According to Glenn Greenwald, if you want to see what Iraq journalism looked like, read the the hyped up news on Iran. Take, for example a recent Washington Times piece by Toby Warrick, which is:
purely one-sided, unquestioning and entirely anonymous series of dubious, unverified, fear-mongering assertions that can have no purpose other than to create the most sinister picture of the "Iranian threat" possible.
This is insanity: The bond raters, those three big Wall Street companies that rated crappy mortgages to be great investments, thereby plunging the country into economic chaos, are hiding behind the First Amendment. They are claiming that they can't be sued for the financial equivalent of calling a mouse an elephant, because their work product is just an "opinion." We charge millions of dollars for giving you a rating, and you can't hold us accountable because it's an "opinion." I'll tell you this: I work as a lawyer. If a screw up someone's case because I give him bad advice (in return for charging her a fee), she could (rightfully) sue me for malpractice. If I raised the defense that I can't be sued for terrible advice because it was merely "an opinion," I'd be laughed out of court with an adverse judgment tattooed onto my forehead. That the courts aren't letting these ratings firms get hammered makes you wonder whether the unspoken defense is "too big to fail." If they didn't have this ridiculous "First Amendment" defense, the smug and irresponsible raters would be ripped apart by millions of justifiably irate plaintiffs. And, of course, Congress is in no hurry to beat back the ratings firms' lobbyists and hold these jokers accountable for all of the 401K's they've trashed.
I've previously blogged on Powers of Ten, a classic book that illustrates relative sizes of various things, both extremely large and extremely small. I just ran across a terrific website that illustrates that relative sizes of many kinds of small things, the largest of which is a coffee bean. When you go to this site, wait a bit so that it finishes loading. Then move the horizontal slider slowly to the right and enjoy your journey into the universe of small and smaller things, all the way down to a carbon atom. [applause!]
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."
What can be done about your Facebook friends who die? According to an article by Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon.com, Facebook is coming up with some solutions centered on "memorial pages." Williams also gives this advice:
Be careful what profile pic you post or what your friends write on your wall -- it might be your last enduring image.