Our civil liberties and First Amendment rights are threatened by the Supreme Court’s decisions in the Julian Assange case; if Mitt Romney’s father was still around, he’d probably endorse Obama; meanwhile, Fox News is ruining the GOP. These discoveries and more below.
On a regular basis, Truthdig brings you the news items and odds and ends that have found their way to Larry Gross, director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. A specialist in media and culture, art and communication, visual communication and media portrayals of minorities, Gross helped found the field of gay and lesbian studies.
The links below open in a new window. Newer ones are on top.
Falling in Love With Dusty Treaties
One of the more surprising twists in recent Middle East punditry is a sudden surge of interest among pro-Israel hard-liners in the fine points of international law.
Can Italy Change?
What would it mean for a country to change profoundly? What real news would we get of that and how would it feel to its citizens?
Citizen Philosophers: Teaching Justice in Brazil
Getting out of the cave and seeing things as they really are: that’s what philosophy is about, according to Almira Ribeiro, a high school teacher in a beautiful, poor and violent neighborhood in Brazil’s northeast.
Science decodes ‘internal voices’
Researchers have demonstrated a striking method to reconstruct words, based on the brain waves of patients thinking of those words.
A tale of two Romneys
If former Michigan governor and auto-industry CEO George Romney—father of GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney—were here today, his son would probably be calling him a European socialist. And George Romney would probably be supporting the auto policies of Obama and possibly endorsing the president for reelection.
Is Ron Paul Selling Out To Mitt Romney—Already?
Watching Ron Paul and Mitt Romney campaign for president, they would seem to be polar opposites in their perspectives on critical issues, from economic policy to foreign affairs. Yet close observers of both now agree that these two very different candidates are covertly allied against Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, the surviving insurgents.
How Fox News Is Destroying The Republican Party
More and more despondent conservatives are expressing alarm over the unfolding Republican primary season and what they see as the party’s dwindling chances of defeating President Obama in November. If the current state of concern transforms into a larger, enveloping blame game, Fox News chairman Ailes ought be a looming target.
If you have trouble leaving a comment, review this help page. Still having problems? Let us know. If you find yourself moderated, take a moment to review our comment policy.
There’s nothing complex about any of this. It’s just the usual shoot the messenger bullshit you always get from those who are doing wrong and don’t want anyone to know. The ‘rape’ case in Sweden is an obvious set up and has never been anything else. Arundhati Roy summed the big picture up perfectly:
She correctly identifies how impossible it now is to separate economics and war which have fused and become the same thing. The economic agenda is the plan and war is the way it is enforced. She also correctly identifies the way in which globalization has become another version of the divine right of kings: ‘Powerful, pitiless and armed to the teeth, he’s the kind of king the world has never known before. His realm is raw capital, his conquests emerging markets, his prayers profits, his borders limitless, his weapons nuclear’ (From ‘The Chequebook and the Cruise Missile’). At the World Water Forum in Holland she heard an American ‘expert’ claim, ‘God gave us the rivers but he didn’t put in the delivery systems. That’s why we need the market’. Arundhati Roy understands the situation: the lunatics are running the asylum and the future of the human race and all life on earth depends on taking the asylum back. The real ‘crime’ of Manning and Assange is that they understand it too.
As Roy points out, people all over the world are ‘fighting for a right to information. The organizations that control the world today – the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank – operate in complete secrecy’. The World Bank employs hordes of PHDs in the same way that 80% of science graduates in America end up working for the military creating weapons of mass destruction. The World Bank knows that to continue justifying the status quo it must not only control money but knowledge:
‘It funds studies that suit its purpose’, Roy writes. ‘Then it disseminates them and produces a particular kind of worldview that is supposed to be based on neutral facts. But it’s not. It’s not at all’.
Military/ corporatist consciousness, is not the outcome of reason and rational consideration of facts, whether economic or historic –it is in fact a created consciousness which induces conformity, based on the preferences and ideology of a group of people who are unelected and make up less than 1% of the population of any nation. The real facts must be hidden and those who reveal them must be punished. Assange’s fate is our fate and our planet’s fate and it’s right to point that out. Information is power.
LOL, LaFayette! The US wants to try Assange for “sedition” because of leaks that directly challenge the methods of the business world? Please! What is at stake here is the grave political danger of government “surveilling” ordinary citizens into conformity, and eliminating freedom of speech, of information, and of action—all of which are the life blood of democracy.
The grave danger that it may be possible to give citizens of a democracy the information which they must have in order to govern themselves—that’s what’s at stake here.
Why else would this vast amount of money be spent on two trials heavily prejudiced in advance, with “suspects” accused of being “traitors”, being isolated and imprisoned for months and months on evidence from sleazy betrayals?
These give all the appearance of “show trials” to see how far citizens will permit short-sighted authorities to go in avoiding the truth they, and we, must ultimately face if the human race is to survive. It’s that important.
LL: The Assange case means we are all suspects now Washington’s enemy is not “terrorism” but the principle of free speech and voices of conscience within its militarist state.
More sensationalist, over-the-top, journalistic hyperbole from the Looney Left. Aka, print just about anything to grab eye-attention.
Washington is too complex an entity of competing forces to have focused on just the above. Besides, the basics of the Assange case have not been heard and decided by any court in the land. (Only in the UK is Assange in front of a judge to dismiss a lower-court’s decision to extradite him to Sweden. And if we want sensaationalism, let’s get into why the court wants him extradited, shall we?)
