Flinging Poo at the Monkeys

Ever since the earthquake and tsunami hit I've been watching the coverage from various sources, both online and on television. I rarely watch TV, especially for news, and the crap that passes for coverage on American network and cable news is appalling when you compare it with international sources. Before I could find the cable station with straight from Japan coverage, I had to wade through an embarrassment of faux-journalism that was painful to watch.

First of all, it has never been more obvious that the talking heads on television are not journalists but merely actors paid to read lines written by someone else. They're so used to handing off the story of the day to whatever propaganda spouting figure the network has provided for them that they are helpless when it comes to any in depth reporting done on the fly.

They fumble, stumble, and end up repeating inane phrases over and over again, as they desperately try and pass the story off to the expert who isn't there because there's no party line to push when it's a tragedy that happens somewhere else.

Give them a few days. I'm sure the experts will show up soon to promote more oil drilling in our backyards and less regulations in order to free up the supplies. How can the Corporate Borg resist such a natural disaster opportunity to promote their slash, burn, and get stinking rich policies?

But until then there's always "the man/woman on the street" who is asked how they feel so they can blather on in mindless fashion like some idiot wind-up toy until they're mercifully cut off for yet another commercial. And when the talking heads return after a slew of totally inappropriate perky ads, there's always a near feeding frenzy over some poor unfortunate fool who claims a friend of a friend of a cousin three times removed who knows someone who may have been in Japan AT THE VERY MOMENT THE DISASTER HIT!

All this pales when measured against the bigger shame, and that is how the news actors, when they finally get their new scripts and no longer have to try and improvise, talk down to the viewers. They know that most of their audience probably consists of knuckle-draggers and geriatric viewers who haven't quite figured out that new-fangled internet thing so they're forced to watch TV News. They know their audience's knowledge of Science probably came from visiting the Creation Museum, and watching the Jesus was an Alien channel that ignores any history older than 6000 years.

They know they have to explain the simplest concepts such as what is an earthquake and did god do it or is it more of that global warming (snicker snicker) nonsense?  If they don't simplify it to barely breathing level, they know their audience will go back to watching Jesus's spaceship land on the pyramids, or some gossip station that talks breathlessly of people they've neve met but knos more about than members of their own families.

I joke but I was shocked at how simple the concepts were that they're forced to explain to what is probably the most uneducated and unsophisticaed audience on the planet. "There are two kinds of earthquakes; shallow ones and deep ones." It's obvious they're assuming their audience slept through the third grade, and they're probably right.

Meanwhile, online you can get live coverage with real experts who actually study earthquakes, who know something about tsunamis other than surfing jokes, who have no agenda to push other than letting you know the facts of what happened. You have journalists on the ground following leads such as nuclear plants that are about to explode, instead of American TV who uses the potential tragedy as an opportunity to promote coal mining and oil drilling and only covers the nuclear plant by saying horrid things like "the Japanese have a lot more reason than we do to fear nukes." Seriously. This came out of the mouth of an American news actor.

What is lost in all this simplistic reporting of monumental events is that when you have a news source such as Al-Jazeera English ,the Guardian, the BBC, and online blogs that carry live twitter feeds from people on the ground, you have an audience that expects a certain level of reporting. This expectation creates a literate and educated journalistic pool more interested in bringing you the story than creating or slanting it to fit a particular advertiser or network owner.

American news,  instead of reporting the facts, repeatedly slants the story to create the propaganda they're pushing. The talking heads are interchangeable and do little but act as set decorations with moving lips. Instead of in depth reporting, the American audience gets Joe Doofus on the street talking stupid shit that is supposed to be average, but instead comes off sounding totally idiotic and nonsensical.

 It beats having to cover the story and it sure beats educating the audience beyond the point where simple Scientific concepts are too difficult for them to grasp. Because if the viewers get too smart, then they won't buy the stupid, meaningless crap that takes up most of the half hour anyway. And that's what American TV really exists for: to sell stuff. They could care less about the news, about the audience, about the idiocy of the viewing public. All they care is that you buy enough of the advertised crap so they can keep their job reading propaganda written by their overlords to pass on to viewing morons.

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Flinging Poo at the Monkeys

The Corporate States of America presents...

