The Best Propaganda Ever
Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” is sometimes ranked as the most effective propaganda film of all time, although she claimed that it was simply an “art film.”The latest email bulletin from the USC Center on Public Diplomacy called our attention to a list that someone has compiled of the “Top 10 Propaganda Videos.” Viewing the list in chronological order is like taking a trip through the social obsessions of yesteryear: a clip from Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 pro-Nazi film, “Triumph of the Will”; a 1943 anti-Nazi cartoon by The Walt Disney Company, and a pro-tax film from the same year featuring Donald Duck; a Communist propaganda film from Moscow in the 1940s; American anti-Communist and anti-homosexual films from the 1950s; anti-porn and anti-LSD films from the 1960s; an anti-software piracy film from the 1990s; and a recent anti-American film that denounces the war in Iraq and the Project for the New American Century.
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Saddam Hussein Provided More Food Than the U.S.
Dec 27 2007
The Iraqi government announcement that monthly food rations will be cut by half has left many Iraqis asking how they can survive. The government also wants to reduce the number of people depending on the rationing system by five million by June 2008… The programme has continued into the U.S.-led occupation. But now the U.S.-backed Iraqi government has announced it will halve the essential items in the ration because of “insufficient funds and spiralling inflation.”
At:
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40613
From: CLG News
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Assessing Iraq
DAVID ENDERS, david.enders@gmail.com,
http://pulitzercenter.typepad.com/death_of_a_nation
Enders is a journalist who has spent nearly half of the last four years in Iraq and is author of the book “Baghdad Bulletin.” He said today: “Any progress the military is claiming to have made in Iraq should be looked at in the big picture: the prison population is larger than ever, and some of the drop in violence can likely be attributed to neighborhoods having been effectively ‘cleansed.’ You also have the problem of millions of refugees, many of whom have had their homes taken from them. What will happen to them? Just because fewer U.S. troops are dying does not mean the situation is ‘better.’”
On Wednesday, the Washington Post published a story headlined “All Iraqi Groups Blame U.S. Invasion for Discord, Study Shows.”
http://tinyurl.com/2xc9mx (www.washingtonpost.com)
Added Enders: “A reason all factions blame the U.S. is that from the very beginning of the occupation, the focus has been on sectarian quotas and playing one group off another.” Enders’s most recent piece is “Make-a-Sheikh: How the Pentagon transformed a contractor into a symbol of the surge’s ‘success’.”
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3362/make_a_sheikh
From: Institute for Public Accuracy
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Iraq Oil Report – ‘Iraq oil up end-’07, sketchy ’08 … Update on South Korea backlash ‘
Iraq’s oil sector ends 2007 on a relatively upbeat note, with production at levels not seen since before the war. But the year had more downs than ups, and sustaining success through next year is far from guaranteed.
Iraq averaged production of 2.4 million barrels per day in November, according to the global energy information firm [...]
You may view the latest post at
http://tinyurl.com/392mbe (iraqoilreport.com)
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Anglo-American Ambitions behind the Assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the Destabilization of Pakistan
By Larry Chin
Global Research, December 29, 2007
It has been known for months that the Bush-Cheney administration and its allies have been maneuvering to strengthen their political control over Pakistan, paving the way for the expansion and deepening of the “war on terrorism” across the region. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto does not change this agenda. In fact, it simplifies Bush-Cheney’s options.
Seeding chaos with a pretext
“Delivering democracy to the Muslim world” has been the Orwellian rhetoric used to mask Bush-Cheney’s application of pressure and force, its dramatic attempt at reshaping of the Pakistani government (into a joint Bhutto/Sharif-Musharraf) coalition, and backdoor plans for a military intervention. Various American destabilization plans, known for months by officials and analysts, proposed the toppling of Pakistan’s military.
The assassination of Bhutto appears to have been anticipated. There were even reports of “chatter” among US officials about the possible assassinations of either Pervez Musharraf or Benazir Bhutto, well before the actual attempts took place.
As succinctly summarized in Jeremy Page’s article, “Who Killed Benazir Bhutto? The Main Suspects”, the main suspects are
1) “Pakistani and foreign Islamist militants who saw her as a heretic and an American stooge”, and
2) the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, a virtual branch of the CIA. Bhutto’s husband Asif Ali Zardari directly accused the ISI of being involved in the October attack.
