Thanks to the East Bay Express and editor Jay Youngdahl for supporting Dissident Voice and allowing us to re-post his piece on the Bay Area. In fact, San Francisco is Seattle is Portland is Phoenix is, well, you get the picture, no?
We had it here, at DV — “Collective Stockholm Syndrome . . . “
Oh, drats, someone in my family line, in Scotland, sent me this link as an example of, paraphrasing, great American stick-to-it gumption, superiority and bad-ass imperialism.
Quote: “No wonder the Iranians want this ship (aircraft carrier) out of the Persian Gulf. This is a great example of United States of America technology, teamwork and strength in action. Hang on for the ride!”
Yep, this is the export of America, North America, that is — a nuclear powered, $4.5 billion dollar junk-killing-droning-child-wedding party-bombing-human death toll creator.
Comic relief has become an industry, its own self-justifying premise. In January this year, BBC2 hosted its Great Comic Relief Bake Off. It had four million viewers, meaning that 16.3 percent of the audience was nabbed between 8pm and 9pm on one specific viewing day. The object of this bakeoff – raising funds for the indigent and needy – were the spectres of the moment.
It remains one of the most exquisite concerts ever filmed. My friend Rich and I fantasized about buying tickets when sales were announced in the early fall of 1976. We sat in his apartment near the University of Maryland’s College Park campus doing bong hits and running scenarios about getting to the show. Should we try and get a friend in San Francisco to buy us tickets, then buy a cheap plane ticket or should we just buy a beater car and drive across country hoping to find a reasonable scalper? There were no phone sales of tickets in those days, much less anything online.
In his recent book Harvard and the Unabomber, Alston Chase describes how Theodore Kaczynski, a 16-year-old Harvard student in 1958, suffered traumatizing abuse as an unwitting test-subject in a CIA-connected psychology experiment designed to manipulate human behavior under intensive isolation and harsh interrogation (and also ultimately: LSD and torture). This humiliating, formative experience, Chase argues, shaped Kaczynski’s dislike for the techno-scientific manipulation and control of human beings. But Chase also maintains that the Harvard Gen Ed.
Early morning trucks rolled in to wire Big Media to the stars.
Immense wheels beat asphalt streets like drum-skins, deafening. Big Media cameras; cables; generators; crews with headsets, walkie-talkies, official Big Media caps; wireless phones; caterers; buffet tables; Klieg lights; microphones; tents; guards; interns; factotums; trailers; wardrobes; make-up artists; lackeys; bit-players, stars and miles and miles of wire, all issued from Executive minds out West.
The Photographer exhibited downtown. Galleries, museums. Big hit in the art community, but not in the infallible system that measures the worth of all things, from culture to fruit salad: The Market. Did it, is it, or will it make/be making money? If so, Artist + Sales = Success, anywhere from up-and-coming novice to assiduous craftsman to Genius, depending on The Market’s sober assessment.
The Jack the Ripper murders that plagued late 19th century London were the work of the first modern serial killer. They have also been the subject of many a literary investigation and speculation, both fictional and otherwise. The basic ingredients of most succeeding serial killing sprees are present in the Jack the Ripper case; dead women, many of them prostitutes; a twisted killer who mutilates his victims; a police investigation that sputters and starts without an apparent understanding of the nature of the perpetrator; and the potential for so-called copycat crimes.
We are in the mad-mad-mad world of delusions and Pokémon. Sure, that Fukushima premature, err, glow, solved by dental lead bib over the ovaries and testes (see photo directly below). Yep, the world has gone to Type Three Diabetes. Quoting that article on radioactive proof of our dumbdowning DNA. Is it HFCS that’s eating away at our noggin? Those 10,000 newly compounded chemicals produced each year chipping away at IQ?
The series Homeland is now in its third season. Apparently the once flagship drama for Showtime, has hit the ratings skids this season, but not critically, and that remains troubling. This is an overtly, nakedly, proudly, racist bit of police state propaganda. That’s in no way hyperbole. The show never misses a chance to stigmatize the standard villains of the day (as if Dick Cheney, Bibi Netanyahu, and Eric Holder were script advisers), while valorizing and justifying torture, entrapment, illegal surveillance (I know, quaint idea), and racial profiling.