Last week Senator Franken tore into Comcast CEO Brian Roberts over conflicting responses he gave regarding the proposed merger with NBC. read more



And previously a few weeks before, the Supreme Court put the control of elections in the hands of Corporations by giving them a blank check to buy any politicians they want, no matter who the American people would rather have represent them. This decision insured that party affiliation will cease to matter and candidates will represent entities such as banks, Pharmaceutical companies, the Insurance lobby, agri-business, Wall Street, and anyone with the millions and millions of dollars required to run for office as a voice of the "people."

There is no clearer example of how bad this can get than that found in NBC's coverage of the Olympics. Most Americans don't realize what an obscenity this coverage has become because they're not allowed to see anything but NBC's little handpicked circus.

People like me who live on the border with Canada receive in the moment live coverage through Canada's CTV, while viewers in Seattle, 90 miles south, and much of the country, have to wait for taped versions airing hours later. (By the way, my cable service is Comcast which means they are CHOOSING to block Seattle viewers from an event happening in their own backyard.)

And if anyone wants to go online to try and find live coverage, they'll run into a blockade set up by the marriage from hell between NBC and Comcast. There is no live coverage. Between the two of them, they've made sure no one gets to watch any Olympic coverage that hasn't passed through their biases and filters.

As a consumer with a small window of choice, I've noticed some glaring differences in the coverage between CTV and NBC. The most obvious and the saddest for Americans, is that Canada still remembers the Olympics are a sporting event. They try to cover as many events live as possible, and they show taped events only when it wasn't possible to show two things at once. Even then, there's access on another Canadian service for those who must watch their favorite events live.

While they praise their athletes, they are fair about it and show as many of the other competitors as possible. Their coverage is like the Olympics of a few years ago when everyone gathered to watch their favorite events live...even if they were televised at 3 am. There were dead times, there were athletes from obscure countries, there were unrehearsed moments. And there was excitement, anticipation, fun and a sense of the whole world watching at the same time.

This was the spirit of the Olympics, an event that began as a break from war and hostilities to put on an athletic event that allowed nations to compete with each other and bring honor to their nations in a peaceful manner. And it is a spirit the Canadians clearly understand and share as much as possible with anyone who wants to take part.

In contrast, NBC/Comcast do not see the Olympics as an athletic competition. For them it is a marketing event, a chance to herd "viewers" into a common pen they have no choice of allowing themselves to be herded into if they want to watch the show. Once in this pen they are bombarded with advertisements and messages designed to sell you everything from drugs to your next president.

And their coverage is filled with jingoistic praise and slogans for the individual athletes--as long as they are American and have a wealthy future of many endorsements waiting for them. Everyone else is irrelevant, unless they come from one of the many evil empires America has to keep thumping its chest over, so the sheep will continue to give them even more money for war. Then it becomes hero vs. villain, a real comic book depiction of what other countries take as a serious athletic competition.

American commentators talk incessantly through the events, chattering inanely about petty gossip and endorsement futures, while the Canadians remain respectfully silent except for the moments when they explain the technical aspects of an event as if they had an intelligent audience interested in what they have to say. American commentators talk as if their audience was a captive test group for the corporate marketing departments who study the right buzz words to win the consumer dollar.

This is sad because the Olympics were meant to be a time of peace when all nations came together for some good, old-fashioned fun. It's a shame that in America, that fun has been handed over to the corporate ringmasters interested only in financial gain and propaganda.

I wish everyone had the opportunity to watch the Olympics as they were meant to be watched. It might end some of the cynicism, the divisions, the mean-spirited attacks on each other that seems to grow bigger each day. But then, maybe that is what the corporate interests fear. They can only profit from hatred and division. It's their bread and butter and they're not about to give it up.

But you can fight back by writing to Senators such as Al Franken and letting him know he has your support at preventing a merger between NBC and Comcast because with their Olympics coverage they've given the American people a very clear picture of why this merger is a very bad idea. And it's your right to have what our neighbors to the north have so skillfully demonstrated is the right of everyone to enjoy--a sporting event meant for the world to share together in real time.

The Corporate States of America presents...

Politicizing 9-11

It's too bad the Republicans and ABC had to exploit the tragedy of 9-11 by allowing Sarah Palin's political rant to take the place of news coverage. At least Obama's campaign treated the day with respect. But considering that from the moment this event happened, the Republicans have done nothing but exploit the tragedy for their own political agenda, then I'm not surprised. Disappointed once again. Sad for the families that had to see that. But so typical of the abusive exploitation synonymous with the political agenda of the Republican party. Shame on ABC and shame on Sarah Palin. I ask as has been asked before at the callous exploitation of human beings for political gain: where is your sense of decency?

