Article: Why are wars not being reported honestly?

- by John Pilger, 10 December 2010



In the US Army manual on counterinsurgency, the American commander General David Petraeus describes Afghanistan as a "war of perception... conducted continuously using the news media". What really matters is not so much the day-to-day battles against the Taliban as the way the adventure is sold in America where "the media directly influence the attitude of key audiences". Reading this, I was reminded of the Venezuelan general who led a coup against the democratic government in 2002. "We had a secret weapon," he boasted. "We had the media, especially TV. You got to have the media."

Never has so much official energy been expended in ensuring journalists collude with the makers of rapacious wars which,

Article: Glaspie Memo Refutes Claims Leaked Docs Were Classified for ‘Security’

by Jason Ditz, January 20, 2011

The most sought-after State Department document of the past several decades, the infamous Glaspie Memo, was recently released by WikiLeaks. The memo details a conversation between Ambassador April Glaspie and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein on July 25, 1990, exactly one week before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and Glaspie’s reassurances to Hussein both of enduring American friendship and America’s disinterest in the Kuwaiti border dispute. In short, it confirmed decades of suspicion that Glaspie had, in the meeting, given Saddam Hussein the impression that the United States was giving him the green light for the invasion.

The revelation, which puts the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in a decade of post-war sanctions and the even greater numbers killed in the 2003 US invasion in a new, decidedly unseemly light, and does enormous service to historians. More importantly, however, the release of a document

Video: The Crisis of Credit Visualized

The Short and Simple Story of the Credit Crisis. An old video but still I felt it had to be included in the blog. Makes a complex, confusing situation, such as the Credit Crisis, easily understandable for everyone that still has not really got it.
How everything works and what went wrong, all explained in this simple, graphically intriguing animation!

Enjoy!

Article: Dying for the World...

"In the shadow of my doubt, my life becomes dust in empty rooms. On the ruins of my defeat, the headlights turn off and the curtain is lowered. On the stage, a clown without audience, his grief, allows him to smile. Who am I to rule the world, when the faithful worship naked walls? The lines of right and wrong became muddy in the name of freedom. What do you want from the world, what are you looking for in life? Are we trapped or enslaved?

I wake up from the violent dreams of the day; there are no different people, nor anything on the other side of the coast to swim against the current. Heaven has changed to “Heaven TV”. Is this perfection? Have I lost my mind? Choose your friends wisely. Look to the sky with new, amazing eyes, kid enjoy your life! Rain and darkness will come, but enjoy it, fold the pain in your arms. The world is a rotating sphere you can’t understand. Take care..”

The doctor folded the paper and

Documentary: The War On Democracy by John Pilger (2007)

The story of the manipulation of Latin America by the United States over the past 50 years, including the real story behind the attempted overthrow of Hugo Chávez in 2002.

http://www.johnpilger.com/videos/the-war-on-democracy

Speech: John Hardy - My green school dream

Join John Hardy on a tour of the Green School, his off-the-grid school in Bali that teaches kids how to build, garden, create (and get into college). The centerpiece of campus is the spiraling Heart of School, perhaps the world's largest freestanding bamboo building.





Jewelry designer John Hardy co-founded the extraordinary Green School in Bali, where kids get a holistic and green education. Full bio and more links

Article: The fear of non-acceptance

It’s why you don’t say what you think. You want to have a peace of mind, you want your finger to indicate the different but you can’t stand criticism. You can’t stand it because you don’t feel ready to deal with it. You are scared about being in the front and what you learned from your education was to complain behind the backs of other people, not more capable than you. You make yourself feel different by wearing sophisticated clothes, you find a personal way to express your toughness but you are moving within the lines that society commands you to live.


Always acceptable to your surroundings, you know that you are far away from the deeper meanings of life, but as you move near the magnetic field of propaganda that

Documentary: The End Of Poverty? (2008)

Filmed in the slums of Africa and the barrios of Latin America, The End of Poverty? features expert insights from: Nobel prize winners in Economics, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz; acclaimed authors Susan George, Eric Toussaint, John Perkins, Chalmers Johnson; university professors William Easterly and Michael Watts; government ministers such as Bolivia's Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera and the leaders of social movements in Brazil, Venezuela, Kenya and Tanzania . It is produced by Cinema Libre Studio in collaboration with the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation.




