Philip K. Dick: How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later

(Courtesy of The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension)

How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later
by Philip K. Dick, 1978

Well, I will tell you what interests me, what I consider important. I can't claim to be an authority on anything, but I can honestly say that certain matters absolutely fascinate me, and that I write about them all the time. The two basic topics which fascinate me are "What is reality?" and "What constitutes the authentic human being?" Over the twenty-seven years in which I have published novels and stories I have investigated these two interrelated topics over and over again. I consider them important topics. What are we? What is it which surrounds us, that we call the not-me, or the empirical or phenomenal world?

...

In 1951, when I sold my first story, I had no idea that such fundamental issues could be pursued in the science fiction field. I began to pursue them unconsciously. My first story had to do with a dog who imagined that the garbagemen who came every Friday morning were stealing valuable food which the family had carefully stored away in a safe metal container. Every day, members of the family carried out paper sacks of nice ripe food, stuffed them into the metal container, shut the lid tightly—and when the container was full, these dreadful-looking creatures came and stole everything but the can.

Finally, in the story, the dog begins to imagine that someday the garbagemen will eat the people in the house, as well as stealing their food. Of course, the dog is wrong about this. We all know that garbagemen do not eat people. But the dog's extrapolation was in a sense logical—given the facts at his disposal. The story was about a real dog, and I used to watch him and try to get inside his head and imagine how he saw the world. Certainly, I decided, that dog sees the world quite differently than I do, or any humans do. And then I began to think, Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. And that led me wonder, If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe, it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too diffrently, there occurs a breakdown of communication... and there is the real illness.

...

It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question "What is reality?", to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." That's all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven't been able to define reality any more lucidly.

But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it's all misunderstood. And the thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy to reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, Be passive. And—cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because Officer Beratta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.

So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

...

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. George Orwell made this clear in his novel 1984. But another way to control the minds of people is to control their perceptions. If you can get them to see the world as you do, they will think as you do. Comprehension follows perception. How do you get them to see the reality you see? After all, it is only one reality out of many. Images are a basic constituent: pictures. This is why the power of TV to influence young minds is so staggeringly vast. Words and pictures are synchronized. The possibility of total control of the viewer exists, especially the young viewer. TV viewing is a kind of sleep-learning. An EEG of a person watching TV shows that after about half an hour the brain decides that nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state, emitting alpha waves. This is because there is such little eye motion. In addition, much of the information is graphic and therefore passes into the right hemisphere of the brain, rather than being processed by the left, where the conscious personality is located. Recent experiments indicate that much of what we see on the TV screen is received on a subliminal basis. We only imagine that we consciously see what is there. The bulk of the messages elude our attention; literally, after a few hours of TV watching, we do not know what we have seen. Our memories are spurious, like our memories of dreams; the blank are filled in retrospectively. And falsified. We have participated unknowingly in the creation of a spurious reality, and then we have obligingly fed it to ourselves. We have colluded in our own doom.

And—and I say this as a professional fiction writer—the producers, scriptwriters, and directors who create these video/audio worlds do not know how much of their content is true. In other words, they are victims of their own product, along with us. Speaking for myself, I do not know how much of my writing is true, or which parts (if any) are true. This is a potentially lethal situation. We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur. And in all probability it is not deliberate. In fact, that is part of the problem. You cannot legislate an author into correctly labelling his product, like a can of pudding whose ingredients are listed on the label... you cannot compel him to declare what part is true and what isn't if he himself does not know.

...

If any of you have read my novel Ubik, you know that the mysterious entity or mind or force called Ubik starts out as a series of cheap and vulgar commercials and winds up saying:

I am Ubik. Before the universe was I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.

It is obvious from this who and what Ubik is; it specifically says that it is the word, which is to say, the Logos. In the German translation, there is one of the most wonderful lapses of correct understanding that I have ever come across; God help us if the man who translated my novel Ubik into German were to do a translation from the koine Greek into German of the New Testament. He did all right until he got to the sentence "I am the word." That puzzled him. What can the author mean by that? he must have asked himself, obviously never having come across the Logos doctrine. So he did as good a job of translation as possible. In the German edition, the Absolute Entity which made the suns, made the worlds, created the lives and the places they inhabit, says of itself:

I am the brand name.

Had he translated the Gospel according to Saint John, I suppose it would have come out as:

When all things began, the brand name already was. The brand name dwelt with God, and what God was, the brand name was.

...

Such is the fate of an author who hoped to include theological themes in his writing. "The brand name, then, was with God at the beginning, and through him all things came to be; no single thing was created without him." So it goes with noble ambitions. Let's hope God has a sense of humor.

Or should I say, Let's hope the brand name has a sense of humor.

Link to Read the Entire Speech

In Our Time: The Social Contract

THE SOCIAL CONTRACT
In Our Time (BBC)
Host: Melvyn Bragg

"Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains."



Thus begins Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s great work of political philosophy, The Social Contract. Rousseau was trying to understand why a man would give up his natural freedoms and bind himself to the rule of a prince or a government. It is among the oldest questions in political philosophy, but it flourished particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries as France and Britain were racked by civil strife and revolution – what another great social contract thinker, Thomas Hobbes, might call the war of all against all.

Contributors

Melissa Lane, Senior University Lecturer in History at Cambridge University

Susan James, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London

Karen O’Brien, Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick

To Listen to the Episode, Research More and Read Listener Comments

Also check out (where the image came from):

The Social Contract in America: Reality or Myth?

Documentary Archive: Fading Traditions

Fading Traditions
Documentary Archive (BBC)

Part One
The Moroccan halakis' dying art of story-telling

Part Two
Will Georgia lose its 7000-year old wine producing tradition?

Part Three
Temple prostitutes - the clash of ancient and modern culture in India

To Listen to the Shows

Common Sense with Dan Carlin: Crazy Alien Mutant Whigs

Crazy Alien Mutant Whigs
Common Sense with Dan Carlin

To paraphrase Archie Bunker; Dan may be crazy, but he makes a lot of sense. In this show he talks about the year 1979, the responsibilities of a Great Power, behavioral freedom and health care.

Show Notes

1. “Extremism is its own enemy” (Local headline) by Gary Anderson for the Washington Post, January 16, 2008.

2. “Fighting terrorism with terrorists” by Joshua Kurlantzick for the Los Angeles Times, January 6, 2008.

3. "Study says Bush misled public before Iraq war” by Douglass Daniel, the Associated Press, January 23, 2008.

To Listen to the Episode

New York Times: Because They Said So

"Because They Said So"
2/10/08 Editorial
New York Times

Even by the dismal standards of what passes for a national debate on intelligence and civil liberties, last week was a really bad week.

The Senate debated a bill that would make needed updates to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — while needlessly expanding the president’s ability to spy on Americans without a warrant and covering up the unlawful spying that President Bush ordered after 9/11.

The Democrat who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, John Rockefeller of West Virginia, led the way in killing amendments that would have strengthened requirements for warrants and raised the possibility of at least some accountability for past wrongdoing. Republicans declaimed about protecting America from terrorists — as if anyone was arguing the opposite — and had little to say about protecting Americans’ rights.

We saw a ray of hope when the head of the Central Intelligence Agency conceded — finally — that waterboarding was probably illegal. But his boss, the director of national intelligence, insisted it was legal when done to real bad guys. And Vice President Dick Cheney — surprise! — made it clear that President Bush would authorize waterboarding whenever he wanted.

The Catch-22 metaphor is seriously overused, but consider this: Attorney General Michael Mukasey told Congress there would be no criminal investigation into waterboarding. He said the Justice Department decided waterboarding was legal (remember the torture memo?) and told the C.I.A. that.

So, according to Mukaseyan logic, the Justice Department cannot investigate those who may have committed torture, because the Justice Department said it was O.K. and Justice cannot be expected to investigate itself.

As it was with torture, so it was with wiretaps.

To Read the Rest of the Editorial

National Coalition Against Censorship: "A Presumption in Favor of Secrecy"

"A Presumption in Favor of Secrecy"
National Coalition Against Censorship

A flourishing “marketplace of ideas” is one of the great goals of the First Amendment. It is jeopardized today by an environment of government secrecy that denies the public and even lawmakers access to information necessary to make sound decisions.

The trend to keep the public in the dark was first signaled by the 2001 “Ashcroft memo,” which reversed a long-standing “presumption in favor of disclosure” of information about government activities, absent a sound legal basis for secrecy.

Before adjourning for the holidays, Congress passed the Openness Promotes Effectiveness in our National (“OPEN”) Government Act of 2007, a suite of minor reforms to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Sadly, a clause that would have overturned the “presumption in favor of secrecy” was removed from the bill at the last minute.

