Two new videos from Onion Network News:
Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks
And now a video about Ford's new concept car:
Ford Unveils New Car For Cash-Strapped Buyers: The 1993 Taurus
Ashleigh Banfield has finally gotten hired back to work at a major network, after losing her job at MSNBC in 2003 for speaking out against the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Here's what she had to say back in 2003, which caused her to lose her job. She is speaking of what you are not shown by the news media when the nation is at war:
What didn't you see? You didn't see where those bullets landed. You didn't see what happened when the mortar landed. A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me. There are horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism or was this coverage-? There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage, and getting access does not mean you're getting the story, it just means you're getting one more arm or leg of the story. And that's what we got, and it was a glorious, wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news. But it wasn't journalism, because I'm not so sure that we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war, because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successful terrific endeavor, and we got rid oaf horrible leader: We got rid of a dictator, we got rid of a monster, but we didn't see what it took to do that.Banfield also has some critically important things to say about the "Fox News effect" (the patriotizing and glorification of war). Reading this Huffpo post about Banfield reminds me of this post featuring similar comments by Amy Goodman. It also reminds me how Phil Donahue also lost his job at MSNBC for being critical of the Iraq invasion (more about Donahue's views here). These sorts of firings are actually predictable. The documentary "War Made Easy" reminds us that hawks close ranks around Presidents who start wars and they also put tremendous pressure on networks to do the same. Banfield's story reminds us that we need to strive to keep dissenting voices prominent during times of war because something about war makes us insanely fearful and even less able to reason than in times of peace. It is during times of war that we become collectively willing to let ourselves run amok wrapped in the flag.
The shootings at Fort Hood last week have provoked a media feeding frenzy. Questions abound, and there is no dearth of speculation as to the shooter's motives. Most articles I have seen waste no time pointing out that the shooter was a Muslim, that he exclaimed "Allahu akbar" before shooting, and that he is linked with radical imams and possibly Al Qaeda. That's from the ostensibly "impartial" media, but there are also a few extremely distasteful editorial perspectives that are unfortunately quite mainstream that I wanted to comment on today. I'm afraid my ability to edit sarcasm out of my posts declines in direct proportion to the insanity and hypocrisy with which I'm confronted, so bear with me. First, Forbes featured an article by Tunku Varadarajan entitled "Going Muslim", a play on the old phrase "going postal". He describes it thusly:
As the enormity of the actions of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan sinks in, we must ask whether we are confronting a new phenomenon of violent rage, one we might dub--disconcertingly--"Going Muslim." This phrase would describe the turn of events where a seemingly integrated Muslim-American--a friendly donut vendor in New York, say, or an officer in the U.S. Army at Fort Hood--discards his apparent integration into American society and elects to vindicate his religion in an act of messianic violence against his fellow Americans. This would appear to be what happened in the case of Maj. Hasan.
Covert government by defense contractor means corrupt wars of conquest, government by dope dealer. When the world's traditional inebriative herbs become illegal commodities, they become worth as much as precious metal, precious metal that can be farmed. ... Illegal drugs, solely because of the artificial value given them by Prohibition, have become the basis of military power anywhere they can be grown and delivered in quantity. ... To this day American defense contractors are the biggest drug-money launderers in the world.— Drug War: Covert Money, Power and Policy, p.318.Revelations from today's New York Times that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of president of Afghanistan, has been on the payroll of the CIA for years should be utterly unsurprising to anyone that has followed the history of either the CIA or drugs in Afghanistan. In a considerable understatement, the Times story says "The C.I.A.’s practices also suggest that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban." Far from "doing everything in its power" to end the drug trade, Afghan poppies are also a major source of revenue for the CIA. As Noam Chomsky said: The close correlation between the drug racket and international terrorism (sometimes called "counterinsurgency," "low intensity conflict" or some other euphemism) is not surprising. Clandestine operations need plenty of money, which should be undetectable. And they need criminal operatives as well. The rest follows."
Israel is one of the countries most fervently criticizing Iran in Iran's quest for nuclear research (see here and here). Al Jazeera English notes, however, that Israel hasn’t even signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.