The fantastic products of the sensationalist experience alive and well in North America. Carefully nurtured from in the fair and balanced to the left and right extremes.
Murder, fanaticism, religion and media:
The Usual Suspects.
I spent the morning watching morning news. Every time I do this I can't explain away how the rest of America manages to make it through their day. The inane banter and banal wit crosses the boundaries of both channel and opinion. In other words... WTF?
Since morning news chaps my hide so severely, I'd rather watch Fox News than be disappointed in my hope for actually bring informed by the news. Ever since Kilmeade's walkout, and subsequent rebuttal, I hope beyond hope that I'll get to see another Fox & Friends breakdown. Hope to no avail. The same vanilla news over every channel, the only difference is what they harp on. Mediocrity punctuated by commercials.
I can't stand commercials and absolutely refuse to wait patiently for Fox & Friends to return. I head up a channel (Charter in my area has 90 percent of the news within seven channels) to MSNBC and find them talking about Bob Woodward. Whoever they had on to talk about Woodward explained how he gets the dirt on Washington that nobody else can. He leverages what he knows against everybody.
Like an avalanche, or snowball. Described thusly: he brings you (an alleged player in whatever he's trying to expose) over to his house for dinner and tells you what he knows, then explains that you can either work with him or pray he never finds everything out. When it comes to the Bush administration, he had unprecedented access to memos and even W. Bush (the younger) himself through extensive interviews.
No president likes what he has to say, it's like they work with him to lesson the blow. Here's a like to his bibliography on Amazon.com. No link to the guest on the Morning Joe website.
(Correction, it was Gabriel Sherman from "The New Republic")
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Being as that it is the start of summer and I am currently without a day job, I have the ability to get side tracked when modern man must typically go to work. So I read some excerpts from "State of Denial" by Bob Woodward on Google Books. I found what I could read of it's opening two chapters to be enthralling, like saltines w/o any fluids: salty and good, but ultimately too dry to continue without incentive. No doubt another fine bathroom reader destined to bring me fines from the local library.
Lately, I've been reading Matt Taibbi and recommend you do the same. After being blown away by "The Great Derangement," which I found to be the anti-conspiracy theorists guide to conspiracy theorists/religious fanatics/the government, I started "Spanking the Donkey." While "Derangement" has an evergreen, almost timeless feel, "Spanking the Donkey" keeps making me which I read it when it came out. If you consider yourself an American read "The Great Derangement," if you like Taibbi's work, read "Spanking the Donkey."
Here's a promotional movie put together by his publisher: The Great Derangement. I recommend listening to it as opposed to watching as the vocal track serves like reading the back cover of the book while the video seems to be an overboard distraction.
He makes a point about how Americans no longer have an agreed upon fact-set (and if you're listening to the rhetoric coming out of Iran - holocaust/9-11 - possibly the world). Between the 9/11 truth movement, Fox News White America (FxNWA), the End-Times religious right and the Media Elite, nobody seems to know what's really going on but they're more than happy to talk about it; if they do, they're not talking about it or somebody's not buying it.
We are living in a world without truth. Facts are being used by both sides. The names of experts are being attributed to facts as widely spaced as the views they are made to appear to support. Anybody who agrees with one fact set is either a wack-job or an insider - depending on the standpoint of the viewer. We might as well be living in a kaleidoscope.
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Brian Williams Interview with Iran's publicly elected President Ahmadinejad from July 2008, and subsequent appearance on "The Daily Show."
1953: American involvement in Iranian politics, from the Iranian Chamber Society; and a root of the modern problems between American and Iran as explained by Stephen Kinzer.
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The situation between Iran and the United States is strained and tenuous at best. In this disjuntled world of the disinformed, how important does it become to get everyone's opinion? Especially those people who we disagree with or don't see eye to eye with. We're all people.
An Iranian Journalist speaks out against an anti-American tradition; Mazdak Ali Nazari may not speak for the entirety of the Iranian people - but who are we judge a people divided?
What if Iran is not some monolithic enemy of everything?
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Killings with Religoius motives?
Muslim Convert Assaults Army Recruiters Office in Arkansas; Note differences between AP and Fox report. Also, Abortionist Slain in Kansas Church; and AP report on suspect.
Over the past decade the media mainstream has fed the American people a steady diet of varying aspects of carefully selected information. Perhaps not propaganda per se, but certainly a curriculum. For the third time (?) in fifty years (JFK, Watergate, 9/11) the menu has consisted of primarily magic marker. Choosing to black out the official reports of critical instances/turning-points in US culture.
When the truth is too sensitive to be revealed is it any wonder that the worst will be assumed? No wonder there isn't a set of facts we can all agree on when we're not given all the information - or not all the information at once or in one place.
* * *
Sure, the major news networks are all parlaying the same vanilla news, but as they focus on differing aspects the important stories lose their finer points. By polarizing the facts, the truth becomes easily obscured:
If Iran is a Shi'ite state, think of the USA as a Christian state. Think of it this way: Islam is the second largest religion in the world (behind Christianity), how many non-practicing Christians are there in America... How about Muslims in Iran? Does it make you a Christian just because you live in a Christian state? Violence in the name of God (or a god/goddess) isn't an invention of the modern age - if anything it's a holdover from a previous one - it has certainly been around longer than anyone alive today.