Since 2001, government secrecy has been the default position, and disclosure the exception to the rule. As documented in a 2004 report, Secrecy in the Bush Administration, issued by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), this policy has been implemented through Executive Orders, increased classification of documents, and “denial through delay.” As a result, Congress has been unable to exercise its oversight function fully, and, in some cases, public debate, judicial review, and legislative action have been foreclosed.

Without question, some information must be safeguarded in the interest of national security. Nevertheless, review by courts or legislators is essential to ensure that national security is not invoked unnecessarily, or merely to keep potentially incriminating or embarrassing conduct under wraps. Some recent revelations justify public skepticism.

Take the administration's covert surveillance program, for instance. It was first disclosed to the public in late 2005 by The New York Times (in a story that was held, unpublished, for over a year at the government's behest) that the National Security Agency was using wiretaps without court-issued warrants, bypassing the requirements of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and threatening the constitutional rights of Americans.

To Read the Entire Hyperlinked Report

George Carlin: "It's Called the American Dream Because You Have to Be Asleep To Believe It"

Carlin, "There's a reason education sucks and it'll never get any better, because the owners of this country don't want it better."

[This video] clip ... is tough, gruff George Carlin routine from his stand up special, "This Life is Worth Losing." He starts out slamming America's education system and moves on to how the corporations and business interests have Americans "by the balls." Carlin says the people that run this country want nothing more than "obedient workers" and now they want our social security money and retirement. "It's a big club and you and I aren't in it," says Carlin. Check out the video to your right for more harsh but funny truths.

Watch the Video Clip

The Danger of Unemployed Graduates

(Courtesy of Open Democracy



There is no more dangerous a political animal than the unemployed or disappointed graduate
— Anatol Lieven

Happy Valentine's Day: Songs of Love and Loathing

(Boycott this corporate holiday. There is nothing like "obligatory" signification of one's love!)

So Your Tiny Black Heart Is Broken
By Stephen Thompson
NPR

For those who are boycotting this holiday set of songs should get you in the mood ;)

Where Do Our Income Taxes Go?

(Courtesy of Claire)

Friends Committee on National Legislation

PDF Poster:

Where Do Our Income Taxes Go?

Saul Williams: "Sermon on the Mount of Inevitable Progression of Saul to Saul" and "Wake Up Show"

"Sermon on the Mount of Inevitable Progression of Saul to Saul"



"Wake Up Show"



"Pledge of Resistance" (music by DJ Spooky)

To the Best of Our Knowledge: The Politics of Audacity

The Politics of Audacity
To the Best of Our Knowledge (Wisonsin Public Radio)

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. It depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is. From Bold declarations to bald-faced lies. In this hour of To The Best Of Our Knowledge, the audacity of American politics. How did we get from Thomas Jefferson to William Jefferson Clinton in a little over 200 years? And, where are we headed?

SEGMENT 1:



NPR's Senior News Analyst Daniel Schorr talks with Steve Paulson about the audacity of today's politicians. Schorr thinks the only hope is an alert corps of journalists. Schorr's latest book is "Come to Think of It: Notes on the Turn of the Millennium." And we revisit Donald Rumsfeld on the subject of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

SEGMENT 2:



We revisit President Reagan's threat to fire air traffic controllers in 1981. Also, Rachel Boynton is director of the documentary film "Our Brand is Crisis." She talks with Steve Paulson about her film which follows the efforts of an American political consulting firm which became involved in the Bolivian presidential election. And, we revisit President George Bush aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. Also, Jean Edward Smith is the author of "FDR," and tells Jim Fleming about Franklin Roosevelt's Supreme Court-packing scandal of 1937.



SEGMENT 3:



Matt Taibbi is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine and is the author of "Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire." He talks with Anne Strainchamps about political audacity, voter memory and the scandalous behavior of some defense contractors in Iraq. Also, we hear Archibald MacLeish's poem "The End of the World."

To Listen to the Program

Bluegrass Community and Technical College Sustainability Speaker Series

(Free and open to the public!!!)

All presentations will be in the Oswald Building Auditorium, on the campus of Bluegrass Community and Technical College, in Lexington, KY.

More information will be coming out soon, but just to give you a heads up, we have the following talks scheduled:

• March 25, 6:30-7:45: Jim Embry from Sustainable Cities Network, to talk about Lexington’s community gardens

• April 8, 6:30-7:45: John Walker, UK Biologist, to talk about the WWII Victory Gardens in Lexington

• April 14, 6:30-7:45: Mac Stone, Kentucky Department of Agriculture Manager, to talk about the positive impact on Kentucky farms of the tobacco settlement money

• April 17, 6:30-7:45: Aloma Dew, Sierra Club, to talk about eating as a moral act (food ethics)

• April 22, 6:30-7:45: Garrett Grady, UK Geography Graduate Student, to talk about the political ecology of seeds

Henry Jenkins: Recut, Reframe, Recycle: An Interview with Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi

(Of interest to media activists, independent filmmakers and curious citizens)

Confessions of an Aca-Fan
Henry Jenkins

As I was getting ready to head out to the conference, I conducted an interview for the blog with media scholar Pat Aufderheide (of the Center for Social Media) and Law Professor Peter Jaszi, both from American University. I've long been interested in the work Pat and Peter have been doing promoting fair use in relation to a range of different communities of practice -- including documentary filmmakers, media literacy instructors, and producers of online video content. We featured some of the work they were doing through the Media in Transition conference at MIT last year. You can hear a podcast of that discussion online. I wanted to check in with them because in the past few months, they've issued several major new studies on the impact of copyright confusion on our culture, work which is setting the stage for efforts to identify "best practices" and to negotiate "acceptable use" standards to broaden the protections afforded those of us who are tying to integrate media production activities into our classrooms or who are involved in mashing up content as a form of expressive practice. Today, I am running the first installment of this exchange.

Recut, Reframe, Recycle: An Interview with Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi (Part One)

Recut, Reframe, Recycle: An Interview with Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi (Part Two)

Michael Benton: Films Viewed in January 2008

Films Viewed in January 2008

After Words: Susan Faludi author of "The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America"

Susan Faludi author of "The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America" - 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
Interviewed by: Marie Arana
After Words



Pulitzer prize winning journalist Susan Faludi contends that following the attacks of September 11 the U.S. psychological reaction was defined by the assignment of regressive gender roles. In "The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America" Ms. Faludi argues that the American cultural and political landscape became imbued with exaggerated images of brave men and dependent women. Susan Faludi discusses her book with Marie Arana, editor of the Washington Post's Book World. Ms. Faludi is a finalist for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.



To Listen to the Episode

Dr. Zoltan Grossman: A Century of U.S. Military Interventions

(Courtesy of Claire Glasscock)

FROM WOUNDED KNEE TO IRAQ: A CENTURY OF U.S. MILITARY INTERVENTIONS
by Dr. Zoltan Grossman (Faculty member in Geography and Native American Studies, The Evergreen State College)

Check it Out Here

Merriam-Webster Word of the Day: Gadfly

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

gadfly \GAD-flye\ noun

1 : any of various flies (as a horsefly, botfly, or warble fly) that bite or annoy livestock

*2 : a person who stimulates or annoys especially by persistent criticism
Example sentence:

Robert, the self-appointed gadfly of the local paper, would write a scathing letter to the editor whenever he felt the news coverage had been inadequate or inaccurate.

Matthew Rothschild: You Have No Rights-Stories of America In An Age of Repression

"I'm very liberal and sometimes my friends say I'm giving them some kind of paranoid, nutty stuff, and I agree, but then the FBI show up."
—Marc Schultz, reported to the FBI for reading an article called "Weapons of Mass Stupidity: Fox News hits a new lowest common denominator" while he stood in line at a coffee shop

In West Virginia, Renee Jensen put up a yard sign saying "Mr. Bush: You're Fired." She's questioned by the Secret Service. In Alabama, Lynne Gobbell put a Kerry/Edwards bumper sticker on her car. She's fired from her job. In Vermont, Tom Treece had his high school students write essays and make posters either defending or criticizing the Iraq War. After midnight, the police entered his classroom and took photos of the student artwork.

The heated debates about the Patriot Act, about extensive registration and arrest programs for immigrants, and about domestic spying by the FBI, Pentagon, and National Security Agency have all been front-page news. But less understood are the effects of ramped-up national security policies on ordinary people across the country.

In this hard-to-put-down book, Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive magazine, shows that post-9/11 America has entered a repressive age. Through dozens of engrossing and disturbing individual stories, You Have No Rights makes clear that America is now a country that is both less safe and less free.

