about the evolving Abramoff scandals, what with the Post pretending repeatedly that it is a bipartisan scandal and not 100% dyed in the wool GOP trainwreck or how the various media pretended to be outsiders in the Valarie Plame affaire while in reality, in cahoots with the White House in that illegal smear job.

Unrepentant, they churn forwards, swivelling the hips and baring their bosoms to their bosom buddies, lap dancing lap dogs.
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Washington Pest

Striking Workers Attack EU Buildings In Strasbourg

2006-01-17T10:58:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

I once ran around Strasbourg during the Student Uprisings in 1968. Well, this time, it is the workers who are rioting. This got near zero coverage in America unlike, say, riots in China, eh? What a surprize...NOT.

From Associated Press:

Demonstrators fought with police and smashed windows at the European Parliament building Monday during a protest over a proposal to make port operations in the European Union more competitive.

Strikes and work slowdowns also disrupted cargo handling at several ports as unions pressed their opposition to the plan even as EU legislators predicted it would be rejected.

Police used water cannons and tear gas trying to keep thousands of protesters away from the EU legislature in this eastern French city. But the mob surged forward, hurling rocks, logs and metal fences to shatter windows along a 150-foot stretch of the building's front.

Earlier, officers fired pepper gas into a crowd of protesting dock workers from major European ports who threw flares, glasses and stones at officers. At least three protesters were detained.

Workers in yellow vests accompanied by marching bands set off smoke bombs and waved banners saying "Victory to the dockers." Some cars were set afire, and smoke mingled with the smell of pepper spray in parts of the old town.

Ah, memories! Lovely city, the old town is utterly medieval and when I was there, paved with wonderful cobblestones which we put to good use. Also, the tanks had trouble clanking around sharp corners there which is why the rabbit warrens of old towns were splendid venues for street action.

Unlike America which has been built deliberately so the capitol is far from all forms of commerce and activity of the peons, the European countries are all easily accessible especially thanks to the splendid public transportation systems, again, unlike America. When we had our last antiwar demonstration, all the Amtrak trains were stopped for hours forcing the march organizers to put things on hold and naturally, the venal pressitutes pretended this was due to lack of good organization. And unlike in Europe, the demonstration was utterly peaceful and sweet. Not like South Koreans who go bezerk at the drop of a drumstick!

Unlike the cowed populace here, the European workers know, if they don't actively fight back, they will end up slaves like the Americans who are not roll models any more than Russians but are feared as possible enemies of union organizing, seeing how defunct and demoralized the Americans have become over the years, losing ground, influence and now all the labor gains they fought so hard for before turning "anticommunist" in the fifties which is what killed them.

Cleaving to their enemies was a disaster!

The American press is utterly hostile to unions. If they strike, the media goes for the "how did the mean strikers ruin whatever" stories and when unions are destroyed, the press celebrates this with stories about how, despite all things that workers must pay shooting up in price, wages stay down thanks to worker inability to get even a few pennies more, isn't this great, it means inflation will be confined to the lower levels of society and not bug the rulers as they debase the currency!

Whoohoo.

Because our media want us to think China is falling apart, they carry stories like this on the front pages. From the NYT:

A week of protests by villagers in China's southern industrial heartland over government land seizures exploded into violence over the weekend, as thousands of police officers brandishing automatic weapons and electric stun batons moved to suppress the demonstrations, residents of the village said Monday.

The residents of the village, Panlong, in Guangdong Province, said that as many as 60 people were wounded and that at least one person, a 13-year-old girl, was killed by security forces. The police denied any responsibility, saying the girl died of a heart attack.

Of course, the lesson again is this: want something? Better be ready to fight for it and this means facing death. For the forces that need to suppress the will of the people can and will and do kill anyone in its path but the only way of stopping it is to stand in its path.

The Chinese student who, in that famous film, refused to let the tanks go around him, was murdered under torture, you know. I was representing the students back then, in 1989, and when I learned he was arrested, we demanded he be turned loose, I had arranged passage to America for him but they wouldn't turn him loose at the last minute and then denied they even had him and no one has seen him since.

From Xinhua net:

Hu Jintao said that a shift in the country's mode of economic growth is an important and urgent strategic task which is crucial to maintaining national economic and social development.

During an inspection tour to east China's Fujian Province from Jan. 12 to 16, Hu called for stronger resolve and more vigorous measures to promote conservation-minded, environment-minded and safety-minded development.

China will push economic and social development truly on the track of human-centered, all-round, coordinated and sustainable development, said Hu, who is also General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee.

While in Fujian, Hu visited rural villages, companies and urban communities to oversee how they boost local economic and social development in a scientific way.

Cumbersomely and slowly, the communist leaders who successfully ignored the peasants and workers is waking up to their own possible demise and are struggling to find some sort of solution and you can bet, they will only do this so long as the people downstairs make a very loud racket.

America is so big and mobile, we think we can Grapes of Wrath our way to a new state and make money again so we seldom stand and fight. The fights over New Orleans are sporatic and desperate and a rearguard action because, again, things are so diffuse, when people were evacuated, for example, they were deliberately sent to the far corners of the imperial realms.

This is harder to do in smaller places. Russia did this for centuries, this is what Siberia meant to them.