Wikileaks was both a good and a bad thing. It opened up wide the underbelly of diplomacy, which we have known has always been two-faced. It just made that fact more grusomely obvious. But did we really learn something that we did not know - and, more importantly, that we needed to know?
Yes, that the Pentagon, for all its daunting intelligence operatives can’t seem to find and close a possible breach of confidential information. Hoo-rah ...
MY POINT
It’s time for WikiLeaks to move on.
We need one for whistle-blowers, both in government and in business. But most importantly in business, where the mischief is greatest and those fomenting it are whistling Dixie all the way to the bank. (In effect, down a flight of stairs within their own offices.)
Such a Corporate Wiki-Leaks would help prosecutors put the culprits before a judge - which would do all of us a world of good.
Marching in Chicago: Resisting Rahm Emanuel’s Neoliberal Savagery
 . '/' . substr('9781556592478',-6,3) . '/' . '9781556592478' . '.jpg'; ?>)
Email 
Print
Share
Email to a friend
Newsletter 
Like Us
Follow Us
Get Our Feed
By diamond, February 6, 2012 at 2:43 pm Link to this comment
There’s nothing complex about any of this. It’s just the usual shoot the messenger bullshit you always get from those who are doing wrong and don’t want anyone to know. The ‘rape’ case in Sweden is an obvious set up and has never been anything else. Arundhati Roy summed the big picture up perfectly:
She correctly identifies how impossible it now is to separate economics and war which have fused and become the same thing. The economic agenda is the plan and war is the way it is enforced. She also correctly identifies the way in which globalization has become another version of the divine right of kings: ‘Powerful, pitiless and armed to the teeth, he’s the kind of king the world has never known before. His realm is raw capital, his conquests emerging markets, his prayers profits, his borders limitless, his weapons nuclear’ (From ‘The Chequebook and the Cruise Missile’). At the World Water Forum in Holland she heard an American ‘expert’ claim, ‘God gave us the rivers but he didn’t put in the delivery systems. That’s why we need the market’. Arundhati Roy understands the situation: the lunatics are running the asylum and the future of the human race and all life on earth depends on taking the asylum back. The real ‘crime’ of Manning and Assange is that they understand it too.
As Roy points out, people all over the world are ‘fighting for a right to information. The organizations that control the world today – the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank – operate in complete secrecy’. The World Bank employs hordes of PHDs in the same way that 80% of science graduates in America end up working for the military creating weapons of mass destruction. The World Bank knows that to continue justifying the status quo it must not only control money but knowledge:
‘It funds studies that suit its purpose’, Roy writes. ‘Then it disseminates them and produces a particular kind of worldview that is supposed to be based on neutral facts. But it’s not. It’s not at all’.
Military/ corporatist consciousness, is not the outcome of reason and rational consideration of facts, whether economic or historic –it is in fact a created consciousness which induces conformity, based on the preferences and ideology of a group of people who are unelected and make up less than 1% of the population of any nation. The real facts must be hidden and those who reveal them must be punished. Assange’s fate is our fate and our planet’s fate and it’s right to point that out. Information is power.
Report thisBy gerard, February 5, 2012 at 2:28 pm Link to this comment
LOL, LaFayette! The US wants to try Assange for “sedition” because of leaks that directly challenge the methods of the business world? Please! What is at stake here is the grave political danger of government “surveilling” ordinary citizens into conformity, and eliminating freedom of speech, of information, and of action—all of which are the life blood of democracy.
Report thisThe grave danger that it may be possible to give citizens of a democracy the information which they must have in order to govern themselves—that’s what’s at stake here.
Why else would this vast amount of money be spent on two trials heavily prejudiced in advance, with “suspects” accused of being “traitors”, being isolated and imprisoned for months and months on evidence from sleazy betrayals?
These give all the appearance of “show trials” to see how far citizens will permit short-sighted authorities to go in avoiding the truth they, and we, must ultimately face if the human race is to survive. It’s that important.
By Lafayette, February 5, 2012 at 5:13 am Link to this comment
OTT JOURNALISM
More sensationalist, over-the-top, journalistic hyperbole from the Looney Left. Aka, print just about anything to grab eye-attention.
Washington is too complex an entity of competing forces to have focused on just the above. Besides, the basics of the Assange case have not been heard and decided by any court in the land. (Only in the UK is Assange in front of a judge to dismiss a lower-court’s decision to extradite him to Sweden. And if we want sensaationalism, let’s get into why the court wants him extradited, shall we?)
Wikileaks was both a good and a bad thing. It opened up wide the underbelly of diplomacy, which we have known has always been two-faced. It just made that fact more grusomely obvious. But did we really learn something that we did not know - and, more importantly, that we needed to know?
Yes, that the Pentagon, for all its daunting intelligence operatives can’t seem to find and close a possible breach of confidential information. Hoo-rah ...
MY POINT
It’s time for WikiLeaks to move on.
We need one for whistle-blowers, both in government and in business. But most importantly in business, where the mischief is greatest and those fomenting it are whistling Dixie all the way to the bank. (In effect, down a flight of stairs within their own offices.)
Such a Corporate Wiki-Leaks would help prosecutors put the culprits before a judge - which would do all of us a world of good.
Report this