From You Have No Rights: Near Albany, New York, Stephen Downs went to a mall with his son Roger, and the two of them bought shirts in a T-shirt shop. Downs put his shirt on, went to eat in the food court—and was arrested. The T-shirt's message? "Peace on Earth."

Elizabeth DiNovella: Amy Goodman Interview

Amy Goodman Interview
By Elizabeth DiNovella
The Progressive

Amy Goodman is one of the leading journalists of our time. -She is executive producer and host of Democracy Now, a daily, independent radio and television news program broadcast on 650 stations around the world.

“I’ve always been surprised that people say it’s a hopeful program because we deal with such difficult subjects,” she says. “But I think it’s hopeful because of the people we interview. They are both the analysts and those that are doing something about it, wherever they might be.”

Many people, including myself, have relied upon Amy Goodman’s reporting on the Bush Administration. She’s the left hook to the rightwing Administration’s assault on our civil liberties. She doesn’t flinch from tough topics like torture, and she interviews people other media neglect, such as Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah, a Yemeni national who was a victim of the CIA rendition program. She scrums with the likes of Lou Dobbs. And her coverage of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq goes beyond retired generals and Beltway pundits. Unlike other news programs, anti-war voices get their say on Democracy Now.

She has a missionary zeal and calls journalism “a sacred responsibility.” Goodman started out as a volunteer at WBAI, the Pacifica radio station in New York City. She went on to become WBAI’s news director. She launched Democracy Now as a radio show on the Pacifica network in 1996 and eventually it evolved into a television program.

She’s done her share of international reporting, too. In 1991, Indonesian soldiers beat her bloody and fractured the skull of Allan Nairn in East Timor as they followed a memorial procession. She and Nairn survived the Santa Cruz massacre, though 270 Timorese were killed. Goodman and Nairn were thrown out of the country and produced Massacre: The Story of East Timor, a documentary about the Indonesian and American involvement in the Southeast Asian nation. They won numerous awards for their reporting, including the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Award, the Armstrong Award, the Radio/Television News Directors Award, as well as awards from the Associated Press, United Press International, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. She returned to East Timor for live coverage in 2002 when the nation gained its independence.

In 1998, she and then-Democracy Now producer Jeremy Scahill traveled to Nigeria and documented the collusion between Chevron Oil company and the Nigerian Navy’s killing of two local environmental activists and other human rights abuses. Drilling & Killing won George Polk and Project Censored awards.

She is a rock star at places like WORT-FM, the community radio station in Madison, Wisconsin, which broadcasts her program weekdays. WORT is one of the many small stations Goodman visits and lends support to. “Independent media has been the hope for the last few years,” she says.

Reporting runs in the family. With her brother David, she has co-authored two books, Static and Exception to the Rulers. She somehow finds the time to write a weekly syndicated newspaper column.

I met up with Goodman in mid-December in New York City. It was 7 p.m. when I arrived at a locally owned cafe in Hell’s Kitchen. Goodman was in a meeting with her producers.

At fifty, she still dresses like she’s in radio. Wearing black jeans and black sweater, her brown hair showing shades of gray, she lacks the power suits and shiny mane sported by most television anchors.

She ordered a cup of coffee, a chocolate biscotti, and a plate of fruit. She told me she is a procrastinator. If it were up to me, she says, I would put things off until tomorrow. But with the show, when the tape rolls, and the countdown begins, you have to start.

Question: Talking to people who are the target of U.S. foreign policy is a hallmark of your show. How did that happen?

Amy Goodman: We have a special responsibility as American journalists. We live in the most powerful country on Earth. Yet there is probably a level of ignorance about our effect in the rest of the world because the media doesn’t bring it to us. It’s much more difficult for people at the target end to forget, to be oblivious, because they are right there living it every day. We have a responsibility here to understand what it feels like, because we are the ones who are creating that situation, whether we like it or not.

We’re constantly hearing from the small circle of pundits in Washington who know so little about so much, explaining the world to us, and getting it so wrong. Every network is the same. Unfortunately, sometimes public broadcasting sounds the same way.

The United States has the potential to have tremendous power for good. Right now, it just doesn’t have that position. But there are many, many people who make up a pro-democracy movement in this country, just like in other countries, people who really do deeply care. If we want to be safer here, we have to extend those voices to the rest of the world. That’s going to increase our national security.

To Read the Rest of the Interview

Matthew Rothschild: FBI Deputizes Private Contractors With Extraordinary Powers, Including 'Shoot to Kill'

(Courtesy of AlterNet)

FBI Deputizes Private Contractors With Extraordinary Powers, Including 'Shoot to Kill'
By Matthew Rothschild
The Progressive and

The FBI has a new set of eyes and ears, and they're being told to protect their infrastructure at any cost. They can even kill without repercussion.

Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does—and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to “shoot to kill” in the event of martial law.
InfraGard is “a child of the FBI,” says Michael Hershman, the chairman of the advisory board of the InfraGard National Members Alliance and CEO of the Fairfax Group, an international consulting firm.

InfraGard started in Cleveland back in 1996, when the private sector there cooperated with the FBI to investigate cyber threats.

“Then the FBI cloned it,” says Phyllis Schneck, chairman of the board of directors of the InfraGard National Members Alliance, and the prime mover behind the growth of InfraGard over the last several years.

InfraGard itself is still an FBI operation, with FBI agents in each state overseeing the local InfraGard chapters. (There are now eighty-six of them.) The alliance is a nonprofit organization of private sector InfraGard members.

“We are the owners, operators, and experts of our critical infrastructure, from the CEO of a large company in agriculture or high finance to the guy who turns the valve at the water utility,” says Schneck, who by day is the vice president of research integration at Secure Computing.

“At its most basic level, InfraGard is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the private sector,” the InfraGard website states. “InfraGard chapters are geographically linked with FBI Field Office territories.”

In November 2001, InfraGard had around 1,700 members. As of late January, InfraGard had 23,682 members, according to its website, www.infragard.net, which adds that “350 of our nation’s Fortune 500 have a representative in InfraGard.”

To join, each person must be sponsored by “an existing InfraGard member, chapter, or partner organization.” The FBI then vets the applicant. On the application form, prospective members are asked which aspect of the critical infrastructure their organization deals with. These include: agriculture, banking and finance, the chemical industry, defense, energy, food, information and telecommunications, law enforcement, public health, and transportation.

FBI Director Robert Mueller addressed an InfraGard convention on August 9, 2005. At that time, the group had less than half as many members as it does today. “To date, there are more than 11,000 members of InfraGard,” he said. “From our perspective that amounts to 11,000 contacts . . . and 11,000 partners in our mission to protect America.” He added a little later, “Those of you in the private sector are the first line of defense.”

He urged InfraGard members to contact the FBI if they “note suspicious activity or an unusual event.” And he said they could sic the FBI on “disgruntled employees who will use knowledge gained on the job against their employers.”

In an interview with InfraGard after the conference, which is featured prominently on the InfraGard members’ website, Mueller says: “It’s a great program.”

The ACLU is not so sanguine.

“There is evidence that InfraGard may be closer to a corporate TIPS program, turning private-sector corporations—some of which may be in a position to observe the activities of millions of individual customers—into surrogate eyes and ears for the FBI,” the ACLU warned in its August 2004 report The Surveillance-Industrial Complex: How the American Government Is Conscripting Businesses and Individuals in the Construction of a Surveillance Society.

InfraGard is not readily accessible to the general public. Its communications with the FBI and Homeland Security are beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act under the “trade secrets” exemption, its website says. And any conversation with the public or the media is supposed to be carefully rehearsed

To Read the Rest of the Report

Context Creates Meaning: The Art of the Film Trailer

(My favorite example was a cowboy I met on my brother's farm out in Eastern Oregon who, when he found out I was a film studies professor, complained about being misled by the trailer for Brokeback Mountain. He thought it was going to be a traditional Western tale and didn't figure it out until about 20 minutes into the film. Have you ever felt you were misled by a film trailer? I once picked up the film "Happiness" to bring back for a friend who was suffering after a break-up. It was advertised as a "comedy" and was in the comedy section of the DVD store! Totally inappropriate for that situation.)



Also:

Scary Mary Poppins



Zombie West Side Story



And so wrong, but so good:

Toy Story Requiem

Glengary Glen Ross Romance

Sleepless in Seattle Horror

Courtesy of Alex Needham and his readers

----------------------------------------------------------------------

To end this list. I must add my alltime favorite film trailer (it helps that it is easily one of my top ten films). I remember sitting in the front row of the opening night for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and this trailer was shown and I was very intrigued, I knew I had to see it, even though I had no idea what the film was about:

Can You Guess the Film Trailer

and of course, even this masterpiece of a trailer, has been recut

and recut

and again

To the Best of Our Knowledge: To Sprawl or Not To Sprawl

To the Best of Our Knowledge
Host: Steve Paulson
"To Sprawl or Not To Sprawl"

Subdivisions. Industrial Parks. Strip Malls. Gridlock. Sprawl is socially unequal, environmentally irresponsible, and aesthetically ugly. Right? In this hour of To the Best Of Our Knowledge, we'll look at the costs and – YES – the benefits of suburban sprawl. Because maybe, just maybe, sprawl is a good thing.