Our Siberia is the strip mall/strip joint countryside that is formless and barren. The eternal Motel 666.
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Imperialist Editors of the NYT Fake Headlines Concerning Chile Show Ruling Class Insecurity

2006-01-16T08:24:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Like a Freudian slippage of San Andreas earthquake in size, the New York Times editor's fake headlines today reveal the fears and insecurities the ruling elite feel whenever any socialist wins any election anywhere.

From the NYT:

What Is Missing in This Woman's Victory? Coattails

This is the headlines. So I looked in vain for any mentions of "coattails" or no one voting for her party or anything that could be remotely constrewed as lack of support except for this:

The tally this time suggested that class may have trumped gender. In some northern copper-mining regions, where union sentiment is strong and suspicion of Mr. Piñera's wealth and support for untrammeled free-market policies also runs high, Ms. Bachelet won more than 60 percent of the vote. In more prosperous areas, her support was generally weaker among both men and women.

That is it! So, the fact that voters there, unlike here, voted for their own collective interests as workers meant Ms. Bachelet's victory was "coattailless". Hahahaha.

And this, in a nutshell, is what is wrong with Kansas. The ruling elite, whenever voters anywhere on planet earth, no matter how remote from us geographically, vote for class interestes, the fury and fear and rage here at the citadels of power are unimaginable!

The new President of Chile now has to watch out since the CIA and the USA powers will work frantically to undermine her and replace her with a general or a billionaire. We have handed over America to million and billionaires and what did they start doing?

Cutting their own taxes and handing our heads on a platter to two hostile Asian countries! Great! Unlike South America's leftists who are banding together rapidly to do something for thier working classes and those ever pesky peasants we hate with such an enduring passion!

President Bachelet's father was murdered by CIA operatives, tortured literally to death in a School of the Americas run prison. She, herself, as a daughter, was also tortured just like we tortured the children of suspected "terrorists" in Iraq and Afghanistan, to force daddy to tell them where various socialists were hiding.

I had a socialist friend down there during the coup, he was working at the University and he ran from the masked government gunmen who shot at him, he waved his passport at the locked gates of the American embassy and they kept him locked outside! Being athletic, he climbed over the gate and demanded to call a lawyer. He couldn't get one but he got me. I had enough influence to force the State Department to keep him inside otherwise he would be dead, wouldn't he?

It was a horrible time. I was furious with Nixon and Kissinger, two war criminals. Here we sit today, demanding all other countries disarm so we can invade or overthrow them and use them like tissue paper to blow our noses. The profound unpopularity of Americans down in South America means we lost the hearts and minds battle thanks to our need to support only the upper classes down there.

By the way, the one thing the new President intends to do is fix the stupid "retirement" system that allows only the upper middle class a real retirement. This alone, has caused tremendous fury in the ruling elite in the USA because that stupid, idiotic, cruel system is being touted as a model for us to follow.

So VIVA, BACHELET! VIVA!!!
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New Website/New Webpage Design

2006-01-03T00:29:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

My computer literate progeny promised to make me a .com homepage. So here is a mockup which we designed over New Year's weekend. I would like to hear any opinions about this redesign. Feel free to comment.

This one was too dark and too corporate (see what happens when one uses corporate sites as role models?!) So I lightned it all up and found a banner I made earlier and had tucked away in my files.

Is this better?

OK, now after talking to my husband who was a photographer and worked in publications, we made more changes. All clickable items are in blue like it is on my present blog. Does this work, visually? Please tell me if there are problems. I'm wondering if the titles inside the lower blocks should be black instead of blue.

Blair Intimidates Newsmedia But Not Bloggers Who Run Uzbekistan Torture Story

2005-12-31T07:33:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The media mythology always has been that they need to "scoop" each other and this is why the news always comes out, they are in such a rush to publish or put it on TV. This fairytale is hogwash, of course. Again and again, we bloggers online have to shove hard as hell to force the media to cough up the news. Here is yet another example of this: the torture story out of Uzbekistan.

From Yahoo:

A former British ambassador has published government documents he says prove that Britain knowingly received intelligence extracted under torture from prisoners in Uzbekistan.

Craig Murray, who was removed as ambassador to Uzbekistan after going public about his concerns, defied a Foreign Office ban to publish the internal memos on his Web site Friday. The documents include memos to Foreign Office chiefs in which Murray expressed his concern over the use of "torture material."

In one memo, Murray said he was told by Foreign Office legal adviser Sir Michael Wood that it was not illegal to use information acquired by torture, except in legal proceedings. Intelligence officer Matthew Kydd had also told him the intelligence services sometimes found such material "very useful indeed, with a direct bearing on the war on terror," he said.

It used to be, when the mainstream media finally was shoved and dragged by us bloggers into covering obviously important stories, they would moan and groan about how we need blogger ethics and how unreliable we all were and how we didn't understand what real news is (missing white women and celebrity divorces, of course!) and etcetera.

Not only was this story news, it is important news. The memo where Sir Michael "Boil them in oil" Wood blandly states that yes, it is illegal to torture but hey, it could be useful. "Ve haff vays off making you talk," is very popular in despotic regimes, right? Remember all those WWII movies where the Allies tortured people we captured? No?

Um, geeze. I do believe that doing this makes one the bad guy except today, in movies, the good guy tortures, murders, runs amok and doesn't follow any civilized finesse, does he?