Technorati Tags: Sarah Palin interview, ABC, exploiting 911 for political gain, propaganda, anti-gop, anti-republican, anti-Palin

Politicizing 9-11

The Manipulated Mind

Today I had one of those mercifully brief conversations via email with a poor fool who claimed to be in the army. He could barely put a sentence together and most of his accusations were on the level of a fifth grader shouting insults to anyone within hearing distance. My first inclination was to dismiss him as too stupid, too uneducated, too enamored of slogans and sound bites to be what he claimed to be. But then I remembered this article by Fred Kaplan I read a few months ago called Dumb and Dumber. Here's an excerpt:

"In order to meet recruitment targets, the Army has even had to scour the bottom of the barrel. There used to be a regulation that no more than 2 percent of all recruits could be "Category IV"—defined as applicants who score in the 10^th to 30^th percentile on the aptitude tests. In 2004, just 0.6 percent of new soldiers scored so low. In 2005, as the Army had a hard time recruiting, the cap was raised to 4 percent. And in 2007, according to the new data, the Army exceeded even that limit—4.1 percent of new recruits last year were Cat IVs."

I realized then he was probably a charter member of the lowered standards club, and when he began to spout "war on terrah" programmed responses to me I realized he was just another tool of the puppet masters he didn't have a clue were controlling his strings. If he was halfway smart enough (unlikely) to Google the phrases he was lamely trying to type, he'd see how they were spread around to people like him like shit on a cornfield.

One person who did bother to type in some phrases was Dr. Danielle Allen who tracked down the origins of the Obama chain mail that falsely accused him of being a radical Muslim. According to an article in the Washington Post An Attack That Came Out Of The Ether, Dr. Allen reached a virtual dead end until she typed certain syntactic phrases in Google that seemed to repeat in the chain letter and Internet postings:

"Poring over these early articles on the topic, Allen noticed what she thought was an important pattern. In each instance, someone had posted the articles on the Free Republic Web site, prompting a discussion involving the same handful of people, with several expressing a desire to spread the word about Obama's supposed faith."

The Propaganda Machine method used by Fascists, Nazis, and run of the mill petty dictators in Banana Republics, the Pentagon and other tyrannical organizations, do very little of the leg work themselves. They put the word out in someplace where the frenzied do their feeding, and then they let the uneducated and deluded minions, like the "soldier" who quoted slogans to me today, spread their propaganda for them.

But in order to do this effectively, they have to keep the messengers in a state of constant fear. Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine is excellently reviewed by Chris Barsanti's Brave New World.

"Believers in the shock doctrine are convinced that only a great rupture-a flood, a war, a terrorist attack-can generate the kind of vast, clean canvases they crave. It is in these malleable moments, when we are psychologically unmoored and physically uprooted, that these artists of the real plunge in their hands and begin their work of remaking the world." (from The Shock Doctrine)

The article describes how effective tools such as economic distress caused by gas prices, increasing food prices, and the home mortgage meltdown are when used by those who want to control and manipulate the population. When you take away the safety nets, the ability to survive, you are left with terrified and confused human beings who are looking for any way out of their horrible situations, anyone to blame for the sudden and inconceivable reality they are now forced to live. By taking away the familiar, the comfortable, the necessary, such manipulators send these organisms into shock and thereby control them the same way one controls a lab rat with electric shocks.

And it's usually based on greed and financial gain. If enough people who could make a difference choose to ignore disasters such as Katrina, eventually they and their buddies can go in and put up expensive beach front condos where the poor were literally washed away from. They don't even bother to justify it. Just as the Fascists saw themselves as entitled to rule over the masses because of some privileged delusionary mindset, and just as the Nazis and their belief they were the master race allowed them to kill millions of people, these neo-bastards don't consider those who die to make them rich worthy of a moment's thought. They can't be shamed because they have no shame. They can't be made to care because they have no conscience. It's all about the money and the power that comes with it. They laugh at tools like the soldier who spouted the propaganda they wrote for him. They'd kill him as easily as swatting a fly no matter how good a puppet he was for them.