SEGMENT 1:



Joel Hirschhorn is the author of "Sprawl Kills: How Blandburbs. Steal Your Time, Health and Money." He obviously thinks urban sprawl is a terrible idea and tells Steve Paulson all the reasons why.

SEGMENT 2:



Robert Bruegmann makes the case for the opposite point of view in his book "Sprawl: A History." He says societies have always grown and ours looks the way it does because suburbs represent the way Americans like to live.



Also, urban sprawl is a staggering problem in China as a result of the on-going Chinese industrial revolution. Photographer Edward Burtynsky traveled to China to document its "Manufactured Landscapes," and film-maker Jennifer Baichwal documented his trip in her film of the same name. Baichwal talks with Steve Paulson about the scale of China's ecological problems and the beauty of Burtynsky's images.

SEGMENT 3:



Novelist Tom Perrotta reads from "Little Children" and "The Abstinence Teacher," and talks with Anne Strainchamps about life in the suburbs, where everything is nice, and nobody wants a pedophile to move into the neighborhood.

To Listen to the Episode

Charles Baudelaire: Be Drunk; Kim Rush: The Frosting Window/Mirror of Literature

Be Drunk

Always be drunk.
That's it!
The great imperative!
In order not to feel
Time's horrid fardel
bruise your shoulders,
grinding you into the earth,
Get drunk and stay that way.
On what?
On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever.
But get drunk.
And if you sometimes happen to wake up
on the porches of a palace,
in the green grass of a ditch,
in the dismal loneliness of your own room,
your drunkenness gone or disappearing,
ask the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock,
ask everything that flees,
everything that groans
or rolls
or sings,
everything that speaks,
ask what time it is;
and the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock
will answer you:
"Time to get drunk!
Don't be martyred slaves of Time,
Get drunk!
Stay drunk!
On wine, virtue, poetry, whatever!"

--Charles Baudelaire

Now read Kim Rush's commentary on the poem:

The Frosting Window/Mirror of Literature

Best Book of 2007; Books Finished in January

Best Book of 2007:

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
A very important road map of the rise and beliefs of our current world order.



Books Finished in January:

The SFWA European Hall of Fame: Sixteen Contemporary Masterpieces of Science Fiction from the Continent. (ed. James Morrow and Kathryn Morrow: USA 2007, Tor Books) 4 stars



A good collection of short stories for those seeking to expand their science fiction reading beyond the english language field. It is obvious that the Morrows are passionate about bringing these authors to a new readership and I commend their efforts in this case. I will use this collection as a guide to increase my international literary experiences. Now, lets hope this is a success, and we can soon see similar collections of authors from Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, etc…

Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami: Japan 2002/US 2005, Vintage International) 4 stars



My third Murakami book. It builds steam slowly with its twin narratives, dropping clues, playing with communication genres (government reports, interviews and straight narratives), and slowly introducing magical realist elements (talking cats, doppelganger ghosts, labyrinths/dark-forests, bizarre elementals, philosophical discussions of time and identity). Once the hook was set, though, I settled in and enjoyed the ride. No doubt this book will reverberate in my consciousness for awhile. The character Nakata is one of my all-time favorites.

The Cassini Division (Ken MacLeod: UK 1998/US 1999, Tor Books) 4 stars



I could not put this book down and hungrily devoured it in a few days. MacLeod has an interesting background for a SF writer, BS in Zoology, researcher in Bio-mechanics, MA in philosophy and computer-analyst/programmer. He demonstrates all of these interests in this fast-paced space-faring sociological and political adventure. The story easily hooked me because the main character, Ellen May Ngewthu, is an agent of an anarcho-socialist society and is in a race/struggle against both post-human and anarcho-capitalist societies/worlds. In addition to its space opera feel, the book evokes reflections on sexual, economic, and political relations, while, most importantly, forcing us to think about the nature of “humanity” through the struggles of post-human entities. I’m still wrestling with the political implications of this book, especially the ultimate decisions made by the crew of Ellen’s ship The Terrible Beauty. MacLeod is another example of the innovative Scottish new wave of Science Fiction/Fantasy writers.

The No-Nonsense Guide to Global Media (Peter Steven: London 2003, New Internationalist/Verso) 3 stars
Introduction for the uninitiated. Lots of facts, but very dry and boring.

In Our Time: Socrates

(With apologies to Starrider who despises Socrates :)

Socrates
Host: Melvin Bragg
In Our Time (BBC)

Of all the names in ancient philosophy, Socrates is one to conjure with. Born in 469 BC into the golden age of the city of Athens, his impact is so profound that all the thinkers who went before are simply known as pre-Socratic.

In person Socrates was deliberately irritating, he was funny and he was rude; he didn’t like democracy very much and spent quite a lot of time in shoe shops. He claimed he was on a mission from God to educate his fellow Athenians but has left us nothing in his own hand because he refused to write anything down.

Contributors

Angie Hobbs, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Warwick University

David Sedley, Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Cambridge University

Paul Millett, Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge

Listen to the Discussion

In Our Time: The Court of Rudolph II

THE COURT OF RUDOLF II
Host: Melvin Bragg
In Our Time (BBC)

In 1606 the Archdukes of Vienna declared:

“His majesty is interested only in wizards, alchemists, Kabbalists and the like, sparing no expense to find all kinds of treasures, learn secrets and use scandalous ways of harming his enemies…He also has a whole library of magic books. He strives all the time to eliminate God completely so that he may in future serve a different master.”

The subject of this coruscating attack was the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II, and his court at Prague. Rudolf had filled Prague with the wonders of the age – the great paintings of Italy were carried over the Alps, intricate automatons constructed, maps and models of the heavens unfurled and engineered. But Rudolf’s greatest possessions were people - the astronomers Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe, the magus John Dee and the philosopher Giordano Bruno had all found their way to his city. Far from the devilish inquisitor of the archdukes’ imaginations, Rudolf patronised a powerhouse of Renaissance ideas.

Contributors

Peter Forshaw, Postdoctoral Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London and an Honorary Fellow of the University of Exeter

Howard Hotson, Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Oxford

Adam Mosley, Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Wales, Swansea

To Listen to the Discussion

As Dubya Prepares His Last State of the Union Speech Lets Look at His Resume

(Courtesy of Danny M. I found multiple versions of this online including an interactive, collaborative one.)

RESUME:

GEORGE W. BUSH
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20520

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE:

Law Enforcement:
I was arrested in Kennebunkport, Maine, in 1976 for driving under the influence of alcohol. I pled guilty, paid a fine, and had my driver's license suspended for 30 days. My Texas driving record has been 'lost' and is not available.

Military:
I joined the Texas Air National Guard and went AWOL. I refused to take a drug test or answer any questions about my drug use. By joining the Texas Air National Guard, I was able to avoid combat duty in Vietnam.

College:
I graduated from Yale University with a low C average. I was a cheerleader.

PAST WORK EXPERIENCE:

I ran for U.S. Congress and lost.

I began my career in the oil business in Midland,Texas in 1975. I bought an oil company, but couldn't find any oil in Texas. The company went bankrupt shortly after I sold all my stock.

I bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in a sweetheart deal that took land using taxpayer money.

With the help of my father and our friends in the oil industry (including Enron CEO Ken Lay), I was elected governor of Texas.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS GOVERNOR OF TEXAS:

I changed Texas pollution laws to favor power and oil companies, making Texas the most polluted state in the Union. During my tenure, Houston replaced Los Angeles as the most smog-ridden city in America.

I cut taxes and bankrupted the Texas treasury to the tune of billions in borrowed money.

I set the record for the most executions by any governor in American history.

With the help of my brother, the governor of Florida , and my father's appointments to the Supreme Court, I became President of the United States, after losing by over 500,000 votes.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS PRESIDENT:

I am the first President in U.S. history to enter office with a criminal record.

I invaded and occupied two countries at a continuing cost of over one billion dollars per week.

I spent the U.S. surplus and effectively bankrupted the U.S. Treasury.

I shattered the record for the largest annual deficit in U.S. history.

I set an economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any 12-month period.

I set the all-time record for most foreclosures in a 12-month period.

I set the all-time record for the biggest drop in the history of the U.S. stock market. In my first year in office, over 2 million Americans lost their jobs and that trend continues.

