BITS & BITES

This is a new regular feature for "House on Fire." For now let's call it "Bits & Bites."

From time to time, I will be write a blog post, like this one, of short entries that touch on multiple issues and news stories.

Democracy Now Vs. A Politician Taking Nudie Shots of Himself

This snapshot of how news/"news" is reported in this country, is a typical example of what happens every day in the U.S. mainstream media....

On Friday, the independent, alternative, online news source DemocracyNow.org aired a program that included the following:

Headlines

* NSA Whistleblower Thomas Drake Reaches Plea Deal in Setback for Admin Crackdown
* NATO, Gaddafi Forces Launch New Attacks
* U.N. Human Rights Panel Hears Allegations of Gaddafi Crimes
* Panetta Expects Iraq Request for Prolonged Occupation
* Gates Chides NATO on Military Spending
* Syrian Forces Move on Restive Town
* Alabama OKs Harshest Anti-Immigrant Law in U.S.
* Manning Supporter Subpoenaed in WikiLeaks Case
* Gingrich Staffers Resign En Masse
* HIV/AIDS Meeting Targets New Infections
* Conviction Reached in 2007 Murder of Oakland Post Editor

In-depth Feature Stories with Extended Interviews

1/ Japan Admits 3 Nuclear Meltdowns, More Radiation Leaked into Sea; U.S. Nuclear Waste Poses Deadly Risks

2/ Dale Maharidge’s Chronicles of Widely Ignored U.S. Working Poor Inspire Music of Bruce Springsteen

The feature stories were detailed, engaging, and quite troubling. They gave facts and details about two very big problems that need to be urgently addressed.

Meanwhile, the mainstream, corporate-owned media gave us daily updates on yet another D.C. soap opera, this time involving a House Rep who sent naked photo of himself to a number of women. The media can't get a enough of this relatively minor story and now the Hill is obsessed with it as the best political football they've had to kick around for quite a while.

So you tell me: Are we being told the things we really need to know?

Go here to visit DemocracyNow.org. They air their one-hour news program live each weekday, and it, and archived installments remain available on the site.

 

Buy This Book: "Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression"

This is the book that was featured on DemocracyNow.org on Friday. In it you meet the real people in this country who have been facing their own Great Depression for 30 years.

It's written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Dale Maharidge -- who also gave us the landmark book "Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression" in the mid-90s -- and inspired rock legend Bruce Springsteen to pen "Youngstown" and "The New Timer."

Very Environmentally Friendly -- and easy to do

-- By now we should all be using our own carry bags to bring our groceries from the market. Have you every looked at how many of those plastic bags go into the average shopping cart? Multiply that out and it's an immense amount of ecological damage. Most supermarkets even have reusable carry bags for purchase, so it's an easy purchase to make. (Many supermarkets also recycle the bags they usually pack your groceries in. Give them a call and check.)

-- What could be easier than taking a coffee cup and drink container for non-bottled water to work? If your place of work uses bottled water, filter your own water at home and take it to work in a reusable container. And use a coffee cup instead of any disposable cups on offer. Again, multiply it out. It's a lot of waste and pollution.
 

"Global Uprising" Book Inquiries

For those of you who've written asking me if I have paper or digital copies of the book I recently discussed in this blog -- "Global Uprising: Confronting the Tyrannies of the 21st Century: Stories from a New Generation of Activists" -- unfortunately I don't. The book is out of print but you should be able to track down a copy by doing a Web search.

Hillary Clinton to Head Up the World Bank?

I'd suggest that she is sufficiently lacking in principles to lead that corrupt and cruel organization if its goal is to continue to be raping the Third World.

Whitewater seems so long ago.

Reader Comments

I want to say how much I appreciate the reader comments I receive for this blog. Even the ones that suggest that I should leave the country immediately or risk being sent to Gitmo at the wrong end of a poison-tipped pitchfork. Special kudos to the chappy who completely misread a comment I left on a "news" site message thread, saying he took people "like me" very seriously and was going to report me to the FBI. In my mind, that counts as a character reference. Unfortunately, my friend, you're probably years too late. In all likelihood the FBI already has a half-baked file on my modest activism and political writing. (And I'm certain they've decided I'm not quite a Level 1 threat just yet.) Ironically, they may well have one on you too. And that's probably the key point here.

Money -- Part 2

I will be writing this blog post and hope to do so in the next week.


Best wishes and take care,
Adrian

IF YOU FOUND THIS BLOG POST INTERESTING you might also like to take a look at "MELTDOWN JAPAN. BYE BYE PLANET EARTH?"