Like the Downing Street memos, we bloggers single handedly (actually, a thousand bloggers pushing very hard!) forced the media to pay attention. This forces politicians to pay attention and say something or even force a prosecutor to go after criminal actions done by our rulers.

This is why they hate bloggers on the left. Right wing bloggers work for the rulers. This is why any yapping on their part instantly comes into the media. And they are petted and praised and even the, "Oh my, aren't you SOOOO much more effective than those unethical, annoying liberal bloggers!" stories show up time to time, most recently in Time magazine where they tell us sneeringly that we are so uneffective, why don't we imitate the right wingloons!

Well, they ain't pushing stories the media owners and their co-conspiritors, the men in power, are pushing!

And push we do, magnificently, thanks entirely to our many readers who faithfully read so many liberal bloggers and who are the real fuel that keeps all of this going, this budding experiment in real democracy, real news in real time by real people!

I love other leftist bloggers and there are now so many, it is impossible to keep up but I wish I could read all of them every day but then, I wouldn't have time to write, myself. But do remember, it is all of us together that matters and if 10,000 blogs carry these important stories this means 1,000,000 people will read and 100,000,000 will learn the real news as we force the mainstream media to tell the truth.

Onwards and upwards! Go, team!
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Fox TV's Christmas Party Celebrates Sinking of Titanic

2005-12-16T07:32:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Breaking news: Novak fired by CNN.
As we all know, Fox TV has cynically decided to wage war against civilization by screaming about how we are taking Jesus out of Xmas yet they are the first to do so. This year's Xmas party for the staff has decided to use the sinking of the Titanic as their theme. Seems about right to me. Glub, glub, Murdoch.

From Campus Progress:

ThinkProgress and The Majority Report have been covering News Corp (the parent company of Fox News) and how they invited everyone to a "holiday party."

Well it turns out that Fox is apparently a full-on combatant in the war on Christmas, since it wasn't their only one. At the end of this post is a scan of an invitation to another NewsCorp "Holiday Party," this one with a Titanic theme, which, in itself, is really, really weird.

So maybe it's time for Bill O'Reilly to start explaining why he's not objecting to his bosses having multiple parties refusing to acknowledge Christmas. (How can his heart possibly go on?)

Do click on this URL. The invitation is amazing. To think that adults will celebrate the baby Jesus by making fun of the icy, horrible deaths of over a thousand passengers on the Titanic boggles the mind. This comes on the heels of a deliberate program of fanning the flames of religious bigotry at Fox TV. On all shows featuring loudmouthed pundits, they have been pounding away at this idiotic theme and now they will get drunk and laugh themselves silly celebrating the sinking of a passenger ship!

This rampant, cynical hypocricy is the avian flu of the media. Just like them all pretending they were outraged by Clinton getting a blowjob, O'Reilly, for example, had to pay an outraged former employee millions to shut her up when she charged him with sexual harrassment. But was he fired? Did all the media attack him for being a blackguard and hypocrite? Did he apologize to Clinton?

Of course not! He roars and bellows and waves baby Jesus in the air as he tosses the Holy Child into the watery deep.

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Newsweek Reads Us Bloggers: Calls Bush Bubble Boy

2005-12-12T21:07:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

On the left side of the blogsphere, the intelligent side, we have alternated between calling Bush a chimpanzee or bubble boy. Looks like the mainstream media is sufficiently unafraid of him to pick up the bubble boy formula, now if they only see how degenerately Darwinian Bush is....Well, Bush blew up today about all this.

From Yahoo:

Bush had been asked about an article in Newsweek magazine that says he is isolated and features a drawing of Bush in a giant bubble -- the traditional term for the layers of aides between a US president and the US public.

"I don't feel in a bubble. You feel in a bubble in the sense I can't go walking out the front gate and go shopping like I'd love to do for my wife -- although I may, and I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to buy her," said Bush.

"I just talked to the president-elect of Honduras. A lot of my job is foreign policy. And I spend an enormous amount of time with leaders from other countries, and they come right here in the Oval Office and tell me what's on their mind. And I tell them what's on my mind," he said.

Bubble boy can ask Karl Rove what is going on outside the super strong solid steel in an undisclosed location bubble he inhabits! Of course, this has a wee problem, especially with the cops hot on Rove's ass.

Here is the Newsweek bubble boy picture from MSNBC:

President Bush has always shown an admirable ability to ignore the Washington pundits and make fun of the chattering classes. Yet his inattention to Murtha, a coal-country Pennsylvanian and rock-solid patriot, suggests a level of indifference, if not denial, that is dangerous for a president who seeks to transform the world. All presidents face a tension between sticking to their guns and dealing with changing reality. History suggests it can be a mistake to listen too closely to the ever-present (and often self-aggrandizing) critics. But likewise, the idea that any president can go it alone is, to say the least, problematic.

Bush mocked his own courtiers who work for rich people who wanted tax cuts and raiding the Treasury. So they put up with the patrician frat rat's mockery as he sneered at their obvious grovelling. But the little pig overstepped the bounds of grace and is not being mocked or hated by many victims of his misrule. So the press can now attack him so long as their tax cuts keep rolling in.

Of course, we are going bankrupt, our nation is bleeding red ink, hemmoraging a sea of red ink, but they and the media owners barely mention this. But they can mention Bush's obvious bubble which they helped construct. The news story won't mention this glaring fact. It will pretend that Bush build this all by his little own self! Sort of like a personal Habitat for Inhumanity.

