Alex Jones

infowars.com

UPDATE APRIL 5, 2009: I didn’t listen to Jones much more after this blog entry last June. The recent shooting of police officers in Pittsburgh is being linked, probably unfairly, to the shooter’s interest in Jones’ topics and shows (by, for example, one of my current favorite, frequently-visited online news sites, RawStory; and here is Jones’ take on that). I still place a link to Jones’ blog here on Jimblog because I’m loyal to sites that have helped me flesh out my knowledge of the world in the past, even if I don’t frequent them anymore, and even if (especially true in Jones’ case), I can’t agree with most of what they promote. The greatest thing about Jones, in my opinion, is that he has what is so sadly lacking and sorely needed in journalism today– the guts to be independent of the corporate brain laundry, and investigate anything he wants.

_________________
For the past two weeks I’ve been listening to Alex Jones daily. This is the Austin, Texas radio journalist and activist who has remained focused for longer than anyone in the media on exposing the drift of our American experiment in democracy toward tyranny. Special concerns of Jones and his guests include 9/11, the power leaving average American citizens and accumulating into the hands of wealthy elites, and the ever-expanding police state as our republic morphs into Big Brother.

He has guests on who share his concerns, such as Willie Nelson, Ray McGovern, and the young man who made the eye-opening documentary Loose Change was his guest host last week. His excellent coverage of the Irish vote against acceptance of the Constitution of Europe included conversation by phone with Irish activists on the ground, and was deeper than anyone in the mainstream and many independent broadcasters.
Read the rest of this entry »

Proposal: Public School Radio

America, why not take back our airwaves for neighborhood radio stations?

PROBLEM:
Radio stations across America are being consolidated quickly into fewer and fewer large multi-national corporations. The local voice of local radio is drowned out by ClearChannel, Sirius and XM satellite radio, and even NPR’s local voice is abdicated more and more to the national feed. Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, you could take your freshly minted single down to the local DJ, and he would play it on the radio. You use to be able to call in to a local radio personality and speak personally to all the local listeners about a topic of local concern. News beyond the inane surreal bites that local TV allows past their filters was readily available in the longer, more in-depth treatment only radio news tends to allow any more.

The problem is that you and me, the local consumer of radio, have no voice in this radio marketplace. The powers that we put in charge of making sure our airwaves remain OUR airwaves have sold out to the highest bidders, the media conglomerates. They aren’t hearing us anymore. The two big parties seem more interested in getting elected and preserving status quo than solving any serious problems. Appealing to them will get us nowhere fast.

SOLUTION:
In every single neighborhood in this country is an institution for the education of the public known as the local public school. We, the people, send our kids there (disclaimer: I don’t; I send mine to the private school where I teach, but please– keep reading!), pay for the school’s upkeep through our local property taxes, and occasionally visit the campus for parent-teacher conferences, to vote, or for other community functions. The local public school is a ubiquitous, known entity which is vital to every community, and control over its activities is fiercely maintained at the most local levels, namely, the parents and teachers and local school boards.
Read the rest of this entry »

Stumble Upon

OK, I like it now. I tried it when it first came out, and found it clunky, boring… whatzit for again??

Now, on second look, and after reading the suggested uses more carefully(!), this Stumbleupon really works for me.� That’s a reminder for me and all the other just-jump-in-and-start-using-it types out there.

Just give it another look, if you’ve already dismissed it.� If you are enjoying it, keep it up!� It just gets better the more we all use it.

The Big Lie

A favorite tactic of demagogues is the Lie. They get away with outright lies by controlling the mass media, thus avoiding accountability. Fascist dictatorships protect their exploitation and favoritism by dumbing down the masses. Hitler and Stalin, Maoist China and Castro’s Cuba, North Korea, all are threatened by the free flow of ideas. That’s because their ideas are (or were) terrible!

Most of the current admin’s own party have sharp disagreements with the demagoguery of Bush & Co. The Republican base, including right-wing Christians, have abandoned the party enough that last November’s elections turned a Republican Congress into a Democratically-controlled one. Historians agree that this will have been our worst president to date. Search the world for the foreign leaders who have any love for our President. Not only will you not find them, the most violent foreign leaders hold you and me personally responsible for allowing this dangerous administration to last this long. Hence the increased threats to Americans from the hostile corners of the world.

Who is left as the cheerleaders of Bush & Company? Fox News Channel and its owner Rupert Murdoch, and especially talking heads Hannity and O’Reilly, and contributors like Ann Coulter and William Kristol.
With Fox’s hold on the attention of masses of Americans, loyal Fox viewers are becoming tools of the Neoconservative agenda of the Project for the New American Century.

Please, voter, do America and the world which trembles in its shadow a favor:

STOP WATCHING FOX NEWS!!!

IT’S MAKING YOU STUPID!!!

Olbermann On Chertgut

…your “gut feeling” was actually that you’d better throw up a diversion soon on Mr. Bush’s behalf, or “something real” like the Republicans’ revolt about Iraq, and the nauseating “gut feeling” that we have gotten 3,611 Americans killed there for no reason — was actually going to seep into the American headlines and consciousness.