The assassination of Bhutto has predictably been blamed on “Al-Qaeda”, without mention of fact that Al-Qaeda itself is an Anglo-American military-intelligence operation.
Page’s piece was one of the first to name the man who has now been tagged as the main suspect: Baitullah Mehsud, a purported Taliban militant fighting the Pakistani army out of Waziristan. Conflicting reports link Mehsud to “Al-Qaeda”, the Afghan Taliban, and Mullah Omar (also see here). Other analysis links him to the terrorist A.Q. Khan.
Mehsud’s profile, and the reporting of it, echoes the propaganda treatment of all post-9/11 “terrorists”. This in turn raises familiar questions about Anglo-American intelligence agency propaganda involvement. Is Mehsud connected to the ISI or the CIA? What did the ISI and the CIA know about Mehsud? More importantly, does Mehsud, or the manipulation of the propaganda surrounding him provide Bush-Cheney with a pretext for future aggression in the region?
Classic “war on terrorism” propaganda
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Complete article at:
www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7699
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Pakistan
SAMEER DOSSANI, sameer@50years.org, http://50years.org
Director of 50 Years Is Enough, a group that scrutinizes major international financial institutions, Dossani, a Pakistani-American, said today: “While the death of Benazir Bhutto is the latest in a long and tragic line of blood that has been spilled in Pakistan’s history, it should not detract from our analysis of her legacy. Benazir Bhutto, like nearly every politician in Pakistan today, saw her role as twofold: first to implement the interests of her political backers in Pakistan, which in her case were the feudal lords from the southern state of Sindh, and second, to implement the interests of the U.S establishment, Pakistan’s primary benefactor for over 30 years. … We should not forget that she was among those leaders who sacrificed Pakistan’s own economic and political development in order to remain on good terms with the U.S.”
From: Institute for Public Accuracy
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How to Erode and Destroy Democracy– a Dozen Tested Strategies #1 of 12
December 28, 2007
By Rob Kall
How to Kill Democracy
tips to fascists, dictators, corporatists, militarists, imperialists, neocons, right wingers, theocrats, theofascists and terrorists.
1- Kill the strongest opposition candidate and then pretend that elections should go on as normal, without allowing the opposition party to reorganize.
Examples:
Benazir Bhutto– strategy– hamstring security abilities to the extent that the candidate actually writes a letter accusing the government leadership of intentional sabotage of security.
Paul Wellstone– rush through a replacement candidate and politicize the funeral. Get the mainstream media “partners” to portray the funeral as despicably political to eliminate sympathy for the new candidate. (Expect something like this with the candidate who replaces Bhutto
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Complete article at:
http://tinyurl.com/2jpx78 (www.opednews.com)
Authors Bio:
Rob Kall is executive editor and publisher of OpEdNews.com, President of Futurehealth, Inc, inventor and organizer of several conferences, including StoryCon, the Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story and The Winter Brain Meeting on neurofeedback, biofeedback, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology. He is a frequent Speaker on Politics, Impeachment, The art, science and power of story, heroes and the hero’s journey, Positive Psychology, Stress, Biofeedback and a wide range of subjects.
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Top 25 Censored news stories of 2007 – #3 Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger
Source:
Mother Jones, March /April, 2006
Title: The Fate of the Ocean
Author: Julia Whitty
Faculty Evaluator: Dolly Freidel
Student Researcher: Charlene Jones
Oceanic problems once found on a local scale are now pandemic. Data from oceanography, marine biology, meteorology, fishery science, and glaciology reveal that the seas are changing in ominous ways. A vortex of cause and effect wrought by global environmental dilemmas is changing the ocean from a watery horizon with assorted regional troubles to a global system in alarming distress.
According to oceanographers the oceans are one, with currents linking the seas and regulating climate. Sea temperature and chemistry changes, along with contamination and reckless fishing practices, intertwine to imperil the world’s largest communal life source.
In 2005, researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory found clear evidence the ocean is quickly warming. They discovered that the top half-mile of the ocean has warmed dramatically in the past forty years as a result of human-induced greenhouse gases.