Here is one picture of bubble boy I did in the past:

If you google "bubble boy" at the top of this blog, many a story will appear for I and a host of other bloggers have called this idiot that name for quite a while.

Well, let's hope this iron bubble of his is popped. Fitzgerald, you hear me? Pop.

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"Happy News" Blog Story Reveals Mental Collapse of Right Wing America

2005-12-12T07:09:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

As the right wing drags us ever deeper into terrible times, as we struggle to keep up with all the crappy news this creates, the right wing's leaders and followers both run away from reality prefering only "happy news." So it is no surprize to see all the media go ga-ga over a blog that compiles what right wingers consider to be "happy news" like soldiers handing candy to children in Iraq and aren't blown up.

From Yahoo:

Carrie Rodgers is so engrossed by cable-television news shows that her husband calls her a news addict, but lately she has found another source to balance the onslaught of stories about war, crime and natural disasters.

Two or three times a day, the 28-year-old insurance agent in Columbia, S.C., turns to a Web site called HappyNews.com.

She often clicks first to a section called "Heroes," which recently featured stories about U.S. troops rescuing two cheetah cubs in Ethiopia and the induction of 12 people into the Hall of Fame for Caring Americans.

"There's so much going on in the world that is so sad," Rodgers said. "You can go anywhere and find depressing news. I'm glad somebody has stepped up and shown there are still good people in the world."

HappyNews is the brainchild of Byron Reese, chief executive of Austin, Texas-based PageWise Inc., which publishes several how-to and advice Web sites. He decided the world needed a refuge from all the unpleasantness served up by newspapers and television news shows, so he launched HappyNews in July.

As the Mothership of the right wing neo-nazis famously said, ""Why should we hear about body bags and deaths," Barbara Bush said on ABC's "Good Morning America" on March 18, 2003. "Oh, I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"

All over right wing America, people are tuning out. The refusal to view the body bags pouring into America from this woe-begotten war isn't just Bush. These people never want to see that which they wrought. It is getting so bad, the military has ceased honoring their dead when they ship them, like crates, home. From Channel 10 News:

Dead heroes are supposed to come home with their coffins draped with the American flag -- greeted by a color guard.
But in reality, many are arriving as freight on commercial airliners -- stuffed in the belly of a plane with suitcases and other cargo.

John Holley and his wife, Stacey, were stunned when they found out the body of their only child, Matthew, who died in Iraq last month, would be arriving at Lindbergh Field as freight.

"When someone dies in combat, they need to give them due respect they deserve for (the) sacrifice they made," said John Holley.

I still remember the Vietnam war in gory detail. I used to go to the airport in San Francisco to leaflet. Many people didn't want leaflets reminding them about the war. I used to observe the dead coming home, there was no honor guard after 1967. The sad dark boxes were hustled out of the hold of planes and studiously ignored. This is when hyper flag waving and screaming at antiwar people demanding the war stop was at its height. This is also when the same right wingers were actively, like Bush and Cheney and the entire leadership of the GOP, scheming and pulling strings to avoid fighting in this war.

The exact same disconnect from the reality they want that we see today.

The happy face was created when America was very divided. We were all supposed to put on a happy face, take tranquilizers or sniff coke like Bush was doing at that time, and laugh and drink and be merry. My tedious job was to shove the dead bodies into people's faces and force them to see reality.

From Yahoo:

Moderates are imploring colleagues in Congress to tone down the rhetoric on Iraq as debate about President Bush's war policies has become increasingly bitter and partisan.

Their pleas are likely to be ignored.

The war is expected to be front and center in the upcoming congressional election year, particularly in several races where candidates are Iraq war veterans. Neither party has much incentive to pull its punches, with Republicans eager to paint Democratic critics of Bush's Iraq policies as soft on defense and Democrats looking to exploit his woes as polls show declining support for the war.

Nevertheless, some senior lawmakers are appealing for courteousness, saying that while debate is essential to democracy, politics and partisanship should stop at the waters' edge.

Good fucking grief. When a country runs amock abroad, you should have screaming debates at home. The screaming should be deafening. Our representatives representing us antiwar people should make life hell for the pro-war creeps who have created this mess. How dare anyone tell us to shut up? Why is being cute and friendly good when we are murdering thousands of people? Eh?

Always, we are told to not fight. Yet whenever the right wants something, they cheerfully go forth and call us names, attack us, suggest we be blown up, spread hate talk, and worse, the loopy idiots who want happy news lap it all up and ask for more violent talk, more hate. So long as they are hating fellow Americans.

Buzzflash:

In many ways -- although this is our observation and not Pickett's -- the interview with GOP/FOX shill Cavuto reminded us that so many Democratic leaders are missing the boat. The battle is not between two visions of public policy, although the differences are night and day. The major political conflict of our time is between propaganda and the truth. That is why the Bush administration is spending so much time buying off journalists and news coverage here and in Iraq.

The Vietnam war at home, our struggle for the hearts and minds of Americans, was hobbled by the desire to be happy no matter what. "Laugh-In" is an icon of the times. We were supposed to laugh and play and ignore things. Luckily for us, the news on TV wasn't profit driven at that time so reality would leak into the conscience of the audience.

Here is an interesting study about how we deceive ourselves. From Live Science:

Do you always get what you ask for? A new study finds that when you don't, you might not even notice the difference.