“THEY’RE BEING EXECUTED ON THE BATTLEFIELD.”

We are murderers too.

By “we,” I mean the government that supposedly represents us after we supposedly put its members in power by means of what is supposedly a democratic process.

It’s easy for us, as poorly informed citizens who live relatively comfortably, to think that life is good and all the bad guys live in other countries. We know the names of the big ones: Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao. We were taught these things in school and by the History Channel.

But “we” are the bad guys too. In fact, what other nation can claim as much multinational malfeasance around the world since WWII, the era of the American Empire?

Our leadership through the decades is a rogues gallery. As preeminent socio-political intellectual/dissident Noam Chomsky has pointed out, if we applied the Nuremberg laws (from the Nuremberg trials of the head Nazis) to our U.S. presidents, you’d have to hang every one of them going back at least as far as WWII. I want to look at that in my next blog entry.

Today I want to look at the “micro” level. The level of the individual soldier.

To see a TV commercial for the Marines, you’d swear you were watching some cross between a Biblical epic and a superhero movie. A lot of “motivational” nonsense and BS. Trying to rope in the kids of the gaming era.

And you yourself might think it all looked pretty good. This factory that makes fine citizens who are tougher, smarter and better than the rest. The BS merchants propagandize us as much as they do those they seek to enlist. If the commercials showed more blood and entrails and honesty, well, they might not work so well.

The point is, our guys do bad things on (and around) the battlefield too. Please take a look at this news excerpt from the very fine website Democracynow.org:


‘Hersh: U.S. Carrying Out “Battlefield Executions” in Afghanistan

…investigative journalist Seymour Hersh (pictured above) says U.S. forces are carrying out battlefield executions of prisoners in Afghanistan. Hersh made the comment during a discussion at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Geneva. In 2004 Hersh broke the story about the abuse and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Seymour Hersh: "And the purpose of my [Abu Ghraib] stories was to take it out of the field into the White House, and where it -- you know, it’s not that the President or the Secretary of Defense, Mr. Rumsfeld, or Bush or Cheney -- it’s not that they knew what happened in Abu Ghraib. It’s that they had allowed this kind of activity to happen. And I’ll tell you right now, one of the great tragedies of my country is that Mr. Obama is looking the other way, because equally horrible things are happening to prisoners, I mean, to those we capture in Afghanistan. They’re being executed on the battlefield. It’s unbelievable stuff going on there that doesn’t necessarily get reported. And things don’t change.”

Seymour Hersh went on to say that he had been told about the battlefield executions by five or six different people.’

The issue here is that our Commander-and-Chief, his key people, the Congress and the top brass of the military, create a “war culture.” They unleash the dogs after feeding them raw meat and training them to kill. They have their military tactics (pretty easy stuff when you’re clearing a path with the most advanced military technology on the planet) but out in the field, as far as they in their ivory towers are concerned, whatever happens happens.

And so you have the My Lai massacre (another story Hersh broke back in 1969), Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, fragging in war, rape in war, and on down the line. None of us are made up of good alone. And under extreme pressure, our demons can be loosed.

The military personnel who commit these atrocities are not innocent. But more culpable are the decision-makers who put them in the position in which they act out. And the socio-economic system – fueled by corporate greed and political power lust – that creates and promotes those decision-makers.

Of course, saying this sort of thing out loud (or in a blog) will always be labeled as “unpatriotic” by some. Or it will be personalized at the micro level: “How dare you say that about our brave fighting men and women.” But I am not questioning the courage of the individual soldiers. I am admitting, on their behalf, the fallibility of their humanity. Whatever awful deeds they have done (and of course, the majority don’t commit war crimes – but they are willing to kill in illegal “wars” if ordered to), it is OUR duty to declare war on those who have used them like pawns.

So email your senators and congressmen and President Obama (who is the commander-in-chief and who recently ok’d another 30,000 troops be shipped to Afghanistan) and tell them that you are outraged. By atrocities in war and the wars (invasions!) themselves.

Do it for those who cannot do it themselves. Just as you would want someone to speak up on your behalf if you were losing your mind at one end of a barrel or another in a distant land.

Some people will say Hersh’s claims are all BS. But to me they’re absolutely plausible. In this violent world, why would this be so hard to believe? Under that kind of duress. Our guys crack under pressure too. And out leaks their id. I mean, even if you just look at it from the point of view of percentages, you’d have to bet that these things happen.

To me it would be ridiculous to think that you could send thousands of young people into a war zone and it wouldn't result in a few of them losing their minds at some point.

Unless you believe those commercials for the Marines and think our men and women are bulletproof. But who’d be dumb enough to buy into that?