Operative terms in the two killings with possible religious implications depend on the place they are obtained from. Fair and balanced with a media elite bias refers to the killing of the doctor in church in terms of the Christian fanaticism it sees behind the shooting, the fact that he was an abortion doctor who was one of the few remaining late term abortionists in America is used to add to their argument placing the Christian fanatic outside the norm. Duh, fanaticism is seldom normal.
But this is a two way street. Fair and balanced with the FxNWA slant likes to tell this story keying on the Dr. who still performed late term abortions aspect, marginalizing or simply leaving out that the act was done in the church, allegedly by a radical Christian. Where is my 'Christia-fascist' phrase to coin?
And while fair and balanced with the FxNWA bend tells the story of the recruiter slayings keying on the Islamic convert angle (playing up the enemy in our midst tension), media elite likes to just mention his religion in passing and leave us with the unjust war taste in the mouth.
Though both stories are getting airtime on all stations the focus is very different. As of this morning, I have yet to see the panels of experts though I can't believe it's not coming. A pastor who will re-frame the actions of a misguided, poorly adjusted individual acting outside the confines of his faith, a "moderate" muslim scholar who will be called upon for the same; a sociologist will show the dangers of religion and a lawyer/ex-cop/Homeland Security spokesperson/Dick Cheney will let us know the dangers of worldwide Islamic fundamentalism.
Some "Technotronic" lyrics comes to mind, something along the lines of "Pump up the jam, pump it up, a pump it up yo pump it."
The real world doesn't have a shared reality anymore. Our opinions are being sold to us like advertisement. People who are scripted to appear to think like we're supposed to (varying by our socio/political/religious groups and TV habits) are all mangling the facts. Through commercial funded mass media (not media elite, but including it) the subjective experience has taken on the feel of groupthink. Meanwhile, the shared experience (which includes dialogue and compromise) is being largely ignored.
That said, the so-called blogosphere has just as much B.S. and little to no regulation (compared to objective journalism). So don't think I'm just rallying against mainstream media. I am of the opinion that the blogosphere is a part of the internet, which I see as another aspect of mass media.
A fine example of this lack of regulation can be found in Rick Moran the proprietor of rightwingnuthouse.com and a regular contributor to americanthinker.com and to a lesser extent yabbadabbahubbado.com.
In my perusing this morning I was looking into the assault on the recruiter(s) in Arkansas and found this article. Which oddly echoes statements made by Mike Malloy regarding FxNWA anchor(s) and specifically Bill O'Reilly in relation to the shooting of Dr. George Tiller (see anti-bio here).
Meh, but what really caught my eye was another of Moran's essays for americanthinker.com, regarding the here-to unreleased torture photos. Besides the fact that he seems to backtrack on who is running who and how from start to finish, the third paragraph from the end gives us an unattributed quote regarding a lesson in humility.
I immediately posted a comment regarding what I felt were asshole fingers used in print. By which I mean using quotation marks to quote an opinion held by the author and imply the opinion of another (in this case, the President of the USA or one of his "leftist allies"). In passing conversation asshole fingers have many uses but they have no place in print journalism, adding confusing murk to already unregulated editorial.
I have since sent him an email via the only method seemingly available, and look forward to more information regarding the origination of his quote, "teach us a lesson in humility," which appears to be attributed to the President or someone very close to him. God willing, I will be able to post his response though I seldom have any luck getting a reply from form based emails.
* * *
Ok, now that all that agitation is put away I can get back to where all this started. Obama's transformation from radical-partyboy to ascetic-scholar during his time at Columbia University. About half an hour after the Bob Woodward segment of Morning Joe, Richard Wolffe came on for this segment. Around the 4:20 mark of the clip, Wolffe (author of "Renegade: The making of a President" which I have not, but hope to soon read) describes Obama as Disciplined and cool under fire," and refers to his "self made character" as galvanizing through reading and writing and during his education at Columbia where he was "running and even fasting; not talking to anyone."
This segment made me instantly interested in his time at Columbia. The first thing I found out is that it is shrouded in secrecy. His transcripts have not been released, and the only real information that is readily available comes from his (Obama's) book "Dreams from My Father."
The best information that I found easily accessable on the interwebs comes from an election era Barack Obama as Obama the Marxist Muslim" site, theobamafile.com. Which is more than happy to give all sorts of information regarding his college friends (from partiers to leftist radicals to muslims and any awkward combinations there-of). One such friend, who's family Obama reportedly stayed with is described by theobamafile.com as a "radical muslim," who runs (with his family), chandoo.com. The site, at the time of publishing, was in a period of revamping and down for an unstated amount of time.
theobamafile.com's claims of anti-semetic and anti-american rhetoric on the site couldn't be confirmed or denied at the time of publishing (6/2/2009). The site was last cached by google on May 27, 2009. Aboutus.org and whois searches were similarly fruitless.
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and there you have it. Who knows? Pay attention.
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