Amen, Keith. And thanks, C&L
display_podcast]

Foxed Christians

Bob Tracey, of Las Vegas, introduces the following remarks with a few paragraphs, then proceeds to speak my mind brilliantly:

So the message to my Christian brothers and sisters is this:

Grab a hold of the best and most fundamental concept upon which Christianity was founded, and forgive yourselves. They told you what you wanted to hear, and you believed them. It’s OK.

They told you they would appoint judges who would protect the lives of the unborn, and then started a war for profit and power, sacrificing thousands of the already born, and when they told you it was to free the Iraqi people, you believed them. It’s OK.

They hooked you with gay marriage, tax cuts for the wealthy, and the guys preaching in your churches backed their play every step of the way, and you believed them, too. It’s OK.

I know that now it is obvious to you that you have been snookered. They didn’t outfox you, They FOXED you.

Belief is the most powerful force in the universe. As we believe, so shall it be done unto us. A timeless message to remind us of the power that is within US.

If no one taught you of the perfect imperfection of yourself when you were growing up, you got foxed then, too.

Any time you believe something that makes you feel safer, it is likely that some clown with a lust for power and control is trying to scare you into giving up your freedom.

You don’t need a benign patriarchal figure, be it a pastor or a politician, to make you feel safe. You are already a child of God, and there is nothing to fear.

So don’t give away your power to impostors. Don’t let them fox you.

And one more thing. America is about the freedom to live as you choose, and for me to live as I choose. Your faith does not give you the right to create the agenda for my life.

When you try to tell others how to live, you have become the very person our founding fathers were trying to get away from when they came here and founded our country.

So don’t be foxed Christian. Be a free American.

Thanks to cristo lumen, who was noticed by nina bobolina, a research associate at UCSF, whose Yahoo 360 site is linked to my own.

Before Speechwriters

dailykos.com had a fantastic short essay this morning. Had to share it:

I had the opportunity to talk in a conference call with Al Gore earlier today. The impetus for the call was climate change. And much to his chagrin, probably, I’m not going to mention anything he said. Well, not at the moment, anyway.

I asked my question — probably a petty and trivial one, no doubt, about where on the spectrum he believes the American people as a whole to now be at, in terms of knowledge and action — and he answered, and at length, an answer that took perhaps ten or fifteen minutes, constructed not just in words but paragraph by paragraph, concept by concept, answering the question by constructing the framework for the question and then building it in pieces, one at a time, until he arrived at the endpoint he intended with the bits and pieces that were required to support it.

Ah, what might have been. Gore was widely derided by the press for the audacity of the lengthy answer or the wonkish explanation, a man too versed in facts, or God forbid with a speaking style that paused, from time to time, to find the right phrase instead of the next phrase. Not a man you would want to have a beer with, was the conventional wisdom shoved down our gullets like we were geese being prepped for our final hours. Knowledge is wooden, education is wooden, intellectualism is wooden, because facts are like trees: there’s too damn many of them, and they’re hard to tell apart.

With all due respect to the national media: you sorry, hollow, pretentious jackasses. What I would not give for a President that could speak in complete sentences; that was able to write with clarity, and read from time to time; that could come around the back of an issue and pull the curtain away for a better look, even if only every once in a great while. What would we ever do with some of the giants of our past, figures who, back in the days before speechwriters, could turn conversations on a dime with the power of their own arguments, when now a few turns of phrase churned out from a Peggy Noonan wannabe and presented via teleprompter before a repetitive moron-proof backdrop is considered the only soluble standard of leadership. God help us, our pundits are idiots.

Honestly. Yet another mark of an ongoing era that I will never forgive, and never forget. The elevation by the supposed masters of our discourse of vapid, boozy barroom conversation as the mark of national leadership. Anti-intellectualism embraced now for perhaps twenty five years by pundits that pretend mightily at being erudite, but can only manage it in the confines of their own swelled heads and whose eyes gloss over like those of dolls if a conversation makes it beyond the first few words they can scribble down.

Dear pundit class: bite me, and I mean that sincerely. Dear Al Gore: whether you ever run again or not is up to you. But I’m glad to know you, even if only for a ten minute stretch, and I’d give my eyeteeth to have a beer with you.

And that’s about all I have to say, for now, about that.

Beautycheck

“Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.” -Confucious

This is a fascinating study of facial beauty using computer morphing technology.

Available in English and German.

Independent Media

Independent Media in a Time of War

Amy Goodman has kept the faith. She has fought the good fight. She is a journalist owned by no one. The way it used to be. She is fearless, like every reporter, investigative journalist, and news anchor ought to be, but cannot be, because they are OWNED.

[display_podcast]

They are owned by corporations, and they are subject to the controls, censorship, and career insecurities that corporate ownership puts on employees of the company. That means that WE are subject to a filtration of the news, because corporately-controlled editors and news producers will say nothing to us that the corporation does not want us to hear.If mainstream TV and radio news is your source of information, YOU ARE NOT HEARING THE WHOLE TRUTH.
Read the rest of this entry »