The Obama administration has created and staffed a new position tucked inside their communications shop for helping coordinate rapid response to unfavorable stories and fostering and improving relations with the progressive online community.
Adam Curtis – All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
A new BBC film by Adam Curtis is out:
The film tells the story of two perfect worlds. One is the small group of disciples around the novelist Ayn Rand in the 1950s. They saw themselves as a prototype for a future society where everyone could follow their own selfish desires. The other is the global utopia that digital entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley set out to create in the 1990s. Many of them were also disciples of Ayn Rand. They believed that the new computer networks would allow the creation of a society where everyone could follow their own desires, yet there would not be anarchy. They were joined by Alan Greenspan who had also been a disciple of Ayn Rand. He became convinced that the computers were creating a new kind of stable capitalism – “Like a New Planet”, he said. But the dream of stability in both worlds would be torn apart by the two dynamic human forces – love and power.
You may remember the film The Power of Nightmares by Adam Curtis. It described how the neocons and al-Qaeda developed out similar strands of thought.
Hat tip to Bernhard@moon of alabama Blog.
Distinguished law scholar Elizabeth Warren teaches contract law, bankruptcy, and commercial law at Harvard Law School. She is an outspoken critic of America’s credit economy, which she has linked to the continuing rise in bankruptcy among the middle-class. Series: “UC Berkeley Graduate Council Lectures”
“The Two Income Trap” and “Collapse of the Middle Class” are brilliant books. Warren is one of the best public policy leaders we’ve had in a long time. Of course, that’s why the elite will fight by all means necessary, to keep her from being appointed. Even if they have to kill her. Think I’m being an alarmist? Wait and see…
Meanwhile the War at home ; Thomas Drake: NSA Whistleblower
Thomas Drake is a former NSA whistleblower who is being prosecuted under the Espionage Act for retaining, not leaking, classified information in conjunction with a Department of Defense investigation into massive NSA fraud, waste, abuse and illegality.
Wikileaks cable reveals Saudis, Emiratis (and NOT Al Qaeda or Taliban) were funding extremists and militants in Pakistan
Petro-monarchies, Bush Family, CIA, tea and biscuits…
Bin Laden Death Script & the Needed Trigger for Next Step-Pakistan
by Sibel Edmonds
Why, and why, now…
They would never lie to us, with impunity, right?
Texas Drinking Water Radiation Cover-Up Exposed: Top Gov Officials Knew And Kept Silent
They didn’t believe the science data…
The Merchants of Doubt is a new book that reports how a small group of scientists committed to an extreme free-market ideology have been employed by large corporations over several decades to cast doubt on such different environmental issues as the risks of tobacco smoke, the dangers of DDT, the effectiveness of the Strategic Defence Initiative, the regulation of CFCs, and the causes of global warming. A review in the Christian Science Monitor calls this “one of the most important books of the year. Exhaustively researched and documented…”
Dr. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway wrote a book entitled, ‘Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming’ in it she shows that it isn’t always about money -though that is a welcome side benefit- but often about ideology, denial and beliefs.
Salesmen, OR Scientists
This presentation isn’t so much about Climate Change as it is about Temperament and Ideology … As well as System Justification Thoery… i.e., Think Tanks, lobbys etc..
Supreme Court OKs More Warrantless Searches
How “secure” do our homes remain if police, armed with no warrant, can pound on doors at will and, on hearing sounds indicative of things moving, forcibly enter and search for evidence of unlawful activity?
The transformation of human society needed for the coming aeon must go hand-in-glove with the transformation of individual human consciousness. And vice versa.
~Buzzy Krongard, CIA
“I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down, livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town, I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime, but is there because he’s a victim of the times.”