politics

According to hhavensteincw over at Slashdot, there’s a new Google Bomb campaign to get liberal bloggers to associate John McCain with a number of posts and articles that highlight “ugly” things about the Republican Presidential candidate:

Zionism might not be the first thing that comes to mind when considering Malcolm X.  And yet in the last chapters of his life, he was intensively vocal about it.  This is what he had to say about the subject writing for the Egyptian Gazette in an article dated September 17th 1964, just six months prior to his assassination.

Once again the state of Montana, along with Yellowstone National Park, are killing bison migrating out of Yellowstone National Park. The slaughter of Yellowstone’s bison is represented as a disease contamination program, but it is really a sham. If disease control were the issue, we wouldn’t be killing bison. The more you know about the brucellosis-bison issue, the angrier you get.

It has been estimated that if all of the ranching that exists from the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains to the west coast of the United States was eliminated that only two percent of the national beef production would be affected. This is because of the nature of the landscape in the west of America where it takes about fifty times the amount of land to raise one cow as it does in the biomass-rich east. Given how much more delicate the countryside is in the region, it makes little sense to put cows all over and make the entire west into what Edward Abbey called "cow burnt." In case you are wondering: no, bison do not have nearly the effect that cattle do. Hoof shape and the migratory instinct lessen such impact.

Click here for Dennis' opinion of Ron.

It was the opening salvo of a campaign to press forward a post-Cold War foreign policy of 'Pax Americana,' a world that the neo-conservatives who made up the bulk of the 25 people who signed PNAC’s statement of principles the previous June saw as a US dominion.

Fascism, in this day and age, seems a rather nebulous concept. I can't count how many times I have asked someone to define fascism only to draw a blank stare or an amibiguous collection of rants against the Anglo-American power structure that, while often true, do little to define fascism.

How does entire population become, itself, a weapon of war?

According to Lakota Oyate (For a Free & Independent Lakota Nation), on December 30, 2007, the Lakotah Freedom Delegation website and contact info were hijacked by one delegation member without consent of other delegates.

While I am tempted to issue some pronouncement on the validity or lack thereof regarding recent declarations of Lakotah sovereignty and secession, in all reality I must admit that there may be more rational and/or reasonable responses to the facts as we know them. Take, for example, the relative lack of any serious indigenous challenge to the Lakota Freedom Delegation; this could mean many things.

BLACKWATER, the secretive private army now emerging into public view, is a perfect hinge linking two key elements of the Republican political base: America's war machine and a muscular form of fundamentalist Christianity.

Two: The Engineering of Consent

The programme explores how those in power in post-war America used Freud's ideas about the unconscious mind to try and control the masses.

Politicians and planners came to believe Freud's underlying premise - that deep within all human beings were dangerous and irrational desires and fears. They were convinced that it was the unleashing of these instincts that had led to the barbarism of Nazi Germany. To stop it ever happening again they set out to find ways to control this hidden enemy within the human mind.

Sigmund Freud's daughter, Anna, and his nephew, Edward Bernays, provided the centrepiece philosophy. The US government, big business, and the CIA used their ideas to develop techniques to manage and control the minds of the American people. But this was not a cynical exercise in manipulation. Those in power believed that the only way to make democracy work and create a stable society was to repress the savage barbarism that lurked just under the surface of normal American life.

Three: There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed

In the 1960s, a radical group of psychotherapists challenged the influence of Freudian ideas in America. They were inspired by the ideas of Wilhelm Reich, a pupil of Freud's, who had turned against him and was hated by the Freud family. He believed that the inner self did not need to be repressed and controlled. It should be encouraged to express itself.

Out of this came a political movement that sought to create new beings free of the psychological conformity that had been implanted in people's minds by business and politics.

This programme shows how this rapidly developed in America through self-help movements like Werber Erhard's Erhard Seminar Training - into the irresistible rise of the expressive self: the Me Generation.

But the American corporations soon realised that this new self was not a threat but their greatest opportunity. It was in their interest to encourage people to feel they were unique individuals and then sell them ways to express that individuality. To do this they turned to techniques developed by Freudian psychoanalysts to read the inner desires of the new self.

Four: Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering This episode explains how politicians on the left, in both Britain and America, turned to the techniques developed by business to read and fulfil the inner desires of the self. Both New Labour, under Tony Blair, and the Democrats, led by Bill Clinton, used the focus group, which had been invented by psychoanalysts, in order to regain power. They set out to mould their policies to people's inner desires and feelings, just as capitalism had learnt to do with products. Out of this grew a new culture of public relations and marketing in politics, business and journalism. One of its stars in Britain was Matthew Freud who followed in the footsteps of his relation, Edward Bernays, the inventor of public relations in the 1920s. The politicians believed they were creating a new and better form of democracy, one that truly responded to the inner feelings of individual. But what they didn't realise was that the aim of those who had originally created these techniques had not been to liberate the people but to develop a new way of controlling them.

Applied Memetics for Disillusioned Dems by Nathan F. Piazza of Dead Reckoning

Applied Memetics for Disillusioned Dems

Four: Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering

This episode explains how politicians on the left, in both Britain and
America, turned to the techniques developed by business to read and
fulfil the inner desires of the self.

Both New Labour, under Tony Blair, and the Democrats, led by Bill
Clinton, used the focus group, which had been invented by
psychoanalysts, in order to regain power. They set out to mould their
policies to people's inner desires and feelings, just as capitalism had
learnt to do with products.

Out of this grew a new culture of public relations and marketing in
politics, business and journalism. One of its stars in Britain was
Matthew Freud who followed in the footsteps of his relation, Edward
Bernays, the inventor of public relations in the 1920s.

The politicians believed they were creating a new and better form of
democracy, one that truly responded to the inner feelings of
individual. But what they didn't realise was that the aim of those who
had originally created these techniques had not been to liberate the
people but to develop a new way of controlling them.

How long has the United States and Big Oil conspired to take over the Caspian Basin? It all started before 1988 and what was expected to be a breakup of the USSR.