I'm proud that the members of my cabinet are the richest of any administration in U.S. history. My 'poorest millionaire,' Condoleezza Rice, has a Chevron oil tanker named after her.

I set the record for most campaign fund-raising trips by a U.S. President.

I am the all-time U.S. and world record -holder for receiving the most corporate campaign donations.

My largest lifetime campaign contributor, and one of my best friends, Kenneth Lay, presided over the largest corporate bankruptcy fraud in U.S. history, Enron.

My political party used Enron private jets and corporate attorneys to assure my success with the U.S. Supreme Court during my election decision.

I have protected my friends at Enron and Halliburton against investigation or prosecution. More time and money was spent investigating the Monica Lewinsky affair than has been spent investigating one of the biggest corporate rip-offs in history. I presided over the biggest energy crisis in U.S. history and refused to intervene when corruption involving the oil industry was revealed.

I presided over the highest gasoline prices in U.S. history.

I changed the U.S. policy to allow convicted criminals to be awarded government contracts.

I appointed more convicted criminals to my administration than any President in U.S. history.

I created the Ministry of Homeland Security, the largest bureaucracy in the history of the United States Government.

I've broken more international treaties than any President in U.S. history.

I am the first President in U.S. history to have the United Nations remove the U.S. from the Human Rights Commission.

I withdrew the U.S. from the World Court of Law.

I refused to allow inspector's access to U.S. 'prisoners of war' detainees and
thereby have refused to abide by the Geneva Convention.

I am the first President in history to refuse United Nations election inspectors (during the 2002 US election).

I set the record for fewest numbers of press conferences of any President since the advent of television.

I set the all-time record for most days on vacation in any one-year period. After taking off the entire month of August, I presided over the worst security failure in U.S. history.

I garnered the most sympathy ever for the U.S. after the World Trade Center attacks and less than a year later made the U.S. the most hated country in the world, the largest failure of diplomacy in world history.

I have set the all-time record for most people worldwide to simultaneously protest me in public venues (15 million people), shattering the record for protests against any person in the history of mankind.

I am the first President in U.S. history to order an unprovoked, pre-emptive attack and the military occupation of a sovereign nation. I did so against the will of the United Nations, the majority of U.S. Citizens and the world community.

I have cut health care benefits for war veterans and supported a cut in duty benefits for active duty troops and their families in wartime.

In my State of the Union Address, I lied about our reasons for attacking Iraq and then blamed the lies on our British friends.

I am the first President in history to have a majority of Europeans (71%) view my presidency as the biggest threat to world peace and security.

I am supporting development of a nuclear 'Tactical Bunker Buster,' a WMD.

I have so far failed to fulfill my pledge to bring Osama Bin Laden to justice.

RECORDS AND REFERENCES:

All records of my tenure as governor of Texas are now in my father's library, sealed and unavailable for public view.

All records of SEC investigations into my insider trading and my bankrupt companies are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view.

All records or minutes from meetings that I, or my Vice-President, attended regarding public energy policy are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public review. I specified that my sealed documents will not be available for 50 years.

UChannel: On Nuclear Terrorism

(A very balanced, calm and clear explanation of the possible risks and the dangers of overexaggerating the problem.)

On Nuclear Terrorism
Michael A. Levi, Fellow for Science and Technology; Director, Program on Energy Security and Climate Change, Council on Foreign Relations.
Presider: Richard N. Haass, President, Council on Foreign Relations
UChannel (Princeton University)



To Listen to the Lecture

Jonathan Edwards: The Shanty

(Courtesy of Spider Robinson)



Jonathan Edwards' Website

Also a documentary (trailer):

Open Source: Backstage with Henry the V

(Is Shakespeare's play an anti-war masterpiece?)

Backstage With Henry V
Open Source
Hosted by Christopher Lydon



Henry the Fifth remains, for many, the familiar favorite among Shakespeare plays. For Lydon kids, it began with my father’s doctrine that Laurence Olivier’s Henry V was the best movie ever made — though we all came to see the sinew-stiffening World War 2 propaganda dimension of the piece, which Winston Churchill had cleansed, for example, of the mass slaugher of French prisoners in Shakespeare’s account. Those magic lines of Henry’s — “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers” to his warriors, and his love banter with the French princess Katherine — “take a soldier; take a King” — summon the blood and melt the heart long after we realize that this warlike Harry was bluffing his way through an aggressive and unpopular war of choice, egged on by a corrupt church establishment.

...

What is Shakespeare saying through Henry the Fifth about honor and heroism, about the earning of kingship and manhood, about nationhood and war, about chivalry and tragic irony?

To Listen/Read the Episode

Democracy Now: Abu Ghraib Whistleblower Samuel Provance Speaks Out on Torture and Cover-Up at U.S. Military Jail

Abu Ghraib Whistleblower Samuel Provance Speaks Out on Torture and Cover-Up at U.S. Military Jail
Democracy Now

In a national TV broadcast exclusive, we spend the hour with Abu Ghraib whistleblower and former Army sergeant Samuel Provance. From September 2003 to the spring of 2004 Provance ran the top secret computer network used by military intelligence at Abu Ghraib. He was the first intelligence specialist to speak openly about abuse at the prison and is the only military intelligence soldier listed as a witness in the Taguba report. Among the abuses he lists
is the torture of a 16 year-old Iraqi boy in order to make his father talk. After Provance spoke out, the Army stripped him of his security clearance, demoted him and threatened him with ten years in jail.

Listen/Watch/Read

This American Life: Shouting Across the Divide

Shouting Across the Divide
This American Life

A Muslim woman persuades her husband that their family would be happier if they left the West Bank and moved to America. They do, and things are good...until September 11After that, the elementary school their daughter goes to begins using a textbook that says Muslims want to kill Christians. This and other stories of what happens when Muslims and non-Muslims try to communicate, and misfire.

Prologue.
In the 1930s, the designer of the U.S. Supreme Court made a frieze to adorn the courtroom walls. It depicted eighteen great lawgivers through ages, including Moses, Solon, Confucius...and Muhammad. The only problem is that Islam forbids such portrayals of the prophet. Host Ira Glass talks to Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, about why the frieze is offensive to Muslims, and what they tried to do about it. (7 minutes)

Act One. Which One of These Is Not Like the Others?

Serry and her husband's love story began in a place not usually associated with romance: the West Bank. That was where the couple met, fell in love and decided to get married. Then Serry, who was American, convinced her Palestinian husband to move to America. She promised him that in America their children would never encounter prejudice or strife of any kind. But things didn't quite work out that way. This American Life contributor Alix Spiegel tells the story. (33 minutes)

Act Two. America, the Ad Campaign.

The New York advertising agency where Shalom Auslander works got an assignment from the State Department back in 2001: sell American values to the Muslim world. Now they just have to figure out exactly what to say to millions of people they know absolutely nothing about. Shalom is the author of a book of stories called Beware of God. (15 minutes)

To Listen to the Episode

Fred Phelps Targets Heath Ledger's Funeral for His Homophobic Hate Display

(Courtesy of Literaghost and Friendly Atheist. Fred Phelps and Westboro Baptist Church are continuing to do homosexuals a favor by making the ugly, hateful, bigoted nature of homophobia visible.)

Theodore W. Allen: The Invention of the White Race

Theodore W. Allen's book The Invention of the White Race (Summary of Volume 1 and Summary of Volume 2), which I first read as an assigment in Dr. Ronald Strickland's course on Marxism, was paradigm-shifting in moving me past the last vestiges of my early indocrination into tribal allegiances based upon skin/ethnicity. His book, along with my later reading of Many-Headed Hydra and The Wages of Whiteness, outlined how the construction and naturalization of a dominant white race had served to keep the working classes from recognizing their true power in collective numbers, effectively fragmenting them through petty, destructive, constructed racialized hatreds.

I was never the same after reading Theodore W. Allen. He pushed me to a higher level, and when I think upon these issues, I am standing on his shoulders.

Michael Dean Benton

In Memoriam: Theodore W. Allen
by Jeffrey B. Perry
Cultural Logic

Theodore W. Allen, a working class intellectual and activist and author of the influential two-volume history The Invention of the White Race (Verso:1994, 1997), died on January 19, 2005, surrounded by friends in his apartment at 97 Brooklyn Avenue in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. He was 85. The cause of death was cancer, which he had battled for 15 years. Announcement of the death was made by his close friend Linda Vidinha.