Take care,
Adrian Zupp

IF YOU FOUND THIS BLOG POST INTERESTING you might like to take a look at THE MASS MURDERERS OF WASHINGTON D.C.

THE IDIOT CULTURE

Back in the ’90s, while I was still living in Australia, I read an article by Carl Bernstein (pictured) entitled “The Idiot Culture.”

Bernstein, you might recall, was one half of the Woodward and Bernstein journalism team that broke the whole Watergate thing in The Washington Post in the 1970s – the political event that is perpetually trotted out as a luminous paragon of the American checks and balances system.

Bernstein’s article made a big impression on me – despite the fact that it didn’t go nearly far enough in its analysis or criticism. (Bernstein, now 66, still talks on the subject at various venues.)

The thrust of the piece, as the title suggests, was that the Western World is hooked on garbage entertainment. Throwaway icons and shallow creativity. TV shows that woo the voyeur in us. Paparazzi snapshots of “stars” who just don’t matter. Mind-numbing pseudo news that weighs us down rather than lifting us up.

The whole “idiot culture” thing could be a thesis or a book, not merely an article. Actually it has been: Take for example Neil Postman’s deeply analytical book “Amusing Ourselves To Death.” Postman and his ilk – including lauded socio-political commentator Professor Noam Chomsky – posit, correctly, that public discourse – the things we talk about and think about – have moved from the somewhat meaningful to the painfully absurd in the past half century or so.

The net result is that we have become junk-info addicts who are almost completely distracted from the important issues that affect us, those we love, and our fellow human beings around the globe. More to the point, to a large degree we are no longer even aware of what is important. We have been fed sugar-coated rat poison and dragged out beyond the margins of true culture to whither and die, spiritually and mentally.

The simple point is this: If we don’t focus our thoughts and energies on learning about the real and profound problems our planet is facing, and on taking actions to remedy them, then we’re closing the door on hope. Like anything worthwhile in life or history, saving the world (literally) will only be achieved through true understanding followed by concerted effort.

There are some vital things we need to do if we are to survive. We need to change the way the world is governed; we need to see that poverty is put to the sword; we need to end the suicidal environmental degradation of our planet; we need to assign anything with the word “nuclear” attached to it to the archives. And much more.

That’s a lot of thinking and a lot of work. We really need to dig for the truth and see that that truth is served. And we are not going to find truth on reality shows or in tabloid magazines; in the pitiful tirades of TV’s political talk show ego turds or the endless mire of nonsense that clutters much of the Internet. And no, we can’t even turn to traditional news sources or the likes of Carl Bernstein. We have to go to more pure information sources. More courageous ones. And we must find similarly concerned citizens. But first we must want to apply ourselves and not seek addiction-escapism by sinking into the couch and praying to the tube.

While Bernstein was right to rail against our toxic non-culture almost two decades ago, he has certainly been a beneficiary of it. His work on Watergate and subsequent lecturing on “serious journalism” have given him (and Woodward) a kind of demigod status. In a sense, they have accrued credibility in large part because of the contrast between themselves and the lower reaches of the idiot culture. But that contrast creates a false credibility: They are merely at the "high end" of that culture.

The fact is, they – and The Washington Post – are still part of the timid/privatized media industry and are hardly daring in what they do. Nixon was just a twisted creep who made for a good story. He was relatively easy to axe. But where are these pillars of pious journalism when it comes to things such as COINTELPRO, Gitmo, U.S. imperialism, the exploitation of Third World economies, the rape of the world ecosystem, the real and present danger posed by nuclear weapons and energy, the severe lack of democracy in America, or profoundly dissecting their own industry? It’s easy to make a bit of noise about Jerry Springer and Paris Hilton. Taking on Rupert Murdoch or transnational corporations in any serious way is another matter. And that takes a courage far greater.

Do we live in an idiot culture? Turn on your TV and flip through 20 or 30 channels and you tell me. Are we idiots? No, we are not. But the people with their hands on the levers want us to act like idiots. Passive consumers of their faux information and unnecessary products. So far, we've been pretty much playing into their hands.

But we can stop any time we decide we're ready to.

***********

Thanks for reading and check back soon. In the meantime, check out www.democracynow.org for some brave and honest journalism. Yes, you can handle the truth.

Adrian Zupp

IF THIS BLOG POST WAS OF INTEREST TO YOU you might also like to read REMEMBERING SIMPLER TIMES or KIM KARDASHIAN NUDE VS. GAY SUICIDES -- WHAT PEOPLE ARE TALKING ABOUT.