Swedish researchers showed a pair of female faces to 120 volunteers for 2 seconds and then asked them to choose which one they thought was more attractive. The researchers then asked the volunteers to explain their choice.

The trial was repeated 15 times for each volunteer, using different pairs of faces. but in three of the trials the faces were secretly switched after a decision had been made.

Surprisingly, not only were a large number of the volunteers oblivious to the switch when ultimately allowed to take a longer look at their choice, they were actually able to gave detailed explanations for why they preferred the face that, indeed, they had actually rejected.

It would be asking for an apple and then explaining exactly why you wanted the banana you got instead.

Everyone likes to think they control their own brains but as we well know, propagandists and con artists prey upon people's innate need to think they are in control even as someone is forcibly guiding them into a box they can't escape. The reason why news services iike mine exist is because I feel one needs to know what is going to happen next. Pretending it won't happen is futile. This is why I look to the far future, the obvious future when our planet is destroyed by our local star. Being a worry wart, I want to have the living creatures of this planet spread to other star systems. This is why I support the space program.

Many death traps in nature are set up so the victim enters willingly and can't escape. Spider webs, venus fly traps, flowers filled with fluid and cupped so one can't escape, human traps are alway baited with goodies for the unsuspecting. And this is why news is important: so one can see the traps, see the danger.

The tendency to turn our news into Pravda is very strong. All despots order news to be only happy news. Five year plan exceeded! Look at the cute kitten! Everything is coming up roses!

Here is news about the approaching mess I call WWIII: From the London Times:

ISRAEL’S armed forces have been ordered by Ariel Sharon, the prime minister, to be ready by the end of March for possible strikes on secret uranium enrichment sites in Iran, military sources have revealed.
The order came after Israeli intelligence warned the government that Iran was operating enrichment facilities, believed to be small and concealed in civilian locations.

Iran’s stand-off with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) over nuclear inspections and aggressive rhetoric from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, who said last week that Israel should be moved to Europe, are causing mounting concern.

This was not a headline in America. Anywhere. You are reading it here and you hair better stand on end. This is bad news everyone should know. Relentlessly, our allies in the Middle East are shoving the world towards the Apocalypse and at home, the happy news consumers like the lady in Texas in the article at the top, are enabling this to happen because she voted for the people who are sponsoring this stupid event and many happy news readers actively desire this event because their churches have assured them that happy Jesus will happily pick them up and save them while we sinners will be ripped to shreds while they and Jesus laugh happily in heaven.

Gads. What a moronic mess. Cassandra was never popular but she was also never wrong.

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Fox TV's Cynical Xmas Hysteria Invades Their Business News

2005-12-05T10:09:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Crooks and Liars website ran the screen capture of Fox TV's "Bulls and Bears" show. It is full of unintended irony. I wonder why these fatuous, cynical people are flogging the "Liberals are killing Christmas" meme when it is them who are reducing welfare to the poor and bah-humbugging Tiny Tim all the time?

The screen crawl at the bottom is the same news service with the latest propaganda ploy in Iraq, about how "secular" Iraqis (nearly all Sunnis!) don't want a religious dictatorship. Yet the right wing bloviators are screaming at us all that the winter festivities are not everyone's but are the sole province of the born again right wing white Christians. Namely, this isn't a holiday, it is only Jesus' birthday.

This crude attempt at intimidating all of us into handing over the classic Winter Solstice to a gang of ill tempered, ill educated lunatics is really fueling bad blood in America. The world watches, agast, as we out Taliban al Qaeda. Today, in the news, the GOP is talking about which tax cuts to give to the already very rich while cutting even more services to the poor. This is the exact opposite of Jesus who was a liberal, he even had long flowing hair. And a beard. So there!

Indeed, Jesus and bin Laden, if they stood side by side, would be hard to tell apart, wouldn't they? Long robes, long hair, long beards. Yup. Twins.

"Happy Holidays" was created to be civil to all people especially Jews who have had to endure terrible progroms and attacks on Christmas and especially Easter. To recognize they would be filled with trepidation and even fear upon hearing "Merry Christmas," the tradition of not saying this to them or anyone else has arisen for good reason.

The thuggish, snappy, ill tempered attacks on us all coming from the sour faced sour pusses pushing "Merry Christmas" has driven many of us to hating those words. I know, if anyone spouts that to me this winter, I will tell them to shove it. Instead of merely ignoring the hyperfluidity of merchantalism at Christmas (yes, my son wants video games, of course!) I am now in a very bad mood.

Bah on buying stuff. My son will get his thingie but not because I love Jesus. Jesus has absolutely nothing to do with all this. Orion rules the winter skies so I will dedicate it to that constellation, not Pisces which is the one appropriated by the Jesus nuts.

To tabulate the things that aren't even remotely Christian, reindeers, pine trees, mistletoes, hog's heads, puddings and pies, cookies and taffy, feasts and costumed characters like Santa are many of the non-Christian things we attached to the winter solstice festivals. Lighting all those lights is pure paganism.

There is a Jesus thing going now: Bethlehem, which has been cut off from humanity behind tall walls, a ghetto set up to imprison the native people of the Holy Land. Isn't that charming? Tear down those walls! If "protecting" people means murdering and enslaving millions, it is totally wrong. After all, Hitler was "protecting" Germany when he murdered all those innocent people!