Allen, an ardent opponent of white supremacy, spent much of his last forty years researching the role of white supremacy in United States history and examining records of colonial Virginia as he documented and analyzed the development of the "white race" in the latter part of the seventeenth century. His main thesis, that the "white race" developed as a ruling class social control formation in response to labor unrest as manifest in Bacon's Rebellion of 1676-77, was first articulated in February 1974 in a talk he delivered at a Union of Radical Political Economists meeting in New Haven. Versions of that talk were published in 1975 in Radical America and in pamphlet form as "Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race."

In the 1960s "Ted" Allen significantly influenced the direction of the student movement and the new left with an article entitled "Can White Radicals Be Radicalized?" which developed the argument that white supremacy, reinforced among European Americans by the "white skin privilege," was the main retardant of working class consciousness in the United States and that efforts at radical social change should direct principal efforts at challenging the system of white supremacy and urging "repudiation of white skin privilege" by European Americans.

Allen was in the forefront in challenging phenotypical (physical appearance-based) definitions of race, in challenging "racism is innate" arguments, in challenging theories that the working class benefits from white supremacy, in calling attention to the crucial role of the buffer social control group in racial oppression, in documenting and analyzing the development of the "white race" in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and in clarifying how "this all-class association of European-Americans held together by 'racial' privileges conferred on laboring class European-Americans relative to African-Americans--[has served] as the principal historic guarantor of ruling-class domination of national life" in the United States. These contributions differentiate his work from many writers in the rapidly growing white race as "a social and cultural construction" ranks, which his writings helped to spawn.

In The Invention of the White Race Allen focused on Virginia, the first and pattern-setting continental colony. He emphasized that "When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no white people there" and he added that he found "no instance of the official use of the word 'white' as a token of social status before its appearance in a Virginia law passed in 1691." He also found, similar to historian Lerone Bennett, Jr., that throughout most of the seventeenth century conditions for African-American and European-American laborers and bond-servants were very similar. Under such conditions solidarity among the laboring classes reached a peak during Bacon's Rebellion: the capitol (Jamestown) was burned; two thousand rebels forced the governor to flee across the Chesapeake Bay and controlled 6/7 of Virginia's land; and, in the latter stages of the struggle, "foure hundred English and Negroes in Arms" demanded their freedom from bondage.

To Allen, the social control problems highlighted by Bacon's Rebellion "demonstrated beyond question the lack of a sufficient intermediate stratum to stand between the ruling plantation elite and the mass of European-American and African-American laboring people, free and bond." He then detailed how, in the period after Bacon's Rebellion the white race was invented as "a bourgeois social control formation in response to [such] laboring class unrest." He described systematic ruling class policies, which extended privileges to European laborers and bond-servants and imposed and extended harsher disabilities and blocked normal class mobility for African-Americans. Thus, for example, when African-Americans were deprived of their long-held right to vote in Virginia and Governor William Gooch explained in 1735 that the Virginia Assembly had decided upon this curtailment of the franchise in order "to fix a perpetual Brand upon Free Negros & Mulattos," Allen emphasized that this was not an "unthinking decision"! "Rather, it was a deliberate act by the plantation bourgeoisie; it proceeded from a conscious decision in the process of establishing a system of racial oppression, even though it meant repealing an electoral principle that had existed in Virginia for more than a century."

For Allen, "The hallmark, the informing principle, of racial oppression in its colonial origins and as it has persisted in subsequent historical contexts, is the reduction of all members of the oppressed group to one undifferentiated social status, beneath that of any member of the oppressor group." The key to understanding racial oppression, he wrote, is the social control buffer -- that group in society, which helps to control the poor for the rich. Under racial oppression in Virginia, any persons of discernible non-European ancestry in colonial Virginia after Bacon's Rebellion were denied a role in the social control buffer group, the bulk of which was made up of working-class "whites." In contrast, Allen explained, in the Caribbean "Mulattos" were included in the social control group and were promoted into middle-class status. For him, this was "the key to the understanding the difference between Virginia ruling-class policy of 'fixing a perpetual brand' on African-Americans" and "the policy of the West Indian planters of formally recognizing the middle-class status 'colored' descendant (and other Afro-Caribbeans who earned special merit by their service to the regime)." The difference "was rooted in the objective fact that in the West Indies there were too few laboring-class Europeans to embody an adequate petit bourgeoisie, while in the continental colonies there were too many to be accommodated in the ranks of that class." (In 1676 in Virginia, for example, there were approximately 6,000 European-American bond-laborers and 2,000 African-American bond-laborers.)

In 1996, on radio station WBAI in New York, Allen discussed the subject of "American Exceptionalism" and the much-vaunted "immunity" of the United States to proletarian class-consciousness and its effects. His explanation for the relatively low level of class consciousness was that social control in the United States was guaranteed, not primarily by the class privileges of a petit bourgeoisie, but by the white-skin privileges of laboring class whites; that the ruling class co-opts European-American workers into the buffer social control system against the interests of the working class to which they belong; and that the "white race" by its all-class form, conceals the operation of the ruling class social control system by providing it with a majoritarian "democratic" facade.

Entire Essay

Cultural Logic Interview of Allen

Allen's "In Defense of Affirmative Action in Employment Policy"

Allen's "'Race' and 'Ethnicity': History and the 2000 Census"

Allen's "Be Fair: Reverse Discrimination"

ANDREW W. MELLON POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP: Peace and Justice Fellowship (2/25)

VASSAR COLLEGE

ANDREW W. MELLON POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP
In
Peace and Justice Studies


Vassar College invites applications for a two-year Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Peace and Justice Studies, to begin Fall, 2008. Candidates should be relatively new PhDs with research interests in peace, justice, militarism or violence; we welcome applicants from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. We seek scholars who have an interest in teaching in an undergraduate liberal arts college and who would welcome the opportunity to participate in the development of a multidisciplinary concentration in Peace and Justice Studies. Vassar College is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer and is strongly and actively committed to diversity within its community. Applications from members of historically underrepresented groups are especially encouraged.

The Fellow will teach or team-teach one introductory or intermediate level course each academic year and will help to organize and facilitate a monthly faculty seminar throughout the academic year intended to extend and deepen the interests in Peace and Justice Studies of faculty from several disciplines. The Fellow also will have some responsibility in advising students on projects and theses. In addition, the Fellow will be able to pursue her or his own scholarly project in a supportive and intellectually stimulating environment where exchange among faculty from different disciplines is encouraged. The fellowship includes $47,380 in salary, plus benefits, as well as support for research, professional travel and relocation expenses.

Please submit a letter of application, a curriculum vitae, a graduate school transcript, three letters of recommendation, a brief description of teaching interests, selected syllabi of courses previously taught and/or other teaching materials, and examples of scholarly work to: Ronald Sharp, Dean of the Faculty, Vassar College, Box 4, 124 Raymond Avenue, Poughkeepsie, NY 12604-0004. Review of applications will begin on February 25, 2008.

Vassar College is a highly selective, coeducational liberal arts institution. Its 250 faculty members offer undergraduate education to 2,300 students on a beautiful 1,000-acre campus situated ninety minutes north of New York City in the scenic mid-Hudson Valley. The College provides strong support for teaching and scholarship through its extensive library holdings, the extraordinary collection of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, its program in teaching development and its excellent media and information technology resources.

The Treatment: Julian Schnabel

(Lexington Green Theater will be getting this film!)

Interview with Julian Schnabel
Host: Elvis Mitchell
The Treatment (KCRW)

With Basquiat, Before Night Falls and his newest, The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, artist and director Julian Schnabel turns film biography into art. He discusses separating fiction from fact.

To Listen to the Episode

Robert Greenwald/Brave New Films/Reverend Yearwood/Bill Moyers/David Cay Johnston: Martin Luther King, Jr's Dream; War on Greed; Free Lunch

What would he say if he were alive today?



Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 1929-1968
Democracy Now

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. He was born January 15, 1929. If he lived, he would have turned 79 years old. In the early 1960s, King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South where police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods were used against Southern blacks seeking the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter. After passage of Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, King began challenging the nation’s fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without “human rights”—including economic rights.

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for “radical changes in the structure of our society” to redistribute wealth and power.

By 1967, King had also become the country’s most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967—a year to the day before he was murdered—King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

Time magazine called the speech “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi,” and the Washington Post declared that King had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.”

To Listen to the Speech and Visit Democracy Now/Pacifica Archives of MLK Jr.s Other Speeches

Reverend Yearwood on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Dream and the War on Greed:



To watch the film War on Greed (Robert Greenwald: USA, 2008)



Robert Greenwald on CNBC discussing the film (and the brave reporter who defends the subjects of the documentary ;)





Also the most recent episode of Bill Moyer's Journal includes an interview with David Cay Johnston:

With all the talk of change coming out of the campaigns, can we expect big money to lose its grip on Washington? Bill Moyers interviews NEW YORK TIMES investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize-winner David Cay Johnston who says America's system has been rigged to benefit the super-rich.