Propaganda and the creation of convenient and stupid political human tools to spread whispering campaigns are as old as the first politicians running for office against each other for a chance to feed at the public trough. As Bill Shunas writes in Fraggin':

"For forty-four years, Cold War propaganda held sway in this country. It had a large role in allowing politicians and corporations to have their way in domestic and foreign affairs — even if their way had nothing to do with the Russian or Chinese menace. For all practical purposes the menace mainly was an excuse for corporate America's efforts to secure markets and raw
materials in other countries and feed at the defense industry trough at home. If the standoff with the Soviet Union hadn't existed, then they would have liked to invent it."

Barsanti's article ends with the following chilling paragraph:

"It would be nice to think that (Milton) Friedman and others like him were and are just the ivory tower deep thinkers of repute, that like Marx and Engels, they don’t deserve criticism for the evil done in their name. It’s hard to believe that, though, once Klein brings up the case of Orlando Letelier. In August 1976, Orlando Letelier (one-time Chilean diplomat, at that point
working for an American progressive think tank) published an essay in The Nation, “The Chicago Boys in Chile”, which included a charge that Friedman personally shared responsibility for Pinochet’s crimes against humanity, that there was “an inner harmony” between the free market and unlimited terror. A month later, as Letelier was driving to work in Washington, D.C., a bomb planted in his car by a member of Pinochet’s secret police exploded, killing Letelier and a colleague. Today there’s a memorial commemorating the location of the assassination, a physical testament to the “inner harmony” that threatens us all. "

The Manipulated Mind

Flies On The Wall #44

Flies On The Wall #44

Anna Nicole and The Bubble Boy

There's something deeply obscene and sad about the way the world came to a sudden stop the other day over Anna Nicole Smith. People who had shut out most of the Iraq war horrors, and the reality of a leadership that sees its own citizens as impediments on its path to perpetual war, and the juvenile and vengeful reactions of the Libby-Cheney cabal over someone who dared to insert some truth into their bullshit--they all stopped to pay a weird sort of homage to this pathetic caricature of a woman.


After I got over my outrage and stopped my stream of insults directed at the simple mindedness and short attention span of my fellow citizens, (her death replaced a crazed astronut in diapers, for dawg's sake!) I began to understand exactly what Anna Nicole represented and why she had such a pull on people. She was the America we've come to know in the last few years of the Bush Junta.


She was the garishness of an ideology that was fed by greed, an unfathomable lust for power, bling instead of substance, and the indifferent coupling required to move forward one notch on the political belt. With her inflated, unreal breasts, exaggerated red lips, and hair so stripped of color it was an anti-color, she paralleled the inflated expectations of world domination based on unreal mountains of evidence, an exaggeration of all fears and ethnic groups to more clearly create a red and blue divided country, and propaganda so stripped of truth that it became its own doublespeak crapped out daily by the White House press secretary of the quarter.


She was crude as Bushco is crude. She was uneducated as Bushco is uneducated. She was a package put together to appeal to the lowest common denominator just as the Buscho political agenda was put together to appeal to the dumbest of the dumb, the weakest and most gullible of the flock. She was portrayed as both the used and the user, just as Bush is portrayed as both puppet and inflexible ideologue. Everyone wanted to be her daddy but no one wanted to step up and take responsibility while she was alive, just as everyone can see the daddy issues between Bush the bubble boy and the daddy who loves Jeb best, but no one can step up and say get some therapy you assholes before you kill all of us.


And now the vultures that always follow train wrecks so they can pick the bones clean are circling Anna Nicole's preserved by court order body to lay claim to money she might be granted sometime in the mythical future. They are claiming paternity of her baby now that it is a child of future wealth and privilege instead of the product of their white trash coupling. They are saying oh how awful that she was so exploited as they stare transfixed at those enormous breasts, those red lips and hear that breathless little girl voice coming through the television screens once more.


And while they are so transfixed, Bush the Bubble boy is pulling wings off the fly that is Iran while shiny, ideological toys are waved in front of him by the neo-con vultures getting ready to wind up the idiot for one more spin around the room of smoke, mirrors and lies. If we fail to stop this next war in Iran, it is only fitting that Anna Nicole Smith becomes the historical symbol of our generation. We'll have earned her.

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Anna Nicole and The Bubble Boy