And of course, we are doing this, too, today, in Iraq. Which takes me back to the whole damn Christmas thing: "Peace on Earth and Good Will Towards Men." You can't buy that. It has no price. It is what Christmas was supposed to be all about.

Peace.

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Downey, WP Editor, Attacks War Critics

2005-11-20T07:55:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The disgusting, lying editor-in-chief of the Washington Post attacks war critics and whines about how fine the war is going even as he and his ilk cowardly refuse to fight...Ever.

From the Washington Pest:

What's needed is more talk about Iraq in 2005. Though there have been successes -- including the staging of an election and a constitutional referendum -- the country is in danger of splitting into pieces, and the Bush administration has not done enough to head that threat off. New elections in December could propel the country toward a political accord that would undermine the insurgency. But reconstruction has foundered and needs to be relaunched, with emphasis on supplying electricity and jobs. Iraqi troops are improving but still are far from ready to fight the counterinsurgency war on their own. If there is to be any chance of that war being won, the United States will have to commit its own forces to the fight for years, though perhaps not at current levels. The alternative is to risk a defeat that would be devastating to U.S. security. That's a hard truth to face: It can't be done amid a partisan free-for-all.

We can't even rebuild New Orleans without tons and tons of graf and misallocation of funds and this week, talk of tossing the refugees out into the streets!

Downey, a notorious coward, makes no mention about finances. This is not unusual. Virtually none of the blowhard editors who advocated war in the first place, joined in lying and deceiving readers during and after the beginning of this war, these clowns yap about bringing order and democracy to Iraq and never talk about how our military/industrial complex is feeding off of this war, growing fat and bloody! They don't ever mention the fiscal black hole that has opened up at our feet! They never mention Bin Laden's many statements about how his plan it to bankrupt us just as the Jihadists bankrupted the Soviet State in Afghanistan!

By the way, here is a typical story from that warfront from the same paper! From the Washington Post:

In September 2002, nearly a year after an American-led coalition deposed the Taliban, the United States launched what would become an aggressive effort to build or refurbish as many as 1,000 schools and clinics by the end of 2004, documents show. However, design flaws and construction errors caused the initiative to fall far short.

By September 2004, congressional figures show that the effort's centerpiece -- a $73 million U.S. Agency for International Development program -- had produced only 100 finished projects, most of them refurbishments of existing buildings. As of the beginning of this month, only about 40 more had been finished and turned over to the Afghan government.

Internal documents and more than 100 interviews in Washington and Kabul revealed a chain of mistakes and misjudgments: The U.S. effort was poorly conceived in a rush to show results before the Afghan presidential election in late 2004. The drive to construct earthquake-resistant, American-quality buildings in rustic villages led to culture clashes, delays and what a USAID official called "extraordinary costs." Afghans complained that the initial design for roofs made them too heavy to build in rural areas without a crane, and the corrected design made them too light to bear Afghan snows. Local workmen unfamiliar with U.S. construction methods sometimes produced shoddy work.

Think this isn't happening today in America? Of course, it is! This is the modus operandi of the famed American military/industrial complex as built during the Vietnam war. Unlike the WWII efforts, the sole reason we do anything is so top executives can get huge pay checks. Period.

There is no other reason. Oh, and propaganda. Potemkin projects galore.

Their sole function is to ape WWII real projects that were done with ernest, real reasons. Of course, Democrats ran THAT show. They passed laws preventing the wholesale looting of the Treasury by military companies. No war windfall profits! Everyone worked together to a real end, not a nebulous end.

The rip-off artists running America today have only one goal: to enrich themselves by hook or crook and deposit the money in bank accounts outside of America. And then move outside, themselves, to live like pashas.

To do this, today, they are cutting Medicare, Medicade, reducing the inflation boosts to fixed incomes by manipulating inflation numbers, cutting school aid, children's care programs, school building in America, housing programs for the poor, hurricane aid that goes directly to families and not them, etc. Meanwhile, the flow of red ink goes utterly unabated, nay, it has increased in volume. One huge tap is the Iraq/Afghani war that we lost utterly and hopelessly. If we withdraw, oil will go up in price but it already has so what the hell?

It doesn't matter anymore, does it? Do we buy oil from there?

NO! Japan does! Japan is not paying for this damn war, they are loaning us money, setting us up to be Weimar Germany, forced to pay off huge war reparations. In this case, the pay-off will put us in hock to an industrial power who doesn't mean well for us since they openly lust for using us as a military tool.

The Chinese this week played a magnificient diplomatic game. Understanding how power grows out of the barrel of a gun yet talk softly and carry a big club, they made Bush salute their troops over and over again as they paraded communist icons past him just like Putin did, communicating to their own people, like Putin did, that the triumph of the communist states will be total in the end, Bush stood there, cap in hand, cup in other hand, begging and they graciously handed over something that was already in the bag, a jet contract for military/industrialist entity, Boeing! Boo! What a victory.

Not.

So the Chinese are keeping Boeing alive, economically. As well as buying our bonds that are pretty much worthless since our ability to repay will be very restricted if they need to call in our debts by selling back the bonds (an impossibility now). So here we are: going steeply into debt in a stupid war that has no goals except to make traitors very rich at our expense, many soldiers dying or being severely disabled, and for what?