To Watch the Episode



More from Democracy Now:

“Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick You with the Bill)”

And from AlterNet

RECLAIMING KING: BEYOND "I HAVE A DREAM"
By Adam Howard
People usually focus on the historic "I Have a Dream" speech,
but it's the work King was doing at the end of his life that
deserves more attention.

To Read the Article

THE FREEDOM WE SEEK
By Eliseo Medina and Gerry Hudson
40 years later, Dr. King's dream of a more just society is a
long way from being realized.

To Read the Article

BBC World Service: Debt Threat

Debt Threat: Credit Monster
BBC World Service: Documentary Archive

Everyone now knows that the credit crunch began with American banks giving seemingly crazy loans to poor or uneducated home-buyers who had little or no chance of repaying them.

Early hopes that the problem would be restricted to these so-called sub-prime borrowers have been dashed and the credit crunch is now spreading rapidly to engulf homeowners in middle-class suburbs and on to squeeze industries and jobs in America and around the world.

No-one now seems to knows how big the problem is or where it's going to end, but all seem to be agreed it's set to get far worse in 2008.

In this special series for BBC World Service, reporter Michael Robinson delves deep into the innards of the credit crunch to try to get some answers.

In the first programme Michael explores how rapidly the shock wave of the credit crunch is spreading and why it is now moving far beyond the sub-prime homeowners where it began.

What are some of the little-known techniques bankers used to throw off the old constraints on their lending to create their unprecedented mountain of debt?

How have these techniques have resulted in the true extent of the debt problem being hidden away often offshore in strange new financial devices, well away from the gaze of politicians and regulators?

To Listen to the Episode

Allida Black: Eleanor Roosevelt and the 1960 Elections

Eleanor Roosevelt and the 1960 Elections
Word for Word (American Public Media)



Historian Allida Black says Eleanor Roosevelt's influence went far beyond being First Lady. Besides being a driving force behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Mrs. Roosevelt played a key role in the 1960 Democratic primary battle between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. In a 2007 speech at the Minnesota History Center, Black tells the story of how Roosevelt was one of Kennedy's most vocal critics — and one of his most important allies — during one of the closest presidential elections in the history of American politics.

To Listen to the Episode

Dr. Alice Ginott-Cohn: Answering Dr. Kinsey

"Answering Dr. Kinsey"
Interview of Dr. Alice Ginott-Cohn
The Story (American Public Media)

[January 4th] marked the 60th anniversary of the first Kinsey Report on Human Sexual Behavior. The identity of many of the participants who divulged the details of their sex lives to Kinsey remains secret. However, one woman decided to shed her anonymity.

Dr. Alice Ginott-Cohn was interviewed by Dr. Kinsey when she was 19 years old. He was seeking female volunteers in her psychology class at Indiana University. Alice says she found Kinsey very attractive and comforting, so she volunteered to be interviewed. Dick Gordon talks to Alice about the famous study and how participating in it has influenced her own life and work.

To Listen to the Episode

James Curran: Global Media System, Public Knowledge and Democracy

"Global Media System, Public Knowledge and Democracy"
James Curran, director of the Media Research Programme at Goldsmiths, University of London. Chair: Sonia Livingstone
(Nov 13, 2007 at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
UChannel



Much of the world is moving towards the entertainment-centred, market-based media model of the United States. If this continues, we will enter a new era of political ignorance.

To Listen to the Lecture

Filmschool: Donald Karslake

FOR THE BIBLE TELLS ME SO
Filmschool
Hosted by Nathan Callahan and Mike Kaspar



An interview with Daniel Karslake the director of For the Bible Tells Me So. Winner of the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Seattle International Film Festival, Karslake's documentary brilliantly reconciles homosexuality and Biblical scripture, and in the process reveals that Church-sanctioned anti-gay bias is based almost solely upon a significant (and often malicious) misinterpretation of the Bible. Through the experiences of five very normal, very Christian, very American families — including those of former House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt and Episcopalian Bishop Gene Robinson — we discover how insightful people of faith handle the realization of having a gay child. For six years, Daniel Karslake has been an award-winning producer for the highly acclaimed newsmagazine, In the Life, which airs nationally on PBS in over 120 markets. Recognition for his outstanding work for the show, which has centered primarily on issues regarding religion and homosexuality, includes an Emmy nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, as well as praise from GLAAD and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. For the Bible Tells Me So is on the Academy's short list of nominees for Best Documentary.

To Listen to the Episode

Taxi to the Dark Side (Alex Gibney: USA, 2007)

Alex Gibney, director of the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and executive producer of No End in Sight, has just released his latest documentary Taxi to the Dark Side.



Green Cine Archive on Taxi to the Dark Side

Official Website for the Film

The Presidential Forum on Renewable Energy Student Essay Contest (Three $10,000 Winners!!!)

(Courtesy of Claire Glasscock)

The Presidential Forum on Renewable Energy is sponsoring an essay contest for college students with three $10,000 prizes for winning essays. Find out more by visiting this site.

Michael Pollan: The Way We Live Now

The Way We Live Now: Our Decrepit Food Factories
By MICHAEL POLLAN
New York Times



The word “sustainability” has gotten such a workout lately that the whole concept is in danger of floating away on a sea of inoffensiveness. Everybody, it seems, is for it whatever “it” means. On a recent visit to a land-grant university’s spanking-new sustainability institute, I asked my host how many of the school’s faculty members were involved. She beamed: When letters went out asking who on campus was doing research that might fit under that rubric, virtually everyone replied in the affirmative. What a nice surprise, she suggested. But really, what soul working in agricultural science today (or for that matter in any other field of endeavor) would stand up and be counted as against sustainability? When pesticide makers and genetic engineers cloak themselves in the term, you have to wonder if we haven’t succeeded in defining sustainability down, to paraphrase the late Senator Moynihan, and if it will soon possess all the conceptual force of a word like “natural” or “green” or “nice.”

Confucius advised that if we hoped to repair what was wrong in the world, we had best start with the “rectification of the names.” The corruption of society begins with the failure to call things by their proper names, he maintained, and its renovation begins with the reattachment of words to real things and precise concepts. So what about this much-abused pair of names, sustainable and unsustainable?

To call a practice or system unsustainable is not just to lodge an objection based on aesthetics, say, or fairness or some ideal of environmental rectitude. What it means is that the practice or process can’t go on indefinitely because it is destroying the very conditions on which it depends. It means that, as the Marxists used to say, there are internal contradictions that sooner or later will lead to a breakdown.

For years now, critics have been speaking of modern industrial agriculture as “unsustainable” in precisely these terms, though what form the “breakdown” might take or when it might happen has never been certain. Would the aquifers run dry? The pesticides stop working? The soil lose its fertility? All these breakdowns have been predicted and they may yet come to pass. But if a system is unsustainable — if its workings offend the rules of nature — the cracks and signs of breakdown may show up in the most unexpected times and places. Two stories in the news this year, stories that on their faces would seem to have nothing to do with each other let alone with agriculture, may point to an imminent breakdown in the way we’re growing food today.

The first story is about MRSA, the very scary antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus bacteria that is now killing more Americans each year than AIDS — 100,000 infections leading to 19,000 deaths in 2005, according to estimates in The Journal of the American Medical Association. For years now, drug-resistant staph infections have been a problem in hospitals, where the heavy use of antibiotics can create resistant strains of bacteria. It’s Evolution 101: the drugs kill off all but the tiny handful of microbes that, by dint of a chance mutation, possess genes allowing them to withstand the onslaught; these hardy survivors then get to work building a drug-resistant superrace. The methicillin-resistant staph that first emerged in hospitals as early as the 1960s posed a threat mostly to elderly patients. But a new and even more virulent strain — called “community-acquired MRSA” — is now killing young and otherwise healthy people who have not set foot in a hospital. No one is yet sure how or where this strain evolved, but it is sufficiently different from the hospital-bred strains to have some researchers looking elsewhere for its origin, to another environment where the heavy use of antibiotics is selecting for the evolution of a lethal new microbe: the concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO.

The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that at least 70 percent of the antibiotics used in America are fed to animals living on factory farms. Raising vast numbers of pigs or chickens or cattle in close and filthy confinement simply would not be possible without the routine feeding of antibiotics to keep the animals from dying of infectious diseases. That the antibiotics speed up the animals’ growth also commends their use to industrial agriculture, but the crucial fact is that without these pharmaceuticals, meat production practiced on the scale and with the intensity we practice it could not be sustained for months, let alone decades.