The aphorism "The poor are always with us" dates back to the New Testament, but while the phrase is still sadly apt in the 21st century, few seem to be able to explain why poverty is so widespread. Activist filmmaker Philippe Diaz examines the history and impact of economic inequality in the third world in the documentary The End of Poverty?, and makes the compelling argument that it's not an accident or simple bad luck that has created a growing underclass around the world. Diaz traces the growth of global poverty back to colonization in the 15th century, and

Video: George Clooney - Endgame in Sudan (Prevent a War)

By NICHOLAS KRISTOF

In just over a month, South Sudan is scheduled to vote on whether to become an independent nation. But it’s no clearer now than it was three years ago that the North will actually allow the referendum to go ahead. There’s still considerable anxiety that the North, determined not to lose the three-quarters of the country’s oil that lies in the South, will find one means or another to block the vote or deny its legitimacy — and that the result will be the world’s worst war in 2011.

That’s where George Clooney comes in. He was recently in South Sudan and did this video from his trip, trying to galvanize attention:

In a worst-case scenario I wrote earlier this fall, I raised the possibility that the Referendum Commission (controlled by the North) would ask for a modest delay in the vote, to have an excuse to

Article: Government-created Climate of Fear

Another excellent article by Glenn Greenwald about the US creating a climate of fear, through intimidation, for everyone who wants to practice his right to free speech. Even their own citizens are afraid to fly through the US.
"A government can guarantee all the political liberties in the world on paper (free speech, free assembly, freedom of association), but if it succeeds in frightening the citizenry out of exercising those rights, they become meaningless."

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BY 
GLENN GREENWALD

One of the more eye-opening events for me of 2010 occurred in March, when I first wrote about WikiLeaks and the war the Pentagon was waging on it (as evidenced by its classified 2008 report branding the website an enemy and planning how to destroy it). At the time, few had heard of the group -- it was before it had released the video of the Apache helicopter attack -- but I nonetheless believed it could perform vitally important functions and thus encouraged readers to donate to it and otherwise support it. In response, there were numerous people -- via email, comments, and other means -- who expressed a serious fear of doing so: they were worried that donating money to a group so disliked by the government would cause them to be placed on various lists or, worse, incur criminal liability for materially supporting a Terrorist organization.

At the time, I dismissed those concerns as both ill-founded and even slightly paranoid. From a strictly legal standpoint, those concerns were and are ill-founded: WikiLeaks has never even been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime, nor does it do anything different than what major newspapers around the world routinely do, nor has it been formally designated a Terrorist organization, nor -- I believed at the time -- could it ever be so designated. There is not -- and cannot remotely be -- anything illegal about donating to it. Any efforts to retroactively criminalize such donations would

Video: Assange needs money, controversy follows (Debate about his motives & the consequences of WikiLeaks)

Jessica Yellin talks to Glenn Greenwald and Frances Townsend about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his motives.

A must-watch, especially if you are still "undecided" about the whole WikiLeaks matter.





A very interesting debate about WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and his motives. Notice how the CNN reporter tries to lead the conversation where she wants to and how Glenn Greenwald perfectly answers to everything and backs it up with valid arguments, unlike the rest of them. It's funny how Frances Townsend even lies by stating fake facts but thankfully Greenwald is quick to answer to all the paranoia.

They are trying to suggest he is actually profiting from his publicity, they speak as he is a criminal for sure while

Video: Dawkins on the Evolution of the Eye

Creationist advocates argue that the extreme complexity of the eye indicates that there must be a creator involved and that it cannot have possibly evoled by clear chance.

In this demonstration, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins shows how the formation of the eye can be striped down into simple formation steps that can happen through gene mutation and evolutionary steps that would benefit an organism to have an advantage in survival.