So the Iraqis can vote? Gads. Tell me another fairy tale.

And Downey can go there and do foot patrols if he is so hot to trot. Put his lousy, nasty life where it counts. Stop bloviating at the Washington Pest.

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Like Roberston, O'Reilly of FOX TV Wants to Kill Americans

2005-11-12T15:57:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Right on the heels of satanic ritualist, Pat Robertson, far right wing fascist O'Reilly hopes al Qaeda attacks San Francisco. Again and again, these clowns show who they really hate: good Americans. Homeland Security should arrest them for inciting terrorism.

From SF Gate:

Not everybody took Fox News host Bill O'Reilly's on-air comments this week about terrorists bombing Coit Tower as the hyperbole that fills the talk-radio ether. One of the ticked off was San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly, who Friday called for O'Reilly to be fired.

"For an anchor on a major station, Fox News, to be saying those kinds of things, it's just not OK," Daly said Friday. "It was just over the top."

Agreeing with Daly was San Francisco firefighters union president John Hanley, and not just because the hose-shaped tower is a tribute to firefighters.

O'Reilly gets to be on TV, on the radio, in print, he is literally everywhere. He gets top dollar and top billing. Some clowns are paying him a lot of money to trash talk Americans. Why they do this?

Well, Murdoch wasn't even an American, he is now, but he keeps his other passports because he isn't really an American, this "divided loyalty" garbage means everyone connected with keeping America safe, well, don't want to. These bangers of the patriotism bucket are often cynics pretending to be one of us while keeping the back door open for departure to where ever they hail from.

O'Reilly doesn't hold two passports but then, he is just their barking dog, doing his master's bidding. And his master, Murdoch, obviously is very pleased that his pet hates America and attacks Americans. This is a top thing with these ueber-menschen: to divide their host nations, to seperate and destroy the American unity. Since the majority of Americans are agaisnt the war in Iraq and it is obvious most of us have zero desire to die in Iraq or to go bankrupt in Iraq, the people who really hate America like O'Reilly and Murdoch have to stir the pot of poison, attacking us for being correct and sane.

Why doesn't the FCC shut these clowns down and force Murdoch to sell off his properties? After all, would we invite Tokyo Rose to host radio shows after WWII? Would we hire Goebbels to run our news media after WWII? Heck, knowing the Bushes, Prescott probably would have!

Time to fine Murdoch, fine O'Reilly, arrest them for urging terrorist attacks! After all, you are either with the good guys or you want terrorists to attack American, right?

Right.

More news:From Think Progress:

O’Reilly not only stood by his comments, but claimed they “needed to be said”:

I mean, look, everybody knows what’s going on there. What I said isn’t controversial. What I said needed to be said. I’m sitting here and I’m looking at a city that has absolutely no clue about what the world is. None. You know, if you had been hit on 9/11 instead of New York, believe me, you would not have voted against military recruting. Yet the left-wing, selfish, Land of Oz philosophy that the media and the city politicians have embraced out there is an absolute intellectual disgrace.

This man has no shame. Like the Cheney chick peddling women's rights, he pretends to be a patriot...well, why aren't reams of right wingloon youths signing up to fight in Iraq? Why should sane people in SF sign up? Eh? What? Why have recruiters, even, if patriotism is all about fighting? Where is the right wing?

NYers aren't all hyped up to fight in Iraq. They know this is a diversion. We all know this. Time to arrest terrorists like O'Reilly.

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Washington Post Asks Bush to be Sane About Global Warming

2005-11-07T21:52:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The Washington Post thinks Bush can read and will listen to them tell him to do something about global warming. But he is happy with it because it increases banana production. This is why he wanted a single market at the Americas summit meeting. Chavez wrecked that scheme!

From the Washington Post editors:

ACCORDING TO the British press, the Prince of Wales issued a "gentle rebuke" to President Bush last week. Speaking at a formal White House dinner, Prince Charles said that "many people throughout the world look to the U.S. for a lead on the most crucial issues that face our planet." That, apparently, was a coded challenge to the president to do more about climate change and the greenhouse gas emissions that cause it.

Nothing less than a swift kick to the head will get any point across the chimperer-in-chief. Not a soul on this planet looks towards Bush for leadership. This is why, when he dares to visit any country, huge numbers of people turn out to scream at him to go away! Just this week, they were waving signs saying, "We don't want you on this planet!" at him!

Speaking at the first day of a summit of energy and environment ministers, Mr. Blair noticeably hinted at the idea that Europeans should begin moving away from reliance on the Kyoto treaty to meet the goal of curbing greenhouse emissions.

Since the USA, the world's biggest polluter, won't sign the treaty or change, nay, we are making things much worse each year, deliberately, Blair is "hinting" that everyone else drop the treaty?

And this says what? To my ears, it sounds like giving the fuck up! Forget about global warming! Hey, it is rapidly reducing America to rubble! Hoorah!

Instead of an "external force" that would impose an "internal target," Mr. Blair said that "in the world after 2012 we need to find a better, more sensitive set of mechanisms to deal with this problem."

Blair won't say what this mechanism is. Perhaps, this is the goal of the ridiculous Mars mission: to remove Bush and his buddies to another planet!

In the five years since Mr. Bush was first elected, climate-change science has been moving rapidly toward firmer conclusions. More scientists have observed the impact of global warming on plant and animal life, on the Arctic ice pack, and on weather patterns. More studies have concluded that human activity is a cause. The president has a chance to break the vicious cycle of European whining and American stonewalling on climate change. He should take it.