Public-health experts have been warning us for years that this situation is a public-health disaster waiting to happen. Sooner or later, the profligate use of these antibiotics — in many cases the very same ones we depend on when we’re sick — would lead to the evolution of bacteria that could shake them off like a spring shower. It appears that “sooner or later” may be now. Recent studies in Europe and Canada found that confinement pig operations have become reservoirs of MRSA. A European study found that 60 percent of pig farms that routinely used antibiotics had MRSA-positive pigs (compared with 5 percent of farms that did not feed pigs antibiotics). This month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study showing that a strain of “MRSA from an animal reservoir has recently entered the human population and is now responsible for [more than] 20 percent of all MRSA in the Netherlands.” Is this strictly a European problem? Evidently not. According to a study in Veterinary Microbiology, MRSA was found on 45 percent of the 20 pig farms sampled in Ontario, and in 20 percent of the pig farmers. (People can harbor the bacteria without being infected by it.) Thanks to Nafta, pigs move freely between Canada and the United States. So MRSA may be present on American pig farms; we just haven’t looked yet.

To Read the Rest of the Article

Roy Greenslade: Press for Freedom

Press for Freedom
Documentary Archive (BBC World Radio)
Roy Greenslade presents this four-part documentary series on the freedom of the press.

Part One - Government control

When reporting, Russian journalists Anna Politkovskaya was critical of the government and sought to expose the human rights abuses of the war in Chechnya. The deputy editor of the newspaper she worked for, Vitaly Yaroshevsky, believed she was killed because of her work. "We don't see any other motive for this terrible crime," he said.

Part one of this series looks at the effects of government control and the risks that journalists take to pursue the truth.

We hear from a young Iraqi journalist - Ali Fedhil - who describes the dangers of being perceived to belong to one press factions in Iraq over another.

Peta Thornycroft talks about the difficulties of being a foreign correspondent in a country that wants to put you in prison.

Part two: Freedom of the internet

How do the motives of mainstream news websites compare with the agendas of blogs?

In this part of 'Press for Freedom', we talk to Iraqi blogger Salam Pax and others who have delivered on-the-ground viewpoints in regions where the government would have otherwise silenced them.

In Kuala Lumpur, we hear from the government-owned Bernama press, who also fund Nam News Network, supposedly the only unfiltered news wire in a non-aligned world.

Part Three - Building democracy

What is the role of radio in building democracy?

In Papua, a new radio station is being installed as part of Indonesia's 68H network. 68H has introduced electricity by building a dam to power the station in the village.

How did 68H get around censorship under Suharto? And why is radio such a key player in building civil society?

Part Four: Established democracies

What is the story of press freedom in established democracies?

What is getting in the way of editorial integrity in societies which apparently have freedom of the press?

In the final part of the series, we hear from Michael Wolff, biographer of News Corp's Rupert Murdoch; former editor of the Los Angeles Times, Dean Baquet; and Dan Gillmor of the Centre for Citizen Media.

To Listen to the Series

Documentary Archive: Only One Bakira

Only One Bakira
Documentary Archive (BBC World Radio)

Madame Justice Florence Mumba from Zambia made legal history five years ago when she declared rape a crime against humanity.

Justice Mumba was the presiding judge at the International War Crimes Tribunal on Yugoslavia in the Hague.

Her ruling was heralded around the world. In Bosnia, rape was not just one of the spoils of war, it was a clearly contemplated military strategy, a means of terrorizing the population.

It is estimated that 20,000 women were raped as part of the conflict in the Balkans.

There have been nine or ten convictions. And now the Hague Tribunal is shutting up shop.

The remaining cases - and they are legion - will be tried in the Balkans - where the crimes took place.

Victims are still waiting for justice.

"They made us permanent invalids. Unable to go back to their origins and the places where they used to live" says Bakira Hassecic, a woman who deals with the rape she endured with a relentless pursuit of war criminals.

Croats, Bosnians and Serbs will have to deal with the past themselves. There doesn't seem to be a lot of enthusiasm for the task. Some people would prefer to forget, but Bakira will not let them.

Bakira - and the network of women she formed, the Association of Women Victims of War - act as investigators. Finding perpetrators and providing their location to the authorities.

This is their story.

To Listen to the Episode

Cath Elliot: Designer Vaginas, Anyone?

Designer Vaginas, Anyone?
By Cath Elliott, Comment Is Free and AlterNet

Hymenoplasty, vaginal tightening, revirgination, G-spot amplification and labial reduction are the latest craze for women with more money than sense.

Once you've had your breasts enhanced, your thighs sucked thin, your skin stretched taught over your cheekbones, and your lips pumped full of cow's tissue, what better way to finish off that perfect Barbie doll look than to have your genitals surgically remodeled and your pubic area waxed smooth? And if you're worried that your partner might be tempted to stray because you've had a couple of kids and things have started to sag a bit, what better way to guarantee his fidelity than to transform yourself into a porn queen lookalike with the fanny of a pre-pubescent girl?

Hymenoplasty, vaginal tightening, revirgination, G-spot amplification and labial reduction are the latest craze in cosmetic surgeries for women with more money than sense. Surgeries that were originally designed to help overcome some of the more debilitating side effects of childbirth have now been appropriated by an industry whose sole purpose is to convince women that they're imperfect and to profit from the plummeting self-esteem they promote.

In last week's Observer, Cristina Odone lauded hymenoplasty as "brilliantly subversive" and as "good news" for women. "After all," she chortled, "nowadays you don't have to be a virgin -- you just pretend to be one."

Well, sorry to burst your bubble Cristina, but having your hymen repaired to meet with societal expectations of a new bride's virginity, or having your vagina tightened as a gift to your husband so he can re-live that first night experience, is not "good news for women," not by any stretch of the imagination. Something's surely gone amiss if we're now celebrating voluntary mutilation as some kind of benchmark for women's progress.

To Read the Rest of the Commentary

More:

Literaghost refers us to the new VULVA perfume:

VULVA

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: A Fly on James Burke's Wall

A Fly on James Burke's Wall
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History



In this episode, Dan discusses history with famed television host, author and science historian James Burke, the man the Washington Post called “one of the most intriguing minds in the Western world”.

To Listen to the Podcast

More:



You can listen to the audio version James Burke's history The Day the Universe Changed at GPod:

The Day the Universe Changed

Studio 360: The Wire

(One of my all time favorite series dramas is The Wire. Critical, relevant, and multiperspective.)

The Wire
Hosted: Kurt Anderson
Studio 360



"The Wire" just began its final season on HBO. The dramatic series’ gritty, unblinking portrayal of Baltimore has critics calling it the best show on TV. But those are critics. What do the real people of Baltimore think of "The Wire?" Aaron Henkin of WYPR asked some residents of the city’s tough neighborhoods what they thought of the drama.

To Listen to the Feature

Boumediene vs Bush

(We here at Dialogic would like to state that we are horrified that our country is running camps that "disappear" people--Guantanamo and the various other places aroung the world. Even more sickening is the judicial defense, Justice Scalia in particular, of these camps. The legalistic slide into declaring people non-existent and non-entities and non-combatants and not-governed--or protected--by law defies any democratic belief/stance and encourages a society of control through abuse [starting with the weakest/despised and working its way upward]: Means Without Ends or the Historical Judicial Process That Led to Death Camps. Shame on them for justifying it, shame on us for letting it continue.)

IN THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
LAKHDAR BOUMEDIENE, ET
AL.
Petitioners
v.
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT
OF THE UNITED STATES, ET
AL.;
and
KHALED A. F. AL ODAH, NEXT
FRIEND OF FAWZI KHALID
ABDULLAH FAHAD AL ODAH,
ET AL.,
Petitioners
v.
UNITED STATES, ET AL.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Washington, D.C.
Wednesday, December 5, 2007

The above-entitled matter came on for oral
argument before the Supreme Court of the United States
at 10:01 a.m.

To Listen/Read the Argument

NOW: Dirty Politics 2008

(This is a good mainstream critique of the dirty politics between our two hegemonic political parties, of course the problem is that it completely ignores the dirty tricks used against anyone that isn't an accepted member of their limited clique--for that you should check out Bill Moyer's Journal--which demonstrates the problems with NOW since Moyer's left--but we are thankful that Moyer's is back and we here will accept the watered down NOW as long as we have Bill Moyer's Journal :)

Dirty Politics 2008
NOW (PBS)

Political mudslinging as a campaign tactic is as popular as it's ever been. Romney, Clinton, Huckabee, Giuliani, Obama - no one's managed to steer clear of targeted rumors and malicious gossip. NOW on PBS travels to South Carolina, the home of legendary no-holds-barred campaigner Lee Atwater, to see where negative stories come from, how they spread, and whether they can be effectively defeated with positive messaging.

To Listen to the Report