One manifestation of this warming is the melting of the Arctic. A shrinking ratio of ice to water has set off a feedback loop, accelerating the increase in water surfaces that promote further warming and melting. With polar waters growing fresher and tropical seas saltier, the cycle of evaporation and precipitation has quickened, further invigorating the greenhouse effect. The ocean’s currents are reacting to this freshening, causing a critical conveyor that carries warm upper waters into Europe’s northern latitudes to slow by one third since 1957, bolstering fears of a shut down and cataclysmic climate change. This accelerating cycle of cause and effect will be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.
Atmospheric litter is also altering sea chemistry, as thousands of toxic compounds poison marine creatures and devastate propagation. The ocean has absorbed an estimated 118 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, with 20 to 25 tons being added to the atmosphere daily. Increasing acidity from rising levels of CO2 is changing the ocean’s PH balance. Studies indicate that the shells and skeletons possessed by everything from reef-building corals to mollusks and plankton begin to dissolve within forty-eight hours of exposure to the acidity expected in the ocean by 2050. Coral reefs will almost certainly disappear and, even more worrisome, so will plankton. Phytoplankton absorb greenhouse gases, manufacture oxygen, and are the primary producers of the marine food web.
Mercury pollution enters the food web via coal and chemical industry waste, oxidizes in the atmosphere, and settles to the sea bottom. There it is consumed, delivering mercury to each subsequent link in the food chain, until predators such as tuna or whales carry levels of mercury as much as one million times that of the waters around them. The Gulf of Mexico has the highest mercury levels ever recorded, with an average of ten tons of mercury coming down the Mississippi River every year, and another ton added by offshore drilling.
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Complete article at:
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Borowitz Report – Three-way Shocker
Edwards Blasts Obama for Criticizing Hillary’s Claim That Obama Criticized Edwards
Iowans Confused By Charges, Countercharges, Counter-countercharges
An already perplexing Iowa race became even more impenetrable today as former Sen. John Edwards blasted Sen. Barack Obama for criticizing Sen. Hillary Clinton’s claim that Sen. Obama had criticized Sen. Edwards.
At a campaign rally in Cedar Rapids, the former North Carolina senator said that the Illinois senator’s criticism of the New York senator for claiming that the Illinois senator had criticized the North Carolina senator was “an attempt to confuse the voters.”
Mr. Edwards’ comments set off a new round of charges, countercharges, and counter-countercharges between the three Democratic rivals, with Sen. Obama lashing out at Sen. Clinton for supporting Mr. Edwards’ criticism of Sen. Obama’s criticism of Sen. Clinton.
In a particularly nasty remark, Mr. Obama called Mr. Edwards a son of a mill worker, “but not in so many words.”
Davis Logsdon, chairman of the political science department at the University of Minnesota, says that the Edwards-Obama-Clinton battle royal may be contributing to Iowa voters’ fatigue: “Without a doubt, the Iowa caucuses are turning into the grossest three-way in history.”
New polls taken after the latest volleys and counter-volleys between the three candidates were inconclusive, as a majority of Iowans polled said they were “totally sick of being polled.”
With less than a week to go before the Iowa caucuses, 61% of likely voters agreed with the statement, “If one more stupid pollster asks me one more retarded question I swear I will go postal on his ass, I am not kidding.”
Andy with Amy Sedaris, John Oliver and Christian Finnegan – January 17
Andy hosts an all-new edition of “Next Week’s News” starring Amy Sedaris. John Oliver (The Daily Show) and Christian Finnegan (VH1’s Best Week Ever) at Comix on Thursday January 17 at 8 PM. Comix is located at 353 West 14th Street, just east of Ninth Avenue. For tickets, call 212-524-2500 or go to www.comixny.com . For a $5 discount, use the promotional code ANDY.
http://www.borowitzreport.com/
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three thousand words
Mike Luckovich: conflict on two fronts
http://editorialcartoonists.com/cartoons/LuckoM/2007/LuckoM20071230_low.jpg
Ted Rall: mitt romney
http://picayune.uclick.com/comics/trall/2007/trall071229.gif
Jeff Danziger: Mitt Romney, MLKing
http://danzigercartoons.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/dancart3461.jpg