Yeah, Europeans suffering from global warming should what, shut up? So should we? The Washington Post's editor who is a drinking buddy of Bush and I wouldn't be surprized if the drinks aren't hard liquour, sneers at the people we are victimizing. How tiresome of them to rudely talk about American pollution of the entire planet?

Naw. We will change...When it is way too late. But then, the sight of zillions of Americans fleeing destruction in a snarl of creeping SUVs has amused millions across the planet.

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The Owners and Advertisers in the Media Protect Bush Every Time He Falls Down

2005-11-01T06:48:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Now that Scooter was thrown off the sleigh to be devoured by wolves, the media owners and advertisers and the rich in general all have banded together to save Bush yet again. They want us to go away and ask no pesky questions. Party on, dudes!

From Editor and Publisher:

In its editorial analyzing the indictments of "Scooter" Libby returned yesterday by a federal grand jury, the Times reiterated its backing for Miller's original decision in refusing to testify, and said it had "no reservations" about backing her in jail, while noting that perhaps her struggle could have been handled somewhat differently:

"Journalists from some news organizations testified after trying to fight the subpoenas; others testified on the basis of a document White House officials were compelled to sign that said they waived any promises of confidentiality from reporters. Ms. Miller says she believed the waiver was coerced, and she went to jail until Mr. Libby assured her directly that he was freeing her from her promise.

"While she was imprisoned for 85 days, this newspaper and this page gave Ms. Miller unwavering support. Recently, Times executives have expressed regrets about some of the ways her case was handled. Reflecting on these events, we have no reservations about the obligation of this paper to stand behind our reporter while she was in jail. We also think Ms. Miller was right on the central point, that the original blanket White House waiver was coerced."

Coerced by the cops! Wow. Don't let the cops make criminals squeal! That is a no-no. This country screams about law and order and the need to kill to impose a New World Order but if the authors of all this control get caught breaking any laws, suddenly it is time for gentleness and forgiveness and simple stonewalling.

Of course, the dropping of the "sources say" identity cover was coerced. Since the people conspiring to attack a war critic were breaking some serious laws, they had to conspire further to prevent the deeds from seeing the light of day because it unravels a very dangerous alliance: the press, which is supposed to be feeding information to us is actually colluding with criminals to hide information we need while using secret information to defame.

When Hoover of the FBI went slithering to President Kennedy to ask him if he could use some Martin Luther King blackmail they unearthed while illegally listening in to King's private life by wiring up his hotel rooms so they could watch him all the time, Kennedy said no. It was morally wrong. Then Hoover, I assume, warned the President that he has more dirt of similar import. Kennedy ended up dead as we all know.

Look at Clinton! The media and the people in charge of the machinery in DC went after him relentlessly. Instead of dealing with bin Laden's developing conspiracy which, according to Able Danger, the FBI and CIA knew about, instead, an army of agents went about trolling for Clinton's sex life.

Once it was discovered that he had one, the media joined the witchhunt, howling like banshees. The reason they did all this is very simple: he raised taxes on the rich and he stopped many entities from forming interlocking monopolies and cartels and he crushed oil profits when they tried to milk the system for more loot.

Well, the oil companies are very fat and well fed. They have reaped vast profits and now will settle in and let prices drop to keep Bush's ratings at about 40%, out of the danger zone. Bush doesn't care, he isn't running for office. The GOP knows they only have to come within 5points of winning and tweaking that 5 extra points by screwing around with the voting tallies is easy.

But they are nervous. So the media has ramped up a campaign to do two contridictory things: keep the right wing in power while keeping the right wing troops from gaining anything they really want like the abortion stuff. The restrictions on abortions will be carefully crafted so that they apply only to the poor and middle class. The rich will have their beloved "health of the mother" loophole which they always used, I know this for a fact. Never have they had to go to any back alleys for abortions.

Fellow columnist John Tierney, however, suggested that the administration leaks about Plame were not deliberate, nothing but an "accident."

He said journalists will suffer: "Still, the biggest losers so far in this case -- aside, of course, from Scooter Libby - are journalists. We've spent our careers assuring sources that we'll protect them, but now they can see how our testimony led to one source's indictment. If there's a trial, reporters will have to publicly betray Libby's confidences - and probably endure assaults on their integrity and accuracy from Libby's lawyers."

Of course, these creeps need to confuse honest Americans by pretending that men and women in power are the same as whistleblowers who take their careers and lives into jeopardy to uncover the illegal or dangerous actions of the rich and powerful. Mixing up these utterly opposite identities is at the core of the "we must protect our sources" debate.

The fact that the NYT's owner and the owners of all the vast media circus that is wheezing and bellowing this lie about sources needing to be protected (well, actually, the rich always protect each other's tools!) is a sign of exactly how sick our empire has become. These liars and conspiritors need to confuse people just long enough to finish the looting of the world. When everything collapses, and it has a 100% chance of doing that when America goes bankrupt, these clowns dream of hop scotching off to other lands or worse, imposing a full fascist dictatorship or something like China has, and living in armed compounds while we die outside the gates.

Manhattan is an island, after all. Easy to protect. Remember, Manhattan sided with the King many years ago, to Washington's despair.

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